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Billionaire Clean Energy Advocate Pledges to Spend Big in Mass.

by trasze2aja Posted on March 19, 2013

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A group of young activists is pairing up with a billionaire philanthropist to try to make the Keystone XL pipeline, and climate change, a central issue in the Democratic primary in Massachusetts.

Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager and clean energy evangelist, has spent more than $37 million to pass and defend climate and energy initiatives in California. Now he’s forming a super-PAC to spend on the April 30 Democratic primary for the special election to fill Massachusetts’ empty Senate seat.

Steyer and young environmentalists are targeting Dem Rep. Steve Lynch for his support of the Keystone XL pipeline. Lynch voted for a House bill last year that called for the Obama administration to approve the controversial pipeline. Lynch’s opponent in the primary, Rep. Ed Markey, has the support of a number of environmental groups and opposes the pipeline.

Steyer joined with Craig S. Altemose of the Better Future Project and three other Massachusetts college students to write a open letter to Lynch on Monday demanding he change his position on the pipeline:

Because climate change is such a serious issue, and because it is on the ballot as never before, we are asking you, Congressman Lynch, today to do one of two things by high noon on Friday, March 22. Either act like a real Democrat and oppose Keystone’s dirty energy. Or, get a sworn, binding statement – with securities law enforcement – from TransCanada and the refiners that all of the Keystone-shipped oil will stay here.

If Lynch doesn’t change his tune, they wrote, Steyer will then “immediately launch an aggressive public education campaign” against Lynch. In an interview with Mother Jones, Chris Lehane, a spokesman for Steyer, declined to say how much they would spend on such a campaign, but said it would include paid media, get out the vote work, and field campaigns.

Steyer became involved in the Massachusetts race after Altemose and the other young activists reached out. â&#128;&#139;Altemose said their effort is “less of an endorsement of Markey and more a repudiation of Lynch’s actions.” The campaign, he said, is designed to “make sure there’s political consequences for disregarding future generations.”

“For someone to believe they can represent Massachusetts and be supporting policies that take us backward to the dirty energy past is just mind boggling,” Altemose said.

Mother Jones
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Billionaire Clean Energy Advocate Pledges to Spend Big in Mass.

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Liberals Are Annoying

by trasze2aja Posted on March 17, 2013

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Jared Bernstein was on Bill Maher’s show yesterday, trying to convince him that a tax on soda was a good idea. After all, he says, soda contributes to obesity, and obesity contributes to chronic diseases that cost all of us a lot of money:

But Bill’s point, which I ultimately found pretty convincing (he kept hitting me with it after the show!), is that there’s tons of stuff like that—behaviors that people engage in with potential negative externalities. To suggest taxing them all is what give liberals a bad name, he asserted in terms rarely heard in policy seminars.

Maher is right. Liberals are annoying almost by definition. We are constantly hectoring people to stop doing stuff they’re comfortable with and to instead do brand new stuff that they find awkward, difficult, embarrassing,and wearisome. There’s no help for that—it’s part of the essence of liberalism—but the key to success is to pick our battles carefully. The game needs to be worth the candle.

Unfortunately, we do have a wee tendency to overdo things, which creates lots of resentment for no appreciable gain. It may seem unfair that overdoing things modestly hurts us more than genuinely nutbag stuff—like, say, the video on the right—seems to hurt conservatives, but that’s life. Extremism in the defense of the status quo just isn’t as scary as the opposite. This has been true approximately forever, I think.

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Liberals Are Annoying

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Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

by trasze2aja Posted on March 12, 2013

Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

By John Upton

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The Bahamas, where unspoiled beauty soon will be spoiled.

Catch ya later, unspoiled beaches of Bahamian paradise. It’s been real.

Offshore oil drilling will soon be allowed in the heavenly West Indies archipelago of the Bahamas, which is made up of thousands of islands and cays off the Floridian coast. Initially, the drilling will be exploratory only — an experiment that will punch a bunch of holes in the ocean floor to see what goop lies beneath.

The Bahamas environment minister said the option of allowing large-scale commercial oil drilling would be put to the nation’s voters after results of the exploratory drills are known, perhaps in 2015.

The government had previously said that even exploratory drilling would require the support of the voters before it could begin. With this move to allow exploratory drills, the government is being accused by The Tribune, a Bahamian newspaper, of breaking promises:

According to a statement released by Environment Minister Kenred Dorsett, the government has determined that “we need to find out first, through exploration drilling, whether we do indeed have oil in commercially viable quantities.”

This is in direct contrast to his position less than four months ago, when Mr Dorsett assured this newspaper that no form of drilling would take place ahead of the referendum, planned for sometime before July this year.

The drilling plan is controversial, for obvious reasons. From the Associated Press:

Offshore drilling is sensitive in the Bahamas, where many fear a spill could devastate the fishing and tourism industries. The previous Bahamian government had delayed issuing exploration permits. Prime Minister Perry Christie, who was voted back into office in May, has said he supported exploration.

Dorsett said the government would seek new regulations to protect the environment and cannot ignore the potential economic benefits of oil for a country that now imports fuel. “The discovery of oil in the Bahamas would almost certainly prove to be economically transformative for our nation for many generations to come,” he said in a statement.

Transformative, you say?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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, posts articles to

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Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

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Paul Ryan Hates Obamacare, But Loves Obamacare’s Taxes

by trasze2aja Posted on March 11, 2013

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Paul Ryan is, inevitably, in the news again. Every year around this time he releases his new budget roadmap, and every year it’s roughly the same as ever but with just a few changes for everyone to chew over endlessly. This year, the chattering classes are chattering over the startling news that his budget only gets to balance by repealing Obamacare, but Ezra Klein says that’s not news. In fact, it’s not even true. It’s worse than that:

Every Ryan budget since the passage of Obamacare has assumed the repeal of Obamacare. Kinda. Ryan’s version of repeal means getting rid of all the parts that spend money to give people health insurance but keeping the tax increases and the Medicare cuts that pays for that health insurance, as without those policies, it is very, very difficult for Ryan to hit his deficit-reduction targets.

Last year’s budget also kept Obamacare’s tax increases and Medicare cuts. Then Ryan became a VP candidate, and this was a big problem. So he switched to opposing Obamacare with no exceptions. Now he’s once again just a plain old congressman who needs to balance the budget, so we’re back to Ryan 1.0.

Will it last? Who knows. Ryan’s voucher premium support plan has morphed a bit from year to year, so it will be interesting to see which way it morphs this year. Unlike some people, though, I don’t think Ryan will abandon his usual pledge not to change Medicare for anyone over age 55. That risks pissing off actual Republican voters who only want Medicare to get stingier for the young folks. Deficit apocalypse or not, they certainly don’t want it to change for them.

This pretty much explains all of politics, by the way.

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Paul Ryan Hates Obamacare, But Loves Obamacare’s Taxes

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Global temperatures are at a 4,000-year high

by trasze2aja Posted on March 8, 2013

Global temperatures are at a 4,000-year high

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Andrzej KubikIt’s getting awfully warm.

The news lately has been so full of broken weather records, it’s easy to just glaze over. But today we have one worth paying attention to: Mean global temperatures are warmer now than they have been at any time during the past 4,000 years.

A new study in the journal Science paints the clearest picture yet of the climate since the last ice age ended.

The researchers combined the results of 73 scientific studies that together pinpointed historical weather conditions, using analyses of sediment samples and ice cores and other methods, back 11,300 years. The result was a new hockey-stick graph, reinforcing the data in the old hockey-stick graph, as we noted yesterday.

From an article in Nature:

After the ice age, [the researchers] found, global average temperatures rose until they reached a plateau between 7550 and 3550 bc. Then a long-term cooling trend set in, reaching its lowest temperature extreme between ad 1450 and 1850.

Since then, temperatures have been increasing at a dramatic clip: from the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest.

While the new paper is disturbing because it reveals that we’re experiencing weather not seen for 4,000 years, perhaps its most sobering message is that the ice-melting, hurricane-inducing heat can — and will — get worse than this. From The New York Times:

Even if the temperature increase from human activity that is projected for later this century comes out on the low end of estimates, scientists said, the planet will be at least as warm as it was during the warmest periods of the modern geological era, known as the Holocene, and probably warmer than that. …

[Penn State climate scientist Michael E.] Mann pointed out that the early Holocene temperature increase was almost certainly slow, giving plants and creatures time to adjust. But he said the modern spike would probably threaten the survival of many species, in addition to putting severe stresses on human civilization.

“We and other living things can adapt to slower changes,” Dr. Mann said. “It’s the unprecedented speed with which we’re changing the climate that is so worrisome.”

And with that, we wish you a happy Friday.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

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Global temperatures are at a 4,000-year high

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More Cocaine Could Soon Be on Our Streets, Thanks to the Sequester

by trasze2aja Posted on March 6, 2013

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Add this to the list of potential consequences of sequestration, the across-the-board spending cuts totaling $85 billion this year that went into effect on Friday: more cocaine on our streets.

According to the Virginian-Pilot, the Navy is pulling back from an operation that kept 160 tons of cocaine and 25,000 pounds of marijuana out of the United States last year. The program, called “Operation Martillo,” was a joint effort between the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Agency, and governmental agencies in Europe and Latin America. But now, due to sequestration, the Navy will not deploy two of its ships slated to replace two homebound Navy vessels that were participating in the program. Here’s more from the Virginian-Pilot:

Officials acknowledge that, without the frigates, fighting drug trafficking in the Caribbean just got tougher.

“We are always looking for creative ways to address this problem,” said Lt. Cmdr. Ron Flanders, spokesman for the Southern Command, which is responsible for the task force that works with partner countries to run Operation Martillo.

“Certainly with less gray hulls it will be more challenging,” he said, referring to Navy ships.

Last year, Operation Martillo (“martillo” means hammer in Spanish) intercepted and captured $4 billion worth of cocaine, valued at $12 billion in street resale value; 25,000 pounds of marijuana, worth more than $10 million on the streets; and $3.5 million in cash, according to U.S. Southern Command.

The across-the-board budget slashes took effect Friday, coming down hard on defense and forcing the services to cut operations not considered essential. With the Afghanistan war effort still a priority and the Navy’s pivot to the Pacific region, commanders have warned that police and goodwill operations in South and Central America would be on the sequestration chopping block.

Operation Martillo is not the only naval operation in the Caribbean hit by sequestration.

The hospital ship Comfort was supposed to leave its new base in Norfolk early next month for a four-month humanitarian mission to eight South and Central American nations. That, too, was cut.

For more on how the sequestration is shaking things up, see MoJo‘s previous coverage: Kevin Drum explains what sequestration is and how it works, Erika Eichelberger outlines 12 ways it could hurt low-income Americans, and Zaineb Muhammad highlights six ways it could harm the environment.

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More Cocaine Could Soon Be on Our Streets, Thanks to the Sequester

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A Whole New Use For Parks: Driving Out Sex Offenders

by trasze2aja Posted on March 1, 2013

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The insanity of laws that basically prohibit sex offenders from living anywhere is reaching new heights in Los Angeles. Several itsy-bitsy new parks are being built in the city, but not to give kids a place to play:

State law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school. By building the park, officials said, they would effectively force the sex offenders to leave the neighborhood. This section of Harbor Gateway has one of the city’s highest concentrations of registered sex offenders: 86 live in a 13-block area.

Los Angeles plans to build a total of three pocket parks with the intent of driving out registered sex offenders; two will be in nearby Wilmington.

This is the end result of policies that have made it impossible for sex offenders to live anywhere. As the rules have multiplied—you can’t live near a park, you can’t live near a school, you can’t live near a daycare center, etc.—there are fewer and fewer places where paroled sex offenders can live. The unintended result of this is that they end up crowding into the very few places left to them. Wilmington still has a few areas outside the welter of overlapping circles where sex offenders are banned, so hundreds congregate there in group homes and hotels that cater to them.

It’s pretty easy to see how even residents who are relatively tolerant of one or two sex offenders living nearby would be pretty unhappy over having hundreds dumped into their community. And they’d be especially unhappy that they’re getting dumped there precisely because their community lacks the amenities of richer neighborhoods. So now they’ve figured out a clever dodge to get rid of them.

This is craziness. I don’t really blame the residents of Wilmington or Harbor Gateway. Their frustration is pretty easy to understand. But it’s craziness nonetheless. The end result will be even further concentrations of sex offenders, and even more frustration. When does it stop?

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A Whole New Use For Parks: Driving Out Sex Offenders

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Expert: Movie Based on a Bill O’Reilly Book Is More Accurate Than Spielberg’s "Lincoln"

by trasze2aja Posted on February 16, 2013

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In late August, action-film maestro Tony Scott took his own life, jumping from the Vincent Thomas Bridge into the Los Angeles Harbor. One of the director’s final projects was a made-for-TV movie that he co-executive produced with his brother Ridley: An adaptation of the nonfiction thriller Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, a best-selling book written by writer Martin Dugard and TV host Bill O’Reilly. The film (premiering on National Geographic Channel on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. ET/PT) stars Billy Campbell as President Abraham Lincoln and son of Don Johnson Jesse Johnson as stage-actor/assassin John Wilkes Booth. The movie is narrated by Tom Hanks‘ soothing timbre.

The made-for-cable Killing Lincoln continues Nat Geo’s recent habit of debuting an original film right around the time a more high-profile movie with similar content is making the rounds in movie theaters and the awards circuit. (In November, the channel released its Bin Laden assassination movie starring William Fichtner—a project that might have reminded some viewers of this.)

Killing Lincoln never rises above marginally passable entertainment. It is a generally clunky and flavorless exercise weakly mimicking prestige filmmaking. It is also the latest in a months-long deluge of Lincoln movies that includes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Steven Spielberg’s massive Oscar-bait Lincoln, Saving Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, and Army of Frankensteins. Yet Killing Lincoln has one distinction among this bunch: It just might be the most historically accurate.

This may seem odd, given that the movie is based on a mediocre book that Bill O’Reilly wrote in his spare time in between creatively reinterpreting reality at Fox News. Furthermore, it’s a book that history buffs have flagged for being pocked with factual errors.

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Expert: Movie Based on a Bill O’Reilly Book Is More Accurate Than Spielberg’s "Lincoln"

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Even Tom Tancredo’s Successor Endorses Path to Citizenship

by trasze2aja Posted on February 11, 2013

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This is what a political wave looks like. In 2011, Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Col.), who had previously sought to repeal a portion of the Voting Rights Act mandating that ballots be printed in multiple languages, went on a local talk radio station and warned that President Barack Obama planned to steal the 2012 election by granting blanket amnesty to some 12 million undocumented residents. On Sunday, Coffman, who succeeded Rep. Tom Tancredo, a notorious opponent of illegal immigration, in Congress in 2008, endorsed a path to citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants—and legal status for everyone else. That announcement came just two weeks after Coffman introduced a new bill to allow Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (i.e. formerly undocumented residents who were brought to the United States as kids) to serve in the military legally and be put on the path to citizenship.

So what’s eating Mike Coffman? It’s pretty simple, really: He heard footsteps. The reconfigured sixth congressional district is now 20-percent Latino (it was previously 9-percent Latino before dicennial redistricting). It went to Obama by five points in November. The Democratic House Majority PAC has put Coffman as one of its top-10 targets for 2014. And the Dems have secured a top recruit, former state speaker of the house Andrew Romanoff, to run against him.

Whether the immigration evolution will be enough for Coffman to keep his seat is unclear. Coffman is still a bit cagey as to whether he’d support a path to citizenship for non-DACAs, which, as Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent points out, still puts him at odds with the majority of voters. But for immigration reform advocates wary of another hardliner insurrection, it’s an encouraging sign.

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Even Tom Tancredo’s Successor Endorses Path to Citizenship

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CBO’s Scary Debt Chart Not Looking Very Scary These Days

by trasze2aja Posted on February 5, 2013

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The CBO’s latest budget projections are out today. Here’s the scary debt chart:

Hmmm. Not so scary after all. The CBO’s projections are, of course, sensitive to both their economic forecasts and their reliance on current law. However, their economic forecast seems fairly conservative, and current law is a lot more reliable now than it was before we decided what to do about the Bush tax cuts. So CBO’s projections are probably fairly reasonable.

You can decide for yourself, of course, whether you find this debt projection scary even though it’s flat for the next decade. Maybe you think it needs to decline to give us more headroom for the future. Maybe you think it masks the problem of growing debt after 2023. Maybe you think we’re likely to have another recession over the next decade, which will balloon the debt yet again.

Those aren’t entirely unreasonable concerns. Still, the fact remains that debt reduction just isn’t a five-alarm fire kind of problem, no matter how loudly the Pete Petersons of the world claim otherwise. In fact, if you go to page 23 of the CBO report, you’ll see that federal spending is on a downward slope in almost all categories. Aside from interest on the debt, the only spending that’s projected to increase is Social Security (a little bit) and healthcare spending (a fair amount). Of those, the Social Security spending is baked in the cake and there’s nothing much we can, or should, do about it. Seniors should get the pensions they’ve been promised.

So, as usual, that leaves healthcare spending. If you’re truly concerned about debt, instead of someone who just pretends to be concerned, that’s pretty much the only thing you should care about. If we rein in healthcare spending, we’re in good shape. If we don’t, we have problems.

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CBO’s Scary Debt Chart Not Looking Very Scary These Days

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