Author Archives: alka24

Donald Trump Still Unclear About His Own Talking Points

by alka24 Posted on August 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump gets serious!

RADDATZ: Let me ask you a serious foreign policy question. What would you do about ISIS using chemical weapons?

TRUMP: I think it’s disgraceful that they’re allowed and you can’t allow it to happen and you have to go in and just wipe the hell out of them.

RADDATZ: What do you do? Do you go in with ground troops?

TRUMP: What did you say? Say that again.

Ah, the old “I can’t hear you over the crowd noise” routine. I see that Trump is picking up political pointers from the pros already. He’s a quick learner.

Over on NBC, he has his usual addled conversation with Chuck Todd, but I see that he hasn’t been getting pointers from his policy advisors:

DONALD TRUMP: No, not at all. Look, we are a debtor nation. We owe, I mean, now it’s 1.9 trillion, okay? I’ve been saying 1.8. Now, it’s 1 point — it’s really kicked in. It’s soon going to be 2.4 trillion dollars, okay? That’s like a point, whether you believe in the great economists or not, that seems to be a point of no return. That’s where we’re Greece on steroids, okay?

This is one of the dozen or so talking points that Trump uses as his random answer to whatever happens to have been asked, and yet he still doesn’t actually understand it. The number he’s trying to pull from his brain is 19 trillion, not 1.9 trillion. Since Trump is obviously good with figures and would never misstate, say, the buying price of a property, it’s hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that he doesn’t really have the slightest idea about—or interest in—the size of the national debt and what it means. It’s just a good applause line.

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Donald Trump Still Unclear About His Own Talking Points

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This Machine Turned Colorado Blue. Now It May Be Dems’ Best Hope to Save the Senate.

by alka24 Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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“It’s eerie how much 2014 is like four years ago,” says Craig Hughes, a Denver-based political consultant who ran Democrat Michael Bennet’s successful 2010 Senate campaign. It’s just after 10 a.m., and we’re sitting in a coffee shop called Paris on the Platte. Hughes recounts how, back in 2010, all but one of the final 18 public polls conducted before Election Day showed Bennet losing. In recent weeks, Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has trailed Republican Rep. Cory Gardner in 11 of 12 polls. In 2010, pundits said that Bennet’s campaign ran too many pro-choice advertisements; political commentators these days deride Udall as “Mark Uterus” because his campaign has relentlessly focused on reproductive rights and women’s health. And Udall’s campaign is betting, like Bennet’s 2010 effort did, on the changing composition of the Colorado electorate. Also, just like four years ago, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is seeking a second term, is facing a strongly conservative challenger, and in the state Legislature, Colorado Democrats are fighting to protect their majorities in both chambers.

So if there are so many parallels, do Democrats in Colorado have reason to believe they can again buck the political tide?

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This Machine Turned Colorado Blue. Now It May Be Dems’ Best Hope to Save the Senate.

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Exxon Has 25 Billion Barrels of Fossil Fuel and Plans To Extract it All

by alka24 Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

ExxonMobil has 25.2 billion barrels worth of oil and gas in its current reserves, it’s going to extract and sell all of it, and isn’t expecting any meddling climate regulations to get in the way.

That’s the main takeaway of a report the company released this week to its investors, examining the risk that greenhouse gas emissions rules in the US and worldwide might pose to its fossil fuel assets. Exxon made headlines a couple weeks back when it promised to issue the report after facing pressure from shareholders led by Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth management firm.

If stricter limits on carbon pollution or high carbon taxes force energy companies to keep their holdings buried underground, the thinking among environmental economists goes, it could topple the companies’ value and leave investors holding the bag. The result, economists warn, would be a collapse of the so-called “carbon bubble.”

Some big energy companies (including Exxon) have already nodded to this problem, by building a theoretical carbon price into their projected balance sheets. But this report is the first time a large oil and gas company has published a detailed assessment of its own climate risk exposure, according to the New York Times.

The report doesn’t present a very optimistic view of the prospects for aggressive climate action by world leaders.

“We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded’,” the report says. “Stranded assets” is a term climate economists use to refer to fossil fuel reserves that could be stuck in the ground if countries around the world implement sufficiently stringent carbon regulations to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—a threshold agreed to at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. The amount of carbon humans can release without exceeding this limit—roughly 485 billion metric tons of carbon beyond what we’ve already emitted—is often called the “carbon budget.”

Exxon’s report suggests that its planners don’t believe serious carbon limits will be on the books anytime soon, leaving the company free to burn through its reserves of oil and gas. That’s a disconcerting vision to come just on the heels of Sunday’s new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which predicted a nightmarish future if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t slowed soon.

“The reserves are going to be able to turn into money, because they’re assuming there isn’t going to be a policy change,” said Natural Resources Defense Council Director of Climate Programs David Hawkins. “They’re definitely saying that no matter how bad it gets, the world’s addiction to fossil fuels will be so overwhelming that the governments of the world will just suck it up and let people suffer.”

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Exxon Has 25 Billion Barrels of Fossil Fuel and Plans To Extract it All

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You Can Also Blame Newt Gingrich for the Obamacare Website Screwup

by alka24 Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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As the Obama administration continues to unsuck its health care website, one questions lingers: How did this important government project get so screwed up? If you ask technologist Clay Johnson, the insurance exchange’s problems began, in a way, in 1995, when “Congress decided to lobotomize itself.”

Johnson was referring to a specific action lawmakers took then: They killed a tiny federal agency called the Office of Technology Assessment. Established in 1972 as Congress’ nonpartisan in-house think tank, the OTA studied new technologies and offered recommendations on how Washington could adapt to them. But then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) turned off its lights.

Today, members of Congress have legislative counsels to help draft laws. They have the Congressional Budget Office to analyze how much laws will cost. But they don’t have the OTA’s experts to tell them how those laws will work.

“An OTA review might have prevented some heartburn and embarrassment” associated with the Healthcare.gov rollout, argues Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), an astrophysicist who has previously introduced legislation that would resurrect the agency.

Warning Congress about problems with Healthcare.gov—and explaining them—would have been right in OTA’s wheelhouse. The office, Rep. George Brown (D-Calif.) dryly remarked in 1995, was a “defense against the dumb.” During its 24-year existence, the agency developed a reputation for sharp, foresighted analysis on the problems of the new information age: It called for a new, reinforced tanker design a decade before the Exxon-Valdez spill; emphasized the danger of fertilizer bombs 15 years before Oklahoma City; predicted in 1982 that email would render the postal service obsolete; and warned that President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (better known as “Star Wars”) would likely result in a “catastrophic failure” if it were ever used.

Analyzing health care spending was one of OTA’s specialties. One of its final reports, “Bringing Health Care Online,” published in 1995, focused on the potential (and potential for mishaps) in electronic data interchanges. “Changes in the health care delivery system, including the emergence of managed health care and integrated delivery systems, are breaking down the organizational barriers that have stood between care providers, insurers, medical researchers, and public health professionals,” the report warned.

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You Can Also Blame Newt Gingrich for the Obamacare Website Screwup

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Kaiser Permanente Endorses Plant-Based Diets

by alka24 Posted on October 12, 2013

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Kaiser Permanente Endorses Plant-Based Diets

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