“The Science Is Settled”: In Spite Of What You See Outside, Global Warming Is Real
Cue the igloos.
The winter blizzard set to paralyze the East Coast has given climate change deniers the perfect opportunity to proclaim, once again, that global warming is a hoax, that several feet of snow prove the planet is as cold as ever, that the Earth is flat: You can tell by looking outside. Common sense.
During a similar snowstorm in 2010, the family of one of the nation’s leading flat-earthers, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., built an igloo on the National Mall. His daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren deposited a sign across the structure that read “Al Gore’s New Home,” in mockery of one of the saner voices on the risks of climate change.
This latest storm has produced plenty of igloo material but no evidence that Gore is wrong. Sorry, but the Earth is, in fact, a sphere — no matter what you see as you look out your bedroom window. Similarly, the planet is warming — no matter how cold it is outside your bedroom window.
Earlier this month, climate scientists released a report saying that 2015 was the warmest year on record for the planet, shattering the previous record that had been set by a very warm 2014. El Niño’s winds contributed to last year’s heat, but the bulk of it is a consequence of human activity, scientists said.
By now, the science is settled. Shouldn’t we be talking about solutions? Shouldn’t our politicians be leading a national discussion about ways to build on the climate accord that President Obama signed in Paris?
One of the most promising answers is a carbon tax, a way to raise prices on the fossil fuels that create much of the environmental havoc. A price hike would help to discourage use by everyone, from the executives at coal-fired electric plants to motorists who drive alone to and from work.
A carbon tax is even more compelling in this era of rapidly falling petroleum prices. While cheap gas helps the family budget, it simply encourages us to use more of it. And, oddly, it even encourages car buyers to skip the smaller, more efficient models and opt for bigger gas guzzlers. At the end of 2015, fuel economy for new vehicles was falling, likely reflecting more purchases of pickup trucks and SUVs, according to the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.
It might seem perverse to suggest a carbon tax — or “fee,” as some prefer to call it — just as average households are getting a break from gas prices. After all, the American middle class is still struggling with wage stagnation.
But those households need not be penalized. There are already detailed plans for protecting low- and middle-income households from the budget pinch of a carbon tax, which would affect not only gasoline but also home energy prices.
The bigger problem is that a carbon tax has no chance of passing a recalcitrant Republican Congress, many of whose members still insist that climate change isn’t real. The few GOP moderates who had, in the past, acknowledged human-caused climate change — New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, for instance — dare not say so anymore.
It hasn’t always been this way inside the Republican Party. As The Wall Street Journal has noted, “Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution.” In 2008, GOP nominee John McCain and his Democratic rival, Obama, had similar proposals for a carbon tax.
Nowadays, though, the carbon tax is anathema to an irrational Republican electorate. Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, has said that any GOP candidate who supported a carbon tax “would be at a severe disadvantage in the Republican nomination process.” That helps explain why not a word has been uttered in support of it.
But that’s no reason to give up. Environmentalists and their allies have to keep plugging away at rational solutions, playing the long game. There really is no choice. Global warming is a crisis, no matter how big a blizzard batters the East Coast, and no matter how many igloos the Inhofe clan builds.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; Featured Post, The National Memo, January 23, 2016
“Hillary Clinton’s First Step Forward”: Connecting Her Unique Experience Of The Past To Future Excellence
The first snow fell here as Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump for president. Thinking over Hillary Clinton’s chances in Iowa and New Hampshire, I found the winter landscape gave me a clearer picture.
Palin’s sass makes a useful foil for Clinton’s class. The wild-eyed woman has not aged well since shaking up the 2008 race on the losing side. But don’t count out her “peasant cunning.”
A strategy responding to Palin might go like this. The river between Clinton and Palin is wide as the mighty Mississippi, showing starkly what the parties actually think of women. That’s a jumping off point for the Republican war on constitutional choice, waged in Congress and in many of the 50 states, Ted Cruz’s Texas worst of all.
Looming over the Clinton camp are dark musings, fears of the historic “first” woman contender finishing second in the presidential primary. Again. The Iowa caucuses were unkind to Clinton in 2008. Senator Bernie Sanders is now making Iowa a horse race. Can’t you just hear Trump crow if she loses?
The magnitude of the moment, running to be the first woman president, deserves more spin, oxygen and energy than it’s getting from the Clinton campaign. It’s something to be excited about — for mothers and daughters, wives, friends, sisters and brothers, even for the old Founding Fathers in July in Philadelphia, where the Democratic convention will be held.
Yes, the stars are all there for Clinton to take the bright shining mantle of history. She notably failed to do so in 2008, when she lost narrowly to young Barack Obama. He became the “first,” the African-American president that thrilled much of the body politic.
Clinton spoke of the “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” once the battle was lost, in a spirited concession. Changing the social paradigm is not yet part of the larger cultural conversation; it’s an undercurrent at best.
It’s a shame to make the same mistake twice. The national polls give her a soft lead, but people won’t be excited unless Clinton engages lukewarm voters and plays that point home to fire them up. Trump and Sanders supporters are raring to go, and we know galvinized voters will decide this election.
Clinton must message a sense of destiny for “first,” that her unique experience has molded her for the Madam President page of our shared national life. She is ready and we are ready.
Countless people — of all colors and ages — were euphoric at Obama’s inauguration eight years ago. Tens of thousands braved the frigid space to witness the first black president’s swearing-in. Wonder warmed the air.
That’s the message I’m talking about.
Free advice on how to tell her riveting life story: Simply put, everything Clinton has done, she has done well. Voters need a line that connects that past to future excellence.
From a daring commencement speech at her Seven Sisters college in 1969 to entering the gates of mostly male Yale Law School to working for the House Watergate committee, Clinton was born to the “first” generation to reap the gains of the women’s movement.
Early on, Hillary Rodham was singled out as a front-runner of the baby boomers — and young Bill Clinton knew it. He worried about missing her manifest destiny down in Arkansas. Yet in later life, his wife has real roots all over: She grew up in the Midwest, and has lived in the South and the East. That matters.
Skipping to the White House, Clinton became a revolutionary first lady, breaking the domestic mode (while attending to flowers and dinners) and taking on policy. She impressed Senator Ted Kennedy with her command of health care reform, but it failed. She went through a devastating personal betrayal and impressed even enemies with how she weathered the storm. Whereupon she ran for the Senate herself and won. As secretary of state, she visited 100 nations, mending fences in the wake of the disastrous Bush wars.
For heaven’s sake, don’t forget to let the rays of light and fun in. Have you seen the 2012 tape of Clinton dancing in South Africa? The top diplomat represents the United States beautifully in the moment, with a winning smile that lights her face and an enchanting spontaneity seldom seen. People like to like their presidents.
Let’s meet the woman who will rock our world.
By: Jamie Stiehm, The National Memo, January 22, 2016
“A Stinking Open Sewer”: Unhappy Anniversary: How Anthony Kennedy Flooded Democracy With ‘Sewer Money’
On today’s anniversary of the Citizens United decision, which exposed American democracy to increasing domination by the country’s very richest and most reactionary figures – the modern heirs to those “malefactors of great wealth” condemned by the great Republican Theodore Roosevelt – it is worth recalling the false promise made by the justice who wrote the majority opinion in that case.
Justice Anthony Kennedy masterminded the Supreme Court’s January 21, 2010 decision to undo a century of public-interest regulation of campaign expenditures in the name of “free speech.” He had every reason to know how damaging to democratic values and public integrity that decision would prove to be.
Once billed as a “moderate conservative,” Kennedy is a libertarian former corporate lobbyist from Sacramento, who toiled in his father’s scandal-ridden lobbying law firm, “influencing” California legislators, before he ascended to the bench with the help of his friend Ronald Reagan.
While guiding Citizens United through the court on behalf of the Republican Party’s billionaire overseers, it was Kennedy who came up with a decorative fig leaf of justification:
With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.
As Jane Mayer’s superb new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right reveals in excruciating but fascinating detail, Kennedy’s assertion about the Internet insuring disclosure and accountability was nothing but a little heap of happy horse-shit. “Independent” expenditures from super-rich right-wing donors have overwhelmed the opponents of their chosen candidates, promoting a durable Republican takeover of Congress — often through the deployment of false advertising and false-flag organizations.
Late last year, Kennedy confessed that his vaunted “transparency” is “not working the way it should,” a feeble excuse since he had every reason to know from the beginning that his professed expectation of “prompt disclosure” of all political donations was absurdly unrealistic.
The Citizens United debacle led directly to the Republican takeover of the Senate as well as the House. Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice released a new study showing that “dark money” – that is, donations whose origin remains secret from news organizations and voters – has more than doubled in Senate races during the past six years, from $105 million to $226 million in 2014.
During the past three election cycles, outside groups spent about $1 billion total on Senate races, of which $485 million came from undisclosed sources. In the 11 most competitive Senate races in 2014, almost 60 percent of the spending by “independent” groups came from those murky places, and the winners of those races benefited from $171 million of such spending.
In elections gone by, when anonymous smear leaflets would appear in local races — funded by nobody knew whom — political operatives would shake their heads and mutter about “sewer money.”
Today we can thank Anthony Kennedy, who was either poorly informed or willfully ignorant, for turning American democracy into a stinking open sewer.
What a legacy.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, The National Memo, January 21, 2016
“Ted Cruz Has Got A Problem”: Why The Subtle Sexism Of The Founding Fathers Might Disqualify Ted Cruz For President
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. Can he constitutionally run for president?
Actually, the Constitution is a bit fuzzy on this question, and you can find a lot of people with a lot of different opinions about it. For example, Donald Trump, Cruz’s biggest rival in the GOP presidential primary, thinks the answer might be no.
It all depends on what you think the phrase “a natural born Citizen” means — which, the Constitution states, is what you have to be if you want to run for president. It’s an ambiguous term, and reasonable people disagree on how to interpret ambiguous language in the country’s founding document.
Many legal scholars say Cruz qualifies, and while it has become a political flash point, it still seems pretty unlikely it becomes an actual legal barrier to Cruz moving forward with the campaign.
Interestingly, though, some legal experts say that if you subscribe to Cruz’s own principles of constitutional interpretation, he might not be eligible. And for reasons that have a lot to do with gender norms of the 18th century.
Many legal scholars say Cruz supports an approach to constitutional law in which modern readers try to understand what the words in the Constitution would have meant to the people who wrote them and voted to ratify them more than two centuries ago. It’s a concept known as originalism, and it’s especially popular with conservatives.
“It’s not: take what part you like and get rid of the parts you don’t like,” Cruz said in 2013. “Every word of the Constitution matters.”
On this straightforward, intuitive, and deeply conservative reasoning, several prominent legal scholars have argued Cruz is arguably not a natural-born citizen. As the Founding Fathers and their contemporaries probably would have understood that phrase, the argument goes, Cruz is ineligible for the presidency — not because he was born in Canada, but because he was born in Canada to a Cuban father.
“He should disqualify himself,” said Thomas Lee, a legal scholar at Fordham University, adding that Cruz should “just be consistent.”
Lee explains that in medieval English law, the term “natural born” originally referred to subjects of the crown who were born in English territory.
Under King Edward III, who reigned from 1327 to 1377, England expanded this definition to include the children of ambassadors and soldiers who were serving the monarch overseas. In the centuries to come, Parliament modified the definition further to include the children of private English subjects who happened to be abroad.
In the late 18th century, though, that definition did not include English mothers who were traveling. If they conceived children with foreign men, it was assumed those children would not be loyal English subjects and were not considered “natural born.”
“We don’t understand how sexist society was back then,” Lee said. “They thought that you got your blood, your politics, your loyalty, your allegiance from your father. The mother was irrelevant.”
Many Americans object to the notion we must follow the original implications of the words in the Constitution with regard to gender. Many legal scholars argue that the meaning of the document changes with time, along with the mores and values that shape American society and determine how Americans of any given era will make sense of the Constitution’s text.
On this view, according to which the Constitution is an evolving, living document, it’s not as important how the Founding Fathers thought about children’s relationships with their fathers and mothers. Americans today are free to apply their own ideas about gender and family to the text of the Constitution.
Yet as Cruz sees it, a truly conservative reader of the Constitution does not reject the original meaning of the text simply because it offends the modern sensibility or because it’s politically convenient to do so. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples last summer, Cruz accused the justices of “rewriting the Constitution.”
In any case, at the time that document was ratified in 1788, Lee has argued that the phrase “natural born” would have carried a specific legal meaning. Natural-born citizens would have been those born in the United States, or born abroad to fathers who were U.S. citizens. On that interpretation, Cruz would not have qualified because his mother was a citizen and his father was not. If Cruz takes an originalist approach to constitutional law, then by this logic, he should come to the conclusion that he is not natural born.
A spokesman for Cruz declined to comment for this story.
Some constitutional originalists disagree with this view, including Michael Ramsey of the University of California, San Diego. He has argued that just as Parliament in London had the power to change the definition of “natural born” for purposes of English law, the newly established Congress here in Washington D.C. could change what the phrase meant for American citizens.
In 1790, members of the first Congress took their seats and passed a law stating that as long as their fathers had lived in the United States for at least some time, children born overseas to American mothers “shall be considered as natural born.” This was a law intended to spell out the new nation’s immigration policy. It is not clear whether Congress also wanted to give a new meaning to the words “natural born” in the Constitution regarding would-be presidential candidates.
Under this definition, Cruz would seem to qualify, since his father had lived in the United States for years before Cruz’s birth in Canada.
Lee and Ramsey have collaborated on legal projects in the past, but in this debate, they’ve parted ways.
Lee says it’s “absurd” for an originalist to argue that Congress would have the power to change the meaning of words in the Constitution. According to Ramsey, though, there’s no contradiction in assuming that lawmakers have this power. The authors of the Constitution allowed Congress to define “natural born Citizen” when they wrote that the legislature had the authority “to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization,” he says.
By: Max Ehrenfreund, Wonkblog, The Washington Post, January 14, 2016
“It’s Smart To Think About The Long Game”: Hillary Clinton Supporters; It Is OK To Care About Gender On The Ballot
When it comes to women in politics, the United States is pretty much the pits. Women make up half the population in this country but hold less than 20% of congressional seats and comprise less than 25% of state legislators. The numbers for women of color are even more dismal.
On the world stage, the US ranks 72nd in women’s political participation, far worse than most industrialized countries – and with numbers similar to Saudi Arabia’s. A United Nations working group late last year called attention to this disparity in a report that found massive discrimination against women across the board, an “overall picture of women’s missing rights”.
And so it seems strange that at a time when the country has the opportunity to elect the first female president, the idea that gender might be a factor is considered shallow in some circles.
Only in a sexist society would women be told that caring about representation at the highest levels of government is wrong. Only in a sexist society would women believe it.
There has been an extraordinary amount of scorn – both from the right and from Bernie Sanders supporters – around the notion that Hillary Clinton and women planning on voting for her are playing the “gender card”. The criticism comes in part from Clinton’s unabashed embrace of women’s issues as a central part of her presidential campaign, and in part – let’s be frank – simply because Clinton is a woman.
The absurd conclusion these detractors are making is that if gender plays any role in a woman’s vote, it must be her sole litmus test. (If that were the case, you’d see throngs of feminists supporting Sarah Palin or Carly Fiorina.) As author and New York magazine contributor Rebecca Traister has written, “Somehow the admission of gender as a factor in support for her creates an opportunity to dismiss not only enthusiasm for Clinton as feminized and thus silly, but also a whole body of feminist argument that concerns itself with the underrepresentation of women in politics.”
One could argue that, gender aside, Clinton’s policies are better for women than Sanders’s – Naral Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood’s endorsements speak to that some, as does Clinton’s vocal emphasis on repealing the Hyde Amendment, which denies poor women the ability to obtain reproductive healthcare. But there is also nothing untoward about pointing out that the groundbreaking first of a female president would also benefit women.
After all, while Barack Obama’s tenure hasn’t led to any “post-racial” utopia, the symbolism of the first black president forever changed the way this nation thinks and talks about race. The first female president, while certain to bring misogynists out of the woodwork at proportions that will make GamerGate look tame, would likely do the same for gender.
There is nothing wrong or foolish in thinking about a candidate’s gender in an election. It is politically savvy to vote for your interests. It is smart to think about the long game for women’s rights. And for those of us with our bodies literally on the line, it is wise to cast a vote that you believe will be the most likely to ensure women won’t be forced into pregnancy, arrested for having miscarriages or any other of the horrifying consequences that anti-abortion Republican leadership would surely pursue.
For some people, even weighing gender heavily in their political decision-making still won’t mean a vote for Clinton. But if it does, their vote should be respected as a well-informed one. Dismissing those who want to take gender into account is turning your back on the basic democratic principle that people have the right to be politically represented.
Electing women into office is important for women’s equality, and it’s also crucial for our country’s health. Considering that truth in the election booth is not caring about a “single issue” – it’s voting smart.
By: Jessica Valenti, The Guardian, January 15, 2016
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