Tag Archives: events

How Democrats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Citizens United

by Billy Zane Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Four years ago, in his inaugural State of the Union address, President Obama famously shamed the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices for their decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The court, Obama said, “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” Democratic lawmakers, activists, operatives, and donors piled on, condemning the ruling as “scandalous,” a “disaster,” and “bad for American democracy.” When a subsequent court decision, nodding to Citizens United, opened the door to super-PACs, a new breed of political committee that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash, Obama branded them “a threat to our democracy.”

The Obama of 2010 might not recognize the Democratic Party of 2014.

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Originally posted here – 

How Democrats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Citizens United

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Why Did Obama Go to Costco? Our Wage Calculator Explains

by zdtadaqod1 Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This morning, President Obama visited a Costco in suburban Maryland to reemphasize the theme of income inequality he sounded in the State of the Union speech last night. Our calculator shows why Obama chose the home of the giant pickle jar and behemoth TP package: Even at the relatively low wages paid by big-box retailers, slightly better pay can mean the difference between inescapable poverty and a modest living.

How many people are in your household? One Adult No Children
One Adult One Child
One Adult Two Children
One Adult Three Children
Two Adults No Children
Two Adults One Child
Two Adults Two Children
Two Adults Three ChildrenWhich state do you live in? Which area do you live in? (Area data not available for households without children.)

Where you live, a Costco worker needs to work __ hours each week to make a secure yet modest living to support a family as big as yours (as a sole breadwinner). A WalMart worker would need to work __ hours a week to achieve the same.

Sources: CNN Money, The National Employment Law Project, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator. The annual costs of living for adults without children use state-wide averages from MIT’s Living Wage Calculator. Front page image: Ruaridh Stewart/ZUMA Press.

var first_state = ‘AK’;
var first_locale = ‘Anchorage, AK HUD Metro FMR Area’;
var state_abbr =
‘AL’ : ‘Alabama’,
‘AK’ : ‘Alaska’,
‘AS’ : ‘America Samoa’,
‘AZ’ : ‘Arizona’,
‘AR’ : ‘Arkansas’,
‘CA’ : ‘California’,
‘CO’ : ‘Colorado’,
‘CT’ : ‘Connecticut’,
‘DE’ : ‘Delaware’,
‘DC’ : ‘District of Columbia’,
‘FM’ : ‘Micronesia1’,
‘FL’ : ‘Florida’,
‘GA’ : ‘Georgia’,
‘GU’ : ‘Guam’,
‘HI’ : ‘Hawaii’,
‘ID’ : ‘Idaho’,
‘IL’ : ‘Illinois’,
‘IN’ : ‘Indiana’,
‘IA’ : ‘Iowa’,
‘KS’ : ‘Kansas’,
‘KY’ : ‘Kentucky’,
‘LA’ : ‘Louisiana’,
‘ME’ : ‘Maine’,
‘MH’ : ‘Islands1’,
‘MD’ : ‘Maryland’,
‘MA’ : ‘Massachusetts’,
‘MI’ : ‘Michigan’,
‘MN’ : ‘Minnesota’,
‘MS’ : ‘Mississippi’,
‘MO’ : ‘Missouri’,
‘MT’ : ‘Montana’,
‘NE’ : ‘Nebraska’,
‘NV’ : ‘Nevada’,
‘NH’ : ‘New Hampshire’,
‘NJ’ : ‘New Jersey’,
‘NM’ : ‘New Mexico’,
‘NY’ : ‘New York’,
‘NC’ : ‘North Carolina’,
‘ND’ : ‘North Dakota’,
‘OH’ : ‘Ohio’,
‘OK’ : ‘Oklahoma’,
‘OR’ : ‘Oregon’,
‘PW’ : ‘Palau’,
‘PA’ : ‘Pennsylvania’,
‘PR’ : ‘Puerto Rico’,
‘RI’ : ‘Rhode Island’,
‘SC’ : ‘South Carolina’,
‘SD’ : ‘South Dakota’,
‘TN’ : ‘Tennessee’,
‘TX’ : ‘Texas’,
‘UT’ : ‘Utah’,
‘VT’ : ‘Vermont’,
‘VI’ : ‘Virgin Island’,
‘VA’ : ‘Virginia’,
‘WA’ : ‘Washington’,
‘WV’ : ‘West Virginia’,
‘WI’ : ‘Wisconsin’,
‘WY’ : ‘Wyoming’

var selected_state = jQuery(“#selected_state”);
var selected_locale = jQuery(“#selected_locale”);
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

for (var state in bfjo)
var option = jQuery(” + state_abbrstate + ”);
selected_state.append(option);

var fill_locale_selector = function(state_object)

selected_locale.html(“”);

for (var locale in state_object)
var option = jQuery(” + locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ”);
selected_locale.append(option);

}

fill_locale_selector(bfjofirst_state)

selected_state.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var state_object = bfjostate;

fill_locale_selector(state_object);

)

selected_locale.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var locale_object = bfjostatelocale;

)

enable_disable_locale = function()
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();

if (household === ‘1P0C’ else
selected_locale.removeAttr(‘disabled’);

}
selected_household.bind(“change”,
function()
enable_disable_locale();

);
enable_disable_locale();

jQuery(“#calculate_this”).bind(“submit”,
function()

var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();

var hours_worked_per_year = 2080;
var walmart_hourly_salary = 9.4;
var walmart_annual_salary = walmart_hourly_salary * hours_worked_per_year;
var costco_hourly_salary = 22.8;
var costco_annual_salary = costco_hourly_salary * hours_worked_per_year;

var annual_living_wage_for_household = bfjostatelocalehousehold;

var walmart_hours_needed_per_year = annual_living_wage_for_household / walmart_hourly_salary;
var costco_hours_needed_per_year = annual_living_wage_for_household / costco_hourly_salary;

var walmart_hours_needed_per_week = walmart_hours_needed_per_year / 52;
var costco_hours_needed_per_week = costco_hours_needed_per_year / 52;

console.log(‘Walmart hours per week: ‘, walmart_hours_needed_per_week)
console.log(‘Costco hours per week: ‘, costco_hours_needed_per_week)

var commify = function(number)
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(number.toString()))
number = number.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);
}
return number;
}

jQuery(“#calculated”).show();
jQuery(“#costco_hours_needed_per_week”).text(Math.round(costco_hours_needed_per_week));
jQuery(“#walmart_hours_needed_per_week”).text(Math.round(walmart_hours_needed_per_week));

//var salary_string = commify(salary);
//var yearly_living_wage_string = commify(annual_living_wage);
/*
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(salary_string.toString()))
salary_string = salary_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(yearly_living_wage_string.toString()))
yearly_living_wage_string = yearly_living_wage_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

*/

/*console.log(hourly_for_living);
var hourly_for_living_clean = Math.round(hourly_for_living * 100)
.toString().replace(/(d+)(d2)/, ‘$1’+’.’+’$2′);

jQuery(“#living_wage_hourly”).text(hourly_for_living_clean);*/

return false;

}

)

Excerpt from – 

Why Did Obama Go to Costco? Our Wage Calculator Explains

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Snow’s Melting in Alaska and Pelting the South. What’s Going On?

by LaurieBPKC Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared at Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this month, squeals of delight (and/or searing pain) gripped much of the country as we were collectively introduced to the wonders of the polar vortex. But now the novelty’s over, and for the second time this month, an extreme weather pattern is sending Arctic weather toward the Deep South.

An uncommonly sharp kink in the jet stream is partly responsible for plunging more than half of the United States into the freeze. Meanwhile, (and for the same reason), Alaska is toasty warm. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Satellite image shows the “Arctic blanket.” NOAA/NASA GOES Project.

Much of Alabama is currently under a “civil emergency” due to snow and ice. Interstates have been shut down, and traffic in Atlanta has slowed to a crawl. It’s almost like people there don’t know what to do anymore when winter arrives. #sneauxmageddon is already shutting down New Orleans, and nearly a foot of snow is on tap for the Carolinas by Wednesday morning. The bread and milk purveyors at Piggly Wiggly must be loving this, assuming they’ll be able to keep stores open.

Wind chills have already dipped below freezing all the way south to the Mexican border, and more than a half-inch of ice could cause widespread power outages from Mobile, Ala. across the Florida panhandle.

How’d we get to this point? Here’s the science.

A good measure of the magnitude of jet stream irregularity is the Arctic Oscillation, an indicator of short-term climate variability that, roughly speaking, tracks the strength of the jet stream. In extreme cases, like this week, the circumpolar jet stream—which typically locks the coldest of the cold air up by the North Pole where it belongs—can slow down and spill Arctic frigidity southward. The current Arctic Oscillation is even more negative than during the first polar vortex cold snap, earlier this month.

Research hints that this type of pattern can be triggered by the recent massive loss in Arctic sea ice due to the effects of human-induced climate change. One recent studywhich attempted to explain this counterintuitive “Warm Arctic—Cold Continents” phenomenon during similar patterns in the 2009-‘10 and 2010-‘11 winters called it “a major challenge” to understand, though the pattern is “consistent with continued loss of sea ice over the next 40 years.” Bottom line: Something weird is going on, but scientists are still trying to nail down exactly what it is.

In preparation for Tuesday’s polar weather, meteorologists have started a massive crash course in winter weather safety, lest millions of poor wayward souls abandon all hope for any shred of common decency (think: cats and dogs living together).

One such meteorological hero, Nate Johnson of WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., sent out this helpful tip via Facebook:

“Best advice: By dinnertime tonight, be where you want to be (with whatever you need to have) through at least Thursday.”

Back in the day, cold weather wasn’t so rare down South. Earlier this month, Climate Central did an excellent survey of the dwindling frequency of extreme cold weather across the country, which even got picked up in an xkcd Web comic.

Chart by Climate Central.

Which brings us back to Alaska, where it’s currently more than a dozen degrees warmer than New Orleans. On Monday, Seward, Alaska hit 61 degrees and broke its daily record high by more than 20 degrees. Webcams across the southern part of the state showed snow melting down to bare ground over the weekend, with all-time January record high temperatures crushed and warm rain falling over the dwindling snowpack. As a result, the snow melted so fast that it triggered massive avalanches, cutting off the town of Valdez. A nearly unbelievable helicopter video went viral, showing the extent of the snow slide.

In comparison, Tuesday night’s snow dumping probably won’t even break the currentdaily record in Raleigh, where the biggest ever snowfall on Jan. 28 was 7.5 inches way back in 1899.

The current extreme warmth in Alaska is more typical of April and is essentially being stolen from California by the abnormally persistent jet stream that has dominated the winter so far.

Alaskans, break out the T-shirts, and Southerners, hunker down. Looking forward for the next week or two, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

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Snow’s Melting in Alaska and Pelting the South. What’s Going On?

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US-Funded Hospital in Afghanistan Has 3 Light Bulbs, Forces Staff to Wash Newborns in River Water

by ThedaStapleton Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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A hospital in Afghanistan’s Parwan province, which cost US taxpayers almost $600,000, is so ill-equipped, hospital staff are washing newborn infants using untreated river water, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported on Wednesday. SIGAR’s visit, which was conducted in November 2013 (photos here), also found mold and mildew throughout the hospital; a lack of furniture and equipment; a serious risk for earthquake damage; and only enough electricity to operate three light bulbs in the entire facility.

In 2009, a local Afghan contractor, Shafi Hakimi Construction Company, was commissioned to build Salang Hospital as part of a Department of Defense-funded reconstruction program. When a US Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A) task force first inspected the hospital when it was under construction in 2012, they determined it had major problems and residents of Salang district wouldn’t have adequate healthcare until they were fixed. In November 2012, the contractor was paid in full. But when SIGAR inspected a year later, it found “the deficiencies identified by the task force had not been corrected.”

NBC News, which recently visited the facility, observed “desperate” hospital staff attempting to administer dental care to a 12-year-old girl—even though they only had access to six pieces of rusty dental equipment. As NBC described it: “The girl was shivering with fear, and began crying after the doctor gave her a shot in her gums. Another man held her still as Sarwy swiftly tilted her head back, opened her mouth and yanked out one of her teeth with a pair of pliers.”

Hospital staff told SIGAR that they are paying about $18 a month of their own money to a neighbor, in order to get enough electricity to operate the three light-bulbs in the hospital. Additionally, SIGAR found that the contractor built the hospital two stories high, instead of one, without authorization from US officials or further study. “The hospital does not serve the medical needs of the people of Salang district as intended and may be a danger to its patients and staff because of the potential for the structure’s collapse in an earthquake,” the report reads.

This account differs sharply with a press release put out by US Forces-Afghanistan yesterday, which argued that despite the SIGAR report, “the facility is currently providing improved medical services” and noted that, “local ministry officials are currently in the process of hiring a surgeon and other staff and have installed a solar power generation unit.” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told NBC, “either no one from USFOR-A has actually visited this facility recently or USFOR-A is living in an alternate reality.”

Mother Jones has reached out to US Forces-Afghanistan to find out when they last visited the facility. According to a January 21 US Army document obtained by Mother Jones, US forces have been unable to conduct a physical re-inspection of the hospital since the SIGAR notified them of their findings on January 3, due to “reduced combat forces and threats in the area.” â&#128;&#139;

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US-Funded Hospital in Afghanistan Has 3 Light Bulbs, Forces Staff to Wash Newborns in River Water

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Pete Seeger Memorial Playlist: War, Protest, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Olivia Newton-John, Stalin

by Gabrielle Hartzog Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Pete Seeger, the folk-music legend and activist, died on Monday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He was 94. His impact his on American culture was profound, as he influenced popular music and iconic musicians, including Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, for decades.

“Once called ‘America’s tuning fork,’ Pete Seeger believed deeply in the power of song,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on Tuesday. “Over the years, Pete used his voice—and his hammer—to strike blows for worker’s rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation. And he always invited us to sing along.”

Here are some cool clips, songs, and text for you to check out while reflecting on Seeger’s life and music:

1. Pete Seeger sings in Barcelona about the Spanish Civil War: “56 years ago, I had some friends who came to Spain,” Seeger tells the crowd. “Some of them did come back—and this is the song that they taught me. It’s a song of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.”

2. Seeger testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 1955: For refusing to testify about his time in the Communist Party, he was later sentenced to a year in prison for contempt. But the conviction was overturned. Here’s an excerpt from his testimony:

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it….

I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life. I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody. That is the only answer I can give along that line.

3. The Weavers sing “Goodnight, Irene”:

And while we’re at it, here’s Eric Clapton’s version:

4. When Pete Seeger hosted a TV show devoted to good folk music: It aired in the mid-1960s and was called Rainbow Quest. Here’s the episode with Johnny Cash and June Carter:

5. Seeger sings a protest of the Vietnam War and President Lyndon Johnson on the Smothers Brothers—and gets censored by CBS: His performance of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”—in which Johnson is essentially labeled the “big fool”—was initially nixed from a 1967 broadcast for being too political. A few months later, Seeger was invited back, and Americans got to watch:

6. Seeger wrote a song denouncing Joseph Stalin—and got a fun Fox News headline out of it: The folk singer’s previous support for the Soviet Union had been a less-than-flattering part of his legacy. (He left the Communist Party in the 1950s.) In 2007, Seeger revealed he had written a new yodeling blues song blasting Stalin, titled, “The Big Joe Blues.”

“It’s my first overt song about the Soviet Union,” Seeger told the Associated Press. “I think I should have though, when I was in the Soviet Union, I should have asked, ‘Can I see one of the old gulags?'”

Here are some lyrics from “The Big Joe Blues”:

I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land….

I got the Big Joe Bloo-ew-ew-ews!

Seeger remarked that it was the kind of song his old friend Woody Guthrie might have written in the 1950s.

7. Seeger sings “We Shall Overcome” on Democracy Now! and discusses his late wife Toshi Seeger:

8. Sam Cooke’s fantastic cover of Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer“:

9. Olivia Newton-John covers Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

10. “Bring Them Home”—a song for Vietnam and Iraq: After President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, Seeger rewrote and re-recorded his Vietnam-era number, “Bring Them Home,” with Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, and Steve Earle. The new lyrics included, “Now we don’t want to fight for oil/Bring ’em home, bring ’em home/Underneath some foreign soil/Bring ’em home, bring ’em home.”

Here he is performing the song in the 1970s:

And here’s Bruce Springsteen playing it on his Seeger Sessions tour in 2006:

11. Seeger performing “This Land Is Your Land” (with Springsteen, naturally) at the Lincoln Memorial: They were celebrating the election of President Obama, shortly before his 2009 inauguration.

12. And here’s Seeger singing Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young”—for an Amnesty International benefit album:

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Pete Seeger Memorial Playlist: War, Protest, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Olivia Newton-John, Stalin

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If You Don’t Like This Movie, You Hate America

by RoseanneQVJ Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Perhaps you don’t know this, what with having a life and all, but the right has been throwing mini-conniptions for the past week or two over the liberal media’s response to the movie Lone Survivor. This example is typical. Jonah Goldberg has a suitably toned down version for a mainstream op-ed page here:

Hollywood has never been opposed to propaganda. When Hollywood’s self-declared auteurs and artistes denounce propaganda as the enemy of art, almost invariably what they really mean is “propaganda we don’t like.”

Consider the film “Lone Survivor,” which tells the true story of heroic Navy SEALs in Afghanistan. The film has been denounced by some critics; a “jingoistic, pornographic work of war propaganda,” in the words of one reviewer. Richard Corliss of Time chimed in: “That these events actually happened doesn’t necessarily make it plausible or powerful in a movie, or keep it from seeming like convenient propaganda.” Similar complaints (from non-conservatives, at least) about antiwar films made during the George W. Bush years are much harder to find.

This got me curious. I haven’t seen the movie myself, so I hopped over to Wikipedia to see what it had to say:

Lone Survivor opened in limited release in the United States on December 25, 2013, before opening across North America on January 10, 2014, to critical acclaim and strong financial success. Critical reaction to the film was mostly positive, with commentators praising Berg’s direction, as well as the acting, story, visuals, and battle sequences.

….Lone Survivor has received “largely positive reviews” from film critics, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Los Angeles Times reported the critics’ consensus was that “the film succeeds in bringing the mission to life, although it avoids probing the deeper issues at hand.” Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes sampled 154 reviews, and as of January 2014, the film holds a 73% rating, with an average score of 6.6/10….Another review aggregator, Metacritic, assigned the film a weighted average score of 60 (out of 100), based on 41 reviews from mainstream critics, considered to be “mixed or average reviews”.

How about that? Wikipedia also informs me that five studios originally put in bids for the film rights. What’s more, Lone Survivor has been nominated for two Academy Awards and has already won several other awards.

Nonetheless, it was reviewed negatively by some critics, including a couple of lefties who don’t care much for war films. And that’s all it takes these days to get the grievance machine rolling. It’s yet more proof that liberals hate America.

UPDATE: Apparently this all dates back to a Jake Tapper interview with the real-life SEAL the movie is based on, which got twisted into a belief that Tapper said the other members of the SEAL team “died for nothing.” Asawin Suebsaeng has the deets here.

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If You Don’t Like This Movie, You Hate America

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The Other "Moby Dick": Melville’s "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire

by Arterisa Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

A captain ready to drive himself and all around him to ruin in the hunt for a white whale. It’s a well-known story, and over the years, mad Ahab in Herman Melville’s most famous novel, Moby-Dick, has been used as an exemplar of unhinged American power, most recently of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq.

But what’s really frightening isn’t our Ahabs, the hawks who periodically want to bomb some poor country, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan, back to the Stone Age. The respectable types are the true “terror of our age,” as Noam Chomsky called them collectively nearly 50 years ago. The really scary characters are our soberest politicians, scholars, journalists, professionals, and managers, men and women (though mostly men) who imagine themselves as morally serious, and then enable the wars, devastate the planet, and rationalize the atrocities. They are a type that has been with us for a long time. More than a century and a half ago, Melville, who had a captain for every face of empire, found their perfect expression—for his moment and ours.

For the last six years, I’ve been researching the life of an American seal killer, a ship captain named Amasa Delano who, in the 1790s, was among the earliest New Englanders to sail into the South Pacific. Money was flush, seals were many, and Delano and his fellow ship captains established the first unofficial US colonies on islands off the coast of Chile. They operated under an informal council of captains, divvied up territory, enforced debt contracts, celebrated the Fourth of July, and set up ad hoc courts of law. When no bible was available, the collected works of William Shakespeare, found in the libraries of most ships, were used to swear oaths.

From his first expedition, Delano took hundreds of thousands of sealskins to China, where he traded them for spices, ceramics, and tea to bring back to Boston. During a second, failed voyage, however, an event took place that would make Amasa notorious—at least among the readers of the fiction of Herman Melville.

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The Other "Moby Dick": Melville’s "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire

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Donald Trump’s Climate Conspiracy Theory

by DavidHuber Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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When chilling cold first descended in early January, we had an occasion to correct Donald Trump on climate science. To do so, we simply explained that the widely recognized phenomenon known as winter doesn’t refute global warming, especially since winter is inherently limited to one hemisphere. (In a widely lampooned tweet, Trump had cited “record low temps” in arguing that “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.”)

Alas, Trump has now dug himself deeper into the snow drift. Here are the latest tweets:

With this, Trump joins the grand tradition of climate science conspiracy theorizing, as epitomized by Senator James Inhofe 2012 book title: The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. By using the word “hoax,” Inhofe and Trump are suggesting that there is a conscious attempt to mislead us with fake, trumped up science, in the service of political goals.

So how do you refute this global warming conspiracy theory? Simple: You merely have to explain what a real global warming conspiracy would actually entail, whereupon the utter implausibility of the scenario becomes obvious.

For a global warming conspiracy to exist, you’d need scientists around the world to be in on it. Not scientists at one university, or scientists in one country. Scientists everywhere, from Australia to Japan, from China to America.

This is scarcely possible, especially in light of the incentive structure in science: Scientists advance and get promoted by publishing original research that is highly cited by other scientists. And it is hard to imagine a better citation-grabbing paper than one that seriously refuted what most scientists in a given field believe to be true. There is therefore a huge incentive for a scientist or group of scientists to upset everything we thought we knew about climate change, assuming that this could be achieved in a serious scientific paper that passes peer review and stands the test of time. A researcher who achieved such a feat would be on a parallel, as far as fame and renown goes, with someone like Alfred Wegner, who originally proposed the revolutionary idea of continental drift.

The incentives, therefore, are very much against maintaining a climate conspiracy. The incentives instead tilt towards exposing it. And that makes the 97-percent consensus on climate change among scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature that much more powerful.

Finally, let’s take on this idea that scientists are in it for the money, which may or may not be implied by Trump’s first tweet above, but is a frequent fixture of global warming conspiracy theories. According to 2012-2013 data from the American Association of University Professors, the average salary for a US assistant professor at a doctorate-granting institution was $76,822. Salaries rise as high as an average of $134,747 for full professors at doctorate-level institutions, but that’s academia’s most coveted level, and not everybody gets there.

Surely Trump and other conservatives who believe in the power of the free market can see that people who want the big bucks are likely to embark on a different career path.

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Donald Trump’s Climate Conspiracy Theory

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

by Shelby Morris Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 2011, after Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would ban taxpayer funding for abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” Democrats adopted a new line of attack: the GOP was waging a “war on women.” Instead of changing their policies, Republicans changed the subject, arguing that the sexual behavior of individual Democratic politicians—such as Anthony Weiner—proves the GOP “war on women” is a fiction.

On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) became the latest GOPer to adopt this strategy, arguing on Meet the Press that former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky means Democrats are in no place to cry foul about the Republican party platform.

Paul made the comments after host David Gregory highlighted a moment in a September Vogue profile of Paul in which Kelley Paul, the senator’s wife, said, “Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as first spouse. I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women.”

Gregory asked Paul if Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the White House would be fair game in a 2016 race involving Hillary Clinton. Here’s Paul’s response:

I mean, the Democrats, one of their big issues is they have concocted and said Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office.

And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and that is predatory behavior, and it should be something we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office.

This isn’t having an affair. I mean, this isn’t me saying, “Oh, he’s had an affair, we shouldn’t talk to him.” Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office? I mean, really. And then they have the gall to stand up and say, “Republicans are having a war on women”?

When Democrats say there’s a “war on women,” they are not criticizing the personal conduct of GOP lawmakers. They’re talking about Republican policymakers’ sustained attacks on women’s reproductive rights. It’s hard to see what Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct tells us about today’s battles over reproductive rights policy—especially when he hasn’t held elected office for nearly fourteen years.

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

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Black Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat On Obama Over Judicial Nominees Who Backed Voter ID Law, Confederate Flag

by YoungBurrows Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—a group of African-American lawmakers in the House that defends the interests of minorities and people with low incomes—are planning to publicly chastise President Barack Obama this week over two of his judicial nominees who have backed racially offensive and discriminatory policies, and what they see as a lack of diversity amongst his judicial picks, The Hill reported Sunday.

Obama has confirmed more African-Americans to the federal bench than any other president, but CBC lawmakers see an “appalling lack of African-American representation” amongst Obama’s judicial nominees in Southern states such as Georgia, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) told The Hill. If Obama’s nominees to the federal bench in Georgia are confirmed, there will only be one African-American district court judge in a state where 31 percent of the population is black.

And some of Obama’s nominees have “views… that reflect the regressive policies of the past,” Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) pointed out in a letter to Senate judiciary chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) earlier this month. Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boggs, who Obama nominated to the US district court for the Northern district of Georgia in December, voted to keep the Confederate battle emblem as a central part of Georgia’s state flag when he was a Georgia legislator in the early 2000s. Atlanta attorney Mark Howard Cohen, who Obama nominated to the same court last month, helped defend Georgia’s voter ID law, which voting rights advocates say makes it harder for poor people and minorities to vote.

CBC lawmakers and civil rights leaders have been pressuring Obama for months to rethink these nominations, but to no avail. So CBC members are trying another tack. They will hold a press conference this week to bring attention to the issue, and they’re mulling an opposition strategy to block the nominees.

“We have very grave concerns with certain nominees given disparities that are particularly common in the South,” Norton told The Hill. As my colleague Nick Baumann reported last summer, research has shown that the South remains more racist than the North.

So why did the president pick these nominees, especially now that Republicans can no longer filibuster judicial nominees? It has to do with a procedural hurdle called the blue-slip process that functions as a de facto filibuster. Here’s how the process works: When the president is floating a potential judicial nomination, the senators from the state where the judge would serve are given a blue slip of paper. If both senators do not return their blue slips, the nominee will not be able to move forward to a vote in the Senate judiciary committee. This allows the GOP to exert significant control over nominees. Georgia’s Republican Sens. John Isakson and Saxby Chambliss have used the blue-slip process to delay some of Obama’s nominees to their state’s northern district court for years. To fill those spots, Obama worked out a deal with the GOP senators that resulted in the nominations of Boggs and Cohen.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Adam Serwer earlier this month, a White House official said Obama was not to blame for these nominations, as Republican senators are taking advantage of the blue-slip process. The White House has also pointed out that eighteen percent of confirmed judges under Obama have been black. That number was eight percent under President George W. Bush.

CBC lawmakers are not impressed. As Scott told The Hill: “Do you think a white president, a George W. Bush, a Republican president—any white president—would appoint these kinds of nominees with the confederate flag background? With the voter suppression background? That White House would have been maimed by people crying out.”

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Black Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat On Obama Over Judicial Nominees Who Backed Voter ID Law, Confederate Flag

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