A nice description of the problem – wasted time

As discussed by DarkSyde, the problem is really not the emails that were stolen from the University, cheery-picked and released without context. Climate change does not go away because of this furor.

The problem will be the huge amount of time required now to put these emails in context and explain what is really going on. This is time that these scientists really do not have and will keep them away from their research.

Thus it is perfect for the denialists. Either they make people think climate change is a fraud or they keep the scientists so occupied that they slow down the rate of research.

And, since we have seen what happens when someone gets in the crosshairs of these fanatics, I would expect that the latter is what will have the greatest effect on our understanding of climate change. I would not be surprised to hear that these researchers have gotten death threats.

Well, if you like conspiracy theories, ask yourself who really benefits from this? It does not stop climate change and it only delays our understanding. It muddies the water but not one email I have seen does anything about changing the data in ways to change the conclusions. And there are thousands of scientists elsewhere whose work is completely independent from these particular researchers.

So who benefits? Well, since the energy companies such as Exxon have already spent million if not billions on muddying the water, in exactly the same fashion as the tobacco companies, I think we have a nice suspect.

SImply pay lots of money to illegally hack into the email server, cherry pick the results and send them on to their denialist friends (Has anyone really looked at the finances of the premier denialists?). It is a great win-win for them.

Aren’t conspiracy theories fun? No need to have any real facts at all. Innuendo and misrepresentation works best. And that is all we have really seen from the stolen emails.

[Listening to: A Time For Everything? from the album "Jethro Tull]

ACORN?? Really? Try a little harder, please.

by Big C Harvey

Public Policy Polling: ACORN
[Via Public Policy Polling]

Losing NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman became the latest in an increasingly long line of conservative politicians to blame his problems on ACORN yesterday despite the complete lack of evidence the organization played any role in his defeat.

The Republican base is with him though. PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately. Clearly the ACORN card really is an effective one to play with the voters who will decide whether Hoffman gets to be the Republican nominee in a possible repeat bid in 2010.

[More]

So, somehow ACORN prevented John McCain from getting elected. And how was that supposed to have happened?ACORN workers has been guilty of registration violations, which happens with almost any voter registration effort, but no one has demonstrated that this has led to ineligible voters voting in any substantial way. Where is the actual election fraud?

Registering MIckey Mouse is a violation but does not mean that Mickey Mouse gets to vote. Let’s see. Obama got 10,000,000 more votes than McCain. So how did ACORN swing over 5,000,000 votes and where did that happen?

Obama got 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173. Where in the world did ACORN swing that many states around?

Jeez, if you are going to have a good conspiracy, at least do a little leg work. Look at some of the Dem’s:

2000 – Bush gets only 540,000 more votes than Gore and 5 more electoral votes. In fact, if Florida swings to Gore, he wins. Bush carried Florida by 537 votes. There are lots of great conspiracy theories dealing with a swing of 270 votes. I like the Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballots, where it appears several thousand votes for Gore were mistakenly marked for Buchanan. Or perhaps Republican politicians’ efforts to scrub thousands of rightful voters from the voter rolls, who did not find out this had happened until election night. Those are much better conspiracies than somehow registering people swings elections by 5 million people. This would only take a couple of hundred, very easy to imagine.

2004 – Bush got 3,000,000 more votes than Kerry and 35 more electoral votes. Let’s look at Ohio with 20 electoral votes. There was an 120,000 vote differential between Bush and Kerry. And the electronic voting machines used by Ohio were made by a company whose Republican head had claimed that they were going to bring the election to Bush. This makes for a great conspiracy theory of how real voter fraud could have been perpetrated. And how about those exit polls? There was a huge discrepancy between how people said they voted and how the results came out. If the vote had gone by exit polling, which had been pretty correct in every election until 2000, then Kerry would have gotten 40 more electoral votes than Bush.

Liberals don’t even have to break a sweat to actually make a convincing effort on the side of the 2000 and 2004 results being a sham. Lots of almost believable stuff there. I love this one that suggest that Obama won, even with massive election fraud.

But that ACORN somehow caused a shift in 95 electoral votes and 5,000,000 people? Without anyone knowing or even having any sort of ‘real’ evidence? That is just insanity. That would put them right up there with the Trilateral Commission and the Freemasons for organizations that somehow are undermining something without any outward sign. In fact, it would really put ACORN out in front because at the same time it is secretly undermining our Republic it is also demonstrating itself to be a very incompetent organization when it comes to voter registration, embezzlement or guerilla videographers.

Their incompetency must actually be a smokescreen for their diabolical plans! We would never suspect them because they are so incompetent. Brilliant!

Like I say, at least work for it. Simply saying ACORN did it is like say the Boogey Man did it. While the Romans actually had a real enemy when they scared children by saying ‘Hannibal ad portas‘ (Hannibal is at the gate), modern Republicans have a much less pithy ‘ACORN ad portas’, which apparently only frightens other Republicans. Luckily they only appear to represent about 20% of the population.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the punditry was skewed to reflect actual numbers? So instead of having one liberal for 3-4 conservatives on talk shows, it would be exactly the opposite. Even having 3-4 moderates per conservative would more accurately reflect the actual electorate.

[Listening to: The Man Comes Around from the album "American IV: The Man Comes Around" by Johnny Cash]

[Listening to: South Side of the Sky from the album "Culture of Ascent" by Glass Hammer]

Something we can all agree on

by dandeluca
Goldman: Flu Fear Spurs Donation!:
[Via The Big Picture]

(Reuters) New York: Having inoculated its employees with H1N1 vaccine dosages usurped from pregnant women and children, Goldman Sachs has increased its vigilance against the contagious virus by banning employee contact with spare change.

An internal memo outlines steps staff should take to avoid becoming ill, starting with the eradication of the potentially infected currency that may have lodged itself under the seats of their automobiles. The hazardous materials are being collected and sent to Small Business for disposal.

The memo also advised employees to “resist the urge to open your own car door ; let your driver do it.”

-Richard Ambrose

[More]

I really hope that this is just a spoof. There is no direct link to the Reuter item. But it is so good that it should be on the Onion. I’m sure this could go viral without any problem, it is so unbelievably believable. Goldman really could be that stupid!

It does not matter what your political affiliations are, Goldman should simply be broken up until it is actually run by people who give a crap.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Politics

I was surprised

[UPDATED: I originally mentioned this poll several months ago but did not discuss these numbers.]

by cliff1066™
Scientists and Republicans Don’t Mix:

[Via The Intersection]

I hardly want to lend ammo to those on the other side of the political scientific debates that I so frequently cover. But the new data from Pew are pretty stark: Only 6 percent of scientists describe themselves as Republican. 55 percent describe themselves as Democrats, and 32 percent as independents; which means that scientists skew Dem by a considerable margin when compared to the general population (which claims to be 23 percent GOP, 35 percent DEM).

I think these figures are unsurprising and even justifiable, in that so much anti-science comes from Republicans. I had to deal with one just last night who was attacking both climate science and evolutionary science. And of course, it is not just that Republicans are often anti-science, but that they are often driven by religious motivations to be so. Scientists, by contrast, are a very, very strongly secular group.

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WHile I am not surprised by the small number of scientists who self-identify as republican, I am surprised that so many go all the way to Democrat rather than Independent. I mean 9 times as many scientists call themselves Democrats as do Republicans while it is only 1.5 times in the general population.

In fact, if leaners are counted, 81% fall in the Democratic side vs 11% for the Republican. This compares with 52% and 35% for the public, respectively.

I guess nothing wishy-washy here. Simply because when it comes to scientific issues there really is little room to move. Climate change, evolution, stem cell research, etc. are all areas where science is often diametrically opposed to conservative opinions.

The poll suggests that this is because of the perception of scientists that the Bush administration controlled what scientists could say. 55% of scientists had heard about the muzzling of researchers by the Bush Administration (vs. 10% of the public) and 71% of them believed that this was true (vs. 20% of the public).

Another surprising part of the poll dealt with US scientific endeavors.. Only 17% of the public sees US scientific achievement as the best in the world, with 31% seeing it as average or below average. In contrast, 49% of the scientists, who should be a better judges, say we are the best with only 6% putting us at average or below average.

Some other things are very intriguing. 83% of the scientists believe we have NOT gone far enough in pushing equal rights in this country while 41% of the public does thing we have gone far enough. Only a third of the scientists believe that peace is best assured through military strength, compared to 53% of the public.

A big problem for for people like Chris Mooney is that while 95% of the American public either believes in God or a higher power, only 51% of scientists do. In fact, 41% do not believe in either. It can be very hard to carry on a conversation about science when it conflicts with people’ religious beliefs, since so few scientists actually can empathize with that belief.

And there is a huge divide on a couple of the areas that are not too surprising. Like evolution. 53% of the public believes that humans have either existed in their present form since the beginning of time or have evolved through the actions of a higher being. Just 10% of the scientists feel this way, with 87% saying that we evolved through natural processes.

Hope may spring from the numbers that indicate that only 36% of the public feels that science directly conflicts with their personal beliefs. This is a little higher for Republicans but not too much. Only white evangelicals had a majority who felt that science directly conflicted with their beliefs (52%).

There are a lot of people who would be willing to hear but it will be hard, particularly if it pushes people into a corner. Scientists are making a reasonable start, with some real room to improve.

But we have a long, long way to go!

Technorati Tags: Politics, Science

Eisenhower did it too

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Bowing Hour!:
[Via Lawyers, Guns and Money]

Seems someone forgot to tell Ike what everyone on the right knows (but oddly never cites a source for): the President never ever bows. Because as even a cursory search of the AP Image archive indicates, the man could not stop bowing. Hello there, Pope John XXIII!

Howdy to you, wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi!

Hi again, Archbishop Iakovos of New York, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America!

Long time no see, Charles De Gaulle!

By their logic, I believe that last bow means we have all been French since 2 September 1959. Eisenhower clearly demonstrated by that bow that the American President is a subordinate of the French, which means that for the past 50 years America has been a French territory with pretensions of sovereignty. Mon Dieu!

[More]

I wonder how many more photos would pop up with further search. Hey, Presidents have bowed in the past. Even Republican ones.

There may be points of actual policy difference to discuss but whining about such a non-topic as bowing indicates a real shallowness of thought. It’s like getting upset over the President using a Windsor knot and saying that all real Americans only use a four-in-hand.

It is a nontroversy. We hear a lot of them these days.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Proud about ignorance

by cogdogblog

Palin Proudly Owns Her Creationism
[Via Little Green Footballs]

She did her best to obfuscate the issue during the campaign, but her book completely settles the question: Sarah Palin is an “I didn’t come from no monkey!” creationist.

Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.”

[More]

We keep hearing that there are no fundamental conflicts between science and religion, that scientists should be kinder to those who find comfort in God.

All well and good until you have a major political figure deny science, deny the facts. And deny them in such an exquisite illustration of ignorance. She displays such a disrespect for what I, and millions of others, have spent our lives working on, as do most deniers of evolution and other scientific facts, like relativity.

When I see a supposedly educated person espouse such an uninformed opinion, I really do fear for America’s ability to succeed. For countries that actually have leaders that recognize the facts of the world around us will be much better poised to find successful solutions to difficult problems.

Meanwhile we will have the media captured by someone who unashamedly snubs reality. Are scientists supposed to just be nice and keep their mouths shut in order to not displease some people?

One reason I moved away from the Republican Party was their increasing reliance on anti-scientific rhetoric. (That, and the shredding of the Constitution by Iran-Contra.)

Looks like I do not have to worry about any reconnection with the Republicans any time soon.

[Listening to: Siberian Khatru from the album "The Haunted Melody" by Steve Howe Trio]

Senate rules are awesome!

by Hey Paul

Can a GOP walkout really stop the climate bill?

[Via Congress Matters]

No.

I’m posting from the road, on my phone, so this won’t be as comprehensive and link-rich as it should be, but here goes.

It’s been pointed out that there’s a rule in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that requires the presence of two minority side Senators for a markup to go forward. But like most such rules, it’s probably not “self-executing,” meaning that in order for it to have an effect, someone needs to show up to point out that there aren’t the requisite number of minority Senators in attendance. A majority side Senator could certainly do that, but why? The job of protecting minority rights belongs chiefly to the minority. Let them do it. And when they do, you politely point out that if you’re present enough to object, then you’re present enough to count towards a quorum.

Now, this particular rule requires two minority Senators, not just one. That sounds like a rule designed by someone who had been burned by the one-Senator rule before. So technically, one Republican can show up, point out that there aren’t two, and try to invoke the rule. And if that happens, what can the chair do about it?

Well, one way around it is the way the Judiciary Committee traditionally deals with a similar rule. They ignore it.

Another would be to bypass the formal use of the committee entirely, and use Rule XIV to move the bill to the floor when they’re ready. That is, Chairwoman Boxer could convene a meeting of anyone who’s on the committee and who wants to participate in the process, and in effect simply ask them, “If this were a committee markup, what amendments would you offer, and how would you vote on them?” Then she could alter her draft bill accordingly, and either try to move it to the floor under Rule XIV, pass the resulting document on to the next committee of jurisdiction for its consideration, or set it aside for whatever future merger process the leadership may have planned for it.

[More]

I wrote about this the other day.The Republican members of the committee were going to vanish, making it impossible to continue because 2 minority members were required for markup to continue.

But it requires someone to be present to ‘notice’ that the minority members are absent. If no one ‘notices’ then things are fine. What an perfectly diabolic way to get around a rule.

And then if someone from the GOP does show up to ‘notice’ well, the majority just says that this is not a real committee meeting. “We just happened to get together to talk about the bill. Want to join us?”

Parliamentary procedure at its best!

It will be interesting to see the response

by simone.brunozzi
The must-read solutions book — “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” by Al Gore.:
[Via Climate Progress]

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday. If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions.Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”. Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

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Here is a guy who held summits with people from many walks of life in order to gather information for this book, who has altered his opinions as new data emerges, and I bet many people will just ignore him. While two guys who have no background in this issues and really talked to very few people (apparently mischaracterizing those they did talk with) will make the best seller lists.

We shall see but I am just completely amazed at the vitriol that gets thrown at Gore without any real basis. What has Gore every really DONE that makes him such a target? No sex scandals. No financial scandals. A Vietnam vet.

People can disagree with his politics but I just have no idea where the vitriolic disdain comes from. He is used as a scare word, like ACORN or Kennedy. It apparently does not matter that he is right more often than not and that many of the initiatives he sponsored have had huge positive impacts on us all.

I expect his ideas will be more useful and achievable, with lower overall costs , than those of Superfrteakonmics. They will most likely actually be based in reality.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Politics, Science, Sustainability

More from the party of no

GOP Takes Clean Energy Bill Obstructionism To Yet Another Level:
[Via Crooks and Liars]

From NOW on PBS–Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn’t cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

[More]

You have to admire their discipline. Ideology is always so much more important than actually doing anything. So minority of a minority can prevent government action. It might almost be admirable if Inhofe was not such a black helicopter denialist. But then, why should he really care about the rest of us? He has his.

I wonder who will play Inhofe in the stirring docudrama about this Profile In Courage?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Politics

Why our economy will continue to lack jobs

by Ethan Bloch
Wasted Talent and Corruption:
[Via Firedoglake]

Calvin Trillin explains explains that the cause of the great crash of 2008 was all the smart people who went to Wall Street. Once upon a time, the big jobs on Wall Street were filed with third-raters, the guys who slept through Rocks for Jocks at Ivy U. They got their jobs through their parents or their friends or people they charmed at homecoming. Their dreams were modest, a house in Greenwich and a sailboat.

Of course, Trillin makes this banal insight a joke, claiming that the old boys were only mildly greedy, but then Wall Street started importing really smart people, and making mountains of money. The third-raters weren’t able to comprehend the risks, but loved the buttloads of moolah (you gotta love Margaret and Helen) they were making. The smart people didn’t understand the risks either, but they pretended to, and uncontrolled greed led to the crash.

The humor masks the ugly reality. The standing joke in law school is that the A students become professors, the Bs become judges, and the Cs become millionaires, or as we used to say in college, the business guys hired the engineers, and the science guys become professors.

The most obvious bad thing about smart people going to Wall Street is that it means we don’t have productive jobs for them in the fields they are trained for. If a bunch of physicists are working for Goldman Sachs, it means they aren’t doing physics. It means we don’t have work requiring physicists or their training. It means we are falling behind the countries that do have work for physicists. How many chemists do you think China has working in finance?

The second bad thing is the way financial elites make money. Floyd Norris gives a good picture in this column. They charge high fees, and hidden fees. To justify those fees, they have to produce huge returns, which they do by leverage. They rely on complexity and deception, particularly in swaps and derivatives. Wall Street has become more concentrated. All of these things are dangerous to the rest of society, which has to bail those incompetents out when they fail.

The third bad thing is that they aren’t doing the one thing we need for them to do: allocate capital to its best use. As Norris points out, dumping money into asset bubbles is a giant fail.

Many of the financial innovations of recent years were not designed to increase operating profits for customers. Instead, they sought to avoid taxes, or make accounting statements look prettier, or get around regulations seeking financial safety. At their worst, they boiled down to an offer to charge a customer a dime for letting him evade 20 cents in taxes. Such transfers do nothing for the larger society.

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Both parties are corrupted by the large sums of money being pumped into Washington. It is so easy to see who is doing the bidding of their corporate masters. Thus, nothing will be done over the next few years to really change the dynamic. In fact, I expect things to get worse and that the thing people really care about, jobs, will continue to be secondary to bolstering Wall Street.

I expect this to be the real realignment divide between those who want corporations to continue to have all the rights that citizens have with none of the responsibilities and those who want actual living human beings to come first.. Either a Republican Party that can foster another Roosevelt or a Democratic Party that can foster another Roosevelt.

I just hope the corruption of corporations can be reduced to a molehill instead of a mountain. And soon.

If not, America will not be much of a leader in much of anything.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Government

Living by rumor

Making Stuff Up:
[Via Eschaton]

Get used to a neverending stream of horseshit.

Getting like the 90s again.

[More]

What do facts matter when rumor is so much more useful? Some people will just spread any old rumor without giving any thought at all to its veracity. Some of them are even called journalists. But not by anyone who actually cares about things like the truth.

And these lies will stay with a whole lot of people because a supposed authority figure told them it was true. Even when revealed to be false. But you can be sure that emails detailing this thesis will be making the rounds.

I guess Snopes.com will always exist to deal with this sort of matter, as if any of these guys ever check the facts. Reality-based views of the world apparently just do not work for a sizable fraction of Americans.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Why Fox News needs fact checking

by Rob Lee

Fox News Outfoxes Itself:
[Via Talking Points Memo]

If you’ve had Fox News on today, you’ve seen them cranking up the indignation machine over a supposed new incident between the network and the White House. The claim is that the White House denied Fox the same access other networks had to a press briefing at the Treasury Department yesterday. But we’ve looked into it, and it turns out that’s not what happened. Christina Bellantoni has the details on how a miscommunication over the TV pool feed has Fox playing First Amendment victim.

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Fox News, and a ton of reporters that never bothered to find out what happened, spent Friday claiming foul. Yet, according not only to the White House but also to people who were there, it was nothing of the kind.

Looks like some MSM were punked. Like Rush and Obama’s thesis. Or it would seem so unless you also had a better memory.

What is amazing to me is how many so-called journalists just fell in line with Fox, needing no other verification, yet, when the Bush white House was excoriating MSNBC, the crickets made more noise than the MSM.

I would rather believe that most reporters are simply incompetent rather than they take their marching orders from their corporate owners. I think one reason the MSM are failing is that they no longer select for good reporters. Edward R. Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley etc. got to the top because they were good reporters.

No more. Actually being good is more likely to get you a quick boot out the door. Read a book called Good Work or follow the Good Work Project. They show again and again that the veteran journalists, the ones who mainly got into the field because of the work of the earlier great reporters, who wanted to help create an informed citizenry, are finding those principles are no longer wanted in their business.

What is wanted is a focus on the bottom line, on bread and circuses. Thus we get hours devoted to something that was an obvious hoax to many at the time, with no real investigation into that possibility at all during those hours. The only reason it took off was the admission of a child hours later.

Shiny sells. And explaining does nothing for the bottom line. In fact, outright lying works much better. Not too many years ago, Fox won an appeal in which they stated that they had a First Amendment right to lie. That there was no law forcing hem to tell the truth.

Fox fired two reporters who refused to allow statements that they knew to be false into a telecast. They were fired. They sued for unlawful termination, winning in a jury trial. But they lost on appeal. The court said that there was nothing illegal with Fox presenting falsehoods!

It is enough to make you think that anyone who believes Fox is a legitimate news channel also believes wrestling is a legitimate sport.

They have a right to be viewed as the entertainment channel they mostly are. But just as we would not follow WWE because it represented an unfiltered view of an athletic endeavor, Fox should not be viewed as an unbiased source of news.

Money is more important than truth

by kevindooley
Fewer Americans convinced global warming is real:
[Via CEJournal]

The percentage of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the Earth is warming dropped sharply during the past year, according to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center For the People and the Press.

At the same time, there has been an almost equal decline in the percentage of Americans who say [...]

[More]

Well, there certainly has been little in the science to cause such a drop, not only that humans are involved in climate change but that climate change is even happening at all. There have been no new, outstanding facts to cause this rapid change in opinion.

And this is truly a partisan issue. A majority of Republicans (57%) do not believe that climate change is happening at all. Only 17% of the Democrats feel that way. Half of all Democrats see the human cause behind these changes. Only 18% of Republicans do.

I would submit that the main thing that has happened has been a full court press by industries and organizations directly involved in carbon dioxide release.

Much like the tobacco industries spent decades trying to confuse people about the actual dangers of cigarette smoking, these groups are trying to do the same for climate change. Take a complex subject and make it even harder to understand. It kept the tobacco industry going full speed ahead for half a century. Truth is not what they seek. Profit it.

And they are much better funded than those who seek the truth. Deniers often are.

Luckily, not all corporations fell this way, as we have seen recently with those who disagree with the Chamber of Commerce. Let’s hope some of them do some things to combat the misinformation.

Because, the data shows that the world has warmed significantly over the last 150 years. Public opinion polls do not change those facts.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Science

Why we are so screwed

Questioning Moody’s:
[Via Balloon Juice]

Every now and then some journalism breaks out across this fair nation:

As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody’s Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody’s punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody’s promoted executives who headed its “structured finance” division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: “toxic assets.”

Read the whole damning report. And can I say it is about damned time. There is a pulitzer here.

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There is just no accountability in the financial sector. They refuse to do the right thing, refuse to any reasonable regulation, fire those who see both moral and financial problems with the current situation and promote those who caused the problem.

Punishing those who were right and rewarding those that were responsible for the collapse. What an immoral business full of unethical human beings.

If they can not take care of their own business, and they continue to do things that will be harmful to the economy and to the rest of us, then perhaps government should step in. There does not appear to be anyone else who can. These guys will not regulate themselves and really do not care what the rest of us think.

Technorati Tags: Politics

CBO comes pretty close

The papers are full of news about the ‘record high’ budget deficit announced this week. But very little of this deficit is due to Obama at all. In fact, one could make the case that Obama’s efforts resulted in a smaller deficit than expected.

Last January, when Obama was President-elect, the CBO came out with an estimate for the 2009 budget year. Based on Bush’s policies, such as TARP (which added almost $700 billion), they projected the deficit to be $1.2 trillion. And this does not include the $800 billion stimulus package, which is spread out over two years.

So, the expected amount would be around $1.6 trillion. The current $1.4 trillion is a pretty close to that projection, but indicates that Obama’s policies may actually have saved the US a couple of trillion, based on the January CBO numbers.

By whatever token, the budget deficit is lower than most projections. Assuming the deficit really matters since people in each party keep changing their minds depending who is in the White House.