A Change in the Wind

Sarah Palin's to Run on "Drill Baby Drill" Platform

As predicted in this space a week or so ago, Sarah Palin is running for president on a pro-oil and gas development platform.

In the the next few months and years, assuming she doesn't flip out and self-destruct, she's going to become Ms. Drill Baby Drill.

Inevitably, she will ignore or mock global warming. She has no choice. Her whole career is predicated on business as usual, pollution as usual, fossil fuels now and forever, more and more, and devil take the hindmost. As she (or, more likely, her flack) wrote in the Washington Post today:

Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source. Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.

Wow. Forget about the strangely fractured sentence construction. Just notice the pro-coal, pro-oil and gas, pro-nuke stance. She might as well call for more for more global warming right now, instead of simply pretending the problem doesn't exist, as she does by not mentioning it once in the op-ed.

Grist's editor Russ Walker put together an answer to Palin on Grist, but to yours truly, what stands out is not Palin's misleading claims. (What else is new with her?)

What stands out is her self-centered assumption that support for fossil fuel production and consumption will make her popular, as if global warming simply isn't happening.

After all, what could matter more than this?

Update: Think Progress points out that a few months ago, Palin supported cap and trade.

Palin to Run on Oil Development Platform in 2012

Really. Outside of her flaming display of hurt feelings, it's about the only thing that makes any kind of sense in her resignation "statement" (if we are so generous as to characterize it in that way).

(You'll have to ignore the eccentric capitalization and odd verb choices; clearly, Palin without a speechwriter is like Bush on steroids -- all the malapropisms, but none of the focus.)

We aggressively and responsibly develop our resources because they were created to be used to better our world... to HELP people... and we protect the environment and Alaskans (the resource owners) foremost with our policies.

Here's some of the things we've done:

We created a petroleum integrity office to oversee safe development. We held the line FOR Alaskans on Point Thomson - and finally for the first time in decades - they're drilling for oil and gas.

We have AGIA, the gasline project - a massive bi-partisan victory (the vote was 58 to 1!) - also succeeding as intended - protecting Alaskans as our clean natural gas will flow to energize us, and America, through a competitive, pro-private sector project. This is the largest private sector energy project, ever. THIS is energy independence.

And ACES - another bipartisan effort - is working as intended and industry is publicly acknowledging its success. Our new oil and gas "clear and equitable formula" is so Alaskans will no longer be taken advantage of. ACES incentivizes NEW exploration and development and JOBS that were previously not going to happen with a monopolized North Slope oil basin.

In other words, Palin's most noteworthy accomplishments as a governor, according to Palin herself,  all relate to oil and natural gas development.

Logically, one can only conclude that this will be her platform for a national run. "Drill, Baby, Drill II."

And then she concludes:

In the words of General MacArthur said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

Wow. Steve Brodner takes a look at this craziness and makes the suddenly obvious connection to another flaming narcissist:

Sarah Palin Makes Fun of an Old Man

From an interview with Sarah Palin in Runner's World:

"I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, 'I go wading.' Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up."

No wonder the McCain campaign is still pissed.

On Hypocritical Philandering Right-Wing Politicians

Such as Nevada senator John Ensign; well, I'm with Matt Taibbi.

 [pic of the Senator with Miss Nevada USA for 2006, Tiffany, from 2006 Nevada Queens]

He had an affair with a campaign aide, not Tiffany, but as Taibbi said:

I am going to really enjoy the inevitable media fragging Senator John Ensign is going to take because of his holier-than-thou attitude during the Lewinsky scandal, when he called on Clinton to resign for having an affair. What’s especially delicious about this is that Ensign back then and during the Larry Craig scandal played the “Because of these bad apples, even God-fearing, recreational-sex-disdaining politicians like me are now going to be called sexual deviants” card. He’s sold that angle hard on a number of occasions (”There’s too many people that paint with a broad brush that we’re all corrupt, all amoral,” he once said).  He said a lot of stuff, and it’s all going to be dragged back out now and shoved in his defeated, suddenly elderly face.

Or as my old pal Jack Vacek used to say: "These Republicans, they like to pretend they don't have dicks."

Okay, time to draw the curtains...yours truly is off to Big Sur for an anniversary with the missus. Back Monday. See you then (virtually)...

Lefty vs. Lefty: Was Economic Crash Reagan's Fault?

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said yes it was, in a column called Reagan Did It:

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years... We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

Old-school Robert Scheer, in a column called Reagan Didn't Do It, says no -- Clinton-era hacks did it:

Ronald Reagan’s signing off on legislation easing mortgage requirements back in 1982 pales in comparison to the damage wrought 15 years later by a cabal of powerful Democrats and Republicans who enabled the wave of newfangled financial gimmicks that resulted in the economic collapse.

Reagan didn’t do it, but Clinton-era Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now being paid for with tax dollars.

Reagan signed legislation making it easier for people to obtain mortgages with lower down payments, but as long as the banks that made those loans expected to have to carry them for 30 years they did the due diligence needed to qualify creditworthy applicants. The problem occurred only when that mortgage debt could be aggregated and sold as securities to others in an unregulated market.

The growth in that unregulated OTC market alarmed Brooksley Born, the Clinton-appointed head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and she dared propose that her agency regulate that market. The destruction of the government career of the heroic and prescient Born was accomplished when the wrath of the old boys club descended upon her. All five of the above mentioned men sprang into action, condemning Born’s proposals as threatening the “legal certainty” of the OTC market and the world’s financial stability.

They won the day with the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which put the OTC derivatives beyond the reach of any government agency or existing law. It was a license to steal, and that is just what occurred. Between 1998 and 2008, the notational value of the OTC derivatives market grew from $72 trillion to a whopping $684 trillion. That is the iceberg that our ship of state has encountered, and it began to form on Bill Clinton’s watch, not Reagan’s.

Hmmmm...think Scheer may have won this round. Fascinating to see two men who despise Reagan  bicker over his legacy. Was he not always so bad? Be interesting to hear more from Brooksley Born...

[pic from the Reagan library]

Charting Republican Denial

The Rush Limbaugh effect?

From Kevin Drum. As he says..."just kill me now."

Somalia: How Environmental Piracy Led to Pirate Attacks

Yesterday Congressman Donald Payne (D-NJ) mentioned on NPR's All Things Considered that the pirates operating off the Somali coast grew out of chaos that descended on the region in the l990's. He said one of the costs of that chaos was environmental piracy -- overfishing and toxic dumping. To wit:

"What's happened in the country, of course — there's virtually been no employment because there's been no government," Payne says. The situation has allowed lawlessness to flourish.

On top of that, he notes, foreign vessels have depleted fish in the area, and foreign ships have used the waters off the coast of Somalia as dumping grounds for toxic waste for years. "No one wants toxic waste in their country," Payne says.

Some experts trace the rise of piracy in Somalia, in part, to fed-up fishermen who organized to fight illegal fishing and dumping, before discovering the lucrative benefits of piracy.

This fits well with what a Somali pirate named Sugule Ali told The New York Times over the weekend: He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood.

“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

Of course one can't take criminal self-justifications too seriously, but Somali diplomats partially back the pirate's claim:

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

“From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”

By the early 2000s, many of the fishermen had traded in their nets for machine guns and were hijacking any vessel they could catch: sailboat, oil tanker, United Nations-chartered food ship.

“It’s true that the pirates started to defend the fishing business,” Mr. Mohamed said. “And illegal fishing is a real problem for us. But this does not justify these boys to now act like guardians. They are criminals. The world must help us crack down on them.”

What do you suppose the chances are that environmental piracy will be mentioned on commercial TV or radio reports about these attacks?

(h/t: Treehugger...photo via War is Boring)

Weirdest Right-Wing Obama Taunt

Lately I've heard a new insult directed at Barack Obama by right-wing outlets...claiming that without his teleprompter, he's lost. Unable to pronounce words. Hopeless in front of a crowd with a mic.

No, I'm not kidding. The allegation is that Barack Obama is stupid. Take a look at this genius post from the super-popular right-wing site Powerline, which begins:

Everyone knows that Barack Obama is lost without his teleprompter...

...and goes on to mock him for mispronouncing a word. The post then puts up a YouTube rant, supposedly from the teleprompter to the Prez, in which "the one who bails your ass out night in and night out"  demands better treatment, a private heated compartment, top billing, etc.

Right. The President, who was mocked repeatedly by his Republican opponent during the fall debates for his "campaign of eloquence," now has been struck dumb, and cannot articulate his own thoughts.

This despite the fact that, for instance, a couple of weeks after taking office he took questions from the national press live for forty-five minutes, without a single misstep of the slightest consequence. 

To such a criticism this Democrat can only say: Wow.

With enemies like that, who needs friends?

Limbaugh's Popularity Dives, Hurts GOP

As reported previously, Democratic partisans James Carville and Paul Begala launched an attempt to anoint Rush Limbaugh the head of the GOP in the mind of the American public. This was possible because no one really knows who speaks for the GOP these days, as a poll, from Pew, (here) shows. The top contender is John McCain, at a measly 11%. Second is Limbaugh, at 5%.

It's clear the White House approved. On Monday, President Obama's press spokesperson said (here), reacting to the charge from Darth Vader (er. Dick Cheney) that Obama is weakening the nation:

"Well, I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy, so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal," Gibbs said.

Limbaugh took the bait and appointed himself chief spokesperson for the GOP. And it's helped him in his ratings (here). But though this may be good news for Limbaugh the broadcaster, it's terrible news for the GOP with the broader electorate, according to a new CBS News Poll:

Over the past few weeks, the White House has been casting right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh as the head of the Republican Party, and based on a new CBS News poll, it appears they may be onto something: According to the poll, Limbaugh’s favorable rating stands at just 19 percent, a full 43 points lower than President Obama’s.

Limbaugh’s unfavorable rating, meanwhile, stands at 40 percent, while 41 percent say they don’t know or don’t have an opinion. Not surprisingly, the conservative commentator, who has said he hopes that the president’s economic policies fail, is far more popular with Republicans – 47 percent view him favorably – than with Democrats, just seven percent of whom view him favorably, and Independents, just 14% of whom approve of Limbaugh.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Global Reality vs. George Will

Sunday in the Washington Post, in the news:

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sunday in the Washington Post, in George Will's opinion:

[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.

So Will concluded his misleading spew. (As one of my editors gently puts it: George Will is an Idiot.)

This is standard denier script, and -- as most of my readers probably already know -- it all goes back to the simple fact that we had a monstrously big El Nino event in l998, massively distributing warm energy from the Pacific around the world, and leading to a temperature spike that still stands as a highpoint in much of the temperature data (see James Hansen and the GISS).

Or, as the WMO said, contra Will:

The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century. [...] "For detecting climate change you should not look at any particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently long period of time. The current trend of temperature globally is very much indicative of warming," World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General, Mr Michel Jarraud said in response to media inquiries on current temperature "anomalies".

The problem for Will is that even though he pretends to quote the World Meteorological Organization, he can't actually listen to what they say about the trend because that would make him look like, yes, an idiot.

(h/t: TPM)