Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
The Party of No
The depressing history of the Party of No:
It was December 2008, Barack Obama had just been elected--and the Republican Party had just followed George W. Bush off a political cliff. After preaching small government, balanced budgets and economic growth while producing bigger government, exploding deficits and economic collapse, they had gotten pasted for the second straight election. Publishers were rushing out titles like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. "We were in disarray," recalls Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. "People were comparing us to cockroaches, saying we weren't even relevant. We had to change the mind-set."
With the economy in free fall and Obama's approval rating in the stratosphere, the Beltway believed chastened Republicans would have to cooperate with him. But Eric Cantor of Virginia, the new House minority whip, believed chastened Republicans should start acting like Republicans. He summoned his whip team to his condo building to plot strategy, and the strategy was: Fight. He invited two pollsters to the meeting, but no policy experts because he wanted Republicans to be communicators, not policymakers. They lacked the power to block the Obama agenda, but they could win the battle for public opinion if they could stick together, so Obama couldn't claim bipartisan victories.
"We're not here to cut deals and get crumbs and stay in the minority for another 40 years," Cantor said. "We're not rolling over. We're going to fight these guys. We're down, but things are going to change."
A few weeks later, Sessions began his presentation at a House Republican leadership retreat in Annapolis, Md., with an existential political question: "If the purpose of the majority is to govern ... What is our purpose?" The answer was not to promote Republican policies, or stop Democratic policies, or even make Democratic bills less offensive to Republicans. "The purpose of the minority is to become the majority," Sessions wrote. "That is the entire conference's mission."
Mission accomplished. In the 2010 elections, the GOP reclaimed the House, ushering in two years of bitter stalemate with Obama and the Democratic Senate. But they still haven't done much legislating. They've defined themselves politically by their opposition to Obama, papering over tensions between the Republican Party establishment and Tea Party activists. They've defined themselves ideologically by their tentative embrace of Paul Ryan's ambitious budget plan. So if Mitt Romney wins the White House with Ryan at his side, how would the Party of No try to govern?
To make an educated guess, it helps to go back to the start of the Obama era.
'IF OBAMA WAS FOR IT ...'
Senate republicans held their own retreat in January 2009 at the Library of Congress, and they were even gloomier than their House counterparts. "We might find ourselves in the minority for generations," groaned Utah Senator Bob Bennett. Five of the 41 surviving GOP Senators would soon announce their retirement.
"We were discouraged, dispirited and divided," Bennett recalls. "The one guy who recognized that it need not be so was Mitch McConnell."
The owlish, studiously bland Senate minority leader from Kentucky was the unlikeliest of motivational speakers. He was a strategy guy, cynical and clinical; he reminded his members to stay calm, stay on message and stay united. Obama had promised postpartisanship, and Republicans could turn him into a promise breaker by withholding their support. "We got shellacked, but don't forget we still represent half the population," McConnell said. "Republicans need to stick together as a team." Or as Ohio Senator George Voinovich summarized the strategy: "If Obama was for it, we had to be against it."
The first major Obama initiative would be his stimulus plan, an $800 billion package of tax cuts and spending programs designed to resuscitate an economy that was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month. Who could oppose a jobs bill during a jobs crisis? Every presidential candidate had proposed a stimulus during the 2008 campaign. Romney's plan was actually the biggest.
But McConnell believed Republicans had nothing to gain from me-too-ism. He reminded his caucus that Republicans wouldn't pay a price for opposing Obama's plan if it succeeded, because politicians get re-elected in good times. But if the economy didn't revive, they could return from the political wilderness in 2010. "He wanted everyone to hold the fort," Voinovich later explained. "All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory."
The Republican strategy on the stimulus was as simple as it was clever. The Obama plan had $300 billion worth of tax cuts, plus all kinds of spending that had enjoyed some bipartisan support: unemployment benefits, infrastructure, research and much more. It even included the Race to the Top education reforms, anathema to Democratic teachers' unions. But the GOP message never wavered: Big Government, big spending, big mess.
Inside the leadership team, though, there were tensions between Cantor, who wanted to put Republican politics first, and GOP conference chairman Mike Pence of Indiana, who wanted to put ideological conservatism first. Ultimately, the Republicans fell off both sides of the horse. The official $478 billion GOP alternative was a Pence-style ideological bill, consisting entirely of tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Republicans also crafted a Cantor-style political bill, a $715 billion substitute with even more traditional infrastructure than the Democratic bill. Most House Republicans--including Ryan--voted for both. They never did explain how their stimulus could be good public policy while Obama's similar $787 billion stimulus was freedom-crushing socialism, but their no vote was unanimous. "The caucus had decided we weren't going to give Obama a bipartisan victory on this," recalls moderate Republican Mike Castle of Delaware.
But three moderate GOP Senators voted yes, so Obama won a huge policy victory, a down payment on his campaign promises to reform energy, health care, education and the economy. And one of those moderate Republicans, Arlen Specter, faced such a backlash that he defected to the Democrats, giving Obama the filibuster-proof majority he needed to pass his health reforms.
Nevertheless, Republicans were jubilant. The stimulus was unpopular, so they believed they had won by losing. At a caucus retreat at a Virginia resort, House minority leader John Boehner replayed the video of the vote, prompting a standing ovation. "We'll have more to come!" Cantor said. Pence showed a clip from Patton of the general rallying his troops against their Nazi enemy: "We're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like crap through a goose!"
The stimulus debate established the pattern for the next four years. Republicans opposed the entire Obama agenda--a health care plan based on Romney's, a cap-and-trade regime that McCain had supported in 2008, financial reform after a financial meltdown. Obama squeezed his health care and Wall Street reform bills through Congress anyway, but the quest for 60 votes in the Senate forced him to cut deals that made his initiatives look ugly. And the Tea Party--which held its first rally 10 days after Obama signed the stimulus--became a powerful force opposing the Obama agenda, and a double-edged sword for Washington Republicans.
CAN THEY GOVERN?
Senator Bennett was a loyal soldier in McConnell's army of No, voting against the stimulus and Obamacare. He had been just as loyal a soldier in Bush's army of Yes. But to the Tea Party, that was no longer a point in "Bailout Bob's" favor. Utah's GOP convention didn't even let him defend his seat in a primary in 2010, choosing two Tea Partyers to run instead. "It was just, 'You betrayed us! You voted with Bush!'" Bennett says. "I remember being at Republican conventions where people would say, 'Stand firm with Bush!' So I did, and now you hate me?"
Bennett says his friend Romney commiserated with him about the Tea Party's ingratitude, telling a presumably apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher. "Mitt said the Tea Party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher," he says. "They're so frightened and angry, they'll even bite Bob Bennett, who's trying to get the country out of this mess."
Insufficient anti-Obama fervor had become politically fatal in the GOP. Tea Partyers won rage-a-thon Republican primaries against less dogmatic candidates in Delaware, Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, Kentucky and Alaska, which ultimately cost the GOP control of the Senate in 2010.
As the party comes together in Tampa, it's still not clear whether it can unite behind an agenda. Since the midterms, Washington Republicans have struggled to ride the Tea Party tiger. They've crusaded against spending and debt, threatening to shut down the government if Obama wouldn't agree to their austerity demands. They have pushed--although less vigorously after it polled terribly--the Ryan plan of massive tax cuts for "job creators," a controversial overhaul of Medicare for future generations and dramatic but unspecified cuts in other nondefense spending.
Romney has already distanced himself from some of the few draconian specifics of Ryan's plan. But he has proposed even more-aggressive tax cuts for businesses and investors, which have defined the GOP agenda for decades. Would the Republicans also cut spending? That's harder to say. They haven't in the past; history suggests their concern about deficit reduction mostly emerges when they're out of power. There's a reason Romney won't specify what he wants to cut beyond NPR and Amtrak. It's the same reason Ryan trashed the stimulus as a "wasteful spending spree" while seeking stimulus dollars for his district. Government spending--on Medicare, defense and even the actual contents of the stimulus--remains popular, even though "the government" is not.
And while "deficit reduction" is popular, the spending cuts that actually reduce the deficit are not.
In 2008, Republicans said they were done with Bush-style Big Government conservatism. But the temptation to cut taxes and keep spending remains. Romney will have to decide how fully to embrace the Tea Party vision. And then the ferret will have to decide whether to bite.
Adapted from The New New Deal, copyright 2012 by Michael Grunwald. Published August 2012 by Simon & Schuster Inc. Reprinted by permission
Fact checking for thee, but not for me
Fact checking for thee, but not for me
By Greg Sargent
Get this: The Romney campaign’s position is now that the Obama camp should pull its ads when fact checkers call them out as false — but that Romney and his advisers should feel no such constraint.
This is not an exaggeration. This is really the Romney campaign’s position.
As Buzzfeed reports this morning, top Romney advisers say their most effective ads are the ones attacking Obama over welfare, and that they will not allow their widespread denunciation by fact checkers as false slow down their campaign one little bit:
“Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O’Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. “It’s new information.”...
The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” awarded Romney’s ad “four Pinocchios,” a measure Romney pollster Neil Newhouse dismissed.
“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he said.
That’s a very interesting admission. But it gets better. Reading this brought to mind Romney’s own remarks about fact-checking and political advertising not long ago. Needless to say, he has a different standard for the Obama campaign:
“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”
The upshot is that Romney doesn’t have an intellectual objection to fact checking’s limitations in a general sense, at least when it’s applied to the Obama campaign. In that case, fact checking is a legitmate exercise Obama should heed. But at the same time, the Romney campaign explicitly says it doesn’t see it as legitimate or constraining when it’s applied to him.
By the way, this isn’t the first time the Romney camp has insisted that it is not beholden to the standards it expects the Obama campaign to follow. For the better part of a year, Romney has hammered Obama over the “net” jobs lost on his watch, to paint him as a job destroyer, a metric that factors the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost at the start of Obama’s term, before his policies took effect. Yet Romney advisers have argued, with no apparent sense of irony, that his own record should not be judged by one net jobs number.
In this sense, the Romney campaign continues to pose a test to the news media and our political system. What happens when one campaign has decided there is literally no set of boundaries that it needs to follow when it comes to the veracity of its assertions? The Romney campaign is betting that the press simply won’t be able to keep voters informed about the disputes that are central to the campaign, in the face of the sheer scope and volume of dishonesty it uncorks daily.
Paul Krugman’s question continues to remain relevant: “Has there ever been a candidacy this cynical?”
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Signs of divine intervention for Republicans?
Signs of divine intervention for Republicans?
By Dana Milbank, Published: August 21
Has God forsaken the Republican Party?
Well, sit in judgment of what’s happened in the past few days:
●A report comes out that a couple dozen House Republicans engaged in an alcohol-induced frolic, in one case nude, in the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is believed to have walked on water, calmed the storm and, nearby, turned water into wine and performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
●Rep. Todd Akin, Missouri’s Republican nominee for Senate, suggests there is such a thing as “legitimate rape” and purports that women’s bodies have mysterious ways to repel the seed of rapists. He spends the next 48 hours rejecting GOP leaders’ demands that he quit the race.
●Weather forecasts show that a storm, likely to grow into Hurricane Isaac, may be chugging toward . . . Tampa, where Republicans will open their quadrennial nominating convention on Monday.
Coincidence? Or part of some Intelligent Design?
By their own logic, Republicans and their conservative allies should be concerned that Isaac is a form of divine retribution. Last year, Rep. Michele Bachmann, then a Republican presidential candidate, said that the East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene — another “I” storm, but not an Old Testament one — were attempts by God “to get the attention of the politicians.” In remarks later termed a “joke,” she said: “It’s time for an act of God and we’re getting it.”
The influential conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck said last year that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were God’s “message being sent” to that country. A year earlier, Christian broadcaster and former GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson tied the Haitian earthquake to that country’s “pact to the devil.”
Previously, Robertson had argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for abortion, while the Rev. John Hagee said the storm was God’s way of punishing homosexuality. The late Jerry Falwell thought that God allowed the Sept. 11 attacks as retribution for feminists and the ACLU.
Even if you don’t believe God uses meteorological phenomena to express His will, it’s difficult for mere mortals to explain what is happening to the GOP just now.
By most earthly measures, President Obama has no business being reelected. No president since World War II has won reelection with the unemployment rate north of 7.4 percent. Of the presidents during that time who were returned to office, GDP growth averaged 4.7 percent during the first nine months of the election year — more than double the current rate.
But instead of being swept into office by the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression, Republicans are in danger of losing an election that is theirs to lose. Mitt Romney, often tone-deaf, has allowed Obama to change the subject to Romney’s tax havens and tax returns. And congressional Republicans are providing all kinds of reasons for Americans to doubt their readiness to assume power.
The Politico report Sunday about drunken skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee gave House Republicans an unwanted image of debauchery — a faint echo of the Capitol page scandal that, breaking in September 2006, cemented Republicans’ fate in that November’s elections. The 30 Republican lawmakers on the “fact-finding” mission to Israel last summer earned a rebuke from Majority Leader Eric Cantor and attracted the attention of the FBI. The naked congressman, Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), admitted in a statement: “[R]egrettably I jumped into the water without a swimsuit.”
A boozy frolic at a Christian holy site might have been a considerable embarrassment for the party, but it was eclipsed by a bigger one: Akin’s preposterous claim on a St. Louis TV program that pregnancy is rare after a “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Republican leaders spent the next 48 hours trying to shut Akin’s whole thing down, but after a period of panic (a no-show on Piers Morgan’s show led the CNN host to show his empty chair and call him a “gutless little twerp”), Akin told radio host Mike Huckabee on Tuesday that he would fight the “big party people” and stay in the race.
The big party people had a further complication: In Tampa on Tuesday, those drafting the GOP platform agreed to retain a plank calling for a constitutional amendment banning abortion without specifying exceptions for cases of rape. In other words, the Akin position.
For a party that should be sailing toward victory, there were all the makings of a perfect storm. And, sure enough: Tuesday afternoon, the National Weather Service forecast that “Tropical Depression Nine” would strengthen into a hurricane, taking a northwesterly track over Cuba on Sunday morning — just as Republicans are arriving in Florida.
What happens next? God only knows.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Religiosity declining sharply, atheism on the rise
This is encouraging:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/religiosity-plummets-ireland-declines-worldwide-atheism_n_1757453.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=080912&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief
But I believe Islam is growing faster than atheism, and that's a big problem.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/religiosity-plummets-ireland-declines-worldwide-atheism_n_1757453.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=080912&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief
But I believe Islam is growing faster than atheism, and that's a big problem.
Underground sect charged with abuse
http://news.
Russia: Underground sect charged with abuse
By MANSUR MIROVALEV | Associated Press - 24 mins ago
MOSCOW (AP) - A reclusive sect that literally went underground to stop contact with the outside world kept 27 children in dark and unheated cells, many of them for more than a decade, prosecutors said Wednesday. The children have been freed and the parents charged with child abuse.
Some of the children, aged between 1 and 17, have never seen daylight, health officials said. The sect's 83-year-old founder Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a Muslim prophet in contradiction with the principles of Islam, has also been charged with negligence, Irina Petrova, deputy prosecutor in the provincial capital of Kazan, told The Associated Press.
No members of the sect, who call themselves "muammin" after the Arabic term that means "believers," have been arrested, she said.
The children were discovered last week when police searched the sect grounds as part of a probe into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials blame on radical Islamist groups that have mushroomed in the oil-rich, Volga River province.
Satarov, a former top imam in the neighboring province of Bashkortostan, declared his house outside Kazan an independent Islamic state. He ordered some 70 followers to live in cells they dug under the three-story building topped by a small minaret with a tin crescent moon. Only a few sect members were allowed to leave the premises to work as traders at a local market, Russian media reported.
The children have been placed in local hospitals for observation and will temporarily live in an orphanage, pediatrician Tatyana Moroz said in televised remarks.
The cramped cells, without ventilation, heating or electricity, form eight levels under a decrepit three-story brick house on a 700-square-meter (7,530 sq. foot) plot of land. The house was built illegally and will be demolished, Tatarstan police told local media.
"They will come with bulldozers and guns, but they can demolish this house over our dead bodies!" sect member Gumer Ganiyev said on the Vesti television channel. The ailing Satarov appointed Ganiyev as his deputy "prophet," according to local media.
Satarov had followers in several other cities in Tatarstan and other Volga River provinces, local media reported.
In a 2008 interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, Satarov said that he fell out with other clerics and authorities in the Communist era, when the KGB sent him to Muslim nations with stories about religious freedom in the officially atheist Soviet Union. Government-approved Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics routinely traveled abroad on Soviet publicity trips.
"That's how I became Satan's servant, a traitor," the white-bearded and turbaned man was quoted as saying. "When I understood that, I repented and started preaching."
Muslim leaders in Tatarstan said Satarov's views contradict their dogma.
"Islam postulates that there are no other prophets after Mohammad," Kazan-based theologian Rais Suleimanov told the Gazeta.ru online publication Tuesday. "The teachings of Sattarov, who declared himself a prophet, have been rejected by traditional Muslims."
The sect members stopped accepting new members and are "only dangerous to themselves and their children," Suleimanov was quoted as saying.
Police entered Satarov's house last Friday as part of an ongoing investigation into the killing of Valiulla Yakupov, Tatarstan's deputy chief mufti, who was gunned down in mid-July as he left his house in Kazan. Minutes later, chief mufti Ildus Faizov was wounded in the legs after an explosive device ripped through his car in central Kazan.
Both clerics were known as critics of radical Islamist groups that advocate a strict and puritan version of Islam known as Salafism.
The emergence of Salafist groups in Tatarstan and other Volga River provinces with a sizable Muslim population has been fueled by the influx of jihadists and clerics from Chechnya and other provinces of Russia's Caucasus region, where Islamic insurgency has been raging for years.
Last year, Doku Umarov, the leader of the embattled Chechen separatists, issued a religious decree calling on radical Islamists from the Caucasus to move to the densely-populated Volga River region that includes Tatarstan.
Prosecutors have named two suspects in the cleric's killing who remain at large and arrested five others in the case. Islamist youth groups have staged rallies in Kazan demanding the detainees' release.
More than half of Tatarstan's 4 million people are Sunni Muslims. Tatars converted to Islam more than a thousand years ago, and the province became an important center of Muslim learning and culture under Tatar-Mongol rulers who controlled Russia and parts of Eastern Europe.
Islamic radicals from the Caucasus have called for the establishment of a caliphate, an independent Islamic state under Shariah law that includes the Caucasus, Tatarstan and other parts of Russia that were once part of the Golden Horde - a medieval Muslim state ruled by a Tatar-Mongol dynasty.
Russia: Underground sect charged with abuse
By MANSUR MIROVALEV | Associated Press - 24 mins ago
MOSCOW (AP) - A reclusive sect that literally went underground to stop contact with the outside world kept 27 children in dark and unheated cells, many of them for more than a decade, prosecutors said Wednesday. The children have been freed and the parents charged with child abuse.
Some of the children, aged between 1 and 17, have never seen daylight, health officials said. The sect's 83-year-old founder Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a Muslim prophet in contradiction with the principles of Islam, has also been charged with negligence, Irina Petrova, deputy prosecutor in the provincial capital of Kazan, told The Associated Press.
No members of the sect, who call themselves "muammin" after the Arabic term that means "believers," have been arrested, she said.
The children were discovered last week when police searched the sect grounds as part of a probe into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials blame on radical Islamist groups that have mushroomed in the oil-rich, Volga River province.
Satarov, a former top imam in the neighboring province of Bashkortostan, declared his house outside Kazan an independent Islamic state. He ordered some 70 followers to live in cells they dug under the three-story building topped by a small minaret with a tin crescent moon. Only a few sect members were allowed to leave the premises to work as traders at a local market, Russian media reported.
The children have been placed in local hospitals for observation and will temporarily live in an orphanage, pediatrician Tatyana Moroz said in televised remarks.
The cramped cells, without ventilation, heating or electricity, form eight levels under a decrepit three-story brick house on a 700-square-meter (7,530 sq. foot) plot of land. The house was built illegally and will be demolished, Tatarstan police told local media.
"They will come with bulldozers and guns, but they can demolish this house over our dead bodies!" sect member Gumer Ganiyev said on the Vesti television channel. The ailing Satarov appointed Ganiyev as his deputy "prophet," according to local media.
Satarov had followers in several other cities in Tatarstan and other Volga River provinces, local media reported.
In a 2008 interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, Satarov said that he fell out with other clerics and authorities in the Communist era, when the KGB sent him to Muslim nations with stories about religious freedom in the officially atheist Soviet Union. Government-approved Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics routinely traveled abroad on Soviet publicity trips.
"That's how I became Satan's servant, a traitor," the white-bearded and turbaned man was quoted as saying. "When I understood that, I repented and started preaching."
Muslim leaders in Tatarstan said Satarov's views contradict their dogma.
"Islam postulates that there are no other prophets after Mohammad," Kazan-based theologian Rais Suleimanov told the Gazeta.ru online publication Tuesday. "The teachings of Sattarov, who declared himself a prophet, have been rejected by traditional Muslims."
The sect members stopped accepting new members and are "only dangerous to themselves and their children," Suleimanov was quoted as saying.
Police entered Satarov's house last Friday as part of an ongoing investigation into the killing of Valiulla Yakupov, Tatarstan's deputy chief mufti, who was gunned down in mid-July as he left his house in Kazan. Minutes later, chief mufti Ildus Faizov was wounded in the legs after an explosive device ripped through his car in central Kazan.
Both clerics were known as critics of radical Islamist groups that advocate a strict and puritan version of Islam known as Salafism.
The emergence of Salafist groups in Tatarstan and other Volga River provinces with a sizable Muslim population has been fueled by the influx of jihadists and clerics from Chechnya and other provinces of Russia's Caucasus region, where Islamic insurgency has been raging for years.
Last year, Doku Umarov, the leader of the embattled Chechen separatists, issued a religious decree calling on radical Islamists from the Caucasus to move to the densely-populated Volga River region that includes Tatarstan.
Prosecutors have named two suspects in the cleric's killing who remain at large and arrested five others in the case. Islamist youth groups have staged rallies in Kazan demanding the detainees' release.
More than half of Tatarstan's 4 million people are Sunni Muslims. Tatars converted to Islam more than a thousand years ago, and the province became an important center of Muslim learning and culture under Tatar-Mongol rulers who controlled Russia and parts of Eastern Europe.
Islamic radicals from the Caucasus have called for the establishment of a caliphate, an independent Islamic state under Shariah law that includes the Caucasus, Tatarstan and other parts of Russia that were once part of the Golden Horde - a medieval Muslim state ruled by a Tatar-Mongol dynasty.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Sharia Law Taking Over Belgium
Fundamentalist Islam is a major threat to freedom and democracy, but the real problem is fundamentalism, not Islam specifically:
http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/mp4/DHU227v2_WS
http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/mp4/DHU227v2_WS
Monday, August 6, 2012
The Most Astounding Fact
Not exactly political (or it shouldn't be), but a great answer by Niel deGrasse Tyson anyway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU&feature=player_embedded
Friday, August 3, 2012
New Law in North Carolina Bans Latest Scientific Predictions of Sea-Level Rise
This is why I make my YouTube videos attacking religion (http://youtube.com/underlings). These legislators have the same mentality that fundamentalist religion generates: mistrust of science:
http://news.yahoo.com/law-north-carolina-bans-latest-scientific-predictions-sea-165416121--abc-news-topstories.html
New Law in North Carolina Bans Latest Scientific Predictions of Sea-Level Rise
By ALON HARISH | ABC News - 11 hrs ago
A new law in North Carolina will ban the state from basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise, prompting environmentalists to accuse the state of disrespecting climate science.
The law has put the state in the spotlight for what critics have called nearsightedness and climate change denial, but its proponents said the state needed to put a moratorium on predictions of sea level rise until scientific techniques improve.
The law was drafted in response to an estimate by the state's Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) that the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century, prompting fears of costlier home insurance and accusations of anti-development alarmism among residents and developers in the state's coastal Outer Banks region.
Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue had until Thursday to act on the bill known as House Bill 819, but she decided to let it become law by doing nothing.
The bill's passage in June triggered nationwide scorn by those who argued that the state was deliberately blinding itself to the effects of climate change. In a segment on the "Colbert Report," comedian Stephen Colbert mocked North Carolina lawmakers' efforts as an attempt to outlaw science.
"If your science gives you a result you don't like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved," he joked.
The law, which began as a routine regulation on development permits but quickly grew controversial after the sea-level provision was added, restricts all sea-level predictions used to guide state policies for the next four years to those based on "historical data."
Tom Thompson, president of NC-20, a coastal development group and a key supporter of the law, said the science used to make the 39-inch prediction was flawed, and added that the resources commission failed to consider the economic consequences of preparing the coast for a one-meter rise in sea level, under which up to 2,000 square miles would be threatened.
A projection map showing land along the coast underwater would place the permits of many planned development projects in jeopardy. Numerous new flood zone areas would have to be drawn, new waste treatment plants would have to be built, and roads would have to be elevated. The endeavor would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, Thompson said.
"I don't want to say they're being dishonest, but they're pulling data out of their hip pocket that ain't working," he said of the commission panel that issued the prediction, the middle in a range of three predictions.
Thompson, who denies global warming, said the prediction was based on measurements at a point on the North Carolina coast that is unrepresentative of the rest of the coast.
But the costs Thompson decries as wasteful are to the law's opponents a necessary pill the state must swallow if it is going to face up to the challenge of protecting the coast from the effects of climate change.
State Rep. Deborah Ross, a forceful critic of the bill, compared it to burying one's "head in the sand."
"I go to the doctor every year. If I'm not fine, I'd rather know now than in four years," said Ross, a Democrat who represents inland Greensboro, N.C., but owns property on the coast. "This is like going to the doctor and saying you're not going to get a test on a problem."
Its supporters counter that the law does not force the state to close its eyes to reality, but rather to base policy on more than a single model that produced what they believe are extreme results.
Republican State Rep. Pat McElraft, who drafted the law, called the law a "breather" that allows the state to "step back" and continue studying sea -level rise for the next several years with the goal of achieving a more accurate prediction model.
"Most of the environmental side say we're ignoring science, but the bill actually asks for more science," she said. "We're not ignoring science, we're asking for the best science possible, the best extrapolation possible, looking at the historical data also. We just need to make sure that we're getting the proper answers."
As it thrust North Carolina into a national debate about climate politics, the bill became a lightning rod at home.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Perdue said her office received 3,400 emails opposing the bill in the first week after it passed the Republican-controlled state legislature.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), sea level rise along the portion of the East Coast between North Carolina and Massachusetts is accelerating at three to four times the global rate. A USGS report published in the journal Nature Climate Change in June predicted that sea level along the coast of that region, which it called a "hotspot," would rise up to 11.4 inches higher than the global average rise by the end of the 21st century.
The historical political clout wielded by North Carolina's developers has led some critics of the law to accuse legislators backing it to promote those who line the pockets of their campaigns.
The largest industry contributors to McElraft's campaigns have been real estate agents and developers, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Her top contributor since she was elected to the General Assembly in 2007 has been the North Carolina Association of Realtors, followed by the North Carolina Home Builders' Association.
McElraft, who is a former real estate agent and lives on Barrier Island off the coast, denied that campaign contributions ever influence her decisions as a lawmaker, and said her votes have not always favored increased development.
More than simply protecting developers, the new law protects homeowners from an overactive state government that would take away their right to build on their own property, McElraft said. Given an increased projected risk of flooding, insurance companies would likely charge coastal property owners, who already pay higher premiums, a concern Rep. Ross said she shared.
Ross, though, said she would rather pay for a more expensive insurance policy on her coastal home than be uncertain about whether it will be wiped out by the Atlantic Ocean in a few decades.
Gov. Perdue released a statement Thursday that gave a qualified endorsement of the law while urging lawmakers to develop a coherent approach to sea-level rise.
"North Carolina should not ignore science when making public policy decisions. House Bill 819 will become law because it allows local governments to use their own scientific studies to define rates of sea level change," Perdue wrote.
"I urge the General Assembly to revisit this issue and develop an approach that gives state agencies the flexibility to take appropriate action in response to sea level change within the next four years."
http://news.
New Law in North Carolina Bans Latest Scientific Predictions of Sea-Level Rise
By ALON HARISH | ABC News - 11 hrs ago
A new law in North Carolina will ban the state from basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise, prompting environmentalists to accuse the state of disrespecting climate science.
The law has put the state in the spotlight for what critics have called nearsightedness and climate change denial, but its proponents said the state needed to put a moratorium on predictions of sea level rise until scientific techniques improve.
The law was drafted in response to an estimate by the state's Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) that the sea level will rise by 39 inches in the next century, prompting fears of costlier home insurance and accusations of anti-development alarmism among residents and developers in the state's coastal Outer Banks region.
Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue had until Thursday to act on the bill known as House Bill 819, but she decided to let it become law by doing nothing.
The bill's passage in June triggered nationwide scorn by those who argued that the state was deliberately blinding itself to the effects of climate change. In a segment on the "Colbert Report," comedian Stephen Colbert mocked North Carolina lawmakers' efforts as an attempt to outlaw science.
"If your science gives you a result you don't like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved," he joked.
The law, which began as a routine regulation on development permits but quickly grew controversial after the sea-level provision was added, restricts all sea-level predictions used to guide state policies for the next four years to those based on "historical data."
Tom Thompson, president of NC-20, a coastal development group and a key supporter of the law, said the science used to make the 39-inch prediction was flawed, and added that the resources commission failed to consider the economic consequences of preparing the coast for a one-meter rise in sea level, under which up to 2,000 square miles would be threatened.
A projection map showing land along the coast underwater would place the permits of many planned development projects in jeopardy. Numerous new flood zone areas would have to be drawn, new waste treatment plants would have to be built, and roads would have to be elevated. The endeavor would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, Thompson said.
"I don't want to say they're being dishonest, but they're pulling data out of their hip pocket that ain't working," he said of the commission panel that issued the prediction, the middle in a range of three predictions.
Thompson, who denies global warming, said the prediction was based on measurements at a point on the North Carolina coast that is unrepresentative of the rest of the coast.
But the costs Thompson decries as wasteful are to the law's opponents a necessary pill the state must swallow if it is going to face up to the challenge of protecting the coast from the effects of climate change.
State Rep. Deborah Ross, a forceful critic of the bill, compared it to burying one's "head in the sand."
"I go to the doctor every year. If I'm not fine, I'd rather know now than in four years," said Ross, a Democrat who represents inland Greensboro, N.C., but owns property on the coast. "This is like going to the doctor and saying you're not going to get a test on a problem."
Its supporters counter that the law does not force the state to close its eyes to reality, but rather to base policy on more than a single model that produced what they believe are extreme results.
Republican State Rep. Pat McElraft, who drafted the law, called the law a "breather" that allows the state to "step back" and continue studying sea -level rise for the next several years with the goal of achieving a more accurate prediction model.
"Most of the environmental side say we're ignoring science, but the bill actually asks for more science," she said. "We're not ignoring science, we're asking for the best science possible, the best extrapolation possible, looking at the historical data also. We just need to make sure that we're getting the proper answers."
As it thrust North Carolina into a national debate about climate politics, the bill became a lightning rod at home.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Perdue said her office received 3,400 emails opposing the bill in the first week after it passed the Republican-controll
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), sea level rise along the portion of the East Coast between North Carolina and Massachusetts is accelerating at three to four times the global rate. A USGS report published in the journal Nature Climate Change in June predicted that sea level along the coast of that region, which it called a "hotspot," would rise up to 11.4 inches higher than the global average rise by the end of the 21st century.
The historical political clout wielded by North Carolina's developers has led some critics of the law to accuse legislators backing it to promote those who line the pockets of their campaigns.
The largest industry contributors to McElraft's campaigns have been real estate agents and developers, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Her top contributor since she was elected to the General Assembly in 2007 has been the North Carolina Association of Realtors, followed by the North Carolina Home Builders' Association.
McElraft, who is a former real estate agent and lives on Barrier Island off the coast, denied that campaign contributions ever influence her decisions as a lawmaker, and said her votes have not always favored increased development.
More than simply protecting developers, the new law protects homeowners from an overactive state government that would take away their right to build on their own property, McElraft said. Given an increased projected risk of flooding, insurance companies would likely charge coastal property owners, who already pay higher premiums, a concern Rep. Ross said she shared.
Ross, though, said she would rather pay for a more expensive insurance policy on her coastal home than be uncertain about whether it will be wiped out by the Atlantic Ocean in a few decades.
Gov. Perdue released a statement Thursday that gave a qualified endorsement of the law while urging lawmakers to develop a coherent approach to sea-level rise.
"North Carolina should not ignore science when making public policy decisions. House Bill 819 will become law because it allows local governments to use their own scientific studies to define rates of sea level change," Perdue wrote.
"I urge the General Assembly to revisit this issue and develop an approach that gives state agencies the flexibility to take appropriate action in response to sea level change within the next four years."
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Study: Romney tax plan would result in cuts for rich, higher burden for others
Study: Romney tax plan would result in cuts for rich, higher burden for others
By Lori Montgomery, Published: July 31
Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the tax code would produce cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans — and bigger bills for everybody else, according to an independent analysis set for release Wednesday.
The study was conducted by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who seem to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate. To cover the cost of his plan — which would reduce tax rates by 20 percent, repeal the estate tax and eliminate taxes on investment income for middle-class taxpayers — the researchers assume that Romney would go after breaks for the richest taxpayers first.
They even look at what would happen if Republicans’ dreams for tax reform came true and the proposal generated significant revenue through economic growth.
None of it helped Romney. His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.
“It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers,” the study concludes.
Even if tax breaks “are eliminated in a way designed to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible, there would still be a shift in the tax burden of roughly $86 billion [a year] from those making over $200,000 to those making less” than that.
What would that mean for the average tax bill? Millionaires would get an $87,000 tax cut, the study says. But for 95 percent of the population, taxes would go up by about 1.2 percent, an average of $500 a year.
The Romney campaign on Wednesday declined to address the specifics of the analysis, dismissing it as a “liberal study.” Campaign officials noted that one of the three authors, Adam Looney of Brookings, served as a senior economist on the Obama Council of Economic Advisers. The other two authors are Samuel Brown and William Gale, both of whom are affiliated with Brookings and the Tax Policy Center.
“President Obama continues to tout liberal studies calling for more tax hikes and more government spending. We’ve been down that road before – and it’s led us to 41 straight months of unemployment above 8 percent,” said Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams. “It’s clear that the only plan President Obama has is more of the same. Mitt Romney believes that lower tax rates and less government will jump-start the economy and create jobs.”
© The Washington Post Company
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