Romney and the RNC confuse the timeline

Jake Tapper has a very good, and aptly titled, piece on some Republicans’ criticism of Obama over the attacks in Libya. It points out that, as mistermix said, the embassy’s statement came out before the violence began, and it ends by calling a lie a lie.

Romney wasn’t the only one — Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus tweeted ”Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.”

The evidence that the president “sympathizes with attackers in Egypt” was not immediately apparent, likely because it does not in any way exist.

Kudos to Tapper for spelling it out carefully…why isn’t this done more often? Why can’t an article just say that someone’s claims are not true in any way?

Weird Scenes Inside the Coal Mind

These babies are popping up all over the northern panhandle and southwestern PA:

Because we are in the middle of a post truth and post accountability election, I have no idea where the signs are coming from. There are no paid for markings on the signs, so I just have no clue. Could be the Romney campaign, could be a super pac that is anti-Obama, could be the Friends of Coal, or it could be just one wingnut owner of a coal company like Don Blankenship. What’s depressing, though, is it just keeps pushing the fals narrative that Obama is somehow killing coal. Hell, Obama has spent the last couple years blowing sloppy kisses at the ludicrous notion of “clean coal,” enraging environmentalists. At any rate, as we have stated over and over and over again, what is killing coal is natural gas:

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States from January through March were the lowest of any recorded for the first quarter of the year since 1992, the federal Energy Information Administration reports. The agency attributed the decline to a combination of three factors: a mild winter, reduced demand for gasoline and, most significantly, a drop in coal-fired electricity generation because of historically low natural gas prices. Whether emissions will continue to drop or begin to rise again, however, remains to be seen, experts said Friday.

“While this is a positive step, we shouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, we’ve got plenty of natural gas, we can just switch to that, problem solved,’ and move on,” said Jay Apt, the director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, who was not involved in compiling the study.

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption totaled 1.34 billion metric tons in the first quarter, down nearly 8 percent from a year earlier, the Energy Information Administration said.

Although natural gas is a more efficient fossil fuel than coal, burning it still produces carbon dioxide emissions. One of its strengths lies in that it produces more kilowatts of power than the equivalent amount of coal and it provides more energy for each carbon dioxide molecule emitted into the atmosphere. This so-called carbon efficiency is one of the key equations that scientists use to project carbon dioxide emissions, with more efficient energy sources contributing less to global warming than the more inefficient emitters.

Claiming there is a war on coal is akin to claiming that Henry Ford declared war on horses. At any rate, if there was a war on coal, I wouldn’t say it is completely over, but troops friendly to natural gas are massing near Waterloo.

How To Give A Damn About Climate Change

When it comes to the politics of climate change, there’s one question I’ve never been able to answer satisfactorily: Where’s the outrage?

It’s not entirely missing. I remember the Keystone Pipeline protests, the largest act of civil disobedience at the White House since Vietnam. But, impressive a display as it was, the Keystone protests were dwarfed by Occupy; and worse still the pipeline’s proponents may yet win the war.

My point is not to criticize those who’ve worked to force our political system to seriously address the climate crisis — far from it, in fact. I don’t blame them for the public’s indifference. It’s not their fault; it’s mine. Or at least people like me. I know my bit about climate change, but I confess that I approach the subject in much the same way I would a doctor’s physical or a plate of steamed cabbage. I do it so I can say I’ve done it. It’s passionless. A weak foundation for effective action, to say the least.

Obviously, I’m not the only person who feels this way. So I hope a new paper by two University of Oregon professors “Climate Change and Moral Judgment,” which I found via Dave Roberts of Grist, gets some attention. The paper’s an examination of just why it is that folks like me (and those who are even less inspired) struggle to care about climate change in a personal way. According to the authors, the reasons are multiple (screen grab courtesy of Roberts):

If you want more, you can either fork over $32 to buy the article or you can be cheap like me and read Roberts’ great synopsis instead. But do try to give this one a go, even if you’re the kind whose eyes glaze over once the charts and graphs start a-flying. As Roberts concludes, “Climate change is not only the economic and ecological crisis of our time, it’s also a moral crisis. What we are doing to our descendants is a moral crime. Finding ways to help people get that, feel it in their guts the way they would if someone threatened their own families, is a precondition for serious, sustained action.”

Update: In the comments, the estimable Sir Nose’D shares a free and easy way to read the article.

Fade Away and Radiate

If you wonder whether Fukushima has left the Japanese worried about nuclear energy, this beaming young woman is holding the first smartphone with a built-in radiation detector, just announced by Japanese carrier SoftBank. The next big fear for Fukushima is that the spent fuel storage ponds will run dry because their jury-rigged cooling systems will fail, or because another earthquake will hit.

Open Thread, Political Musings

I keep reading about how Romney can’t close the deal with the fundagelicals no matter what he does. Christ, what does he have to do?  Beat up a gay kid?
Oh. Oh, dear. Ummm, yeah. sorry.

Also too, Rmoney’s”support” of gay adoption lasted less than one day

Obviously, if people knew what they were up to, people might not like it

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m helping a long-shot local statehouse candidate with his campaign finance filing. I’m his treasurer. It’s not difficult. There’s the Handbook of Ohio Campaign Finance to refer to, and we file with the Secretary of State online. I enter the donor name and address on a form and once the report is filed, those names are publicly available.

We met with a small business owner 2 weeks ago. He wanted to fire questions at us for 45 minutes and then (possibly) donate. It was like a competition to see which side could speak more quickly, interrupt the other more often, and listen not at all. I thought he won that in a walk, so didn’t expect a donation after that disaster of an inquisition. His name is on the door of the local business he owns and operates, and when I file my next report, his name will also be on the candidate’s donor list, because we seem to have survived the hazing: he wrote us a check. Will that matter to his customers in this overwhelmingly Republican county? I don’t know. I hope not. I know that we had local volunteers for John Kerry in 2004 who work at the for-profit hospital here. They parked across the street in the supermarket lot when we met for phone banking, because they were afraid they’d face repercussions at work if it became known that they were volunteering for that Alinskyite radical Leftist, Senator John Kerry.

Contrast that with the absolute cowardice and incessant, bleating whining of the moneyed few, speaking through an editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ:

Shareholder proxy season is coming up, and along with it a new batch of politicized shareholder resolutions. The underreported story this year is the flowering of a long-planned political campaign intended to stop companies from exercising their free-speech rights to influence government. Corporate directors need to know what they’re up against.
The campaign is traveling under the assumed name of “disclosure,” which sounds innocuous and is hard for CEOs and corporate boards to oppose. The specific target is to get companies to publicly disclose what they spend on politics—their donations to candidates or PACs, how much they spend on lobbying or government affairs, which industry associations they contribute to, and even in some cases the political contributions of executives.
It’s part of a multiyear campaign by unions, left-wing activists and their factotums to expose and then vilify companies that disagree with them.
The campaign has gained speed since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that restored First Amendment rights to unions and corporations.

Corporations are not democracies. They are businesses organized for the purpose of making money to increase value for all shareholders, not to serve the narrow goals of some shareholders.
The political left is using this disclosure campaign not to serve the interests of shareholders, but to further its own policy agenda. It is an abuse of the proxy process, and companies would be wise to resist it in the interest of their business, their shareholders, and their country.

And, here’s the great Richard Trumka, in his advocate’s hat, responding:

Your editorial “The Corporate Disclosure Assault” (March 19) falsely claims that disclosure of corporate political expenditures is not in the best interest of all shareholders. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United, which upheld the First Amendment rights of corporations to make independent political expenditures, explicitly relied in part on the principle that “prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.”
Current law enables businesses to spend for many political purposes without disclosure, whether to the public or their shareholders. The editorial’s suggestion that businesses should be able to conceal their political spending in order to avoid criticism or controversy disserves shareholders. As Justice Antonin Scalia recently observed in another case, Doe v. Reed, which rejected First Amendment-based claims for keeping secret the identities of ballot-petition signers, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
Unions have long been required to make public disclosures of their political and other spending. Corporations that spend to influence politics have no legitimate gripe against shareholder disclosure resolutions that would require them to publicly disclose that spending—and they have ample opportunity and resources to explain why that spending advances shareholder value and the public interest.
Richard L. Trumka
President
AFL-CIO
Washington

They want what they always want: all of the rewards with none of the risk. Risk is for the people who can least afford it.

h/t Demos blog

Brace Yourselves

Actual journalism has been committed:

That’s because oil is a global commodity and U.S. production has only a tiny influence on supply. Factors far beyond the control of a nation or a president dictate the price of gasoline.

When you put the inflation-adjusted price of gas on the same chart as U.S. oil production since 1976, the numbers sometimes go in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. If drilling for more oil meant lower prices, the lines on the chart would consistently go in opposite directions. A basic statistical measure of correlation found no link between the two, and outside statistical experts confirmed those calculations.

“Drill, baby, drill has nothing to do with it,” said Judith Dwarkin, chief energy economist at ITG investment research. Two other energy economists said the same thing and experts in the field have been making that observation for decades.

The statistics directly contradict the title of GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s 2008 book “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,” as well as the campaign-trail claims from the GOP presidential candidates.

I can’t wait to see how the Politifact folks will spin this.

Do It Yourself Solar

Pretty fascinating little development in downstate West Virginia:

Make The Gas Face For Those Little White Lies

One of the nation’s biggest oil lobbyists in January warned the President that he could make life very uncomfortable for his re-election chances if he didn’t approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

The oil industry’s top lobbyist warned the Obama administration Wednesday to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline or face “huge political consequences” in an election year.

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it would be a “huge mistake” for President Barack Obama to reject the 1,700-mile, Canada-to-Texas pipeline. Obama faces a Feb. 21 deadline to decide whether the $7 billion pipeline is in the national interest.

“Clearly, the Keystone XL pipeline is in the national interest,” Gerard said at the trade association’s annual “State of American Energy” event. “A determination to decide anything less than that I believe will have huge political consequences.”

Jump to six weeks later:

Soaring gasoline prices are threatening to undercut President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects and offering Republicans an easy target. With prices pushing $4 a gallon and threatening to go even higher, Obama sought Thursday to confront rising public anxiety and strike back at his GOP critics.

Obama said dismissively that all the Republicans can talk about is more drilling — “a bumper sticker … a strategy to get politicians through an election” — when the nation’s energy challenges demand much more. In a speech in Miami, he promoted the expansion of domestic oil and gas exploration but also the development of new forms of energy.

For all the political claims, economists say there’s not much a president of either party can do about gasoline prices. Certainly not in the short term. But it’s clear that people are concerned — a new Associated Press-GfK poll says seven in 10 find the issue deeply important — so it’s sure to be a political issue through the summer.

You do the math.  I’m thinking Big Oil already has, and they’re liking the numbers they see.  The Republicans and the Village certainly aren’t above concern trolling President Obama, either.  Remember, he’s “bad for business” when he doesn’t give corporations the “certainty” of a negative tax rate and all the steak fajita grandes they can eat on Tuesdays.

Presidents may not be able to do much about gasoline prices, but oil companies sure as hell can.

Gas, Past Tense, Made Facially

What the price of gas has done over the last 12 months (top green line there):

What FOX News makes out of the green line:

“Man, Mr. Murdoch’s third period math class is effin’ hard.  But just leave out the uninteresting data points AND BLAME PRESIDENT MELANIN MCDARKGUY LOL HOMEWORK’S DONE.  I bet I get a B plus for this one.”

Burning Desire

Secondary to John’s earlier post, Rick Ungar at the Washington Monthly had already dipped a toe into the murky waters:

According to the Automobile Club of America, gasoline prices have risen, on average, 13.1 cents in the past month—despite the fact that gas prices traditionally fall in the month of February as people drive fewer miles during the wintery month.
__
What’s more, virtually every projection out there suggests that gas prices are about to make a dramatic rise to, potentially, record levels with some suggesting that $5.00 a gallon gas or more —double the prices of just a few months ago—could very well be in our future.
__
This becomes a particularly odd statistic when one considers that Americans are using less gasoline than it has at any time in the last fifteen years. Currently, we burn up 8 percent less gas than we did during the peak year of 2006 while most experts expect the trend to continue to where we will be using 20 percent less gasoline by 2030…
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While Wall Street’s ‘priority one’ is to make money, it is clear that, for this year, priority two is the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. Accordingly, from a Wall Street point of view, it certainly is a happy coincidence that that priority one, making big money on oil speculation, could directly lead to accomplishing their second highest mission. I am left to wonder whether this is a happy Wall Street coincidence or a clever strategy that could pay off big-time come November.
__
Gasoline prices have a ‘real time’ impact on middle-class voters. Can you imagine a better way to make voters good and angry than to insure that they are paying five bucks a gallon for the gasoline that will be powering them to the voting booth in November? And if you subscribe to the theory that the President’s opponents would like to keep economic growth down until the election is over, what better way to accomplish such a goal than to force a precipitous rise in gas prices?…
__
As a result of what is coming, it might be a good idea for the Obama Administration to start talking about the reasons for rising gas prices and I’d start talking about it now. This is one instance where silence is anything but golden and without a plausible explanation as to why the Administration is not responsible for what might be a dramatic rise in gas prices, it may be President Obama who is left holding the pump nozzle come December.

Of course, if the President does talk about “the reasons for rising gas prices“, he’ll be accused of both scare-mongering for electoral advantage and of depressing the vote for down-ticket Democrats by poor-mouthing what will be labelled as his administration’s failures. But if you believe that more information is always better, it’s another piece in the jigsaw puzzle…

Round and Round and Round We Go

Here we go again:

Rising gasoline prices, trumpeted in foot-tall numbers on street corners across the country, are causing concern among advisers to President Obama that a budding sense of economic optimism could be undermined just as he heads into the general election.

White House officials are preparing for Republicans to use consumer angst about the cost of oil and gas to condemn his energy programs and buttress their argument that his economic policies are not working.

In a closed-door meeting last week, Speaker John A. Boehner instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger they find among their constituents when they return to their districts for the Presidents’ Day recess.

“This debate is a debate we want to have,” Mr. Boehner told his conference on Wednesday, according to a Republican aide who was present. “It was reported this week that we’ll soon see $4-a-gallon gas prices. Maybe higher. Certainly, this summer will see the highest gas prices in years. Your constituents saw those reports, and they’ll be talking about it.”

Seems like only yesterday:

Policy differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been far and few, but a new one emerged on Monday over a proposed gas tax holiday. Obama says he’s against while Clinton says she’s in favor, putting her on the same side as John McCain, who proposed such a holiday last week.

Gas prices could hit $4 this summer, raising the ire of voters and putting pressure on presidential candidates to promise immediate action.

Speaking on Larry King Live on Monday night, Clinton outlined a series of steps to address the issue at the beginning of the show, reflecting the growing importance of pocketbook concerns among voters. “I would also consider a gas tax holiday, if we could make up the lost revenues from the Highway Trust Fund,” she said, without specifying how to make up those lost revenues.

Earlier Monday at a community college in the Philadelphia suburbs, Obama rejected a tax holiday as bad economic policy. “I’ve said I think John McCain’s proposal for a three-month tax holiday is a bad idea,” Obama said, warning consumers that any price cut would be short lived before costs spike back.

“We’re talking about 5 percent of your total cost of gas that you suspend for three months, which might save you a few hundred bucks that then will spike right up,” Obama said. “Now keep in mind that it will save you that if Exxon Mobil doesn’t decide, ‘We’ll just tack on another 5 percent on the current cost.’”

I’m so glad to see this election cycle we’ll be covering all the previous election’s greatest hits: Iran, abortion, gas prices, immigrant bashing, gay bashing, and the Bush tax cuts. Just this morning Santorum rolled out the “Obama isn’t a real Christian” bullshit, so we’ve got that to look forward to again. Maybe we should be happy they threw in contraceptives so we could have some new material this election.

GAMETIME:

Who will be the first Republican to call for a national gas tax holiday? My guess- ROMNEY.

Who will be the first Democrat to trip over himself rushing to a microphone to undercut Obama and call for a gas tax holiday? My guess- MANCHIN.

Newt Gingrich Secures All Important “Barrens Chat” Vote with Key Chuck Norris Endorsement

Was he this much of a clown in the 70′s (Chuck, not Newt):

For my wife, Gena, and I, we sincerely believe former Speaker Newt Gingrich is the answer to most of those questions and deserves our endorsement and vote.

We agree with our friend and governor of the great state of Texas, Rick Perry, when he suspended his campaign and endorsed Gingrich, that Newt “has the heart of a conservative reformer.” We believe Newt’s experience, leadership, knowledge, wisdom, faith and even humility to learn from his failures (personal and public) can return America to her glory days. And he is the best man left on the battlefield who is able to outwit, outplay and outlast Obama and his campaign machine.

I may have let my nerd show in the title, so my apologies.

Pipeline Execution

When President Obama makes his February decision on the Keystone XL pipeline deal, which Republicans forced as part of the last hostage crisis, he might want to note that a similar pipeline is getting some bad press up in America’s Hat:

Environmentalists accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government of taking the side of big oil over ordinary citizens after the Conservatives said foreign-funded “radicals” were distorting a pipeline approval process.

Blaming “outside agitators” is usually a sign of weakness, so I wonder if the Harper government is going to have trouble pushing through a pipeline that goes across the Rockies and the BC coast to transport crude oil to supertankers. Canadians can tolerate abominations like dollar coins and socialist medicine, so if they can’t put up with a pipeline, why should God-fearing real Americans?

(Thanks to beaver-tail-eating reader Bob for the link.)

Elected conservatives outsource all their work to corporations, leaving me wondering what they do all day

Excellent all-in-one-place piece on ALEC in ProPublica:

This week, both the Los Angeles Times and The Nation put the spotlight on a little-known but influential conservative nonprofit that creates “model” state legislation that often make its way into law. The organization has helped craft some of the most controversial—and industry-friendly—legislation of recent years.
The American Legislative Exchange Council,ALEC, crafted a model resolution for states calling the EPA’s attempts to regulate greenhouse gasses a “trainwreck” and asking Congress to slow or stop the regulations, the Times reported. A press release on ALEC’s site says that at least 13 other states have passed resolutions

It calls itself a “policy making program that unites members of the public and private sectors in a dynamic partnership” based on “Jeffersonian principles.” Critics say it has devolved into a pay-for-play operation, where state legislators and their families get to go on industry-funded junkets and major corporations get to ghostwrite model laws and pass them on to receptive politicians.

I know the information on ALEC has been floating around for months on liberal sites, so it’s heartening to see that news outlets (LA Times, NPR) are now picking it up.

Here’s where you can find the ALEC-drafted bill your state legislator is introducing as his or her own work, “word for word”, in the case of the recent Arizona immigration law:

The Center for Media and Democracy has obtained copies of more than 800 model bills approved by corporations through ALEC meetings, after one of the thousands of people with access shared them, and a whistleblower provided a copy to the Center. We have analyzed and marked-up those bills and made them available at ALEC Exposed.

Looking at the categories, it’s easy to understand why monied interests are drafting this legislation and introducing it in state legislatures all over the country. The profit incentives are clear when they are privatizing public schools and destroying unions, or limiting the right of individual citizens to hold a wrongdoer responsible for money damages suffered, or gutting environmental regulations, or rewriting a state tax code. Those are obvious. What’s interesting is the voter ID bill. That really sticks out. No profit incentive there, so what’s that all about, I wonder?