Author Archives: Pauline80x

There’s No Such Thing As the Liberal War on Science

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In general, I’m no fan of intellectual whack-a-mole. Nevertheless, there’s one bad idea that circulates and recirculates with such frequency that once in a while, you just have to dust off your mallet.

I’m talking about the idea that when it comes to misusing or abusing science, both sides do it—a pox on both their houses—and the left is really just as bad as the right.

This idea is currently being championed by the generally clear thinking (but also ideologically libertarian) Michael Shermer, who wrote in Scientific American recently about the “Liberal War on Science.” I just appeared in an hour-long discussion of this subject on the Canadian public affairs program The Agenda With Steve Paikin, which also featured Shermer and Mark Lynas, the British environmentalist and author who recently gained great attention for his resounding defense of genetically modified foods:

Shermer begins his article by conceding that conservatives have a bad scientific track record, noting their global warming denial and evolution denial in particular. The latter, he writes, springs from the “erroneous belief that the theory of evolution leads to a breakdown of morality.” But then he goes on to argue that since some Democrats also doubt these scientific verities—or more particularly, a recent Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists, and 19 percent doubt the Earth is warming—science denial is a problem on the left too.

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There’s No Such Thing As the Liberal War on Science

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Best. Diet. Study. Ever.

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“All calories count,” declared the voiceover in an infamous recent Coca-Cola ad. “No matter where they come from, including Coca Cola and everything else with calories.” Message: a calorie is a calorie; don’t blame our sugary drinks for your troubles!

But all calories aren’t created equal, two recent studies suggest. The first one, on sugar, is alarming; the second, on the so-called Mediterranean diet, is comforting.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

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Best. Diet. Study. Ever.

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Janet Yellen Explains Why Our Recovery Has Been So Weak

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Ezra Klein points to an interesting speech last week from Janet Yellen, vice chair of the Federal Reserve. The question she’s addressing is why our recovery from the 2008 recession has been so anemic, and the answer comes in the form of three “tailwinds.” The first one is both the most important and the one that we have the greatest control over: fiscal stimulus.

History shows that fiscal policy often helps to support an economic recovery….For example, following the severe 1981-82 recession, discretionary fiscal policy contributed an average of about 1 percentage point per year to real GDP growth over the subsequent three years.

However, discretionary fiscal policy hasn’t been much of a tailwind during this recovery. In the year following the end of the recession, discretionary fiscal policy at the federal, state, and local levels boosted growth at roughly the same pace as in past recoveries, as Exhibit 3 indicates. But instead of contributing to growth thereafter, discretionary fiscal policy this time has actually acted to restrain the recovery….Negotiations continue over the extent of spending cuts now due to take effect beginning in March, and I expect that discretionary fiscal policy will continue to be a headwind for the recovery for some time, instead of the tailwind it has been in the past.

The full speech is here. Ezra has a nice summary here. The bottom line is simple: we’re doing this to ourselves by actively implementing negative stimulus rather than positive stimulus. I still don’t know whether this is the result of ignorance or deliberate malice—maybe it’s both—but for the past four years we’ve been held hostage by ancient economic ideologies that should have died during the Great Depression. And we’re continuing to pay the price.

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Janet Yellen Explains Why Our Recovery Has Been So Weak

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Tea Party Group: Obama’s State of the Union Address Will Be "Hitlerian"

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President Barack Obama’s state of the union address Tuesday night will be a “Hitlerian screed attacking Republicans, Conservatives, The Tea Party, and anyone who dares to disagree with him,” Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, warned in an essay posted to the group’s website Tuesday. “Liberals,” he argued, “are the new Nazis.”

Tea Party Nation, which also sent Phillips’ screed to its email list, calls itself the “leading Tea Party organization in the nation.” But the group, which is a for-profit corporation, is most famous for a sparsely attended, $549-per-person tea party convention (featuring Sarah Palin) that Phillips held in Nashville in 2010. Since then, Phillips has become embroiled in several legal battles, including one with a former investor who told Mother Jones Phillips snookered him into paying Palin’s speaking fee. Last August, a judge ordered Phillips to pay a Las Vegas casino $748,000 for a 2011 tea party convention he planned and then canceled.

Phillips is also known for inflammatory comments: in 2011, he said that “the Left” had “killed a billion people in the last century.” He has also argued that the Founding Fathers’ original plan to only allow property owners to vote “makes a lot of sense.” And in calling for the ouster of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) a couple of years ago, Phillips cited Ellison’s Muslim faith: “There are a lot of liberals who need to be retired this year,” he wrote in a post picked up by the Maddow blog, “but there are few I can think of more deserving than Keith Ellison. Ellison is one of the most radical members of congress. He has a ZERO rating from the American Conservative Union. He is the only Muslim member of congress.”

Tuesday, Phillips said the Boy Scouts are an example of how liberals are like Nazis:

The Boy Scouts are… a good example of what happens to groups that dare to defy the liberal orthodoxy. The Boy Scouts, for very good reasons, exclude gays as scoutmasters and volunteers. For two decades the left has been engaged in a full frontal assault against the Boy Scouts for their position of not allowing homosexual scoutmasters…

This is the tyranny of the left. There is no room for disagreement. If liberals disagree with the Boy Scouts’ policy they could start their own group. They could create the gay scouts or the diversity scouts or what ever else they wanted to call it.

But no, liberals do not want to do that. They want to destroy anyone or anything that dares to offer a contrary opinion.

Tea Party Nation is the only tea party group listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Tea Party Group: Obama’s State of the Union Address Will Be "Hitlerian"

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Corn on Hardball: Drones Under Scrutiny

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With a leaked Justice Department memo giving legal justification for killing US citizens, drone strikes are getting increased scrutiny. How does Obama’s extrajudicial record compare to Bush’s? David Corn talks about targeted killings with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball.

David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.

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Corn on Hardball: Drones Under Scrutiny

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Today’s oily news: Refiner wants to ship oil on Great Lakes, oil barge spills in Mississippi

Today’s oily news: Refiner wants to ship oil on Great Lakes, oil barge spills in Mississippi

A refinery in Superior, Wis., wants to cut in on the rail industry’s sweet deal: shipments of oil from North Dakota. The company doesn’t own trains. But it does sit at the tip of Lake Superior.

NASALake Superior,

covered in white

instead of oily black.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Petroleum refiner Calumet Specialty Products Partners is exploring whether to build a crude oil loading dock on Lake Superior, near its Superior, Wis., refinery, to ship crude oil on the Great Lakes and through connecting waterways, the company said Friday. …

Pipelines are the cheapest way to move petroleum products, [analyst Ethan] Bellamy said, but their delivery points are fixed. Railcars, barges and ships can move to different delivery points. That allows crude to go to the highest bidder.

And what could go wrong?

Josh Mogerman of the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that a pipeline spill two summers ago of Canadian tar sands oil fouled Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, a Lake Michigan tributary.

“That should give anyone who cares about the Great Lakes pause,” he said.

Well, yeah. But that was a pipeline. When is the last time a boat carrying oil leaked into a waterway? I mean, besides yesterday.

From Reuters:

Two oil barges pushed by a tugboat slammed into a railroad bridge in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Sunday, causing one to leak crude oil into the Mississippi River, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Officials used an “absorbent boom” to contain the undetermined amount of oil that leaked into the river after the collision, which occurred shortly after midnight and damaged both barges, Lieutenant Ryan Gomez said. The barge that is leaking was holding 80,000 gallons of light crude oil, he said.

The Associated Press has more details:

Tugs were holding the barge near shore on the Louisiana side of the river, south of the bridge it hit and directly across from Vicksburg’s Riverwalk Casino.

Orange containment boom was stretched across part of the river downstream from the barge, and a small boat appeared to patrol the area. …

The oily sheen was reported up to three miles downriver from the bridge at Vicksburg on Sunday. Gomez said crews have laid down a boom and also a secondary boom. They also were using a rotating skimmer device to sweep up oily water in the river.

This is a minor spill on a relatively narrow body of water. A big spill on Lake Superior — which could, in its worst case, then flow through each of the other Great Lakes and over Niagara Falls — is a daunting prospect. (We looked at the prospect of such a spill last year.)

Spills are written into business plans like Calumet’s, maybe the second or third paragraph on the 19th page. They’re worst-case scenarios for which theoretical accommodations are made. Until, as happened yesterday, the spills cease to be theoretical.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Today’s oily news: Refiner wants to ship oil on Great Lakes, oil barge spills in Mississippi

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During the coldest week in decades, some Sandy-damaged homes still don’t have heat

During the coldest week in decades, some Sandy-damaged homes still don’t have heat

It has been 87 days since Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast. The past three of those days have fallen during the coldest week in New York City in 17 years.

From The New York Times:

As the region suffers through a brutal cold snap this week, with temperatures so punishing that uncovered slivers of flesh feel like paper cuts and the slightest wind can send a chill through the teeth like a Popsicle, the best solution seems not to leave home. But for many people whose boilers were flooded by seawater during Hurricane Sandy and still languish, awaiting repair, home is as frigid as the outdoors.

Residents who have made do with cold homes under extra blankets and triple socks since the storm hit in October face new challenges as the thermometer continues to dip. Temperatures this week have been about 10 to 15 degrees lower than midwinter averages, according to the National Weather Service, and are expected to slide into the teens over the next few nights, and could even fall into the single digits in parts of the region.

As of Tuesday, New York City’s Rapid Repairs construction teams had restored heat, hot water or power to 12,247 residences in 7,112 buildings, according to Peter Spencer, the spokesman for the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery. But work is continuing in an additional 1,893 buildings, a substantial portion of which, Mr. Spencer estimated, remain without heat.

Daniel Choi’s house doesn’t have heat, the Times reports. Neither does Devon Lawrence’s. Retired nurse Hazel Beckett is warming bricks on her stove to stay warm.

dvids

Breezy Point, Long Island.

Most of the still-powerless homes are in the areas of New York along the coast, the neighborhoods deluged by storm surge: the Rockaways, Staten Island, Breezy Point. For years before the storm hit, these were the neighborhoods understood to be most at risk, but little was done to prepare them. Now New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is reluctant to rebuild in them. Again, the Times:

“There are some parcels that Mother Nature owns,“ he said earlier this month in his official State of the State speech. “She may only visit once every few years, but she owns the parcel and when she comes to visit, she visits.”

To deal with such intrusions, the governor wants to give homeowners in these areas a choice. New York will help them rebuild a better house — on stilts, for example, higher than future floodwaters. Or they can sell what’s left of their homes to the state and move to higher ground.

Details of his proposal — called the Recreate NY-Smart Home program — are still being worked out, and it is hard to say how many New Yorkers will take him up on his offer to relocate. It is also hard to know how much money Mr. Cuomo will be able to spend per house, since this program will be part of a larger Sandy package that includes protecting subways and utilities and creating a fuel reserve to manage future gas lines.

Should Cuomo need ready-made stories in his push for smarter rebuilding, he could turn to elderly Hazel Beckett and her warmed-up bricks. This is a scene that should never have happened — much less three months after the fact.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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During the coldest week in decades, some Sandy-damaged homes still don’t have heat

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Obama Gets Political, Kelly Clarkson Wows ‘Em

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I’d say that this was a more explicitly political inauguration speech than usual, with lots of shoutouts to specific political goals and partisan disagreements. I expect the Fox News set to hate it. Here are a few key excerpts:

Our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.

Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.

Also: that was a helluva performance of America from Kelly Clarkson, wasn’t it?

UPDATE: Sure enough, the Fox News commenters seem distinctly unhappy with this speech. Brit Hume is complaining that the economy is still terrible. Chris Wallace says Obama didn’t reach out to conservatives at all. Bret Baer thinks it was basically a challenge to Republicans not to try and mess with the welfare state. Megyn Kelly says that even the Washington Post thinks Obama is too liberal. And so far, we’ve only heard from the relatively moderate wing of Fox pundits. I can hardly wait to see what Karl Rove and Sean Hannity have to say about it.

UPDATE 2: Now they’re chattering about whether it’s OK to say that Beyonce is an attractive woman.

UPDATE 3: Now they’re back to arguing that Obama is the real obstructionist, not Republicans. I think I’ll tune out now. I imagine they can keep up this schtick pretty much forever.

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Obama Gets Political, Kelly Clarkson Wows ‘Em

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