“Rejecting Science”: How Global Warming Deniers Rule The World
For multiple days already this summer, the interior of the country has cooked underneath a bowl of hot air. As that heat wave wore on, a freakish storm erupted from Chicago to Washington, D.C., bringing winds that resembled the edge of a hurricane. And in what has become a summer ritual, wildfires are raging not only in the western United States but in parts of the eastern U.S., too.
If global warming is a hoax, it is a strangely powerful one, hoisting global temperatures to record highs, melting the Arctic ice cap, and threatening agriculture and ecosystems across the planet. So how did scientists make that up?
They didn’t, of course, despite the insistence of powerful Republican leaders that your frying lawn is a figment of your imagination. It’s hard not to notice that it’s hotter than it used to be.
This year, indeed, has brought the United States the broad spectrum of weird weather that climate scientists have warned about for years. That includes drought conditions across two-thirds of the country.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about,” Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Still, of all the debates that rage like wildfires across the political landscape — taxes, health care, immigration — climate change gets precious little attention. Now that Republicans such as Mitt Romney have shifted their stances to line up with hard-core climate change skeptics, Democrats have given up. President Obama hasn’t made it a priority for a long time.
Yet climate change is the issue that worries me most when I think about my child’s future. No one can predict with any certainty how a warming planet will affect the global economy, stores of food and water, or even the spread of disease. Certainly, the world can expect even more conflict over scarce resources since scientists predict that the poorest countries will be hardest hit. It sounds as though we are bequeathing to our kids a very troubled planet.
This would be a difficult issue to tackle — both technologically and politically — even if the modern industrialized nations were all in agreement about what needs to be done. Emerging powers such as China are loathe to be lectured to by countries they believe were free to pollute their way to wealth for a century or so. Moreover, many scientists warn that the Earth is heating so rapidly that huge difficulties may be unavoidable.
But even in this country, we are nowhere near agreement that human-caused climate change is real. The Republican Party has become, among other things, an assemblage of flat-earthers, rejecting science, spreading climate illiteracy and bashing environmentalists.
As recently as the administration of George H.W. Bush, the GOP used to take human-caused global warming seriously. The rejection of climate science probably began when an influential constituency, moguls from fossil-fuels-related industries, began to complain about the focus on their plants and products. As several books, including Joseph Romm’s “Hell and High Water,” have pointed out, industry executives started a public relations crusade to persuade voters that the science on climate change is uncertain.
Decades into that campaign, skepticism toward anthropogenic global warming is part and parcel of Republicans’ DNA, expected of its politicians and grafted onto its voters by the right-wing media machine, including Fox News. Recently I watched in disbelief as a young, well-respected GOPer whom I know insisted on a cable news show that climate change is a hoax intended to “make Al Gore rich.”
Somebody please tell my power company, which is sending me huge bills for my air-conditioning use, that this is all a hoax. If Gore will just admit it, perhaps I can have a summer without fear of heat stroke.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, July 7, 2012
“Unprepared To Lead”: Romney To Look Abroad For Foreign Policy Credibility
When it comes to presidential candidates and foreign affairs, there are basically two kinds of candidates: those who point to their vast experience (Biden, Kerry, H.W. Bush) and those who point to their vision and instincts (Obama).
Then there’s Mitt Romney, who doesn’t quite fit into either camp.
During his first presidential campaign, Romney struggled badly on foreign policy and international affairs, arguing, for example, that it was “entirely possible” that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction in Syria prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
But the inexperienced former one-term governor has had four years to read, get up to speed, and shape a coherent vision. How’s that going? Not at all well.
But don’t worry, Romney has a plan.
Mitt Romney’s campaign is considering a major foreign policy offensive at the end of the month that would take him to five countries over three continents and mark his first move away from a campaign message devoted almost singularly to criticizing President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy, sources tell POLITICO.
The tentative plan being discussed internally would have Romney begin his roll-out with a news-making address at the VFW convention later this month in Reno, Nev. The presumptive GOP nominee then is slated to travel to London for the start of the Olympics and to give a speech in Great Britain on U.S. foreign policy.
Romney next would fly to Israel for a series of meetings and appearances with key Israeli and Palestinian officials. Then, under the plan being considered, he would return to Europe for a stop in Germany and a public address in Poland, a steadfast American ally during the Bush years and a country that shares Romney’s wariness toward Russia. Romney officials had considered a stop in Afghanistan on the journey, but that’s now unlikely.
So, the candidate whose foreign policy experience has been limited to missionary work in France and stashing cash in the Cayman Islands hopes to gain some credibility by heading abroad.
At the surface, there’s nothing especially wrong with this idea, but there is a problem lurking below the surface: what is it, exactly, Mitt Romney is going to say about foreign policy that will be coherent and sound? Or more to the point, how will the candidate choose between the arguments presented by his advisors, most of whom disagree with one another?
About a month ago, the New York Times reported that many members of Team Romney disagree with one another — and at times, even the candidate — about foreign policy, and occasionally, Romney’s own advisors have no idea what he’s trying to say. Last week, Reuters had a similar article, reporting that Romney’s foreign policy advisors are constantly at odds.
The same day, the NYT added that the diplomatic crisis surrounding Chen Guangcheng was seen as an opportunity for the Romney campaign, but they couldn’t get their act together, and couldn’t even agree on what the candidate’s position should be.
Fred Kaplan took stock of what we’ve learned thus far and concluded that Romney is a “foreign policy lightweight” whose ideas “range from vague to ill-informed to downright dangerous.”
Is Romney an extremist? Or, in keeping with the GOP approach to politics in general these days, has he simply calculated that it’s best not to agree with Obama on anything? Either way, one thing is clear: He is not a serious man.
Observers can certainly pick their favorite evidence of Romney’s foreign policy ineptitude — my personal favorite was his profound ignorance during the New START debate — but the point is the Republican candidate seems wholly unprepared to lead on the global stage.
In fact, it’s not even clear if he cares about the subject at all. Inexperience need not be a disqualifier, if voters are given reason to believe there’s a sensible vision and sound judgment that undergirds a coherent set of positions. But Romney hasn’t even met this low threshold, preferring instead to pull together veterans of the Bush/Cheney administration — some of whom have no credibility whatsoever — who’ve been left to argue amongst themselves and leak to the press about their frustrations.
I realize foreign policy probably won’t shape the 2012 race over the next four months, but for a guy who’s supposed to embody “competence,” Romney doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 6, 2012
“A Crass Deadbeat Sperm Donor”: Rep. Joe Walsh’s “Ashleigh” Moments
When Rep. Joe Walsh looks back on his brief and inglorious career in Congress, he will have many moments to blame for his demise, but none more colorful than Thursday afternoon, when he managed to utter the word “Ashleigh” 91 times over the course of a 12-minute interview.
This bizarre verbal obsession had origins in the freshman tea party Republican’s town hall meeting in Illinois a few days earlier, when he unfavorably compared his opponent, who lost both legs in combat in Iraq, to John McCain, who Walsh claimed was reluctant to talk about his military service.
“He talked a little bit about it, but it was very uncomfortable for him. That’s what’s so noble about our heroes,” Walsh said. “Now I’m running against a woman who, I mean, my God, that’s all she talks about. Our true heroes, the men and women who served us, it’s the last thing in the world they talk about.”
So Lt. Col. Tammy Duckworth, who earned a Purple Heart in 2004 when the helicopter she was co-piloting was hit, is not “noble” or a “true” hero because she talks about her military service? It was similar to what Walsh told Politico a few months earlier: “I have so much respect for what she did in the fact that she sacrificed her body for this country. Ehhh. Now let’s move on.”
If this isn’t enough to persuade voters to “move on” from Walsh, the lawmaker continued his self-destruction by appearing on CNN and declining host Ashleigh Banfield’s invitation to cast his remarks as a “slip-up.” Instead, he scolded “Ashleigh,” using her first name repeatedly when he wasn’t calling the 44-year-old anchor “kiddo” or asking the recently naturalized citizen whether she served in the military.
“No, no, Ashleigh. No, Ashleigh, this wasn’t a slip-up. I don’t regret anything I said,” Walsh declared.
Banfield tried to read a list of things Duckworth has talked about other than her military service.
“No, she hasn’t, Ashleigh. No, Ashleigh, no, she hasn’t.”
“Do you want to hear it, Congressman? Do you want to hear it or do you just want to rail on me?”
“Hey, Ashleigh.”
“I’ve got the list here.”
“No, Ashleigh, Ashleigh.”
Banfield read part of the list.
“Ashleigh, Ashleigh, Ashleigh,” Walsh replied. “Hey, Ashleigh, Ashleigh, Ashleigh.”
All indications are that Walsh’s first term in the House may be his last, as challenger Duckworth, a failed candidate in 2006, is favored to win Illinois’s 8th District, redrawn to favor Democrats.
But Walsh’s antics should be of concern to Republicans far beyond the congressional district, both because they are the type of tea party histrionics that raise doubts about the GOP’s readiness to govern, and because they point to a potential Republican vulnerability among veterans, usually a reliable voting bloc.
Polls are conflicting, ranging from a Gallup survey in May showing Mitt Romney with a 24-point lead among vets to a Reuters poll the same month giving Obama a seven-point lead. (McCain won vets by 10 points in 2008.)
Regardless, Obama tends to do better among veterans under 60, and his campaign, seeing a potential inroad, is planning to make veterans’ issues central to the Democratic convention in Charlotte. Obama’s pitch to veterans is that he has sponsored various jobs programs for them and proposed steady increases while Romney backs the House Republican budget, which would cut domestic discretionary spending by 19 percent — likely costing vets tens of billions of dollars.
Walsh is a ripe target for reasons well beyond his crass putdown of Duckworth. During his term, he failed to show up to a court hearing on his ex-wife’s claim that he owed $117,000 in child support (there were earlier tax liens and a foreclosure). His driver’s license was suspended last year for the second time in three years. He called Obama a “tyrant” and accused the president of “lying.” He even squared off with the other Joe Walsh, of the Eagles, over unauthorized use of the song “Walk Away.”
And now there’s Ashleigh, Ashleigh, Ashleigh.
Walsh acknowledged to Banfield that all veterans are heroes, but he defended his claim that Duckworth isn’t a true hero because she spoke about her service. He made this argument primarily by repeating the host’s first name 91 times by my count.
After many such Ashleighs — “Hey, Ashleigh, well, Ashleigh, look Ashleigh” — the interviewer responded in kind with “Yes, Congressman, Congressman. Yes, Congressman.”
“Whew,” Banfield said after the final “Ashleigh.” “I need to take a big breath.”
So should Illinois voters — and send a true hero to Washington in Walsh’s place.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 6, 2012
“Living By Biography”: Mitt Romney Blistered By Conservative Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
This Wall Street Journal editorial is getting a lot of attention this morning for its scathing criticism of the Romney campaign’s equivocations over whether Obamacare’s individual mandate is or isn’t a tax. Yesterday Romney declared that, yes, it is a tax after all — contradicting his campaign’s earlier contention that it wasn’t — and the editorial blasts Romney for squandering a key issue against Obama.
But let’s face it: The skirmishing over whether the mandate is or isn’t a tax probably won’t have much of an impact on the election’s outcome.
That’s why the real news in the Journal editorial — the stuff that should drive the discussion today — is its scalding attack on Romney’s lack of specificity on multiple issues:
The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it’s Mr. Obama’s fault. We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that “Obama isn’t working.” Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President’s policies aren’t working and how Mr. Romney’s policies will do better.
The Journal notes the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s Bain years and offshore accounts, and adds:
All of these attacks were predictable, in particular because they go to the heart of Mr. Romney’s main campaign theme — that he can create jobs as President because he is a successful businessman and manager. But candidates who live by biography typically lose by it. See President John Kerry.
The biography that voters care about is their own, and they want to know how a candidate is going to improve their future. That means offering a larger economic narrative and vision than Mr. Romney has so far provided. It means pointing out the differences with specificity on higher taxes, government-run health care, punitive regulation, and the waste of politically-driven government spending.
The GOP-aligned Journal editoral board is implicitly agreeing that one of the leading critiques of Romney —one being made by the Obama campaign and Dems, but also by more and more media commentators — is entirely legitimate: That he’s refusing to detail his policies with any specificity to speak of on issue after issue.
This goes right to the heart of the central dynamic of this race: The Romney campaign’s gamble that he can edge his way to victory by making this camapign all about Obama, and that along the way, voters won’t notice that he isn’t meaningfully telling us what he would do if elected president. The Journal is calling this out as a non-starter. Does this represent broader GOP establishment opinion? It’s more important than all the short-term skirmishing over whether the mandate is a tax or not.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 5, 2012
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