Libros
Mother Jones
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Politico has “obtained” the Benghazi chapter from Hillary Clinton’s upcoming memoir, and their writeup includes this:
Clinton addresses lingering questions about how military assets were deployed to try to rescue personnel at the besieged compound, writing that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya. It was imperative that all possible resources be mobilized immediately….When Americans are under fire, that is not an order the Commander in Chief has to give twice. Our military does everything humanly possible to save American lives — and would do more if they could. That anyone has ever suggested otherwise is something I will never understand.”
Me, me! Call on me! I understand. Allow me to blogsplain it to you….
Seriously, though, this is pretty much the right attitude for Clinton to take. Of all the nonsense that’s been spewed about Benghazi, the never-ending series of “stand down” conspiracy theories has undoubtedly been the stupidest. Every time one got swatted down, another one popped up to take its place. It was a fast-response team from Italy. No wait. It was a team Gen. Carter Ham was going to send in until Obama ordered him not to. It was a garrison in Tripoli. It was a C-110 team in Croatia. It was a different team from Tripoli. By the time all these theories had been aired, it was apparent that half the United States military was thought to be within striking distance of Libya on the night of the Benghazi attacks.
And as little sense as most of the Benghazi conspiracy theories make, this one made even less. There’s simply no reason that any president of the United States would get in the way of a rescue mission in a situation like Benghazi. But none of that ever mattered. To this day, there are millions of Fox News watchers who are convinced that the deaths in Benghazi could have been prevented but President Obama refused to allow it. Why? Well, if he’s secretly bent on undermining the strength and influence of the United States, it all starts to make sense, doesn’t it? And I wonder where anyone could have gotten that idea?
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Mother Jones
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal, and I was predictably dismissive. It was decent effort, I said, but it was DOA before Camp even officially announced it. Still, “I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.”
In reality, I just forgot about it entirely. But it turns out that the biggest ox being gored by Camp’s plan was Wall Street, which was very much not amused by his proposal to levy a small tax on large banks. They threatened to cancel all GOP fundraisers as long as the bank tax was on the table, and this was enough to bury Camp’s proposal once and for all.
So far, so boring. Camp’s proposal never stood a chance, and the fact that Wall Street happened to put the final nail in the coffin is basically just a footnote. Jon Chait, however, gets at something more interesting:
The whole point of the push-back from Wall Street, which has reinforced a wildly unenthusiastic reception within the GOP, is not only to prevent Republicans from striking a deal with Democrats…. It’s to murder his plan in a public way so as to prevent it from becoming the baseline for any future Republican agenda. That effort seems to be meeting with predictable, depressing success.
It leaves unanswered the basic mystery of why Camp thought he could write a plan like this in the first place. Sources I’ve asked believe Camp was playing a kind of double game, an interpretation that closely fits all the public reporting. He promised Republicans he could produce a tax reform that would lower the top rate to 25 percent, a holy grail of GOP policymaking, and which would produce a massive windfall for the rich. He had also given lip service to make sure his reform did not decrease tax revenue or increase the tax burden on the poor and middle class.
Meeting all these goals was arithmetically impossible. But Republican fiscal proposals usually come face-to-face with arithmetic impossibility. It is their oldest and most bitter foe. Usually they step around with some kind of evasion or chicanery. Camp actually gave in and acceded to his other, un-emphasized goals of revenue and distributional neutrality (that is, ensuring his plan raised the same amount of tax dollars and didn’t shift the burden downward). Nobody outside of Camp and a handful of allies seems to have realized this until the plan was already out in the open.
Unfortunately, this still leaves the basic mystery unanswered. It’s true, as Chait says, that the usual Republican promise—we can lower top rates to 25 percent and make up for it by closing tax breaks—is plainly impossible and everyone knows it. It’s a nice applause line, but it only works as long as the tax breaks are never spelled out, something that requires even more than the usual amount of smoke and mirrors we expect from politicians.
But here’s the thing: obviously Camp knew this. Just as obviously, he knew that making the math work out would produce a plan that Republicans and their interest groups would hate. In the end, he could reduce the top rate only to 35 percent, and only at the cost of killing or reducing some very specific tax breaks that rich people didn’t want killed or reduced.
Camp has been in Congress for more than two decades. He’s hardly an ivory tower naif, and he must have known perfectly well that his plan would do little except to expose Republican hypocrisy on taxes. So why did he do it?
Taken from:
The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan
The red-throated diver is a “species of least concern” as far as the International Union for Conservation of Nature is concerned — there might be a half million of the migratory waterfowl across the globe. But in an estuary east of London, environmental protections for the species have become a major concern for wind energy developers.
So much so that a consortium of utilities has ditched plans to expand what is already the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, worried that it wouldn’t be able to satisfy government requirements that the local red-throated diver population be protected from further harm.
Phase 1 of the London Array is already complete — and generating as much as 630 megawatts of electricity. Phase 2, which would have boosted electricity production at the sprawling site by more than a half, will not move forward as originally planned.
The news is just the latest setback to Britain’s efforts to scale up its already-impressive wind energy portfolio. Other wind-power plans have also been put on ice. Bloomberg explains:
The project is at least the sixth U.K. offshore wind plan in three months to be canceled or reduced. All six of the country’s six biggest utilities have now scaled back their ambitions, delivering a blow to an industry that Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is promoting to reduce emissions and replace aging power plants.
Smart siting of wind turbines is one of the best ways of protecting wildlife from their powerful blades. The good news here is that the companies behind the London Array aren’t abandoning their ambitions to produce more wind energy — they say they’re going to look at other sites.
Source
London Array to Stay at 630 MW, London Array
Offshore Wind Expansion Scrapped by Concern About Birds, Bloomberg
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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World’s biggest offshore wind farm won’t expand because of birds
