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Louie Gohmert Thinks Global Warming Is Good Because It Will Mean "More Plants"

by WandaRoygqir Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert (R) announced his intention to challenge John Boehner (R-Ohio) for his position as Speaker of the House. Gohmert is a tea party hero, and in the (highly unlikely) event that he wins the support of his peers on Tuesday, he would join the swelling ranks of vocal climate change deniers in prominent congressional leadership roles.

Boehner is certainly no climate hawk himself; recently he’s taken up the increasingly popular “I’m not a scientist” deflection when asked about the issue. But Gohmert’s views are even more fringe. Take, for example, the 2009 interview above wherein Gohmert cites Washington, D.C.’s, cold weather as proof that global warming is fake. He then thanks Al Gore for driving Suburbans so their carbon dioxide emissions can warm things up and help grow “more plants.” Gohmert has also criticized President Obama for prioritizing climate action at the expense of veterans, Ebola patients, and terrorism victims.

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Louie Gohmert Thinks Global Warming Is Good Because It Will Mean "More Plants"

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Republicans Are Picking Exactly the Wrong Time to Push for the Keystone XL Pipeline

by RhondaD35k Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times tells us what to expect when Congress reconvenes this week:

Republicans hope to strike early with measures that are known to have bipartisan support. The House is set to pass legislation this week expediting the Keystone XL pipeline; the Senate is making it the first order of business as well. The House will also take up a measure that would change the new health care law’s definition of full-time workers to those working 40 hours rather than the current 30 hours — another proposal that has drawn backing from Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate.

….Mr. Obama, who will embark this week on a series of policy-related trips in advance of the State of the Union address on Jan. 20, says he is open to working with the Republican Congress but draws the line at unraveling some of his major domestic initiatives, particularly on health care, Wall Street restrictions and the environment. The Keystone XL pipeline bill could present him with an immediate decision about starting the year with a veto, and Senate Democrats are confident they could sustain one.

I wonder how big a deal the Keystone XL pipeline is these days? It won’t come on line for years, so current conditions shouldn’t logically affect anything. But the world doesn’t operate according to logic, and at the moment the world is awash in oil. Prices have plunged, OPEC is engaged in a production war, and gasoline is selling for two bucks a gallon. Does the American public really care very much right now about a pipeline that makes it easier for Canadians to ship their oil to Japan via the Gulf of Mexico?

I’m not sure, but I suspect Republicans may be choosing the wrong moment to take a stand on Keystone XL. Democrats can probably hold it up in the Senate without paying any real price, and even if they can’t, Obama can veto it without paying any real price. It’s lost its salience for the time being.

I suppose it’s too late for Republicans to change their plans, but they’d probably be better off picking other fights. Changes to Obamacare could spark battles they’re able to profit from. Keystone XL probably won’t.

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Republicans Are Picking Exactly the Wrong Time to Push for the Keystone XL Pipeline

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The very first thing the new Republican Senate will do is try to push through Keystone

by KarolynThibodea Posted on December 17, 2014

The very first thing the new Republican Senate will do is try to push through Keystone

By on 17 Dec 2014commentsShare

Once Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) becomes Senate majority leader next month, his first order of business will be to hold a vote on authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, he said on Tuesday. If it passes, that would force President Obama to either approve or veto the bill, and thus the pipeline, before he is ready to. From CNN:

The President has said he wants the decision left in the hands of the State Department, which is six years into a review of the project and currently holds final authority because the pipeline would cross international borders. …

The House has repeatedly approved a bill that would take the Keystone decision out of the Obama administration’s hands, end the review and give the project the green light.

For months, the Senate’s Democratic leaders ignored that House bill, but then last month they suddenly changed course and allowed a vote on it in a doomed bid to help Senate Energy Chair Mary Landrieu win her runoff election in oil-friendly Louisiana. Approval for Keystone came up one vote short, and Landrieu lost by 12 points.

Next year, when McConnell is in control of the Senate, newly elected Republican senators will give him the votes he needs to pass the Keystone bill. But if the president vetoes the legislation, McConnell probably won’t have enough votes to override him. Republicans will have 54 seats, and a number of Democrats could be expected to vote with them, but it would be a stretch to get to the 67 needed to overturn a veto.

Climate activists reacted to McConnell’s statement exactly the way you’d expect them to.

“This is just the climate denial agenda that the fossil fuel industry paid for,” Sara Shor, tar-sands campaign manager for 350.org, said in a statement. The group is planning more anti-Keystone protests for January. “The fossil fuel industry has all the money, but we’ve got the people. When it comes to politics, intensity often carries the day. We’re going to bring the heat.”

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The very first thing the new Republican Senate will do is try to push through Keystone

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Elizabeth Warren Says Gay Men Should Be Able To Donate Blood

by RamonAlaniz Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Warren and a host of Democratic lawmakers are demanding the Obama administration stand up for gay rights.

A coalition of 80 senators and House members spearheaded by the Massachusetts senator—alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Reps. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—sent a letter Monday to Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, protesting the long-standing prohibition that bars men who have had sex with men from donating blood in the United States.

In 1983, the federal government instituted a lifetime ban for any man who has had sex with another man—even once—at any time after 1977. That rule went into effect during the early days of AIDS panic when the disease was largely unknown. Now, technology exists that can detect HIV within a few weeks of infection.

Last month, an HHS panel that handles blood policy advocated tossing out the lifetime ban—but argued for replacing it with a measure that would keep any sexually active gay man from contributing to the blood supply: a ban on donations from any man who had sex with another man within the past year.

To the Democrats in Congress, that slight improvement isn’t nearly enough. The letter calls both the lifetime ban and the one-year deferral policies “discriminatory” and “unacceptable.” The lawmakers urged an end to the lifetime ban by the “end of 2014,” while also pushing for a less-stringent restriction than the one-year celibacy requirement.

“The recommendation to move to a one-year deferral policy is a step forward relative to current policies; however, such a policy still prevents many low-risk individuals from donating blood,” the letter says. “If we are serious about protecting and enhancing our nation’s blood supply, we must embrace science and reject outdated stereotypes.”

The letter may have been better directed at the Food and Drug Administration. That agency’s Blood Products Advisory Panel met earlier this month to consider the one-year deferral proposed by HHS, but the panel of experts seemed more inclined to let the current policy stand rather than loosen the restrictions.

Here’s the full letter:

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Letter to HHS on blood donation ban (PDF)

Letter to HHS on blood donation ban (Text)

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Elizabeth Warren Says Gay Men Should Be Able To Donate Blood

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All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates

by LinetteMHY Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday evening, lawmakers released the text of the massive spending bill that Congress must approve to avoid a government shutdown. Buried on page 615 of that 1,603-page piece of legislation is a provision entirely unrelated to government funding that a few lawmakers managed to sneak into the bill without any public debate during last-minute negotiations. It’s a Wall Street giveaway—written by Citigroup—that would allow banks to engage in more types of risky trading with taxpayer-backed money. Progressive Democrats and their allies have since launched an all-out campaign to strike the Citi-written provision from the spending bill. Elizabeth Warren railed against the provision on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, warning, “A vote for this bill is a vote for taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street.” As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear whether House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) could secure enough votes to pass the spending bill containing this measure and send it to the Senate. (Update: The bill passed the House.)

Here are the problems with the Citigroup-drafted provision, according to Michael Greenberger, a former derivatives regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who is now a law professor at the University of Maryland.

What is so bad about this provision? If Congress okays this measure, taxpayers could be on the hook in the event of another financial crisis. This provision guts the so-called push-out rule created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. This rule forbids banks from trading certain derivatives—complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates. Instead, banks would have to shift these high-risk trades into separate nonbank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive taxpayer bailouts. If the Citi-written measure becomes law, the largest FDIC-insured banks in the country will be able to make a wider range of these risky trades.

What will happen if there’s another financial crisis? If there’s an economic downturn triggered by derivatives trading gone bad, banks will be able to count on a taxpayer bailout—just like they received in 2008. “It’s very dangerous,” Greenberger says. “If banks lose on this type of trading and that causes a disruption in the markets, the taxpayer will be confronted with whether to let the banks fail or bail them out to the tune of trillions of dollars.”

Could taxpayers be at risk even in boom times? Yep. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost $6 billion on a bad trade that has come to be known as the London Whale. “JPMorgan was essentially gambling with FDIC-insured money, secure in the knowledge that major losses would be borne by the public while profits would stay in the bank,” David Dayan wrote in Salon last year. JPMorgan, it turned out, was able to withstand that loss without a bailout, but a lot of other US banks couldn’t, Greenberger explains: “You could have a trade that loses a lot more than $6 billion by a rogue trader, in which case taxpayers have to foot the bill.”

How were lawmakers able to sneak this into the big appropriations bill? It’s common for lawmakers to force bills through Congress by attaching them to larger must-pass legislation. The practice is part of the wheeling and dealing that allows Republicans and Democrats to come to agreement on major legislation. But, Greenberger says, “putting these substantive provisions in appropriations bills is very, very dangerous stuff…If you want a controversial provision in there that you couldn’t get in under regular order, this is the way to do it.” He adds, “Then the president has problems vetoing it because the government will shut down. It’s a bad way to do business.”

If Congress approves this measure, what does it mean for economic populism? “Economic populism is alive and well,” Greenberger maintains. “It’s just that nobody in leadership wants to take advantage of it, whether they’re Republican or Democrat.” Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle worked to push the Citi-written provision into the spending bill.

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All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates

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Here’s the Ugly Side of Bipartisanship

by TWTKamwbbsdhe Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dylan Matthews, after running down all the obnoxious amendments to the omnibus spending bill currently wending its way through Congress, wonders aloud if it’s still worth supporting:

If you’re Barack Obama, or a liberal Democrat generally, most of these riders are setbacks, in some cases significant ones. Indeed, Obama’s condemned the Dodd-Frank and campaign finance provisions. He could, in theory, reject the deal and demand that Congress send him a bill without changes to Dodd-Frank, or one that doesn’t meddle in DC’s affairs, etc. And yet he has come out in favor of House passage of the bill.

Is he making a massive mistake?

This is one of those things that demonstrates the chasm between political activists and analysts on the one side, and working politicians on the other. If you take a look at the bill, it does indeed have a bunch of objectionable features. People like me, with nothing really at stake, can bitch and moan about them endlessly. But you know what? For all the interminable whining we do about the death of bipartisanship in Washington, this is what bipartisanship looks like. It always has. It’s messy, it’s ugly, and it’s petty. Little favors get inserted into bills to win votes. Other favors get inserted as payback for the initial favors. Special interests get stroked. Party whips get a workout.

That’s politics. The fact that it’s happening right now is, in a weird sense, actually good news. It means that, for a few days at least, politics is working normally again.

I understand that this sounds very Slatepitchy. But it’s true. Even at its best, politics is lubricated by venality, ego, and mutual backscratching. And you know what? By the normal standards of this kind of stuff, the obnoxious riders in the current spending bill are pretty mild. Really. The only one that rises above the level of a political misdemeanor is the provision that allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business, and even that’s hardly the end of the world. Swaps may have provided a tailwind to the 2008 financial collapse, but they were far from its core cause.

So should working politicians avert their gaze from the muck and vote to keep the government functioning? Of course they should. Government shutdowns are immensely costly in their own right, after all. This kind of crass calculus sucks, but that’s human nature for you. All things considered, I’d say we all got off fairly easy this time around.

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Here’s the Ugly Side of Bipartisanship

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Citigroup Wrote the Wall Street Giveaway Congress Just Snuck Into a Must-Pass Spending Bill

by BethBolendjcmjr Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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A year ago, Mother Jones reported that a House bill that would allow banks like Citigroup to do more high-risk trading with taxpayer-backed money was written almost entirely by Citigroup lobbyists. The bill passed the House in October 2013, but the Senate never voted on it. For months, it was all but dead. Yet on Tuesday night, the Citi-written bill resurfaced. Lawmakers snuck the measure into a massive 11th-hour government funding bill that congressional leaders negotiated in the hopes of averting a government shutdown. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation.

“This is outrageous,” says Marcus Stanley, the financial policy director at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. “This is to benefit big banks, bottom line.”

As I reported last year, the bill eviscerates a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the “push-out rule”:

Banks hate the push-out rule…because this provision will forbid them from trading certain derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates). Under this rule, banks will have to move these risky trades into separate non-bank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive government bailouts. The bill would smother the push-out rule in its crib by permitting banks to use government-insured deposits to bet on a wider range of these risky derivatives.

The Citi-drafted legislation will benefit five of the largest banks in the country—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. These financial institutions control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. If this measure becomes law, these banks will be able to use FDIC-insured money to bet on nearly anything they want. And if there’s another economic downturn, they can count on a taxpayer bailout of their derivatives trading business.

In May 2013, the New York Times reported that Citigroup’s proposed language was reflected in more than 70 lines of the House financial services committee’s 85-line bill. Mother Jones was the first to publish the document showing that Citigroup lobbyists had drafted most of the legislation. Here is a side-by-side of a key section of the House bill:

The bill—sponsored by two Dems and two Republicans—passed easily out of the House financial services committee on a 53-6 vote. The six no votes came from Democrats. In October 2013, the measure passed the Republican-controlled House 292-122. Seventy Dems voted in favor, but that was far fewer than expected, partly due to press coverage of Citi’s involvement in the bill’s drafting.

Back then, the bill’s chances of becoming law seemed dim. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew voiced his opposition to the measure, saying it would be “disruptive and harmful.” Obama signaled to lawmakers that he opposed it. It never came up for a vote in the Senate.

And the legislation was left on the table for corporate-friendly lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to now sneak into the pending spending bill. But Democratic leadership is raising concerns about the Wall Street-friendly provision. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted out a statement Wednesday morning slamming the provision for allowing “big banks to gamble with money insured by the FDIC.” And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling on the House to strike the Citi-written language from the spending bill.

“I am disgusted,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House financial services committee, said in a statement. “Congress is risking our homes, jobs and retirement savings once again.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) issued an even more dire warning, calling the bill “a good example of capitalism’s death wish.”

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Citigroup Wrote the Wall Street Giveaway Congress Just Snuck Into a Must-Pass Spending Bill

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NASA is headed for Mars. What, is there something wrong with Earth?

by AlfredoLovett Posted on December 3, 2014

NASA is headed for Mars. What, is there something wrong with Earth?

By on 3 Dec 2014commentsShare

Maybe you’re skeptical of whether or not the U.N. Climate Summit in Lima will actually do anything. That’s OK! In terms of humans actually moving to turn around carbon emissions and take a last stab at saving the planet, things look a bit dicey. From The New York Times, earlier this week:

While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one.

“Newly unpleasant world” sure does sound rough, not least for its ominous vagueness. What form will that unpleasantness take, exactly? Will herds of small shih-tzus bite your ankles every time you leave your house, until you slowly hemorrhage to death in the street? Will all sandwich options be reduced to watercress and cucumber? Will every new radio single just be Pitbull yelling “DALE” on repeat for three and a half minutes, over a background track of screaming infants?

Ha! No — it will likely take the form of unprecedented natural disasters, sweltering heat, and food shortages. (I mean, those other things could happen too — who’s to say!) One could say, if one were particularly forward-thinking in the most pessimistic way and also were named Christopher Jonathan James Nolan, that we might be in the market for another planet.

Which is why we can all delight in the fact that NASA is taking the next step in sending humans to Mars! Tomorrow morning*, if all goes as planned, NASA will send its new capsule, Orion, into an orbit that extends 3,600 miles from the Earth’s surface. At the conclusion of that orbit, Orion will plop peacefully into the Pacific Ocean and then get trucked back to Florida for testing — a grisly fate, indeed. The journey, which will test Orion’s safety features in deep-space conditions, should take four and a half hours and cost about $375 million.

Does that seem like a very, very brief trip for that amount of money? Screw you — space is spendy! Furthermore, there are two more trips planned (albeit for still more money): Another unmanned test in 2018, and one with real live astronauts in 2021. No word yet on when the actual Mars mission begins.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, professional one-upper and CEO of SpaceX, has been designing his own Mars-exploration capsule — which he claims costs less than Orion to develop. Again from The New York Times:

After the first unmanned Dragon test flight in 2010, Mr. Musk said he hoped NASA would at least consider the possibility. “Dragon has arguably more capability than Orion,” he said then. “Basically, anything Orion can do, Dragon can do.”

You tell ‘em, Elon! But more importantly: Which one would Matthew McConaughey pilot? I will only go to space in an aircraft that Matthew McConaughey is flying. But I will also probably be dead before this whole “newly unpleasant world” thing comes about, so who cares what I think!

*UPDATE: The Orion test launch has been rescheduled for Friday morning.

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NASA Sees Capsule Test as a Step Toward Mars

, The New York Times.

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NASA is headed for Mars. What, is there something wrong with Earth?

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Will Obama Pull the Plug on Wind Energy?

by FrederiFad Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday President Obama threatened to veto a $440 billion package of tax breaks negotiated by a bipartisan group of legislators led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). The bill, a White House spokesperson said, disproportionately benefits businesses over families. The bill excludes a child tax credit for the working poor that had been a top goal for Obama, but makes permanent a group of tax incentives for big businesses that had been provisional.

But if Obama does kill the deal, he’ll also create a casualty that seems odd for a president who in recent weeks has made climate change a central issue: The tax credit for wind energy, which Reid’s bill would resuscitate for a few years before phasing out in 2017.

The Production Tax Credit (PTC) provides wind energy developers a tax break of 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour of energy their turbines produce for the first ten years of operation, which industry supporters say is a important lifeline to help wind compete against heavily-subsidized fossil fuel power sources. For over a decade, wind power has been locked in a boom-and-bust cycle as the PTC expires and then is re-upped by Congress: Every time the credit stalls or looks like it might disappear, contracts dry up, manufacturers shut down production, and jobs get cut. The same could happen again soon: The PTC expired again last year, and so the fate of Reid’s tax bill will be the fate of a cornerstone of America’s clean energy economy.

Any project that broke ground before the PTC expiration last year still got to keep the credit, so the wind industry is still on an up cycle. So far this year, wind accounts for 22 percent of new energy capacity, second only to natural gas, according to federal data. And with or without subsidies, wind is now one of the cheapest electricity sources out there. Those are critical pieces of the puzzle if the US is to meet President Obama’s new goal to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint 26-28 percent by 2025.

But wind’s halcyon days won’t last unless the PTC is extended soon, said Daniel Shury, a market analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“The momentum will peak next year, and then we’ll start to feel the effects,” Shury said. “Without the PTC extension, the main US manufacturers are going to start running out of orders by 2016.”

The Reid bill throws a bone to conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups who have called the PTC a handout for an industry that should be able to support itself by now: gradually phasing out the credit by 2017. The American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, has supported such a plan, saying it would give manufacturers, developers, and other wind investors a degree of certainty about future market conditions that they don’t currently have. Shurey agrees: The actual amount of the credit is far less important, he said, than a clear, consistent signal to frame contracts and investments around.

Whatever tax deal Congress ultimately passes will probably include the PTC, says Jim Marston, vice president of US energy policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. Some of the credit’s biggest proponents are powerful Republicans from windy states, such as Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who said on the Senate floor last week that gutting the PTC “would cost jobs, harm our economy, the environment and our national security.” But a veto could mean a long delay—and more of the uncertainty that the wind industry fears.

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Will Obama Pull the Plug on Wind Energy?

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GOP Takes Revenge Over Immigration Order in Tax Bill. Obama Tells Them to Pound Sand.

by EPEElvapbisqwzl Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Danny Vinik describes the tax extender package currently wending its way through Congress:

Imagine somebody asked you to imagine the worst possible deal on taxes. It’d probably have the following qualities:

It would be bad for the environment.

It would be bad for the deficit.

It would give short shrift to the working poor.

And it would be a bonanza for corporations.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to conjure up such a package. Congressional Republicans already have. And for some unfathomable reason, Senate Democrats including Harry Reid seem inclined to go along—although the White House has vowed to veto such a deal if Congress goes ahead and passes it.

Actually, there’s nothing all that unfathomable about what’s going on. The tax extender bill may be a dog’s breakfast of legitimate tax provisions running interference for a long laundry list of indefensible giveaways and corporate welfare, but it’s always been supported by both parties and it would have passed long ago if not for an outbreak of routine sniping over amendments and 60-vote thresholds last spring. That aside, the whole thing is a perfect bipartisan lovefest. Republicans and Democrats alike want to make sure that corporations continue to get all their favorite tax breaks.

In fact, the only thing that’s really new here is the nature of Obama’s veto threat. He’s made the threat before, but primarily because the extenders weren’t being paid for and would add to the deficit. The fact that middle-class tax breaks might not also be extended was sort of an afterthought. Now, however, that’s front and center:

The emerging tax legislation would make permanent 10 provisions, including an expanded research and development tax credit….a measure allowing small businesses to deduct virtually any investment; the deduction for state and local sales taxes….tax breaks for car-racing tracks….benefits for racehorse owners.

….Left off were the two tax breaks valued most by liberal Democrats: a permanently expanded earned-income credit and a child tax credit for the working poor. Friday night, Republican negotiators announced they would exclude those measures as payback for the president’s executive order on immigration, saying a surge of newly legalized workers would claim the credit, tax aides from both parties said.

So there you have it. This bill is the first victim of Republican frothing over Obama’s immigration order. As revenge, they left out Democratic tax priorities, and Obama is having none of it.

This is all part of the new Obama we’ve seen since the midterm election, which seems to have had an oddly liberating effect on him. Over the course of just a few weeks he’s been throwing sand in Republican faces will gleeful abandon: cutting climate change deals with the Chinese; demanding full net neutrality regulations from the FCC; issuing an executive order on immigration; and now threatening to veto a Republican-crafted bill unless they include expanded EITC and child tax credits. It’s as though he’s tired of their endless threats to go nuclear over every little thing and just doesn’t care anymore. Go ahead, he’s telling them. Make my day.

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GOP Takes Revenge Over Immigration Order in Tax Bill. Obama Tells Them to Pound Sand.

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