Tag Archives: republican

Michigan GOP Primary Results: “Foreclosure King” Beats Santa Impersonator

by cursvalutarotpbank Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The War on Christmas seems to comes earlier every year: Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), a Santa impersonator who was elected to Congress by accident in 2012, was defeated in a 30-point landslide on Tuesday, becoming this year’s first (and probably only) victim of the Republican establishment’s dissatisfaction with congressional tea partiers.

Bentivolio won his party’s nomination two years ago in a fluke after the incumbent, Rep. Thad McCotter, failed to qualify for the ballot and abruptly resigned. (A high school teacher and reindeer rancher, Bentivolio was the only Republican left on the ballot.) Bentivolio never fully sold himself as a serious congressman—he once promised to hold a hearing on chemtrails, the conspiracy theory that airplanes are brainwashing Americans with poison—making him an obvious target, despite winning the backing of Speaker of the House John Boehner.

More interesting than Bentivolio, who always had a placeholder feel to him, is the man who trounced him the primary—David Trott, a high-powered Republican donor whose law firm happens to process most of Michigan’s foreclosures. As one registrar of deeds in southeast Michigan put it in December, Trott & Trott “made a living off of monetizing human misery.” A big donor to the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, and a member of the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s Michigan finance committee, Trott is an archetypal establishment Republican.

But he’ll still have his work cut out for him: Romney won the 11th district by just four points in 2012. He’ll take on the winner of the Democratic race between former CIA analyst Bobby McKenzie (backed by national Democrats) and urologist Anil Kumar.

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Michigan GOP Primary Results: “Foreclosure King” Beats Santa Impersonator

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Can Obama Order Immigration Amnesty All By Himself?

by CharlaG24w Posted on August 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Normally, says Ross Douthat, all the recent alarmist liberal chatter about impeachment “would simply be an unseemly, un-presidential attempt to raise money and get out the 2014 vote.” But not this time:

Even as his team plays the impeachment card with gusto, the president is contemplating — indeed, all but promising — an extraordinary abuse of office: the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants.

Such an action would come equipped with legal justifications, of course….But the precedents would not actually justify the policy, because the scope would be radically different. Beyond a certain point, as the president himself has conceded in the past, selective enforcement of our laws amounts to a de facto repeal of their provisions. And in this case the de facto repeal would aim to effectively settle — not shift, but settle — a major domestic policy controversy on the terms favored by the White House.

….In defense of going much, much further, the White House would doubtless cite the need to address the current migrant surge, the House Republicans’ resistance to comprehensive immigration reform and public opinion’s inclination in its favor.

But all three points are spurious. A further amnesty would, if anything, probably incentivize further migration, just as Obama’s previous grant of legal status may well have done. The public’s views on immigration are vaguely pro-legalization — but they’re also malleable, complicated and, amid the border crisis, trending rightward. And in any case we are a republic of laws, in which a House majority that defies public opinion is supposed to be turned out of office, not simply overruled by the executive.

It’s worth pointing out at the start that we don’t know what Obama has in mind. It’s entirely possible that he’s deliberately leaking some fairly extreme ideas merely to get people like Douthat wound up. If and when he does issue executive orders over immigration, they might turn out to be a lot more moderate than anything the Fox News set is bellowing about. It wouldn’t surprise me.

But suppose Obama does issue an unusually bold executive order, one that halts immigration enforcement against a very large segment of the undocumented immigrants currently in the country. What then?

Well, it would depend on exactly what the order entails and what the legal justification is, but if it really does have a broad scope then I agree that it might very well represent presidential overreach. And, as Douthat says, congressional inaction wouldn’t be any kind of defense. Congress has every right not to act if it doesn’t want to. Aside from genuine emergencies, that provides not even the slightest justification for presidential action.

So I’ll just repeat what I said on Thursday: an executive order is hardly the end of the game. For starters, Republicans can take their case to the public, using Obama’s actions as a campaign weapon in 2016 to spur the election of a president who will reverse them. They can also go to court. In a case like this, I suspect they wouldn’t have much trouble finding someone with standing to sue, so it it would be a pretty straightforward case.

As it happens, I think the current Republican obsession with presidential overreach is fairly pointless because their examples are so trivial. Extending the employer mandate might very well go beyond Obama’s powers, but who cares? It’s a tiny thing. Alternatively, the mini-DREAM executive action is fairly substantial but also very unlikely to represent any kind of overreach. Ditto for recent EPA actions.

Presidents do things all the time that push the envelope of statutory authority. To be worth any serious outrage, they need to be (a) significant and (b) fairly clearly beyond the scope of the president’s powers. I don’t think Obama has done anything like this yet, but if Republicans want to test that proposition in court, they should go right ahead. That’s what courts are for.

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Can Obama Order Immigration Amnesty All By Himself?

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Republicans Maybe Not as Inept as We Think

by MarilynColburn Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman thinks Republicans have become a bunch of bumblers and idiots:

Think about it this way: Has there been a single instance in the last few years when you said, “Wow, the Republicans really played that one brilliantly”?

In fact, before you’ll find evidence of the ruthless Republican skillfulness so many of us had come to accept as the norm in a previous era, you’ll need to go back an entire decade to the 2004 election. George W. Bush’s second term was a disaster, Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006, they lost the White House in 2008, they decided to oppose health-care reform with everything they had and lost, they lost the 2012 election—and around it all they worked as hard as they could to alienate the fastest growing minority group in the country and make themselves seem utterly unfit to govern.

In fact, in the last ten years they’ve only had one major victory, the 2010 midterm election.

Hmmm. It’s true that the GOP has had a rough decade in a lot of ways. The number of self-IDed Republicans has plummeted since 2004; their standing among the fast-growing Hispanic population has cratered; and their intellectual core is now centered in a wing of the party that believes we should return to the gold standard. This isn’t a promising starting point for a conservative renaissance.

Still, let’s not kid ourselves. If Republicans were really as woefully inept as Waldman says, then Democrats should be kicking some serious ass these days. I haven’t especially noticed this. They won in the sixth year of Bush’s presidency, when out parties always win, and then won in 2008, when an economic collapse pretty much guaranteed a victory for anyone with a D after their name. Then they had a single fairly good year—followed by an epic blunder that lost them a sure seat in Massachusetts, and with it control of the Senate. They got crushed in 2010. They won a squeaker in 2012 against an opponent who made a wedding cake figurine look good by comparison. For the last four years, they’ve basically gotten nothing done at all.

And what about those Republicans? Well, they have a hammerlock on the House, and they might very well control the Senate after the 2014 election. They’ve won several notable Supreme Court victories (Heller, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, etc.). They control a large majority of the states, and have passed a ton of conservative legislation in areas like voter ID and abortion restrictions. Their “Just Say No” strategy toward President Obama has tied Democrats in knots. They won an all but total victory on spending and deficits.

Nor is it really true that today’s GOP is notably more bumbling than it used to be. The myth of “ruthless Republican skillfulness” in the past is just that: a myth. George H.W. Bush screwed up on Supreme Court picks and tax hikes. Newt Gingrich—ahem—sure didn’t turn out to be the world historical strategic genius everyone thought he was in 1994. George W. Bush—with the eager backing of every Republican in the country—figured that a war in Iraq would be just the ticket to party dominance for a decade. Ditto for Social Security reform. Republicans were just sure that would be a winner. By contrast, their simpleminded Obama-era strategy of obstructing Democrats at all times and on all things has actually worked out pretty well for them given the hand they were dealt.

Make no mistake: It’s not as if Republicans have been strategic geniuses. There’s no question that they have some long-term issues that they’re unable to address thanks to their capitulation to tea party madness. But if they’re really so inept, how is it that in the past 15 years Democrats haven’t managed to cobble together anything more than about 18 months of modest success between 2009-10?

I dunno. Republicans keep getting crazier and crazier and more and more conservative, and liberals keep thinking that this time they’ve finally gone too far. I’ve thought this from time to time myself. And yet, moving steadily to the right has paid off pretty well for them over the past three decades, hasn’t it?

Maybe it will all come to tears in the near future as the lunatic wing of the party becomes even more lunatic, but we liberals have been thinking this for a long time. We haven’t been right yet.

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Republicans Maybe Not as Inept as We Think

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Northwest wildfires: We broke the forests, now we need to fix them

by DannieDobbie Posted on July 24, 2014

Northwest wildfires: We broke the forests, now we need to fix them

By

Jason Kriess

The Northwest is ablaze. Both Washington and Oregon are in official states of emergency as dozens of fires burn on forests and rangelands. Rainy weather in some areas has helped firefighters in the past few days, but according to the federal government’s InciWeb website, there are still 22 large fires burning almost a million acres in the two states. The half-contained Carlton Complex fire in north-central Washington alone has torched 150 homes and burned more than a quarter million acres, making it the largest in state history.

Welcome to the hot, flammable future, America. We’ve been setting ourselves up for these fires for a long, long time.

David Freedman has a strong piece on the past, present, and future of wildfire in America in the latest issue of Men’s Journal. Here’s a snippet starring Dave Cleaves, an economist and former professor who now advises the chief of the U.S. Forest Service:

In the late 1980s, Cleaves found himself wondering: Why was the U.S. being hit by more and more uncontrollable fires? Up until then, increasing investments in firefighting seemed to have rendered wildfires tamable. But in 1989, 873 structures burned down in California wildfires. In 1990, 641 structures were lost in a single fire. In 1991, more than 3,300 homes were torched in a firestorm near Oakland. Throughout the 1980s, an average of 3 million acres had burned each year in the U.S.; by 1991, the number exceeded 5 million acres. “Large parts of whole counties in the West were going up in single fires,” says Cleaves. “We’d never seen fires like that.”

Cleaves pored over the data and came to a disturbing conclusion, one that seemed almost preposterous at the time: A slow but accelerating rise in average temperatures in the West was tipping the wildlands into a state of unprecedented vulnerability that would render fires increasingly uncontrollable. Today, we call it climate change.

Turns out you don’t have to crank up the thermostat very far to make already flammable forests downright explosive. A 2009 study by the Forest Service and the universities of Washington and Idaho found that the area of Washington burned by wildfires is likely to double or even triple by the end of the 2040s, as trees are stressed by heat and drought, and succumb to bark beetle invasions.

President Obama rightly drew the connection between the fires and climate change at a fundraiser in Seattle earlier this week: “A lot of it has to do with drought, a lot of it has to do with changing precipitation patterns and a lot of that has to do with climate change,” he said.

But it’s more than just climate change that’s stoking these flames. More than a century of logging turned forests that were built to survive fires into tinderboxes of small, tightly packed trees. And many of our fire fighting efforts have only exacerbated the problem by allowing the fuels to build up further. Add a few hots days, a spark, and a little wind, and all hell breaks loose.

That’s exactly what we’ve seen in Washington over the past two weeks. Late spring rains spurred grass and shrubs to grow tall. Then a streak of hot days sent the mercury up over 100 degrees, turning it all into kindling. Lightning and high winds quickly blew up an inferno.

“Our fire behavior specialist told us that the rate of spread during that fastest period — we saw approximately 20 miles of movement in 6 hours,” says Glenn Hohler, a public information officer with the Washington State Incident Management team working the Carlton Complex fire. “That’s almost unheard of.”

There are some things we can do to reduce the threat of these massive fires. We can stop building homes in flammable forests, for starters. We can also send loggers into those forests to thin them out, clearing out brush and other so-called “ladder fuels” that allow fires to roar into the tree canopies. We can also set small “prescribed fires” to clear out understory in relatively controlled situations.

I saw some remarkable examples of this kind of work on a recent trip through north-central Washington. My wife, kids, and I camped on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and spent a day hiking through a thinned out forest of stately larches. A handful of the trees were what the greenies like to call “old-growth” — hundreds of years old, and so broad at their base that the four of us, stretching fingertip to fingertip, couldn’t get our arms around them. Many of the other trees were second-growth, just a couple of feet in diameter — but standing at a good distance apart, thanks to crews that had come through with chainsaws and thinned the forest out.

To my knowledge, the fires haven’t touched those woods, but if they did, chances are good that they would burn through the undergrowth, lick at the thick, fire-resistant bark of those larches, and move on. The unmanaged private lands nearby, crowded with small trees, on the other hand, would go up like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Hohler, whose day job is as a forest entomologist for the Washington Department of Natural Resources, says he’s seen just that where the Carlton Complex fire has burned. In some areas, he says, stands of big, dispersed trees have survived the flames. In another spot, where a thick, overgrown forest burned, he says, “an ATV — there’s literally nothing left but the metal frame. The ash layer looks like snowfall. It’s completely black, the most intense fire you can imagine.”

Sadly, in the aftermath of these current fires, we’re apt to see more of the later, and less of the former, as flames rage through thousands of acres of forests that have been subjected to logging — and deprived of natural fire — for decades. Meanwhile, funding for forest thinning and fire prevention is hard to come by, while we continue to throw millions at “fighting” fires that are far beyond our control.

Freedman, writing in Men’s Journal, details President Obama’s proposal to put about $1 billion into wildfire prevention and damage-reduction efforts.

The proposal is facing fierce opposition. Rep. Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican, has been a particularly outspoken critic of the administration’s intention to downplay firefighting in favor of forest management and fire prevention. He and some other politicians from the West want to keep all-out firefighting as the top priority – harking back to the 1930s, when the Forest Service’s so-called “10 am policy” promised to extinguish new fires by the next morning. They also want to bring in more logging and grazing as a self-funding form of thinning. “I want you to go back to the 10 am policy, ” Pearce said in one congressional speech.

But the war on wildfire, like the war on drugs, is a losing proposition. The harder we fight, the more we get burned.

Instead of fighting, we need to get serious about fixing. We broke these forests. Now we own them.

Greg Hanscom is a senior editor at Grist. He tweets about cities, bikes, transportation, policy, and sustainability at @ghanscom.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Northwest wildfires: We broke the forests, now we need to fix them

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Lots of Americans Think Obamacare Has Benefited Nobody

by BeatrisPerrett Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent points us to an interesting new CNN poll about Obamacare. It asks the usual question about favoring or opposing the law, with the usual results. The basic question shows that Obamacare is unpopular by 40-59 percent, but when you add in the folks who “oppose” it only because they wish it were more liberal, it flips to 57-38 percent. In other words, if you confine yourself to garden variety conservative opposition to Obamacare, there’s not nearly as much as most polls suggest.

But then there’s another question: Has Obamacare helped you or your family personally? About 18 percent say yes. How about other families? Do you think Obamacare has helped anyone at all?

And guess what: A huge majority of Republicans and conservatives don’t think the law has helped anybody in this country.

Among all Americans, the poll finds that 18 percent say the law has made them and their families better off….Meanwhile, 44 percent say the law hasn’t helped anybody — a lot, but still a minority.

Crucially, an astonishing 72 percent of Republicans, and 64 percent of conservatives, say the law hasn’t helped anyone. (Only one percent of Republicans say the law has helped them!) By contrast, 57 percent of moderates say the law has helped them or others. Independents are evenly divided.

Perhaps these numbers among Republicans and conservatives only capture generalized antipathy towards the law. Or perhaps they reflect the belief that Obamacare can’t be helping anyone, even its beneficiaries, since dependency on Big Gummint can only be self-destructive. Either way, the findings again underscore the degree to which Republicans and conservatives inhabit a separate intellectual universe about it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little more dismayed by the news that even a large number of moderates and independents don’t think Obamacare has helped anyone. In a way, that’s more disturbing than the dumb—but predictable—knee-jerk Republican view that automatically produces a “no” whenever the question relates to something positive about Obamacare.

I guess the lesson is that liberals still haven’t done a very good job of promoting the benefits of Obamacare. Maybe that’s an impossible task since, after all, it’s not as if you can expect the media to run endless identical stories about local folks who finally got health insurance. Still, it’s a funny thing. If you passed a law that gave cars to 10 million poor Americans, pretty much everyone would agree that some people benefited from the program. But if you pass a law that gives health insurance to 10 million poor Americans, lots of people think it’s just a gigantic illusion that’s helped no one. What’s more, the number of people who believe this has increased since last year’s rollout.

Why? Certainly not because they think health insurance is worthless. Just try taking away theirs and you’ll find out exactly how non-worthless they consider it. Is it because they don’t think Obamacare policies are “real” health insurance? Or that all these people had health insurance before and the whole thing is just a scam? Or what? It’s a peculiar view that deserves a follow-up.

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How "Citizen Koch" Saw the Light of Day After Public TV Snubbed It

by KrystalMckenney Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were steeped in the production of a documentary on the influence of money in politics, but it wasn’t until funding for their project was unceremoniously yanked last year that the power of big donors truly hit home.

The pair had received a $150,000 commitment from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded organization that bankrolls projects aired on PBS. They would later learn that their film, Citizen Koch, which explores the post-Citizen United political landscape and the rise of the tea party, had touched a nerve among public television officials worried about angering a generous benefactor, David Koch, who served on the boards of Boston’s WGBH and New York City’s WNET. In the fall of 2012, PBS had aired Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, which featured a highly unflattering portrait of the billionaire, including an interview with a former doorman at Koch’s elite Manhattan apartment building who singled him out as its most miserly resident. Public television officials were sensitive about offending Koch again.

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How "Citizen Koch" Saw the Light of Day After Public TV Snubbed It

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This Is How The Right Will Try to Destroy Chris Christie

by KathieArriola Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is crisscrossing Iowa. Officially, the visit is a fundraising trip tied to his side job as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. But like most any big-time politician choosing to spend some of the summer in the first caucus state, the visit is drawing the kind of speculation—and attacks—befitting a potential presidential contender.

Take the Judicial Crisis Network, which has seized the chance to target him with online ads and a website criticizing him for failing to turn the New Jersey Supreme Court into a bastion of right-wing judicial activism. JCN has established itself as significant player in judicial nomination fights and elections over the past several years, and has strong ties to conservative factions that don’t trust the governor’s record on social issues—and who would prefer a 2016 nominee more in line with the evangelical strain of the GOP.

The online ads take Christie to task for reappointing—gasp!—a Democrat as the chief justice of the state’s supreme court, and criticize him for failing to live up to earlier campaign promises to remake the court as a conservative body.

The gripes about Christie’s judicial appointments are pretty bogus. He’s a Republican governor of a democratic state, and he’s been thwarted again and again in his attempts to install conservatives on the high court: only three of his six nominees have been able to get past the Democratic controlled state legislature’s judiciary committee. One of those nominees only got through because Christie agreed to a deal where he re-nominated the aforementioned sitting chief justice, a Democrat.

In a response to the ads, one of Christie’s top advisers has argued that JCN is a Johnny-come-lately to New Jersey’s nomination battles, suggesting that they don’t really care about the composition of the court—but care plenty about dissing Christie. “This group has been noticeably absent from any judicial fight we’ve had in New Jersey, showing up only to criticize after the fights are over,” Mike DuHaime said in a CNN appearance.

As DuHaime’s complaint suggests, the Judicial Crisis Network’s campaign is likely just another shot across the bow by social conservatives who think Christie is too liberal on issues like gay marriage and abortion, and don’t want to see him become the GOP nominee for president in 2016. Indeed, the people behind the organization seem like just the sort who would much rather see a President Rick Santorum than a President Christie.

The JCN was founded by Gary Marx, who wooed family values voters for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, organizing church-sponsored voter drives in Ohio. According to Right Wing Watch, he was encouraged to start the organization, originally called the Judicial Confirmation Network, by Jay Sekulow, a veteran Christian soldier. As president of the American Center for Law and Justice, Sekulow has litigated numerous church-state cases before the US Supreme Court, including a recent one that allowed a Utah park to keep a Ten Commandments statute installed.

In 2004, Marx joined with Wendy Long, a former clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to set up the Judicial Confirmation Network to bolster President Bush’s efforts to install staunch social conservatives on the federal bench. When Obama was elected, the group changed its name and focus to blocking the new president’s nominees. (Marx now leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative evangelical group founded by Ralph Reed. Long left the JCN in 2012 to pursue an unsuccessful GOP Senate campaign against New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat.)

JCN also has close ties to the anti-gay marriage movement, sharing a treasurer with the National Organization for Marriage. Indeed, in a piece published this week by the National Review Online in coordination with the campaign bashing Christie’s judges, the Judicial Crisis Network’s current director, Carrie Severino, wrote that Christie’s “conservative” justices took part in the court’s unanimous decision last year to allow same-sex marriage in New Jersey. She also contends that Christie’s most recent nominee has a record of being pro-choice. Severino—who is also a former Thomas clerk—concludes, “If these are Christie’s conservative nominees, then Christie’s definition of a conservative sounds an awful lot like a liberal.”

Christie is likely to see similar attacks as he makes further steps towards a 2016 campaign after the ignominy of Bridgegate. He’ll be in New Hampshire later this month.

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The IRS Scandal Finally Reaches Its End Game

by Lucia67Nhv Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Every few years the Republican Party goes on a jihad against the IRS. The most famous was probably Sen. William Roth’s theatrical witch hunt in the 90s that regaled an eager public with stories about jackbooted thugs and “Gestapo-like” tactics. The most recent is the seemingly endless investigation into charges that the IRS targeted grassroots conservative nonprofits at the behest of its partisan masters. These charges have turned out to be almost entirely groundless—just like Roth’s—but don’t make the mistake of thinking this makes them pointless. You just have to wait for the other shoe to drop, as it did yesterday:

The House late Monday night adopted proposals by voice vote to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) amendment to the fiscal 2015 Financial Services appropriations bill would cut funding for the IRS by $353 million. Specifically, Gosar’s amendment would cut that funding from the IRS enforcement account and use it toward deficit reduction.

Gosar argued that funding for the IRS would be better used toward reducing the deficit than toward the agency caught in GOP crosshairs….”More directly than financial or condition of the country is the fact that this agency has shown contempt for the American taxpayer.”

The Roth Hearings ended up with reduced funding for IRS enforcement, something that took over a decade to recover from. Now Gosar wants to reduce IRS enforcement funding too. Coincidence? Not so much. If you want to reduce taxes on the wealthy, after all, there are two ways to do it. You can either reduce their tax rates or you can make it easier for them to evade the tax rates that already exist. Either way, it’s a boon to anyone with lots of money and good tax planners. But I repeat myself.

In any case, this was always inevitable. The goal of anti-IRS jihads is always to reduce funding for enforcement. And despite what Gosar might want you to believe, very little enforcement has ever been aimed at middle-class taxpayers or small nonprofits. It’s mostly aimed at the rich, for obvious Willie Suttonish reasons. Weakening enforcement actions against the Republican Party’s core constituency has always been the end game for the IRS scandal, and now we’re finally there.

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The IRS Scandal Finally Reaches Its End Game

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Liz Cheney scorns climate action, just like her dad

by Janie22Bmqhb Posted on July 15, 2014

Like father, like daughter

Liz Cheney scorns climate action, just like her dad

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Reuters/Ruffin Prevost |

spirit of america

Darth Vader and his Sith apprentice — a.k.a. Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz — are totally in synch about climate change. Here’s how they responded to a question on the topic during a conversation with Politico’s Mike Allen on Monday:

Mike Allen: Here’s a question from Felix Dodds. What should the Republican Party do about climate change?

Dick Cheney: Liz?

Liz Cheney: Nothing. [Scornful guffaw.] I mean … [Shrug.] Look, I think that what’s happening now with respect to this president and this EPA and using something like climate change as an excuse to kill the coal industry nationwide — and that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been open about it. They even admit that the emissions from coal aren’t actually causing any kind of a heating of the planet. But this is an opportunity to go in, and they’re killing coal. You know, Wyoming is the leading coal-producing state in the nation. But you don’t have to be from Wyoming to understand that your electricity is gonna be directly affected by that. It is bad policy. It’s bad science. We’re seeing increasingly that it’s bad science.

And a much greater threat to us, frankly, is this massive expansion and growth of the bureaucratic state here in Washington — the EPA, the use of things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to go directly at people’s private property rights in a way that clearly, frankly, is unconstitutional and is a real threat to our freedom.

That Liz is following in her father’s jackbooted footsteps should come as no surprise. She demonstrated her denier cred during a failed bid for the U.S. Senate last year. She told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “the science is just simply bogus, you know, we know that temperatures have been stable for the last 15 years.” She tweeted that Obama’s climate policy is “using phony science to kill real jobs. This is a war on coal, a war on jobs, a war on American families.” And she tweeted a photo of a snowy scene as though it were a clever rejoinder to the whole body of climate science:


Source
Playbook Lunch: Vice President Dick Cheney, Lynne Cheney, Liz Cheney, Politico
Science Denier Liz Cheney To Run For Senate In Warming-Threatened Wyoming, ClimateProgress

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

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Liz Cheney scorns climate action, just like her dad

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Don’t Call Them "Climate Deniers." Call them "Climate Optimists."

by ThorsteTalarico Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Las Vegas is parched. A 14-year drought has left Lake Mead, the local water source, dangerously low. It has dropped 100 feet in the past decade. If it drops 12 more feet, federal water rationing rules will kick in. Some climate scientists predict that will happen in the next year. And most believe the situation will only worsen over time.

The view from inside Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, however, is considerably rosier. That’s where scientists, activists, and bloggers have assembled this week for the Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change, which I’ve been following via live stream. It’s the world’s largest gathering of “climate skeptics”—people who believe, for one reason or another, that the climate change crisis is overblown.

It’s tempting to find irony in the spectacle of hundreds of climate change deniers staging their convention amid a drought of historic proportions. But, as the conference organizers are quick to tell you, they aren’t actually climate change deniers. The majority of this year’s speakers readily acknowledge that the climate is changing. Some­ will even concede that human emissions are playing a role. They just think the solutions are likely to be far worse than the problem.

“I don’t think anybody in this room denies climate change,” the Heartland Institute’s James M. Taylor said in his opening remarks Monday. “We recognize it, but we’re looking more at the causes, and more importantly, the consequences.” Those consequences, Taylor and his colleagues are convinced, are unlikely to be catastrophic—and they might even turn out to be beneficial.

Don’t call them climate deniers. Call them climate optimists.

They aren’t an entirely new phenomenon. Fossil-fuel advocates have been touting the advantages of climate change since at least 1992, when the Western Fuels Association put out a pro­–global warming video called “The Greening of Planet Earth.” (It was a big hit with key figures in the George W. Bush administration.) Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt, traces this line of thinking even further back, to a 1983 report in which physicist Bill Nierenberg argued that humans would have no trouble adapting to a warmer world.

As global warming became more politically polarized, however, coal lobbyists and their shills largely discarded the “global warming is good” approach in favor of questioning the science behind climate change models. These days the liberal stereotype of the climate change denier sounds more like James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma who dismisses “the global warming thing” as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” (He still appears to believe that.)

There are still a good number of Inhofe types at the Heartland Institute’s conferences. But the pendulum of conservative sentiment may be swinging away from such conspiracy theories. Over the past few years, a concerted campaign by climate scientists and environmentalists, backed by mountains of evidence, has largely succeeded in branding climate change denial as “anti-science” and pushing it to the margins of public discourse. Leading news outlets no longer feel compelled to “balance” every climate change story with quotes from cranks who don’t believe in it. Last month, the president of the United States mocked climate deniers as a “radical fringe” that might as well believe the moon is “made of cheese.”

The backlash to the anti-science movement has left Republican leaders unsure of their ground. As Jonathan Chait pointed out in New York magazine, their default response to climate change questions has become, “I’m not a scientist.”

It’s a clever stalling tactic, allowing the speaker to convey respect for science without accepting the scientific consensus. But it’s also a cop-out, and it seems unlikely either to appease the right-wing base or to persuade the majority of Americans who have no trouble believing that the climate is changing despite not being scientists themselves. At last count, 57 percent told Gallup they believe human activities are to blame for rising global temperatures. That’s up from a low of 50 percent in 2010.

Eventually, then, top Republicans are going to need a stronger answer. And they might find it in the pro-science, anti-alarmist rhetoric exemplified by the climate optimists. Those include Richard Lindzen, the ex-MIT meteorology professor who spoke at the institute’s 2009 conference and is now a fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

In a 2012 New York Times profile, Lindzen affirmed that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and called those who dispute the point “nutty.” But he predicts that negative feedback loops in the atmosphere will counteract its warming effects. The climate, he insists, is less sensitive to human emissions than environmentalists fear.

Fellow climate scientists have found serious flaws in his work. Yet it retains currency at events such as the Heartland conference, where skeptics’ findings tend not to be subjected to much skepticism themselves. (While several of the speakers are in fact scientists, few are climate scientists, and their diverse academic backgrounds make it difficult for them to engage directly with one another’s research methods.)

And the idea that the Earth’s climate is too powerful a system for us puny humans to upset holds a certain folksy—not to mention religious—appeal. Still, the Heartland crowd is careful to frame its arguments in terms of science and skepticism rather than dogma.

The climate-optimist cause has been aided immeasurably by a recent slowdown in the rise of the Earth’s average surface temperatures. There are several potential explanations for the apparent “pause,” and most climate scientists anticipate that it will be short-lived. But it has been a godsend for those looking for holes in the prevailing models of catastrophic future warming.

“Skeptics believe what they see,” said Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast. “They look at the data and see no warming for 17 years, no increase in storms, no increase in the rate of sea-level rise, no new extinctions attributable to climate change—in short, no climate crisis.”

Meanwhile, the optimists point out, more carbon in the atmosphere means greater plant productivity and new opportunities for agriculture. In fact, Heartland communications director Jim Lakely told me in a phone interview, “The net benefits of warming are going to far outweigh any negative effects.” Indeed, the institute recently published a study arguing just that.

The climate-optimist credo aligns neatly with public-opinion polls that show most Americans believe climate change is real and humans are causing it—they just don’t view it as a top priority compared with more tangible problems like health care costs. You can imagine how eager they are to be reassured that their complacency won’t be punished.

Again, not everyone at the Heartland conference is a climate optimist. Many are still focused on disputing the basic link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. As I watched the conference, it became clear that some have little trouble flipping between the two viewpoints. “This is what they always do,” Oreskes told me in an email. “As the debate shifts, they shift.”

That makes it easy for liberals to dismiss self-professed climate skeptics as industry shills in scientists’ clothing, especially since many of them, like the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, do in fact receive funding from the fossil-fuel industry. For their part, the Heartland academics tend to view most mainstream climate scientists as conflicted by their reliance on government grants.

In fact, it’s not unreasonable to see the climate fight as part of a much broader ideological war in American society, says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. The debate over causes is often a proxy for a debate over solutions, which are likely to require global cooperation and government intervention in people’s lives. Leiserowitz’s research shows that climate deniers tend to be committed to values like individualism and small government while those most concerned about climate change are more likely to hold egalitarian and community-oriented political views.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the evidence on both sides is equal. There’s a reason the climate deniers are losing the scientific debate, and it isn’t because academia is better funded than the energy industry. All of which helps to explain how climate optimism might be a more appealing approach these days than climate denial. Models of how climate change will impact society and the economy are subject to far more uncertainty than the science that links greenhouse gas emissions to the 20th-century warming trend. The costs of mitigating those emissions are more readily grasped: higher energy bills, government spending on alternative energy projects, lost jobs at coal plants.

There are, however, a few pitfalls for conservatives who would embrace climate optimism as an alternative to climate change denial. Touting the recent slowdown in global average surface temperatures, for example, implies that such temperatures do in fact tell us a lot about the health of the climate. That will become an awkward stance in a hurry if the temperatures soon resume their climb.

More broadly, shifting the climate change debate from causes to outcomes will put the “skeptics” in the Panglossian position of continually downplaying the costs of extreme weather events—like, say, the Las Vegas drought—even as their constituents are suffering from them. In the Heartland conference’s opening keynote speech, meteorologist Joe Bastardi scoffed at the devastating wildfires that have swept across the Southwest far earlier than usual this season. “We had the wildfires in San Diego, right?” he said in a derisive tone. “I think it destroyed 80 houses, 90 houses. They had a wildfire back in October 2007 that took out 1,500 houses…When people tell me things are worse now, I say, ‘You can’t be looking at what has happened before.'”

It’s one thing to tell people global warming isn’t the source of their misery. It’s a lot harder to look them in the eye and tell them their problems aren’t that bad—especially if you’re relying on them to vote you into public office.

Originally posted here:  

Don’t Call Them "Climate Deniers." Call them "Climate Optimists."

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