Again with the False Equivalences on Science

With the measles scare and the question of vaccinations in the air, making false equivalences between the left on the right is again in vogue.

Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post has a column doing it with regard to science. This time his bugaboo is that in poll of scientists and the general populace, the right disagrees with scientists on most everything, while the left disagrees with scientists about vaccinations and eating genetically modified organisms (GMO foods).

First off, GMO foods are not about science. They're about corporate profits. More on this later.

Concern over GMOs isn't just about eating them. It's about the host of other problems the GMO-based agricultural-industrial complex engenders.

Second, the poll results don't represent what the pollsters say they do. When an average person answers a poll question they don't respond to the actual wording -- they're giving their overall reaction to the subject. A question like, "Are GMO foods safe to eat?" will be answered instead as if the poll asked "Do you think GMO foods are good?" The average person has heard a litany of reasons (monocultures, genetic contamination, toxic pesticides and herbicides, agribusiness crushing the family farm) about why they're bad, but can't enumerate them on a poll because polls don't allow for nuance. So they just vote GMO foods off the island.

A more specific example is climate change. Everyone over the age of 50 knows without a doubt that the climate is changing. So when conservatives say they don't believe in global warming, they're really saying A) I don't care because I'll be dead by the time it really starts to matter, B) I hate liberals and their stupid causes, C) Who gives a damn about polar bears?, D) It will cost too much to do anything about it, E) I don't want to give up my riding lawn mower and my Hummer for a bunch of tree huggers, and F) I'm afraid I'll lose my job when the Koch brothers pick up their ball and go home if they don't get what they want. Since they can't say all that on the poll, they just say they don't believe in climate change.

The scientists, however, will answer that GMO safety question honestly. Because, well, they're scientists. "Yeah, eating Bt corn is probably safe; i.e., it will probably not give you a heart attack tomorrow or a brain tumor next month."

Then the scientists would hasten to add (unless employed by Monsanto), "GMO crops like Bt and glyphosate-resistant corn engender a vast industrial-agricultural complex that creates many risks with the excessive use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, all of which contribute to bee die-offs, mutated wildlife, algal blooms in lakes and streams, Parkinson's, autism, and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if eating Bt corn contributed to the obesity epidemic or the alarming spread of food allergies. More unbiased research is needed to answer that."

That "But" will never get on a poll because polls aren't intended to give detailed results. They are, almost always, paid for by someone who wants a particular result to prove the point they want to prove.

The real question is whether the positive aspects of raising GMO crops outweigh the negative aspects.

The fact is, the science says that GMO foods have many negative aspects. These bad qualities are rooted in real science, not silly prejudice. The real question is whether the tradeoffs between the positive and negative aspects of GMO crops make them safe and sustainable on the whole. Monsanto doesn't care about the overall picture, they just care about their bottom line.

Most genetically modified crops are not engineered to make them more nutritious. They have genes inserted in them to make them poisonous to insects (Bt corn), or resistant to herbicides (Roundup Ready Corn).

In other words, the ag giants want to sell GMO crops so they can sell more Roundup and atrazine, as well as lock farmers into buying seed from them every year.

It took decades for scientists to realize that DDT was bad for humans. We haven't been eating Bt corn long enough to have enough data to know with absolute certainty that it's completely safe. The people doing the research on the safety of GMO foods are paid by the companies that produce them. Companies are known to cherry pick their data (mostly by burying studies that disagree with what they want). It's therefore not unreasonable to be scientifically skeptical about their findings.

Monsanto sells GMO corn so they can sell more Roundup and create a seed monopoly.

Furthermore, there are serious problems with industrialized agriculture, and GMO crops allow these bad practices to be used ever more widely.  In particular, the overuse of chemicals on crops.

The herbicides used on GMO crops are known to cause developmental problems in animals (atrazine is notorious for what it does to frogs) and human fetuses. The pesticides used in agriculture are toxic not only to insects, but also to humans, even in relatively small doses. They are neurotoxins known to cause diseases like Parkinson's.

Neonicotinoid pesticides are implicated as at least a partial cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, the condition that is killing bees across the world. Bees are essential to many types of agriculture, such as apples, apricots, almonds, all kinds of vegetables like cucumbers and watermelon, cotton, alfalfa, even okra. Is it wise to risk all those other crops so that some farmers can spray Imidacloprid indiscriminately?

When farmers buy GMO seeds from corporations like Monsanto, they are forbidden to use that crop as seed the next year. They must buy more seed from Monsanto. They can be sued even if they accidentally plant some seed they didn't pay for. This is a huge expense, and it means more money is being transferred from the pockets of farmers into the coffers of big business.

To exacerbate the problem, weeds frequently develop resistance to herbicides on their own. Even worse, the genes inserted into GMO crops are sometimes transferred to weeds, making them resistant to the herbicide and defeating the entire purpose of GMO crops.

Monoculture GMO crops represent a huge gamble that will likely result in a massive crop die-off one day.

Furthermore, when farmers across the country -- and the world -- all plant the exact same crop, we wind up with a genetically identical monoculture. When a disease or pest attacks the entire crop can be wiped out.

This is happening more and more frequently. Within the next few years most of the orange trees in Florida will be affected by citrus blight. The price of orange juice is projected to go way up. In the next few years chocolate prices will go up due to a combination of demand, drought (caused in part by higher temperatures due to global warming) and disease (witch's brew and frosty pod).

So, in the future, when some form of corn rust mutates and infects GMO crops, it will be carried by insects across the country. It will infect a huge fraction of the corn in the country, because there only a couple of companies selling seeds. Because the corn crop will be a monoculture, all from the same seed produced by one or two companies, all the plants will be infected.

This isn't idle speculation. It's something that will happen if we continue to plant a monoculture of corn. And because it can take years to develop new GMO crops, we could have famine that lasts for years because everyone foolishly planted the identical crop world-wide and there isn't enough genetic diversity in the seed banks to find a plant that is immune to the plague.

The problem with GMO crops isn't the science. The problem is with the corporations that use the science to make products without regard to the negative effects that product causes, which may extend far beyond the product itself (such as GMO crops that encourage overuse of fertilizers which winds up killing all the shrimp off the coast of Louisiana).

GMO crops are really an argument for letting the world's population grow without bounds.

In the end, Hiatt's defense of GMO crops doesn't rest on the science. It rests on the assumption that the world's population is going to continue to grow unabated, and unless we use GMO crops to increase yields we will have mass starvation.

Which is incredibly short-sighted. Clearly the population cannot grow unbounded. There are seven billion people in the world. GMO crops may be enough to support nine billion. But about 12? Or 15? Or 20?

Clearly the world survive just fine if there are only seven or five or three billion people on it. But at some point everything will collapse if we continue to increase the population, depending on a scientific infrastructure that requires monoculture crops and the massive use of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that we know will fail at some point.

Science Should Never Yield To Freedom of Expression

Some Good Words...

A “view” differs significantly from a “view necessarily informed by evidence.” The problem with many climate-change naysayers is that they present their views as facts where they are not accountable to the evidence. They avoid having to address expert review. They dodge the systematic technical criticism that is essential to establishing scientific claims as trustworthy. 

In this case, they have failed to persuade the scientific community. Instead, they appeal directly to nonexpert citizens with shards of evidence or emotional pleas, trying to short-circuit the process of validation.

It's always about the short circuiting, isn't it? Why?

I think it comes back to that insecurity/inferiority complex thing again. They just can't stand the fact that there are leaders in our country that are smarter and more successful than they are. So, let's tear them down...somehow...someway...

Pretty fucking sad.

Obamacare Vs. The Affordable Care Act

Shovel To The Head!

I just pulled this from a comment on that same social media thread from the other day...

I think it hit the nail on the head with a hammer ! I doubt they got diaper head ladin at all . This guy is not for America . You think because he forced a bullshit health care bill that he is god . Socialism is for a ignorant populace that can't manage themselves . The world war 2 generation showed us how it was done . That was a generally good generation of people that saw the greatest growth in any country in history . They went to the moon , built cars , bridges , highways , railroads, phone systems , cable TV , airlines , power plants . Anyone want to see what a liberal socialist take over looks like you tube the ruins of Detroit .

Wow...

Honoring Humble Beginnings

While I was mopping the kitchen floor today I contemplated my humble beginnings. My dad was blue collar all the way: variously a short-order cook, a window cleaner, a janitor and a bus driver.  When he had his own janitorial business I would sometimes help him with the lighter work, dusting doors and woodwork in new houses. When I was in high school I worked for a time cleaning apartments for the elderly -- mostly mopping floors.

That reminded of how frequently conservatives tout their "humble beginnings." At the 2012 Republican National Convention they talked about it constantly: from Ann Romney, to Paul Ryan, to Chris Christie, to Condoleeza Rice, they all had stories about their "humble beginnings."

Throughout the nomination process Rick Santorum constantly bragged about his grandfather Pietro being an immigrant coal miner. Of course, neither Rick nor his father were coal miners -- Santorum had to go back two generations to dig up his "humble beginnings."

These conservatives always talk about honoring those humble beginnings, about how that kind of work "builds character."

But you gotta ask: how does our society really honor someone? By waxing poetic for a couple of hours at a political convention? By taking off our hats for veterans at a football game? No.

The best way to honor someone is to pay them more money.

The best way to honor someone is to pay them more money. Enough money so they and their kids don't have to suffer through the indignities of poverty.

That's how we honor our sports "heroes." That's how we honor captains of industry. That's how we honor doctors and judges and attorneys and politicians. We pay them lots of money.

Why is it that the teachers and the janitors and the window cleaners and the maids and the miners and the cooks and the waiters and the cops and the soldiers and the farmers and the meat packers -- the people who actually do all the work to make this country function -- get paid peanuts, while the people who caused all of our major problems -- politicians, CEOs, hedge fund managers, bankers, stock market traders -- get paid the big bucks?

Look at this way: if all the CEOs died tomorrow, the country wouldn't skip a beat. If all the farmers died, we'd all starve. It's not an arbitrary comparison, because their numbers are roughly equal: according to Forbes, there are 1.7 million CEOs in the United States and about 1.9 million farmers and agricultural workers.

And even worse: through the miracle of the capital gains tax cuts passed under George W. Bush, the people who do the least work get taxed at the lowest rate. That's how Romney paid only a 14% tax rate while doing nothing but running for president.

Why is it that the people who do 99% of the work to make this country function have only 65% of the country's wealth?

Based on their policies, conservatives resent and despise their humble beginnings.

Based on their policies, conservatives don't honor their humble beginnings. They resent and despise them. They want to make anyone who hasn't "bettered themselves" -- like they did -- suffer for their laziness and lack of initiative.

When conservatives tout their humble beginnings, they're really just puffing up their own egos. They're bragging, "Look how much better I am than my grandfather, how successful I am. I got where I am because I'm better than they are. Better than you."

If men like Santorum really honored their grandfathers, they'd be demanding that men like Pietro be paid more, work under safer conditions, and be guaranteed decent health care when they were injured on the job.

Why are the people voting for these guys suckered into believing them?

Waving Buh Bye To Austerity

It's not surprising that Europe is finally ejecting austerity from the capsule and moving on to an economic policy rooted in reality as opposed to unicorn, fairy land.

The ECB’s new stimulus “should strengthen demand, increase capacity utilization and support money and credit growth,” Mr. Draghi said. He rejected any criticism that the vast expansion of the ECB’s easy-money policies would stoke inflation down the road, noting that inflation has stayed very low even after several interest-rate cuts and abundant ECB loans to banks. “There must be a statute of limitations for those who say there will be inflation,” he said.

Yeah, that was passed by a long time ago...

Equally not surprising is the recent vote in Greece firmly against austerity.

Greece currently has public debt equivalent to 177 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP). Its unemployment rate stands near 25 percent overall, and more than half of young adults have no jobs and few prospects. The austerity measures have gutted many of the country's most vital social programs. The economy has shrunk by more than 23 percent since the 2008 global financial crisis, a contraction comparable to the U.S. economy's during the Great Depression.

Austerity in times of economic contraction doesn't work. It never has. The only question that remains is when this shift in policy produces results, will the pathological haters of government finally admit fault?

Red State Whining

I've put this map up before but I've had a few requests via email to put it up again. The states in red represent who gets the most government handouts and the states in blue represent who gets the least. Ironic that the states that bitch the most about the federal government get the most money. Regardless of their whining, as a resident of the state of Minnesota, I'm happy that more of my share of tax dollars help people out in these states. Why?

Because I'm a grown up:)

At Least Bush and Cheney Didn't Do That!

More Economic Good News

The Labor Department said on Friday that employers added a seasonally adjusted 257,000 jobs in January, but even more significant was a revision of earlier estimates showing an additional gain of 147,000 jobs in November and December. Since Nov. 1, employers have hired more than one million new workers, the best performance over a three-month period since 1997. More jobs were created in 2014 as a whole than in any year since 1999.

Obama's "destruction" of the United States continues...the clever fiendishness of his evil plot is brilliant!

Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to figure out how to respond:)

Will They, Perhaps, Admit Fault With Other Issues?

Voices In My Head (Social Media Edition)

I recently engaged some Cult members on social media regarding the president's recent remarks on the Crusades at Friday's prayer breakfast. I realized as soon as he made them that bowels would be blown to such a great degree inside the bubble that, from the outside, it would have a decidedly deep brown hue. Sure enough, I was correct. Among the comments in a recent thread...

-We don't need our president focusing on things that happened during the Crusades. We need a president to focus on the threats that face our country today. Obama's remarks at the Prayer Breakfast were a joke.

-Our president is a joke

-...his remarks were so far out of the realm of what is happening that you wonder who the hell wrote that! You have a country of 6 million people (Jordan) taking the lead on the most dangerous situation affecting the whole world. Where is the "Most powerful man in the world"? Hosting illegal aliens. That calls for a big WOW!!!!

-Everything he says is a joke if it wasnt for the terrorists back then, there wouldn't have been any crusades!!

-I want a real president , a real American president ! One that says this is going to be one nation under God ! I want to hear a president with the balls to say , this is America this is how we do it here , and you knew this on the ride over . So if you don't like our customs and way of life go home . If interest on a loan offends you don't borrow money . If the pledge of allegiance offends you go home . It's not the "in god we trust" that really offends them . It's the first sentence . I pledge allegiance to the United States of America , would only offend someone that immigrated to the USA that doesn't plan allegiance ! Why would allegiance be such an insult to a person who technically wanted to be in the USA ? You answer that one yourself.

-He is a MOSLEM POS

When people opine about the United States declining, these comments (from six different people) are the exact reason why.

President Grandma

While the Republicans fill up their clown car with another round of presidential candidates (exception: Jeb Bush) for the 2016 election, ready to spout wacky, ideological nonsense (copyright: Barack Obama), Hillary Clinton calmly waits to announce her candidacy. She will have virtually no opposition from the Democrats and is running far ahead of all GOP Candidates (exception, again, Jeb Bush) in the early polls.

She is certainly not a done deal for the White House and will likely make some gaffes along the way in addition to being hit hard by oppo research. Yet most of this will wash away and it won't be merely be because she is a woman and will draw many women to vote for her. It will be due to one inescapable fact.

She is going to be President Grandma.

And the hate, fear and anger brigade on the Right won't be able to get any traction against her like they did with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Sure, they'll still have the die hard members of the Cult that will be believe anything they say but a good chunk of the cranky, old white people will take severe umbrage against attacking someone's grandmother. In many ways, this negates any discussion of Ms. Clinton's age.

This is an appeal that goes to the very heart of Americana. The image of "grandma" keeping us all safe and warm is inherently universal. Grandma is the one that bakes you cookies, tucks you in, and showers you with love and affection every time she sees you. Even some of the cranky, old white men that hate Barack Obama will be swayed by future President Grandma.

So, my message to Ms. Clinton and her people is simple: every single thing that you do after you announce your candidacy should be geared around President Grandma. Speaking events, townhalls, debates, social media communiques...all of it! Don't fret about getting the young vote. They like grandmas too, remember! Think about the voting bloc you can create...women, old white people, young people, all the non white people who continue to be alienated by the Right...they will all come home to President Grandma!

Who Has The Most Anxiety?

At first glance, the Supreme Court's looming decision in the King V Burwell case will cause the president and the Democrats the most anxiety. If SCOTUS decides that the subsidies do not apply to the states that do not have their own exchanges and are being run by the federal government, millions will lose coverage.

Yet, if I were a conservative, I would think for a moment before I began to thump my chest in victory over the president. This recent piece from AP details how Republicans have quite a bit to lose as well from such a decision.

RED STATES IN THE PATH

Insurance losses would be concentrated in Republican-led states, which have resisted "Obamacare." Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, and New Jersey are among those with the most to lose. Residents of blue states that are running their own markets would continue to receive benefits.

"It is not simply a function of law or ideology; there are practical impacts on high numbers of people," said Republican Mike Leavitt, a former federal health secretary now heading a health care consulting firm.

Because the health law's 2015 sign-up season is still under way, it's unclear how many millions of people could become uninsured. Two independent studies estimate around 8 million. Not all the 37 states where the federal government is currently running insurance markets would be affected equally. Some have made progress setting up their own exchanges.

Imagine you are a Republican governor of one of these states and suddenly millions of your constituents lose their coverage. Certainly, there would be some people that would blame the president but there would be plenty that would blame you.

That's why I predict, in what will be most amusing irony, Republican governors will end up putting together their own exchanges should the court rule against the president. Eventually, every state will and should have their own exchange. This way the federal government can be kept out of it to a greater degree and conservatives can claim some sort of victory. 

What's the Harm from a Measly Vaccination?

I had measles when I was kid. It was no big deal. I had chicken pox too. I even had pneumonia once. I lived.

I also had vaccinations for polio, tetanus,  diphtheria, some kind of hepatitis, and the flu. I lived through all those, too. And I haven't gotten the flu since I started getting the vaccine, for 10 or 15 years now.

Jenny McCarthy juggling breast implants

So what's the big deal about getting vaccinated? Why are Republicans like Chris Christie and Rand Paul joining Playboy model Jenny McCarthy saying that parents should be able to opt out of getting their kids vaccinated? Why do think they that parents should have the freedom to let their kids become Typhoid Mary?

It's interesting, considering how much conservatives blather about freedom, that the two states that have no exemptions for vaccinating school kids are Mississippi and North Carolina.

So why is it a problem when kids don't get vaccinated? Measles isn't all that deadly, and neither is chicken pox. And anyway, if my kids get shots, and the neighbor kids don't, my kids will be immune. Won't just the kids with idiots for parents be the ones that get sick and die? Isn't this just another case of evolution in action?

Nope. Not that simple.

Are parents who don't get their kids vaccinated baby killers?

First, not everyone can be vaccinated. Some people have compromised immune systems or allergies to vaccine components. There are minimum ages for most vaccines, typically two months for polio, pertussis, tetanus and the like, six months for the flu, and 12-15 months for diseases like mumps, chicken pox, measles, and so on. Wouldn't that make parents who don't get their kids vaccinated baby killers?

Second, the more people who get a disease, the more likely it is to mutate, and the more likely it is to develop strains that vaccines don't protect against. This is one reason why the flu vaccine is so hit and miss.

More to the point, for the selfish, parents who don't vaccinate their older kids are gambling with the lives of younger siblings. They're betting that enough other kids at school are getting vaccinated so that their kids won't get sick and bring the disease home to their baby sister or brother who is much more likely to die from it.

Sure, there are risks with vaccines. But those risks are far lower than the risks parents take every day as they ferry their kids around in cars to and from day care and school and play dates and birthday parties and soccer practice.

The reason everyone who can be vaccinated should be vaccinated is herd immunity. This means that if enough of the population is vaccinated, even people who aren't immunized are extremely unlikely to get a disease because it will be so rare. But when lots of people aren't vaccinated, there is no herd immunity and a disease like measles will spread like wildfire.

Jenny McCarthy blames vaccines for her son's autism. Isn't all that crap she's been sticking in her body for decades just as likely a cause?

This another example of the tragedy of the commons, where the selfish actions of a few harm the many.

But what about kids getting autism from vaccines? This was all a lie, based on falsified research by a British doctor. There's more evidence that having an older father is linked to autism and even stronger evidence that exposure to pesticides, which are usually neurotoxins, cause autism.

But the debate has been muddied by the untrustworthiness of pharmaceutical companies. They've demonstrated time and again that they're interested in profit, not public health. For decades vaccines were commonly preserved with thimerosal, which is organic mercury, a known neurotoxin. The toxic effects of organic mercury have been known since the 1950s, yet pharmaceutical companies are still putting thimerosal in vaccines for adults and in products like contact lens solutions. This is just stupid laziness and greed, and it undercuts the entire argument for vaccines.

Mercury is known to cause many types of neurological deficits, from cerebral palsy, to Mad Hatter syndrome, to birth defects. It's why thimerosal is banned from childhood vaccines, most American dentists don't use mercury amalgam fillings, and the EPA requires mercury scrubbers on coal plants and municipal incinerators.

What this last example shows is how unreliable "market based" solutions are in the real world. The harm caused by mercury pollution from burning coal doesn't show up when you turn on your light switch. It shows up in fish and seafood. A housewife has no way to know that turning on her dishwasher exposes her to organic mercury in the fish her husband catches in a nearby lake. Even if she does make the connection, she has no alternative: power companies are monopolies. All she can do is stop eating fish and seafood, making fishermen the innocent victims of power utilities that burn coal.

And when you have a state like Mississippi that requires children be vaccinated, the pharmaceutical companies that have the monopoly on vaccines are not constrained by any kind of market pressures. In fact, Congress passed a law in 1988 that shields vaccine makers from lawsuits, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011.

But the fact is, for the vast majority of diseases, there is no simple cause and effect. In the case of autism, there are hundreds of genetic and environmental contributing factors. When celebrities like Jenny McCarthy stand up and blame vaccines for her son's autism, people looking for an easy answer join her chorus and boycott vaccines, to the detriment of us all.

But seriously, how can you trust the medical judgment of someone like Jenny McCarthy? This woman was a habitual drug abuser, has had numerous breast implant and other cosmetic surgeries and repeated botox treatments.

Isn't it just as likely that all the crap she's been sticking in her body for decades caused her son's autism?

The Mindset of The Gun Cult

Check out Kory Watkins, the leader of Open Carry Tarrant County in Texas.




Punishable by death, you say? Hmmm...remind me again how these guys are NOT like Islamic extremists.

Wow

House votes - again - to repeal Obamacare

This latest vote marked the 67th time the House has voted to entirely repeal, defund or change some provisions of President Barack Obama's signature health care law. Republican aides emphasize that 10 changes to the law have been signed into law by the President.

I am reminded of the following quote...

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

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

Here's a poll conducted recently by the Washington Post and AP regarding implicit racism between Democrats and Republicans.

Certainly, this shows a problem with implicit racism in both parties yet when two thirds are showing a problem (nearly 10 points ahead of the Democrats) that is more significant. Again, this isn't surprising considering that the bulk of the GOP base is in the South.

There is also this Pew Poll which mirrors the GSS data regarding interracial marriage.

Note the uptick again right around the time the president got elected.

So, what exactly is implicit racism? Well, take the survey and find out! Here were my results.

Your Result Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for European American compared to African American.

This comes as no surprise to me whatsoever. I'm curious as to how my five commenters would do on this survey...if they even agree to submit to it. That first screen will likely send them into fits of paranoia:)

How Federal Spending Lifts Economies

Check out the recent study done by the Washington Center For Equitable Growth. If the United States makes more of an investment increasing our students' science and math scores, the dividends would be enormous.

The important thing to note here is that the increase in GDP means an increase in government revenue which means the investment in such programs would more than pay off, based on their study.

This study clearly illustrates the power that federal spending has to lift economies. There simply aren't any other entities out there that have this kind of muscle. One would think that the anti-spending crowd would want to make more money, right?:)

And Cue Up Rush Limbaugh...

Almost as if on cue after Mark's post about the worst president ever, Rush Limbaugh said this:

The best president in my mind, the gentleman president of all time, is George W. Bush ... he conducted himself as professionally and proficiently as possible.

Let's just look at one aspect of the Bush presidency, the most expensive (coming in at over a trillion dollars) and the most destructive blunder (over five thousand American dead, and hundreds of thousands of American wounded vets): the war in Iraq.

Bush told us that Iraq was behind 9/11 and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He got this information from a source named "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who wanted asylum in Germany. The German intelligence service told Bush that Curveball was lying.

Ahmed Chalabi provided the Bush administration with similar intelligence. He was a special guest of Laura Bush at the 2004 presidential inaugural. He was also an Iranian spy: he gave Iran information about codes that US intelligence had broken.

Yes, all the neocons in the Bush administration were fooled into invading Iraq based on lies from an agent of Iran, the country the same people are now telling us is a terrible threat to the entire world, and especially Israel.

Bush was either duped by Iranian spies or was lying about Iraqi WMDs.

Either the Bush administration knew these sources were lying, or they were duped by them. It's hard to believe the Bush administration was really that incredibly stupid, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were lying.

Before the Iraq invasion vice president Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld paraded before cable news cameras telling us it would be a cakewalk. The war would last just six days, or six weeks, or six months at the most. During that time I wrote many times about previous American invasions of other countries that had been successful: they all required us to stay there for 50 to 100 years: Japan, Germany, South Korea, the Philippines. When you invade a country, you basically have to stay there forever to make it stick -- it's the "You break it, you bought it" theory of invasion. You can't just go in, beat up the bad guys, take their oil, then leave and expect it to be stable, functioning democracy. But that was the lie that Bush sold us.

Bush never understood the "You break, you bought it" theory of invasion.

Bush told us the war would pay for itself: we would take Iraqi oil to pay for it. After more than 10 years, we have spent more than a trillion dollars on Iraq. Most of it was in fighting the war, but hundreds of billions went into building and rebuilding and re-rebuilding infrastructure that was bombed over and over again. Tens of billions went into cash that was flown into the country by the planeload as bribes to warlords to fight on our side. A lot of that cash never made it to the warlords, it went into the pockets of mercenaries ("security contractors" in Bush speak) who stole it. And it will continue to cost us billions every year, for decades, as we continue to pay the medical costs of the tens of thousands veterans who were mangled for life.

Bush installed a sectarian Shiite government in Iraq, which is essentially a puppet of Iran. The Shiites immediately began to persecute the minority Sunnis in retribution for the decades of persecution that Saddam had visited upon them. This opened the door for ISIS to invade the majority Sunni areas in Iraq near the Syrian border, threatening the very existence of the Iraqi government and raising the possibility of a terrorist takeover of the entire country.

All because George W. Bush had to overturn the applecart in Iraq, either because he had daddy issues or because his oil exec cronies wanted the Iraqi oil (which the Chinese got, by the way).

Now, the reason for going over all this ancient history is not just to cast aspersions on Bush, but to illustrate why Rush Limbaugh is wrong. One presumes that Limbaugh admires Bush because he made tough decisions and imposed the American stamp of power on the world.

But that was a failure: today Iraq is a total mess. Americans have no influence over the Iraqi government -- that was lost while Bush was still president. In 2008 Bush signed the status of forces agreement that pulled Americans out of Iraq in 2011 -- not Obama.

Worse, the aftermath of the Iraq War spilled over into Syria and destabilized that country. Most of the ISIS terrorists were radicalized and recruited in the prisons of Iraq during Bush's reign of terror (remember Abu Ghraib?).

The lesson of the war in Iraq is that you can't believe anything that anyone over there tells you: Curveball and Chalabi were liars with their own agendas. You can't trust that any of your "allies" in the region will help you: they won't, they're only using you for their own purposes.

Yet, even with this experience behind us, people like John McCain were instantly ready to back ISIS terrorists when the Syrian civil war started -- he even posed in pictures with them. And this isn't just me saying this, it's Rand Paul too.

Did McCain know these guys were ISIS terrorists? Of course not. He wouldn't willingly deal with these people. But that's the point. McCain was duped just like Bush was. We're damned lucky that he never became president. John McCain also wanted to fight in Libya. And Georgia. And Crimea. For a man who lived through a terrible war, this man has learned absolutely nothing about war.

Getting back to Limbaugh's statement, his characterization of Bush as "professional and proficient" is as laughable as it is ironic. Nothing about the Iraq War, Bush's singular "achievement," was professional or proficient. Everything about it, from conception to execution to termination was terribly bungled.

Bush started a war that couldn't be won and made America weaker.

Bellicose bumpkins like Rush Limbaugh think George Bush was a good president because Bush ran roughshod over foreigners and blustered about American power. But in the end those displays of naked aggression backfired. Bush started a war that couldn't be won and made America weaker. And much poorer. And killed a lot of good men and women.

There is simply no question that the United States is far better off after six years of Obama than after eight years of Bush, by any conceivable objective measure. More to the point: our worst problems came from Bush's conscious decisions to invade Iraq and let banks go crazy with mortgage derivatives.

And Obama's biggest mistake? Trying to get all Americans access to medical care.

Which for conservatives like Rush Limbaugh is beyond the pale!

A Very Busy and Informative CBO

So, the Congressional Budget Office has been busy of late. First up, we have this...

CBO: Deficit to shrink to lowest level of Obama presidency 

In a report released Monday, CBO says the deficit will be $468 billion for the budget year that ends in September. That's slightly less than last year's $483 billion deficit.

Of course, the Cult is still going to believe whatever is reported inside of their highly emotional and irrational bubble. Maybe a picture might help.

\

















(note: the above graphic does not include the revised and even lower figures just released by the CBO).

We also have this from the CBO...

Budget Office Lowers Its Estimate on Federal Spending for Health Care


With the latest revision, the budget office has now reduced its 10-year estimate for spending by Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs by $1.23 trillion starting in 2010, the year the health care law took effect. By 2039, the savings would amount to $250 billion a year today, or about 1.5 percent of the economy.

And the bubble continues to contract...:)

The Fizzle of Gunmageddon

Once Again, “Gunmageddon” Fizzles At Colorado Capitol - 

"After all the promises of vengeance against Democrats after the 2013 gun bill brouhaha, and the subsequent recall elections, it's obvious today that the gun issue did not result in the sweeping success for Republicans that Dudley Brown predicted. During a powerful Republican wave election that had everything to do with national political storylines and little to do with Colorado, Republicans took one chamber of the state legislature by a single seat–just like they did in the last Republican wave year. But they did not take full control of the legislature, and they did not elect a governor who will do their bidding. And for good measure, both Democratic seats lost in the 2013 recalls were retaken by wide margins–one of them by the former state director of the much-reviled Mayors Against Illegal Guns"

Yet another chest thumping prediction by the Gun Cult that didn't pan out...shocking...

The President's Long Game Works Again

Russia’s sovereign credit rating downgraded to junk

The 2016 Budget

President Obama released his 2016 budget yesterday and, in just about every way, it represents everything the Democrats stand for and everything the Republicans stand against. Here is a breakdown of some of the highlights. In my view, it's the best budget he has put out since he became president. This one jumped out at me right away...

-Provides Tuition-Free Community College for Responsible Students. The President's America's College Promise proposal creates new federal-state partnerships to provide two years of free community college to responsible students, while promoting key reforms to improve the quality of community college offerings to ensure that they are a gateway to a career or four-year degree. If all states participate, an estimated 9 million students could benefit from this proposal.

A big reason why our country was so successful after World War II is the GI Bill. This echoes that legislation and is a great example of middle class economics. An investment in these students now will pay dividends in our economy's future.


Other highlights...

—Spending of $4.0 trillion and receipts of $3.5 trillion would combine for a $474 trillion deficit. For the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the actual deficit was $483 billion. That was a marked improvement from the $1 trillion-plus deficits during Obama's first years in office, when the country was struggling to emerge from a deep recession. 

—A six-year, $478 billion public works program would pay for highway, bridge and transit upgrades. About $238 billion would come from a one-time, 14 percent mandatory tax on the up to $2 trillion in estimated U.S. corporate earnings that have accumulated overseas. That rate is significantly lower than the current top corporate rate of 35 percent. The top corporate rate for U.S. earnings would drop to 28 percent; foreign profits would be taxed at 19 percent, with companies getting a credit for foreign taxes paid. The remaining $240 billion would come from the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is financed with a gasoline tax.

 —The capital gains rate on couples making more than $500,000 per year would increase from 24.2 percent to 28 percent. Obama wants to require estates to pay capital gains taxes on securities at the time they are inherited. He is trying to impose a 0.07 percent fee on the roughly 100 U.S. financial companies with assets of more than $50 billion. 

 —Obama would take the $320 billion that those tax increases would generate over 10 years and funnel them into low- and middle-class tax breaks. His ideas: a credit of up to $500 for two-income families, a boost in the child care tax credit to up to $3,000 for each of up to two children under age 5, and overhauling breaks that help pay for college. 

 —Painful, automatic cuts to the Pentagon and domestic agencies would be eased, with a 7 percent increase in annual appropriations. For 2016, Obama wants a $38 billion increase for the Pentagon. All told, agency budgets would go up $362 billion over the next six years above caps mandated by automatic spending cuts. 
.
The one that jumps out at me here is the alteration in corporate tax code and foreign profits. Corporations that are keeping their profits abroad should be taxed more and given the incentive, through a lower overall rate, to come back home.

The president has finally gotten smarter on dealing with the GOP. Start with a proposal that is firmly on the left side of the field (at least by today's standards:)) and force the Republicans to compromise on a more moderate approach. Don't begin with a compromise that results in something in the middle on the right side of the field.

President Obama...Yesterday and Today

And the numbers have improved even more since September of 2014. One would think that people would be more grateful but when you are so immature that you can't take the success of an ideology that you despise, it follows naturally that adolescent behavior is the result.

Good Words

From a question on Quora...

This question sounds a bit like it was written by a teenage girl living in an upper-middle-class suburb who declares that she just had the Worst. Day. Ever. just because she didn't make the cheerleading squad and has a lot of homework that night.

An excellent summation of the maturity level of the president's critics.

Businesses Fighting Climate Change

The course to combat climate change has changed significantly in recent days. Polls show most Americans view at as both a threat and man made. This piece from today's New York Times shows just how serious the private sector is taking this issue.

Mr. Page is not a typical environmental activist. He says he doesn’t know — or particularly care — whether human activity causes climate change. He doesn’t give much serious thought to apocalyptic predictions of unbearably hot summers and endless storms. But over the last nine months, he has lobbied members of Congress and urged farmers to take climate change seriously. He says that over the next 50 years, if nothing is done, crop yields in many states will most likely fall, the costs of cooling chicken farms will rise and floods will more frequently swamp the railroads that transport food in the United States. He wants American agribusiness to be ready.

As I have stated many times previously, when companies like Cargill have their bottom line threatened, we will change our attitude about climate change.

Check out the link to their report. 

The Dangers of Straw Purchases

New information has come to light in the New Hope police shooting last Monday night. It turns out that Raymond Kmetz bought his guns online and then sent a straw buyer to the FFL to pick them up. 

A 42-year-old man from Golden Valley who was an acquaintance of Kmetz picked up the guns, Stanek said. A background check was done on him. Documentation for the gun transfer shows the names of both Kmetz and the alleged straw buyer. Troy Buchholz, owner of the gun shop, said in a phone interview Friday night that he questioned the buyer about why Kmetz’s name was on the K-Bid auction form. 

The buyer told him he had used that name to protect his privacy online. Buchholz ran a background check on the straw buyer, which came back with no problems. On the form, the buyer checked a box that said he was buying the guns for himself. He was alone, didn’t appear to have been coerced into buying the guns and paid for them, Buchholz said. Everything appeared legal.

This is the exact kind of bullshit that would have been prevented had Manchin-Toomey been made into law. A review of the bill shows that the new regulations of this bill put tighter controls on this type of transaction. Beginning on page 19 of the bill, the new law expands background checks to include gun shows and internet sales. Page 24, lines 4-22 would certainly have given Buchholz the regulation he would have needed to refuse the sale.

Of course, focusing on this one example for proving or disproving the effectiveness of new gun regulations misses a larger point. The questions that should be considered is this: would Manchin-Toomey (or some other set of new regulations on Americans who want guns) have prevented one or more of the deaths or injuries we have seen in the last year as a result of irresponsible Americans with guns?

If the answer is yes (and it obviously is), what exactly is the cost of the "sacrifice" that the Gun Cult claims will be the result? Is it human lives?

Evidence of Adolescence

Hey, check out the car parked next to me at the club today...

Obama emblem that says "Douche" instead of Obama...something about hand guns...a sticker that says "I'm not a racist, I hate Biden too"...and a little boy peeing on the word "Obama."

Was this person 12 years old?

He also had some sort of emblem that said something about the 2nd amendment being homeland security since 1789 next to an American flag on his bumper. Wow...

The Tide Has Turned On Climate Change

Check out this headline...

Most Republicans Say They Back Climate Action, Poll Finds

Oh snap. What are the members of the Church of the Climate Skeptic going to do now?

In a finding that could have implications for the 2016 presidential campaign, the poll also found that two-thirds of Americans said they were more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change. They were less likely to vote for candidates who questioned or denied the science that determined that humans caused global warming.  

Among Republicans, 48 percent say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports fighting climate change, a result that Jon A. Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University and an author of the survey, called “the most powerful finding” in the poll. Many Republican candidates question the science of climate change or do not publicly address the issue.

Holy shee-it! It's going to be most amusing to watch the GOP candidates in 2016 fall all over themselves in trying to address this. Here's my advice (and the real reason why this poll shows a shift). Focus on how much more money is going to be lost by corporations if climate change isn't addressed. Juxtapose this with how much money can be made in the emerging renewable energy market.

The almighty dollar always wins the day and that, my dear readers, is a good thing!

The Idiot’s Guide To Gun Storage

I'm not a huge fan of Wonkette, mostly because she reminds me too much of the right wing blogs that contain a lot of wacky, ideological nonsense. But her recent piece on just how irresponsible Americans are with guns is right on the mark.

In other words, you can literally misplace your 9mm pistol in the waistband of your one-year-old’s diaper (please don’t!), and most jurisdictions in this country won’t bring criminal child neglect or endangerment charges. Which is exactly what the founders intended. 

On this issue, we need to see more stuff like this. This is the only language the Gun Cult understands. Anything less is like bringing a knife to a gun fight (pun intended).

And, if you think the stories related in this piece are anectdata, think again. We have over 200 children under the age of 18 killed or injured and accidental shootings outnumbering defensive use by 54 incidents already in 2015 with next to nothing being done about it in terms of gun safety.

The responsibility for next to nothing being done lies solely at the feet of the gun lobby and the cult that believes everything they say. Shedding a light on this simple fact, as Wonkette does in her gun violence pieces, is completely supported by this site.

The Whole "if guns were cars" Argument=Torpedoed

Ever notice how a debate about gun laws usually elicits a guns to cars comparison?

It usually goes something like this. A completely rational and logical person asks a member of the Gun Cult why we shouldn't alter our existing gun laws. After wiping away the spittle and mouth foam from their shirts, this same rational and logical person is given a long  and very adolescent diatribe about the American Revolution, totalitarian governments, and tough history coming.

Mixed in with his wacky, ideological nonsense is the inevitable and childish comment about how there should be more car laws or changes to automobile technology because, after all, cars are death machines and kill far more people.

Well, guess what? We ARE doing that.

The chances of a driver dying in a crash in a late-model car or light truck fell by more than a third over three years, and nine car models had zero deaths per million registered vehicles, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Among the improvements credited for declining death rates is the widespread adoption of electronic stability control, which has dramatically lessened the risk of rollover crashes. SUVs had some of the highest rates a decade ago due to their propensity to roll over.

Side air bags and structural changes to vehicles are also helping. Automakers are engineering vehicles with stronger occupant compartments that hold up better in front, side and rollover crashes, allowing the seatbelts and air bags to do their jobs well, said Russ Rader, an institute spokesman. Improved technologies were responsible for saving 7,700 driver lives in 2012 when compared to how cars were made in 1985, the institute said.

So, how about some improvements to gun technology then, eh? Since we like to compare cars and guns, why not use the same method that has been effective here? I would think we could come up with all sorts of techno add ons that would prevent, say, yet another child picking up their parent's gun and shooting themselves or others with it.

What do you say, Gun Cult?

The Week In Politics

Since the State of the Union, the political scene sure has gotten interesting. As I have previously suggested, the president's approval ratings would rise if he started to appeal more to his liberal base. The fact that he was done in the low 40s was partly due to the left (and not exclusively the right) not approving of him because he was being too moderate. Well, they have come home, folks.

The president's tone in last Tuesday's speech shows that he's finally getting it right. You start off far left and then force Republicans to meet you in the middle. You don't start off at the 40 yard line on the left side of the field. Then you end up with a policy that is on the 30 yard line on the right side of the field. Now he's more or less forced the GOP to meet the reality of governing. Yes, that's right, conservatives. Now YOU GUYS have to deal with approval ratings running 30 percentage points behind the president.

Mitt Romney decided not to run for president today. That's too bad because I would have like to see him gum up and already gummed up field. I've heard a lot of talk about the deep bench on the side of the GOP but I see it more like this.

7 right-wing demagogues that will be shoved down our throats in 2016

In many ways, this is good news, though, because Reince Preibus's dream of being able to hide the batshit will not come to pass. These guys are going to be out there with their short wave radio lunacy and wacky, ideological nonsense, straw manning their way to their next appeal to fear to old, white men who can't seem to get over their problem with their parents...I mean, authority.

I say we let them have center stage for the next few months and then President Grandma can announce her candidacy sometime later in the year. What could possibly go wrong?:)

Simply Let Them Speak

From a letter to my local newspaper...

The Jan. 27 editorial “As the Midwest warms, economy will suffer” is the 2015 version of a sky-is-falling progressive scare. We have seen it all before. In the 1970s, it was the “population bomb,” then the coming of a new ice age — both wrong. The next iteration was Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” complete with a dramatic hockey-stick graph of temperature rise. Undaunted by being totally wrong, progressives revised the global-warming mantra using the meaningless term “climate change.” Since climate changes from day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year, this latest scare tactic to save Minnesota, the United States and the world is guaranteed to require more government with higher taxes to support a big new bureaucracy with big new programs. The inconvenient truth is that this is but another boondoggle in a long history of progressive, tax-and-spend, save-the-world ideas.

Wow....

A Very Active Gun Lobby

Two Cops Get Shot and Fox News Isn't Covering It

On Monday a man shot two cops outside a city council meeting in New Hope, Minn. The news has been all over the Twin Cities, but the national press has been almost completely silent about it. NPR and ABC have stories, but Fox News has nothing to say about it.

This seems curious, given the extreme attention that the national press has given such shootings since two cops were assassinated as they sat in their squad cars.

Why is the cop shooting in Minnesota being ignored? Maybe it's because the cops in New Hope survived with only relatively minor wounds.

Or maybe it's because the shooter was a crazy old white guy with a gun fetish.

The shooter, Raymond Kmetz, had a history of mental illness, terrorizing and attacking judges, police officers, lawyers, city council members, and so on. He had dozens of charges filed against him over the years, and his own attorneys filed restraining orders against him.

His son, Nathan, wrote long rambling diatribes on the Internet insisting that his father wasn't crazy, that they'd locked him up in a mental institution and ruined his life. But Kmetz's brother Marvin always feared his crazy brother would get someone killed.

Why did Kmetz go to the city council meeting with a gun?  This appears to be the motivation:

In 2008, he tried to sell the house on Nevada Avenue N. where he had lived for 40 years to the city of New Hope for nearly $1 million, though it was worth well below half that amount. He argued that it was in an industrial zone ripe for development. The council rejected the unsolicited offer. The property was last sold in 2013 for $140,000 and now is boarded up. 

In other words, he was in financial difficulties and wanted to get bailed out.

If Kmetz had been a schizophrenic young black Muslim angry that the city council had blocked the building of a mosque in his town, what do you think the reaction of Fox News and the national news media would have been?

But if a crazy old white man tries to shoot up a city council meeting? That's just another Monday in Minnesota.

Ecolab Going All Solar

Ecolab, a global company that is a seller of hygiene, energy and water technologies to businesses, is the first big Minnesota company to go all-in on solar. With this deal, Ecolab will acquire more solar output than now exists across the entire state.

“It’s groundbreaking in many ways,” Ken Johnson of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group, said of the Ecolab-SunEdison deal. “When people think of solar they tend to think of places like California, Arizona, Hawaii and Florida. They don’t traditionally think of the Midwest. This is going to open up a lot of eyes.”

It's been pretty amazing to drive around Minnesota and Iowa the last few years and see the renewable energy market exploding. Wind turbines have already dominated rural areas in southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa. Now we are going to see more solar panels and deeper buy in from private concerns like Ecolab with renewable energy.

In my view, this shift in the free market will render further discussion about climate change largely moot. If corporate America decides that's where the money is, climate deniers will end up about as relevant as the cassette tape.

Stunning...

I've appreciated Frank Scaeffer's mea culpas over the years but this one is, hands down, fucking awesome. Soak it in deeply, readers, and attempt to answer the following question...

How are Christian conservatives different from Islamic conservatives?

R.I.P., Political Career of Sarah Palin

With Sarah Palin's recent speech in Iowa, I think we can now safely say that her political career is over. Rambling, incoherent, and filled with a whole lot of wacky ideological nonsense, Palin's recent speech in Iowa was so bizarre even conservative Byron York was wondering WTF.

Of course, her speech (which can be seen in its entirely below) is honestly an excellent representation of what happens when you smoke too much right wing blog. I'm happy to report that even people inside of the bubble are starting to realize this.

 

Tea Party "Scam PACs" Are Screwing Over Conservatives

An article in Politico describes a problem that appears to be unique to Tea Party conservatives: PACs that pop up instantly, beg for money to defeat Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, collect millions and then spend all that money on themselves:

A POLITICO analysis of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission covering the 2014 cycle found that 33 PACs that court small donors with tea party-oriented email and direct-mail appeals raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs. POLITICO’s list is not all-inclusive, and some conservatives fret that it’s almost impossible to identify all the groups that are out there, let alone to rein them in.

People who think they're supporting the Tea Party are just lining the pockets of con artists.

“These groups have the pulse of the crowd, and they recognize that they can make a profit off the angst of the conservative base voters who are looking for outsiders,” said the influential conservative pundit Erick Erickson, who has taken it upon himself to call out PAC operators and fundraisers he sees as scams. They are “completely a drain,” said Erickson, whose assessments of candidates and groups carry particular weight among tea party activists and the Republicans who court them. “The conservative activists feel like they’ve contributed to a cause greater than themselves, but the money goes to the consultants, and eventually the activists get burned out and stop giving money, including to the legitimate causes.”

The groups ripping off conservatives under the Tea Party banner are the same sort that the IRS was going after before House Republicans hammered them for doing their job.

These organizations lie about what they're doing and rip off people who think they're helping their political movement. They do just enough to lend an air of credibility to their organization, but they pocket most of the cash.

If only there was an organization that was dedicated to uncovering fraud and abuse of the tax laws and the campaign financing system.

But wait! There is! It's called the IRS. After Citizens United the IRS had a really tough job trying to figure out who the crooks were. They tried to stop Tea Party groups with fishy sounding names that were skirting campaign financing laws and committing perjury on official forms, groups that said they were social welfare groups when they were really just self-dealing fund raisers and political hucksters. And for their efforts to protect the American people from these rip-off artists the IRS was dragged before a House committee and blasted for "singling out" Tea Party groups that were stealing from conservative voters.

The crucifixion of the IRS and the Federal Elections Commission is coming back to bite Republicans. The Republican House has forced the IRS to back off and let these pirates running under the Tea Party banner rip off conservatives. Now Tea Party conservatives are reaping the oats they sowed.

A cynical person would say that all Tea Party organizations are like this. One of the first was formed by Clarence Thomas' wife, almost the instant after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. I can just imagine the dinner table conversations in the Thomas household about how they could cash in big time with their supremely conservative credentials.

Clearly, there need to be controls over these organizations. Word of mouth isn't good enough, because so much of this fund raising goes on over the Internet or cable TV and they all use similar sounding names to intentionally confuse people.

Is the Tea Party is real, or just another scam to rip off cranky old farts?

At this point you've really got to ask whether the Tea Party is real, or just another quick-buck scam like cheap Viagra, dietary supplements, or motorized scooters, designed solely to rip off cranky old farts.

And you can't count on "luminaries" like Karl Rove, or Erick Erickson, or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh to tell you who the good guys are. Because they all have their own PACs and their own consulting firms that are competing for the dollars of conservatives.

We need the FEC and the IRS to do their jobs and watch these clowns so they don't rip us off.

Going Solar!

The cover piece for this week's Christian Science Monitor is truly splendid. Africa is experiencing a quiet solar revolution and brushing off the usual criticism of developing countries not being able to do renewables.

Now, however, a new solar energy movement is bringing kilowatts to previously unlit areas of Africa – and changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The idea behind the latest effort isn’t to tap the power of the sun to electrify every appliance in a household. Instead, it is to install a small solar panel not much bigger than an iPad to power a few lights, a cellphone charger, and other basic necessities that can still significantly alter people’s lives. 

Going smaller better fits the budgets of the rural poor. People use the money they normally would spend on kerosene to finance their solar systems, allowing them to pay in small, affordable installments and not rely on government help. The concept is called pay-as-you-go solar.

Check out the whole piece, folks. There are going to be big things happening with renewables in the next couple of years!

Gun Control: An Inconvenient Truth

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?