Betraying the Planet

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

Leadership in South Carolina

If ever a chief executive rendered himself inoperative, Gov. Mark Sanford did so in skipping out on his responsibilities to South Carolina’s four million citizens for six days on a secretive personal fling in Argentina. In the process, Mr. Sanford failed to transfer emergency powers to the lieutenant governor, as provided in the State Constitution, leaving his state vulnerable to all manner of crises while the governor was nowhere to be found.

This is a compelling reason that Mr. Sanford should resign from office. There are others. He lied to the state and his staff in concocting a false trail to mask his trysting. He tapped taxpayer funds to drum up a trade mission last year that allowed him to see his lover.

It’s not encouraging that the governor compared himself on Friday to King David, the adulterous and murderous Biblical king who fell out of God’s favor “but then picked up the pieces and built from there.”

Any attempt by Mr. Sanford to retain power will prolong the civic shambles he has made. The real issues of government, beginning with the state’s grave economic problems, will be relegated to an afterthought as further details spill out about the governor’s personal lapses. The repair of Mr. Sanford’s family life, while ardently hoped for by empathetic supporters, should not be confused with restoring responsible government.

There is every indication that Mr. Sanford would have maintained his cavalier abuse of the governorship but for the discovery of his official recklessness by the newspaper The State in Columbia. In his mystery odyssey, the governor eluded his security detail and drove a state car to the airport with the whereabouts locater turned off. Surprised by a news photographer in returning from Buenos Aires, the governor countered with his rambling public confession. (How public officials of both parties expect they can indulge themselves without some enemy revealing their hypocrisy is one of the running mysteries of politics.)

Since Mr. Sanford thought enough of his political peers to resign as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, he has a comparable duty to South Carolina voters. Unfortunately, his spinners are emphasizing contrition, not competence, in describing a new mission of “building back the trust” of the people. Mr. Sanford should get out of the way of the need to build back the government he undermined.

From Matt:

The Horny Governor

Posted June 26, 2009 Comments(0)

Shane and I got together last night for our normal jam session.  While normally these don’t result in anything spectacular, we felt our muse was on our side last night and produced some hillarious audio.  It is a parody of “The Happy Wanderer” which we turned into “The Horny Governor”

I hope you enjoy it, you can watch the embedded video, or download the song as an mp3. (download)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpsG4gdIEmw

Majority of Americans Approve Complete Ban on Torture

Questionnaire/Methodology (PDF)

Six in 10 Americans approve of having an international convention saying that “governments should never use physical torture” as a means of trying to get information, while 39 percent say such a ban is too restrictive, according to a new WorldPublicOpinion.org/Knowledge Networks poll.

A majority also opposes nearly all methods for coercing detainees to give information, even when it might be critical to stopping a terrorist attack against the US. Respondents were presented a scenario in which a detainee is being held who is likely to have “information about a possible terrorist attack on the US that may prove critical to stopping the attack.” They were then presented a series of methods for coercing the respondent to reveal the information.

Majorities opposed forcing the detainee to take stressful positions (56%), using threatening dogs (64%), exposing the detainee to extreme heat and cold (66%), making the detainee go naked (71%), holding the detainee’s head under water (78%), punching or kicking the detainee (80%), and applying electric shocks (81%).

One method–sleep deprivation–received modest majority support (52%). Views were divided on putting a hood over a detainee’s head for a long period of time, and bombarding the detainee with loud music. A very large majority (79%) favored offering detainees positive incentives for providing information.

Further, even many respondents who say that a prohibition against physical torture is too restrictive do not want to eliminate the international norm against it. Asked whether “the international conventions on the treatment of detainees should be changed to allow governments to use physical torture,” only 21 percent of total sample say it should.

“Though other polls have shown that most Americans do not want to indict Bush administration figures for the interrogation methods used, a large majority does want to retain the international norm that bans torture,” comments Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org.

More broadly, three-quarters support the general principle of having “treaties establishing international laws governing how a country, in the context of armed conflict, must treat an individual it has detained,” though “these rules limit what the US can do to detainees” as well as “what other countries can do when they detain Americans.”

The poll of 805 Americans was conducted May 27 through June 4. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percent.

Asked about the international convention against “mental torture, such as making someone think that they or their family members will be killed,” 61 percent favor the convention while 37 percent say it is too restrictive. Just 23 percent favor changing international conventions to allow mental torture.

Americans also overwhelmingly support giving detainees the right of habeas corpus. Eight in 10 support having an international treaty that requires that “detainees have a right to a hearing in which the government makes its case for why the detainee should be held and the detainee can challenge the government’s right to hold him or her.”

Trends

Compared to polling conducted in 2004, there have been some modest changes, though the changes do not all move in the same direction and most of the change occurs among Republicans.

The number favoring the ban on physical torture is down seven points from 66 to 59 percent, while those saying this is too restrictive has climbed from 30 to 39 percent.

This is almost entirely attributable to an extraordinary swing in Republican views from 68 percent favoring the ban in 2004 to 44 percent today. Republicans saying it is too restrictive have risen from 31 percent to a majority of 55 percent, though only 34 percent of Republicans favor changing international conventions to allow physical torture.

The number of specific coercive techniques that Republicans endorse is also quite limited and declining. Contrary to the trend in favor of allowing physical torture, in most cases Republicans have become more restrictive in what they regard as acceptable. Across the various scenarios, majorities support sleep deprivation (65%, down from 77%), hooding (63%, down from 66%), loud noise (57%, down from 66%), and stress positions (58%, unchanged). Views continue to be divided on using threatening dogs. For all other methods, clear majorities of Republicans oppose them, including 68 percent who oppose holding a detainee’s head under water (though down from 79% in 2004).

Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, comments on these Republican shifts: “The sharp decline in support for rules against physical torture among Republicans may stem from concerns about the possibility that they may be applied against leaders in the Bush administration for the interrogation techniques they authorized. At the same time, they have grown more opposed to the actual use of specific coercive methods in the future.”

Another general trend is that opposition to using “mental torture, such as making someone think that they or their family members will be killed” has risen from 55 to 61 percent. This upward movement is mostly attributable to Democrats (rising from 61% to 70%). Curiously, Republicans are unchanged, so that now opposition to mental torture (53%) is higher than opposition to physical torture (44%).

While three-quarters support the general principle of having treaties govern the treatment of detainees, this number is down from 88 percent in 2004. This shift is mostly due to a shift in Republicans.

The poll was fielded by Knowledge Networks using its nationwide panel, which is randomly selected from the entire adult population and subsequently provided Internet access. For more information about this methodology, go to http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp.

WorldPublicOpinion.org is a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Funding for this research was provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Calvert Foundation.

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Plame’s Lawsuit Against Cheney, Rove

Tuesday 23 June 2009

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a civil lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, against Bush administration officials who were responsible for leaking her covert CIA status to the media and attacking her husband for accusing the White House of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence.

The Supreme Court’s rejection effectively brings the three-year-old case to a close. The Wilson’s had sued Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Cheney’s ex-chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for violating their civil rights. Libby was convicted on four of five counts and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. President George W. Bush later commuted the sentence, sparing Libby jail time.

“The Wilsons and their counsel are disappointed by the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, but more significantly, this is a setback for our democracy,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an attorney representing the Wilsons. “This decision means that government officials can abuse their power for political purposes without fear of repercussion. Private citizens like the Wilsons, who see their careers destroyed and their lives placed in jeopardy by administration officials seeking to score political points and silence opposition, have no recourse.”

US District Court Judge John Bates dismissed the civil lawsuit two years ago. At the time, Bates wrote, as a technical legal matter, Plame and Wilson can’t sue under the Constitution. Bates added that the defendants - Cheney, Rove, Libby, and others -had the right to rebut criticism aimed at Wilson, who accused the administration of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence. Bates said the leak of Plame’s undercover CIA status to a handful of reporters was “unsavory,” but simply a casualty of Wilson’s criticism of the administration.

“The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson’s comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory,” Bates wrote. “But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration’s handling of prewar foreign intelligence by speaking with members of the press, is within the scope of defendants’ duties as high-level Executive Branch officials.”

“This case is not just about what top government officials did to Valerie and me,” Wilson said following Bates’s ruling. “We brought this suit because we strongly believe that politicizing intelligence ultimately serves only to undermine the security of our nation. Today’s decision is just the first step in what we have always known would be a long legal battle and we are committed to seeing this case through.”

The Wilsons petitioned the Supreme Court after the Republican-dominated US Court of Appeals for DC Circuit, in a 2 to 1 vote last August, turned down their request for a rehearing. The panel said there was no constitutional precedent established to allow the case to move forward and the court declined to set one.

A federal investigation led by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald later found that numerous White House officials - including Cheney and Libby - had retaliated against and sought to discredit Ambassador Wilson for publicly claiming that the administration had manipulated prewar Iraq intelligence.

Administration officials countered Joseph Wilson’s criticism by disclosing to reporters, privately, that Plame worked at the CIA and had arranged to send her husband to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium. The White House was trying to imply that Wilson’s trip was the result of nepotism. Plame testified before Congress last year that she had had no role in selecting her husband for the mission to Niger.

Senior Bush administration officials disclosed Plame’s identity to several journalists in June and July of 2003 amid White House efforts to discredit her husband, former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for challenging Bush’s use of bogus intelligence to justify invading Iraq.

Her CIA employment was revealed in a July 14, 2003, article by right-wing columnist Robert Novak, effectively destroying her career. Two months later, a CIA complaint to the Justice Department sparked a criminal probe into the identity of the leakers.

Initially, Bush professed not to know anything about the matter, and several of his senior aides, including Rove and Libby followed suit.

However, it later became clear that Rove and Libby had a hand in the Plame leak and that Bush and Cheney had helped organize a campaign to disparage Wilson by giving critical information to friendly journalists.

On June 24, 2004, Fitzgerald interviewed Bush for 70 minutes about the Plame leak. The only other member of the Bush team in the room during the meeting was Jim Sharp, the private lawyer that Bush hired, according to a press briefing by then-press secretary Scott McClellan.

“The President … was pleased to do his part to help the investigation move forward,” McClellan said. “No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the President of the United States.”

Fitzgerald had interviewed a couple of weeks earlier Cheney.

Last week, Obama’s Justice Department argued against the release of the Cheney transcript that CREW sought via a Freedom of Information Act request explaining his role in blowing Plame’s cover.

Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith told a federal judge that release of the transcript might open Cheney to ridicule from late-night comics and thus could discourage other White House officials from cooperating with government prosecutors.

“If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren’t going to cooperate,” Smith said during a court hearing last Thursday. “I don’t want a future Vice President to say, ‘I’m not going to cooperate with you because I don’t want to be fodder for The Daily Show.’”

When asked by US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan whether the Obama administration was standing behind the refusal of George W. Bush’s Justice Department to release the transcript, Smith answered, “This has been vetted by the leadership offices. This is a department position.”

McClellan says Rove arranged a private meeting with Libby in 2005 when the two men were under mounting suspicion for leaking Plame’s identity.

Calling the scene “one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss,” McClellan writes in his new memoir “in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, [the meeting] sticks vividly in my mind….

“Following [a meeting in chief of staff Andy Card's office], Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby.”

In his book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and the Culture of Washington Deception,” McClellan doesn’t offer substantive evidence that Rove and Libby used the meeting in 2005 to coordinate their cover stories.

“I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately,” McClellan writes.

“At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much,” McClellan said. “I don’t know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic?”

For more than a year in three separate appearances before a federal grand jury, Rove had insisted he was not a source for columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, two journalists who were told about Plame’s CIA identity when it was still secret.

Rove told the grand jury that he first learned that Plame worked for the CIA when he read it in Novak’s column, according to Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin. But the truth was Rove had been an unnamed source for both Novak and Cooper.

During closing arguments at Libby’s trial, Cheney was implicated in the leak, as Fitzgerald acknowledged that Cheney was intimately involved in the scandal and may have told Libby to leak Plame’s status to the media.

Fitzgerald told jurors that his investigation into the true nature of the vice president’s involvement was impeded because Libby obstructed justice.

Libby’s attorney, Theodore Wells, told jurors during his closing arguments that Fitzgerald had been trying to build a case of conspiracy against the vice president and Libby and that the prosecution believed Libby may have lied to federal investigators and to a grand jury to protect Cheney.

“Now, I think the government, through its questions, really tried to put a cloud over Vice President Cheney,” Wells said.

Rebutting Wells, Fitzgerald told jurors, “You know what? [Wells] said something here that we’re trying to put a cloud on the vice president. We’ll talk straight. There is a cloud over the vice president. He sent Libby off to [meet with New York Times reporter] Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel. At that meeting - the two-hour meeting - the defendant talked about the wife [Plame].”

CREW had been hoping that the Obama administration would approach the lawsuit in a different manner.

But last month, the Obama administration’s representative before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, had also sought the dismissal of the civil suit. Kagan argued that the Wilsons had no legitimate ground to sue and further argued that Ambassador Wilson failed to prove that he was harmed by the attacks he endured from Cheney and others for accusing the Bush administration of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence.

That was not the first time Obama’s Justice Department has backed the Bush administration’s position on issues related to the CIA leak case.

One day after Obama was sworn in, as he was signing executive orders ushering in what he called a new era of government openness, the Justice Department quietly filed a motion in federal court to dismiss a long-running lawsuit that sought to force the Bush administration to recover as many as 15 million missing White House emails, including some from Cheney’s office that special counsel Fitzgerald had subpoenaed in connection with the leak of Plame’s identity.

Last Thursday, CREW revealed in newly released documents that the emails from Cheney’s office went missing right around the time the Bush White House faced a deadline for turning over the emails to Fitzgerald in accordance with a grand jury subpoena.

Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.

Bad Baptist, Better Baptist

ARLINGTON, Texas — A prominent African-American pastor says Southern Baptist leaders should publicly repudiate comments by a former Southern Baptist Convention officer that he is praying for President Obama to die.

Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, said he had not heard an interview on Fox News Radio in which former SBC second vice president Wiley Drake said he is praying “imprecatory prayer” against Obama.

McKissic, who is asking the SBC this year to adopt a resolution celebrating the election of the nation’s first African-American president, said if Drake was identified in the interview as a Southern Baptist, then his remarks should not go unchallenged.

McKissic, a former president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention pastors conference and speaker at the group’s evangelism conference, personally denounced Drake’s comments and said he would ask SBC president Johnny Hunt to do the same.

“They need to be repudiated by Southern Baptist leaders,” McKissic said.

McKissic said Drake’s views “are in the same ballpark” as Rush Limbaugh saying he hopes that President Obama’s administration will fail.

“Southern Baptists don’t need to line up with the Rush Limbaughs and Wiley Drakes in attacking Barack Obama,” he said.
…
Drake said Southern Baptists have lost belief in “imprecatory prayer” — praying passages from the Psalms where the Psalmist is asking God to bring death and misfortune on his enemies — and need to regain the practice.

“It is in the Bible, and we are proud to say as Southern Baptists that we believe the Book,” he said. “You’ve got to believe the whole Book, brother, or you don’t believe any of it.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Transcript and recording of the conversation:

Alan Colmes: When you say you are praying for the death of someone using imprecatory prayer, you then said — I asked, then, “for whom else are you praying in that fashion?” And you said “President Obama.” Are you praying for his death?

- Wiley Drake: Yes.

- Colmes: So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States.

- Drake: Yes.

- Colmes: Do you, are you concerned that by saying that you might find yourself on some kind of a Secret Service call or FBI wanted list or, uh, do you think it’s appropriate to say something like that, or even pray for something like that?

- Drake: I think it’s appropriate to pray the Word of God. I’m not saying anything. What I am doing is repeating what God is saying, and if that puts me on somebody’s list, then I’ll just have to be on their list.

- Colmes: Uh, you would like for the president of the United States to die?

- Drake: If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture, uh, that would cause him, uh, death, that’s correct…. I think we’ll see, in the days ahead, other imprecatory prayers answered. God says clearly in his word that we are to continue to pray, and he will answer our prayers.

- Link

Here is a recording of the above conversation.

This was not a disputed weirdo claim and it only took a minute to do a Google search to find the documentation.

Good News, There’s a Climate Bill — Bad News, It Stinks

By Daphne Wysham, AlterNet
Posted on May 19, 2009, Printed on June 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140084/

First, the good news: One of the most comprehensive pieces of energy and climate legislation ever drafted by members of the U.S. Congress has finally seen the light of day. After lots of haggling among fellow moderate and conservative Democrats, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) released their “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.”

Now the bad news: Their bill stinks. I’ll spare you the many odiferous details and just highlight three particularly bad aspects: 1) It won’t protect the poor from price-hikes as the price of carbon is slowly internalized into our energy bills, but will protect polluting industries by allowing them free pollution permits; 2) It opens the door to fraud and shell games instead of real climate action by setting up a huge carbon derivatives market; 3) It makes a mockery of our common understanding of “renewable energy,” favoring dirty smokestacks over truly clean, renewable energy.

Right out of the starting gate, the bill provides a ridiculous number of giveaways to industry — something President Barack Obama campaigned against as unfair to consumers: Upwards of 85 percent of pollution allowances are being given away for free to the electricity sector, with many of these free permits not phasing out until 2030. This means little to none of the revenues coming into the public coffers from this “cap and trade” scheme will be used to protect low and moderate households from energy price increases, as envisioned by Obama.

This bill would open up the single largest market in carbon in the world, with the potential to reach $2 trillion by 2020. Not only would the Waxman-Markey bill allow for carbon trading between industries, it would open up the so-called “sub-prime carbon” market in carbon offsets — whereby industries can claim emissions reductions by investing in various projects around the world that theoretically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation allows 2 billion tons of carbon offsets — half from developing countries and half from domestic sources — which represents almost 30 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet the Government Accountability Office (GAO) claims it’s virtually impossible to verify whether carbon offsets represent real emissions reductions. And numerous other studies have found that carbon offsets in developing countries often subsidize business-as-usual projects such as hundreds of large hydropower dams in China, many of which were already under construction when they claimed to be providing “emissions reductions.”

Industrial hog farms have found ways of tapping the carbon offset market without making the slightest contribution toward getting society off its fossil fuel addiction. The logic is this: If you capture and flare methane from pig manure, you are turning methane (a potent global warming gas) into CO2 (a less potent global warming gas). Pig farms benefit by selling that difference in greenhouse gas potency to big fossil fuel polluters as a carbon offset, allowing them to continue their business as usual.

And if “carbon offsets” are a misleading term, the words “renewable energy,” as used in this bill, have an Orwellian ring. Do you think “renewable energy” means windmills or solar panels? Think again. The windmills and solar panels of our renewable energy dreams are being supplanted by the smokestacks of our nightmares. All it takes is a little imagination — and a high-paid lobbyist — to claim that just about anything is “renewable energy.”

Take biomass burners: There are plans afoot to cut down 100-year-old trees, throw them into a burner, and call this “renewable energy.” Never mind that trees can’t match coal for stored energy, which would make it necessary to plant whole planets of trees to fuel industry. Just focus your mind on the idea that they grow back!

Or consider the municipal solid waste incinerator duplicitously recast as “waste to energy” projects. This waste could otherwise be recycled (generating 10 times as many green jobs as an incinerator, by the way) or composted, providing rich fertilizer. But, in the twisted logic of the Waxman-Markey universe, incinerators are “renewable” because there is an endless supply of waste going to landfills; if one burns that waste and turns the heat into energy — presto, change-o — this, too, becomes a “renewable” form of energy. This in spite of the fact that burning garbage produces more CO2 per unit of electricity generated than the dirtiest coal power plants.

While industry lobbyists may have worked their magic tricks on members of Congress in the name of “bold climate legislation,” Planet Earth is likely to remain unmoved by these sleights of hand. At 385 parts per million CO2 and rising, our atmosphere is on a steady course to climate catastrophe unless these charlatans and their henchmen in Congress get real. Though the pigs may rule in Animal Farm, they shouldn’t be running our climate politics.

Daphne Wysham is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, and co-host of Earthbeat Radio.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140084/

The news media vs. comedy shows: Or, frivolous distraction vs. incisive journalism

Submitted by pmcarpenter on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 6:12am.

• P.M. Carpenter

As a nation we’ve always delighted in amusing distractions framed by overheated whackomongers as matters of earthshaking import, whether it was Jefferson’s paganism or Cleveland’s paternity or Harry Truman’s profanity. That’s some needed perspective; nevertheless we must stop and ask if those weren’t the good old days of rather silly but still sober distractions, since in the modern era we seem to have institutionalized frivolity in a chronically intoxicated way.

It’s just one damn thing after another — from empty sensationalisms of relatively brief duration, such as the cost of the First Couple’s Saturday-night dinner in New York, to stories both superficial and prolonged, like the nearly endless coverage of a singular line from an eight-year-old juridical speech — as we’re pounded via the airwaves and cyberprint in a ruthless pursuit of all things meaningless.

After a while one loses discrete track of the rolling outrages; each begins with a slight tic, immediately detonates into The Story, and just as the smoke begins to clear, yep, there’s another tic, instantly pounced on for our extended amusement.

It’s relentless, it’s seamless, and it has become, in large part, The News. This is not to suggest there’s no longer any real and intelligent reporting on real stories of real importance, because obviously there is, although it may require some resourceful digging on your part to find it (or you can always just go to BuzzFlash.com, which has done the digging for you). Nor is this to suggest that the distractions delivered by cable, satellite and Internet tubes are the media’s mother lode, quantitatively speaking. It is to suggest, however, that they tend to dominate with abandon.

This year’s primo-silliest example, to date, consumed all of last week and it ain’t over yet: the Letterman-Palin squabble, a matter of such intrinsic unimportance — like, say, the sex habits of one William Jefferson Clinton — as to demand hourly media updates.

Yet a winding and rather profound paradox underlies this particular distraction; which is to say, it was an oddly refreshing byproduct of what has become an influential source of biting political journalism — the evening comedy shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, both of which came about and rose to vast popularity in no small part because the media weren’t doing their job, that of biting political journalism.

To explain …

Media watchers concede that some of the Letterman-Palin kerfuffle came from ultraconservatives’ search for what you might call an “anti-Limbaugh,” some presumably left-leaning media notable they can point to and scream, There, you see, they have their on-air lunatics, too. And, indeed, they have screamed pretty much that. The top man over at the conservative Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, for instance, charged that the Letterman affair “underscore[d] everything that conservatives are saying. If Rush Limbaugh had made a joke about Barack Obama’s daughter, he wouldn’t finish the sentence before they were calling for him to be fired. It is beyond a double standard. It is a rank hypocrisy, and everyone sees it.”

In its rapid, disheveled descent the right has become less and less monolithic, however, so not everyone sees it, or even much gives a damn. Said, for example, former George W. Bush adviser Mark McKinnon: “If the right goes after Letterman, they make him look big and themselves small.” And said GOP media consultant Fred Davis: “I think it’s a mistake too many conservatives are making right now. They are trying to find anything to attack.”

Not surprisingly, media watchers also saw an industrial structural force in play: the ratings game within Letterman’s timeslot — “the funnyman’s need to break through the late-night giggle chamber, particularly with Conan O’Brien’s new gig on ‘The Tonight Show.’ ”

But here’s the real whopper that acutely defines the aforementioned paradox:

“Observers have noticed a change to the ‘Late Show’s’ comedy in recent years,” reports the Politico. “Lauren Feldman, a professor of communications at American University, says that Letterman has become more ’serious and incisive’ in interviews with politicians compared with previous points in his career,” and Ted Johnson, Variety’s managing editor, “sees Letterman’s comedic shift as a response to the ‘Jon Stewart effect.’ ”

Which is this, according to Bob Thompson, of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture: “[T]he one-two punch of Jon Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert…. [T]hey are the ones getting all the attention. All of the late-night comedians have to in one way or another come to grips with that. Letterman did so by becoming more political and more focused and acerbic in his political humor, trying to move in the direction of Jon Stewart.”

Hence the nation is experiencing a heightened level of biting political journalism, loosely defined, by comedians, but not merely in light-hearted competition with the news media. No, comedians are actually filling the analytical void created by the media’s incessantly even-handed treatment of both sides of every hard-news issue, even when the two sides are laughably uneven, which makes for rather easy comedy. Much of this stuff writes itself.

So yes, in itself the Letterman-Palin scrap was, is, a joke, a frivolous distraction. But broadly underlying it is a creative manner in the treatment of serious business: the deliverance of intelligent perspective to an audience sick of the bullshit. And that phenomenon may yet call the news media home for a reexamination of how they — broadly — cover, in actual fact, the intrinsically important issues of the day.

»

More analysis and comment regarding the recent upsurge in right-wing initiated and enabled violence….

I mention again that anyone who wishes to understand what these people are about and what they are attempting to accomplish in this country should read The Authoritarians, a scientific, evidence-based, non-ideological analysis of right-wing thinking and behavior, by Robert Altemeyer, Ph. D. (http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ ), available for free (because of its essential importance for the informed person) as a downloadable book at the site provided. The right-wing agenda was apparent as well as displaying government sanctioned violence during the Bush Administration years. The government sanctioned violence may have, interestingly, held down right-wing citizen violence. Now, as I predicted in 2006, we seem to have a more virulent strain of right-wing fanaticism that has brought out the mental cases.

The first article is from MediaMatters for America. The second is from the New York Times.

Right-wing media and the fringe: A growing history of violence (and denial)

This week, the country’s attention was captured by the horrific shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old man with ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations. The fatal shooting came just two months after an April 7 Department of Homeland Security report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism.

As Media Matters for America documented, the DHS report was immediately and vehemently rejected by numerous conservative commentators, such as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and David Asman, who portrayed it as an illegitimate and politically motivated assault on conservatives. (Media Matters Senior Fellow Karl Frisch puts the attacks in even broader perspective here.)

Following the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, these commentators faced criticism for their earlier dismissiveness. Some have since unconvincingly (and in the case of Joe Scarborough, inaccurately) defended their past assessment, and a handful of reporters and analysts are still engaging in falsehoods and inconsistencies in criticizing the DHS report. But on Fox News, Shepard Smith took a different position — for which he was attacked by conservatives — saying that the report “was a warning to us all. And it appears now that they were right.”

The day before the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert wrote that Fox News and its hosts “will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain.” He added that “militia-style vigilante rhetoric has become a cornerstone of the conservative media movement in America, and it’s now proudly championed by Fox News on a nearly hourly basis.” (He also appeared on CNN this week.)

While right-wing media are certainly not legally culpable for any recent attacks, they are responsible for promoting a culture of fear, paranoia, and violence that is anti-government in the extreme — a culture in which extremists, including von Brunn and Richard Poplawski, who fatally shot three Pittsburgh police officers, were apparently immersed. Poplawski was convinced that the Obama administration was going to take away his guns. Even though no evidence of such a policy exists, right-wing commentators and news organizations made the claim repeatedly before the shooting and have continued to do so since.

Predictably, conservative media figures responded to the museum shooting by attempting to shift attention away from themselves and onto political liberals and even President Obama himself. On June 10, the day of the museum shooting, financial analyst and radio host Jim Lacamp said on Fox News that “we have an administration that’s really done a lot of class warfare, a lot of class-baiting. And so, it sets the stage for social unrest.” That same day, conservative Tammy Bruce wrote that the Obama administration’s “increasing anti-Israel rhetoric and the pandering to the Jew-hating world Arab world … encourages all the beasts among us.” Newsmax.com published an op-ed, cited on Friday by Michael Savage, claiming that Obama “is most certainly creating a climate of hate against” Jews. Colorado radio host Bob Newman even raised questions about whether Obama’s recent visit to a concentration camp, or his statement about Israeli settlements, were factors in the shooting.

But as always, the most virulent reality-denier was Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh claimed that von Brunn “is a leftist if anything.” He said that Obama is “ramping up hatred for Israel” and that “anti-Jew rhetoric comes from the American left.” He claimed that MSNBC broadcasts “hate 24/7.” Despite the right wing’s repeated use of violent, revolutionary rhetoric, Limbaugh said that it was actually Obama who “thrives and needs chaos” to succeed. And in response to Shepard Smith, he remarked that the “claim that the atmosphere is somehow more violently anti-Obama is simply preposterous.”

Indeed, Smith’s remarks were the exception for the right. Despite its love of fearmongering, Fox News spent the 24 hours after the von Brunn shooting downplaying it. And on his broadcast that night, Bill O’Reilly, who hypocritically and incorrectly criticized the media for a supposed lack of coverage after the shooting death of Army recruiter Pvt. William Long, and who stokes the anger of viewers whenever it suits him politically, barely mentioned the shooting and instead featured what he called a “very important story” on gay penguins. “Do they wear tight T-shirts?” he asked, laughing. During the two shows after the shooting, Hannity barely mentioned it.

This weekly wrap-up was compiled by John V. Santore, an associate at Media Matters.

June 14, 2009

New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist

The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers

By FRANK RICH

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States …” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.