Senate Admits Climate Change Is Real, Whining that It's Not Our Fault

Last week the Senate acknowledged in a 98-1 vote that climate change is real, but like some rich kid who wrecked the family car, Republicans whined that it's not our fault.

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Republican who has for years insisted that climate change is a hoax, voted in support of the measure, saying:

Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will. There is archaeological evidence of that, there is biblical evidence of that, there is historical evidence of that, [but t]here are some people who are so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change climate.

What's arrogant is that Inhofe thinks that 7 billion people pumping 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year for centuries will have no effect on the climate. We are burning thousands of billions of tons coal, oil and gas that it took nature billions of years to bury in the span of a few hundred years.

A few million people can change the climate of entire states just by burning gasoline, or by replacing vegetation with concrete and asphalt. A few thousand people can change the climate of Brazil by cutting down hundreds of millions of acres of rainforest over a period of a decade or two. Hundreds of coal plants in China belching out smoke and ash can not only foul the air and kill thousands of Chinese annually, but that much crap in the air alters air temperature by several degrees.

It took just a few tens of thousands of people to create a dust bowl in Inhofe's own Oklahoma in the 1930s. Over the decades farmers cut down millions of acres of oak savannahs and tore up the natural prairie grasses and replaced them with crops. Poor agricultural practices combined with drought caused terrible dust storms that forced tens of thousands of Texans, Oklahomans and Kansans to abandon their farms, exacerbating the effects of the Depression. It took decades to recover, economically and ecologically.

Removing vegetation -- forests and prairies -- and replacing it with crops, roads or buildings on a large scale changes the climate. Forests are one of the major the driving forces of climate. Trees put oxygen into the atmosphere and take carbon dioxide out. Remove them and you change the climate. Drastically.

Inhofe doesn't seem to understand how big a number 7 billion is, or the massive scale of what we do to the environment. He seems to think that humans are tiny and insignificant compared to the wide world.

The fact is, earth's atmosphere originally contained no oxygen. Earth has an oxygen atmosphere today only because tiny and insignificant cyanobacteria began to emit oxygen billions of years ago.

We are millions of times bigger than those tiny, insignificant bacteria and there are 7 billion of us. We humans now produce more CO2 than all the oceans, trees, plants and algae in the world can absorb. That's why CO2 is slowly building up in the atmosphere.

Since we're making more CO2 than plants are making oxygen, the undeniable conclusion is that we are altering the climate.

Of course, we'll run out of oil and coal long before we turn the planet into an inhospitable desert planet like Venus. But the economic and social costs of dealing with the mess we're creating will far exceed the costs of curbing our gluttonous appetite for carbon. And because the oil and coal will eventually run out, we'll have to make this change in any case.

Why not do it now, while we are still rich enough and aren't going to war with every other country for the last few barrels of oil beneath the arctic?

If These Were Deaths By Muslim Extremists...

....what do you suppose would be the reaction of the American people?

Republicans Raising Taxes

It appears that Republicans are finally getting the message: middle class economics works.

At least eight Republican governors have ventured into this once forbidden territory: There are proposals for raising the sales tax in Michigan, a tax on e-cigarettes in Utah, and gas taxes in South Carolina and South Dakota, to name a few. In Arizona, the new Republican governor has put off, in the face of a $1 billion budget shortfall, a campaign promise to eliminate the unpopular income tax there.

But why?

Still, the shift is striking, and it comes in the wake of problems that Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Republican, suffered after pushing though sharp cuts in business and income taxes. Governor Brownback, who found himself in an unexpectedly tough race for re-election in part because of a budget deficit fueled by the tax cuts, recently called for raising cigarette and liquor taxes and slowing planned reductions in the income tax rate to help reduce the shortfall. 

By most accounts, the proposals emerging from state Republican lawmakers seem like acts of pragmatism rather than shifts in philosophy for the Republican Party. 

Pragmatism indeed.

Speaking of pragmatism, it looks like Scott Walker could sure use some. If only he had embrace the now proven to be enormously successful economic policies of Mark Dayton here in Minnesota. Perhaps Wisconsin would have then been named the best state in the country.

Again With The Rape

I'm please to report that Republican Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina is at least owning the GOP's problem with women. Recognizing that you have a problem is a big step. Of course, this simple fact has seemed to have escaped Lindsey Graham.


What exactly is a "definitional problem" with rape? More importantly, why are they talking about rape AGAIN?

Mea Culpa, Fox News Style

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Ten)

The question of which political party is more racist was recently addressed on Quora. This answer was by far the best one given. Several key takeaways emerge from it. First, a summary timeline... 

-From 1828 to 1948, the Democratic Party was clearly the party favored by Southern whites who supported slavery and then Jim Crow & segregation. In 1948, Democratic President Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces. Things start to get murky. 

-From 1948 to 1968, it was a period of great flux with regard to race in politics in America. This was the period of Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign, the Dixiecrats and George Wallace. Again in play was The American South. 

-From 1968 until 2005, the Republican Party had a clear pattern of exploiting racial resentments in the South over the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In what has become known as the "Southern Strategy," the Republican Party – first with Barry Goldwater and then more successfully with Richard Nixon – sought to exploit racial anxieties of Southern Whites. In 2005, then RNC Chair Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy and repudiated it at the annual conference of the NAACP.

With the last segment, we see an admission from the highest ranking member of the GOP at the time that they employed the Southern Strategy to win the white conservative vote. Interestingly, his apology drew criticism that illustrates the point I have been making all along: the GOP has a problem with race, particularly black people.

But what about from 2005 to 2015? In his answer on Quora, Mr. McCullough offers a detailed look at the racial implications of voter ID laws followed by this:

Bottom line: whichever party appeals to and builds upon the voting bloc of Southern White Conservatives owns the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism in the United States. These days, that party is the Republican Party. ...look away, look away, look away Dixieland.

I completely agree. "Owning" is not a word conservatives do really well at all. Their first reaction is to DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and blame the liberal media. It will never cease to amaze me that the party that preaches responsibility completely fails to take any of it on a myriad of issues today.

But own it they must because Southern White Conservatives are a substantial part of their base.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Nine)

In looking at the index of all of the graphics I have put up thus far, it's quite clear that white Republicans tend to be more racist than white Democrats.

The good news is that the trend is downward for both parties. Still, it's far too high for 2015.

Part of what is driving all of this is "the old ways" of the South. Take a look at this.

The above graphic is from Humboldt University's Geography of Hate map and which tracks where the most tweets with the word "nigger" originate. The primary cluster of red globs are located around and below the Mason Dixon line.

Which party overwhelmingly dominates these states?

The Brick Wall

Mocking Conservative Appeal To Fear

John and Mike from Fox News - Eric et Quentin du 16/01

Great Words

From a recent comment thread on Quora...

Thanks Mark, I worked out pretty quickly that it was a waste of time...pedantic, semantic arguments seem to the weapon of choice ( pun intended ) for Kevin. I just find it odd, that there are people out there that see nothing wrong with innocent bystanders dying, so others can exercise their right to own and carry a gun.... Thanks again...

Pedantic, semantic arguments combined with wacky ideological nonsense pretty much sums up today's conservative. Of course, that's the result of a baseline of insecurity and inferiority hence the need to "win" all the time:)

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Eight)

Here is the last question culled by 538 from GSS data in our continuing series on racism and political parties.

I'm not terribly impressed by the question as the word "close" is pretty ambiguous although I am glad to see the numbers lower than some of the other questions. Note that there is still an uptick after the president was elected and that more Republicans rate themselves as not being close to black people.

The Populist President

My first reaction to the speech tonight was this...who won the election again last November? :)

Obviously, the president and the Democrats know that they stole the honeymoon from the Republicans and are sitting pretty right now. The president realizes that there is a missing story from last year's election and so they are going to shift left and pull the country with them. He's got the poll numbers now (and Congress sure as shit does not) to throw his weight around a little more and you could really tell from his body language tonight as well as his speech. Barack Obama is finally at a point where he has absolutely nothing to lose and, man oh man, did the Republicans look uptight and grumpy about it all night during the speech.

A few highlights...

America, for all that we’ve endured; for all the grit and hard work required to come back; for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this: The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong.

Yes it is..in a large part, thanks to him which is why conservatives hate him so much. He has been successful.

We believed we could prepare our kids for a more competitive world. And today, our younger students have earned the highest math and reading scores on record. Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high. And more Americans finish college than ever before.

So much for "Department of Our Collapsing Schools"

So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don't get in the way. We can't slow down businesses or put our economy at risk with government shutdowns or fiscal showdowns. We can't put the security of families at risk by taking away their health insurance, or unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, or refighting past battles on immigration when we've got a system to fix. And if a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, it will earn my veto.

Yes, the verdict is clear. Conservative economic ideology has failed. Time to leave it behind forever.

21st century businesses need 21st century infrastructure -- modern ports, stronger bridges, faster trains and the fastest internet. Democrats and Republicans used to agree on this. So let's set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline. Let's pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than thirty times as many jobs per year, and make this country stronger for decades to come.

I think the Keystone Pipeline is a great metaphor for Republican policies...rigid and out of step with a dynamic world.

I've heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they're not scientists; that we don't have enough information to act. Well, I'm not a scientist, either. But you know what -- I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we'll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

We should also not act like little insecure babies who don't like it when there are other people out there who are smarter and more accomplished than we are. Having more intelligence than someone shouldn't be a prerequisite for attacks from paranoid morons living in their parents basement.

Of course, the main takeaway from this speech is going to be the middle class tax cuts paid for by tax increases on the wealthy. Clearly, that's when GOP members in the audience lost a little in their shorts. How dare President Uppity try to take back the middle class white vote?

It's going to be a fun two years, folks!

Some First-Hand Experiences

I'd like to expand on Mark's post because I have direct personal experience with this kind of racism. I'll be the first to say that anecdotes, like way too many surveys, are meaningless, but since Fox News relies exclusively on anecdotes to buttress every "news" story they air, I figure it's my turn.

When my fourth sister announced that she was marrying a Latino Texan my father disowned her. Then he disowned my third sister for helping her put on the wedding. I had to walk my sister down the aisle because my father refused.

There was nothing wrong with this guy. They met in the Army Reserves. They've got two kids and have been married for 20 years now. He has a decent job locating fiber optic cables buried underground.

Whites seem to have a racial predisposition to getting diseases that put them on disability...

My father approved of my second sister for years. She married a fine, upstanding, right-wing racist just like my dad. She married this kind of guy three times. And now she's been divorced three times. Oddly, it turns out that intolerant white, gun-loving, right-wing conservatives make terrible husbands. They all turned out to be bums, with any number of excuses for why they can't be bothered to work, from "my head hurts," to alcoholism, to multiple sclerosis (not that guy's fault, of course, but whites have this racial predisposition to getting diseases that always seem to put them on disability...).

My third sister's husband was the same: another gun-loving conservative alcoholic who can't keep a job. Is it just my sisters' poor taste in men, or is something wrong with white guys?

But then my second sister got in the doghouse with my dad because her oldest daughter got pregnant and married a Latino guy.

Yes, you can find racists everywhere. Yes, there are blacks who -- after having been treated like animals for centuries by white slave owners, were then harassed for another century and a half by post-bellum Southerners who falsely imprisoned them, beat them, lynched them, prevented them from voting, made them sit at the back of the bus, didn't let them use rest rooms and drinking fountains, segregated them into poverty-stricken ghettos, sent them to terrible schools, and to this day send cops into their neighborhoods to single them out for harassment on minor traffic violations and shoot them for walking in the street -- bear resentment against whites. I can't figure out why.

And, yeah, many Chinese and Filipino and Japanese and English and Irish and Norwegian American parents are opposed to their children marrying outside their ethnic group. But this is not always racism: frequently, it's tribalism.

Is it racist to fear that your culture will die out because your children marry outside your ethnic group?

It's not surprising that some Chinese parents don't want their kids marrying Anglos because they're afraid they'll stop speaking Chinese, they'll abandon Chinese customs, and their grandkids won't look like them.

Children are the only real form of immortality there is. The people some commenters say are racist may just be people who think that if their grandkids don't look like them, it will be the end of their line. Their culture -- their "kind" -- will die out. Now, I'll grant it's a silly notion -- their DNA is still there, they can still wield cultural, social and moral influence over their grandkids (as long as they don't foolishly disown them).

In fact, the entire idea of race is false: there are blood types and tissue types, not racial types. Africans can donate blood and organs to Scandinavians, and all humans can cross-fertilize (to the chagrin of the racists). "Racial" differences are minute evolutionary changes that have crept in over the last few tens of thousands of years. Race is purely a function of geography, not biology.

But the fear of losing ethnic, cultural and linguistic connections with their descendants is understandable.

More to the point, this is exactly the same thing that the Republicans are talking about when they speak of "taking back America." Why is it racist for Filipino Americans to want to perpetuate their culture and ethnic appearance, but not racist for Republicans to want to "take back America?"

When Republicans say the United States is a Christian nation, they're saying that non-Christians are unwelcome.

When Republicans say the United States is a Christian nation, they're saying that non-Christians are unwelcome (although Republicans currently favor Jews for political reasons, this has not always been the case). And since religion and ethnicity are tightly linked, it's an inherently racist proposition.

And here is the core difference between the Democratic and the Republican Parties. The Republican Party welcomes the reactionaries and racists who want to maintain racial, religious and cultural purity. They adopt political platforms to move this agenda forward and actively devise electoral strategies to garner the support of and motivate racists.

Individual Democrats might have racial and tribal prejudices, but the party does not.

Republicans these days don't make their racism explicit. They couch it in terms like "take back America," "Christian nation," "states rights," "welfare queens," and low taxes. But everyone who knows the code knows what's really going on.

Now, Republicans will welcome blacks, Latinos and Asians into their party, just as long as they toe the line and give up everything that makes them different: speak English only, adopt one of two related monotheistic religions, abandon their parent's culture, abhor the "gay lifestyle," constantly mouth Old Testament paternalisms, adopt a vindictive, suspicious and fearful mindset, watch Fox News, badmouth Obama and Obamacare, drive the right kind of car (pickup truck, Hummer or anything that gets less than 15 mpg), constantly screech for the blood of Muslims, denounce climate change as a hoax, genuflect every time St. Ronald is mentioned, etc.

For a political party that prides itself on rugged individualism, the degree of rigid uniformity required to be a Republican is staggering.

The Republican Party is not a political party: it's a conservative Christian tribe. And you have to adopt all the trappings of the tribe or you're not welcome.

Republicans defend themselves against the racism charge by pointing at Herman Cain and Bobby Jindal. But seriously, if Jindal was still a Hindu, do you think he'd be the Republican governor of Louisiana today?

In the end, tribalism is just as evil and destructive as racism.  It encourages the same sorts of violence and hatred that skin color does. Just ask the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, or the soccer hooligans in England.

Or Cardinals and 49ers fans.

The Maturity Level Of The Gun Cult

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Seven)

At a recent holiday gathering, my father in law, a lifelong Democrat and strong supporter of the president, said that he had nothing against black people. He just didn't want my daughter dating or marrying one.

This sort of attitude is illustrated in the graphic below.

Though the numbers are trending downward, they are still far too high for this day and age. No doubt, this is true for both parties. I think the flatline for the Democrats likely represents the age cohort in which my father in law belongs.

Yet it still is important to note that there still are more Republicans than Democrats who opposed interracial marriage. Again, I think this is due to older people simply being more conservative than liberal as well as more conservatives being from the South.

Good Words

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Strength to Love, 1963.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Six)

One of the great lies that has been spread over the years about black people is that they are less intelligent than white people. Or, in the case of this question, they are more unintelligent than intelligent.

White Republicans track pretty even since the early 90s with the GOP being slightly more of the belief that blacks are more unintelligent than intelligent. After the election of 2008, the GOP even sunk lower than the Democrats but rose above them again by 2012. The trend is still downward for the Democrats.

I find it pretty distressing that there are even this many people that think this. 15 percent of our white population? Really?

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Five)

Our series on racism in political parties takes a positive turn today with this question.

One caveat here is that GSS did not ask this question between 1998 and 2006, hence the smoothness during that time. Yet we still see a drop when the question gets asked again and that is very good news indeed.

Progress!

The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Use

Politico has a piece up about the myth of defensive gun ownership that is certain to cause many mouths to foam and bowels to be blown. Here are a few choice pulls...

What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States. 

Check. My brother in law assures me that his children are much more safe in his house because there are many guns there. When I ask him who is more likely to have an accident with a gun, his kids or my kids (living in a house with zero guns), he says, with a straight face, my kids. You really have to love the Gun Cult:)

In 1992, Gary Kleck and Marc Getz, criminologists at Florida State University, conducted a random digit-dial survey to establish the annual number of defensive gun uses in the United States. They surveyed 5,000 individuals, asking them if they had used a firearm in self-defense in the past year and, if so, for what reason and to what effect. Sixty-six incidences of defensive gun use were reported from the sample. The researchers then extrapolated their findings to the entire U.S. population, resulting in an estimate of between 1 million and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year.

Did they, now? Now I understand why the Right is so paranoid about data. They are simply projecting the fact that they manipulate data on to the rest of us. What a complete load of bullshit. Not everyone in American owns a gun so to extrapolate to the entire population is terribly flawed. Worse, the fact that the NRA humps this "fact" all the time without mentioning the amount of accidents that occur with those same gun owners honestly creates a make believe land where guns are always good, forever and ever, amen.

Brand new data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan organization devoted to collecting gun violence data, further confirms Hemenway’s suspicion that Kleck and Getz’s findings are absurd. The archive found that for all of 2014 there were fewer than 1,600 verified defensive guns uses, meaning a police report was filed. This total includes all outcomes and types of defensive uses with a police report—a far cry from the millions that Kleck and Getz estimated.

I've never heard of the Gun Violence Archive but I can bet that the words "non-partisan" are nearly certain to elicit shrieks of disapproval and chest thumping from the Gun Cult. This is especially true when you see something like this.

So, really, it's far less than 2 million defensive uses a year. The Politico piece also notes that Kleck himself admitted that "defensive gun use" is a relative term. 36 to 64 percent of the defensive gun use was illegal? Wow. And when you compare it to the other statistics like accidental shootings, murders, and injuries, the necessity of defensive gun use is exposed to be one of the greatest lies ever believed by the American people. As the article concludes...

But the evidence clearly shows that our lax gun laws and increased gun ownership, spurred on by this myth, do not help “good guys with guns” defend themselves, their families or our society. Instead, they are aiding and abetting criminals by providing them with more guns, with 200,000 already stolen on an annual basis. And more guns means more homicides. More suicides. More dead men, women and children. Not fewer. 

Yep.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Four)

Next up in our series on racism within the GOP is this question.

An interesting question to say the least. It is indeed heartening to see the trend moving downward for both parties but note the uptick (again) right after the president gets elected. It's much sharper with Republicans. I'll be interested to see the data from the last two years.