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Right-wing’s false claims that Obama will take away guns ‘has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms.’

By Faiz Shakir on Apr 4, 2009 at 11:46 pm

In Pittsburgh today, a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on police officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance call, killing three of them. Many bloggers have noted that the shooter, 23-year old Richard Poplawski, irrationally feared for “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” In a presciently-timed op-ed, Charles Blow warns of the disturbing escalating rhetoric of right-wingers like Chuck Norris, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, and others:

guns.jpgLately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias. [...]

At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.

Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling. (Where’s that Pepto-Bismol?!)

John Cole wrote, “Sure, crazy people do crazy things. But that doesn’t make it responsible to encourage them, which is what a lot of really foolish people are doing right now for purely political reasons.”

Yglesias

Legalization Stimulus

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 4, 2009 at 5:29 pm

Here’s one idea:

Of course there are many illegal markets that would generate stimulus were they to be legalized. Here are some of the big ones.

1. Drugs
2. Guns
3. Prostitution (except in Nevada)
4. Gay prostitution (even in Nevada)
5. Gambling
6. Trade with Cuba
7. Liberalized immigration

I’ve heard a lot of that kid of thing lately, but though I’d be a supporter of several of the items suggested on the list, I’m a bit skeptical of the theory. These all sounds to me like things that would do more to raise the potential output of the economy than to raise the actual output of an economy that’s producing far less than capacity right now.

This is probably clearest with immigration. When the economy is growing and labor markets are tight, lots of immigrants want to come here and keeping them out carries a real economic price. But right now there’s extremely little hiring and plenty of jobless people to choose from. Letting more people come would have some effect, I suppose, but it’s hard to see it being a dramatic one. With regard to things like drugs and prostitution, bringing some transactions that are already happening into the above-ground economy would certainly boost our GDP measurements. But these are transactions that are already happening. Shifting them from the illicit to the licit economy doesn’t actually change the fact that there are already people in America earning a living as prostitutes or pimps or drug dealers.

Yglesias

Guarding Your Interests

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 4, 2009 at 3:24 pm

Like most Americans, you’ve probably been worried lately that financial firm executives don’t get paid enough and that there’s a need for more of the vast quantities of public money flowing to their firms to take a “no strings attached” form. Fortunately, Barack Obama and his team agree, so they’re working with big finance to help find loopholes to evade congressional restrictions on the activities of bailed out firms.

Climate Progress

Good news, bad news, webstats, and the anti-scientific deniers at WattsUpWithThat

By Joe Romm on Apr 4, 2009 at 2:14 pm

The good news is that March seems to have set a record in traffic, with more than 150,000 unique visitors and about 300,000 visits.  I probably had some 1.4 million page views.

I use two hedges “probably” and some” because Webstats — especially page views — are, of course, notoriously hard to quantify and different software gives you different numbers.  I use Google analytics Urchin 6 for page views, which is supposed to be pretty accurate .

The bad news is that the anti-scientific denialist website, WattsUpWithThat, from retired TV weatherman Anthony Watts, just noted, “Another record month at WUWT“:

This month was 1,478,801 page views. This is up significantly from both January (1,324,097) and February (1,168,852).

I see no trace of intentional humor in Watts’ statement, but it is unintentionally quite ironic.  Watts, of course, spends a great deal of time attacking NASA for supposedly asserting a false precision in its temperature data.  NASA’s data, however, has many independent checks — and is supported by vast quantities of observations on global warming (see, for instance, “World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year” and “AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003“).

It is absurd to publish one’s page views to 7 significant digits without caveats — even 2 is stretching it.  Yes, the fact that your web stats program shows an increase in page views from month to month is reasonable evidence they may in fact be rising — but of course the fact that your temperature stations show an increase from year to year are apparently not any evidence that temperatures are rising, even if confirmed by multiple independent sources.

Interestingly, there is one independent source that suggests Watts’ page views and mine are in fact the same (and hence possibly around 1.4 million).  If you go to the Web traffic ranking and comparison site Alexa, go to page views, and type in wattsupwiththat.com, you’ll get this graph:

So at best I am just negating the disinformation Watts is spreading.  Sigh.  And lest there be any doubt, WattsUpWithThat is in fact an extremist anti-scientific denialist website, as his recent posts make clear.

Read more

Security

Obama Responds To Afghan Law That Legalizes Rape: ‘I Think This Law Is Abhorrent’

By Faiz Shakir on Apr 4, 2009 at 12:45 pm

At a news conference in Strasbourg, France, this morning, President Obama discussed NATO efforts in Afghanistan and secured the commitment of NATO allies to send 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Fox News’ Major Garrett asked Obama what he thinks of a new Afghanistan law that legalizes rape. The legislation, which applies to the country’s Shia population, contains this provision:

“As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night,” Article 132 of the law says. “Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband.”

In a written statement, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), said the law “legalizes the rape of a wife by her husband. … The law violates women’s rights and human rights in numerous ways.”

This morning, Obama said, “I think this law is abhorrent” and that his administration’s views are being communicated to the Karzai government. “We have stated very clearly that we object to this law.” But Obama added, the priority for the U.S. right now is al Qaeda. “But I want everybody to understand that our focus is to defeat al Qaeda and ensure that they do not have safe havens from which they can launch attacks against the Alliance.” Watch it:

The Afghanistan law poses a difficult diplomatic challenge for Obama and for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said recently, “Women’s rights are a central part of American foreign policy in the Obama Administration; they are not marginal; they are not an add-on or an afterthought.”

President Karzai said he ordered his Justice Ministry to review the law, and if anything in it contravenes the country’s constitution or Shariah law, “measures will be taken.” But he added that he had studied the law earlier in the day and, “I don’t see any problems with it.”

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Depressed About PPIP All Over Again

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 4, 2009 at 12:26 pm

I’d been coming around to the view that the PPIP plan, whatever its shortcomings, is really about the best we could do. This business about banks possibly just swapping toxic assets and proclaiming them now valuable, however, is really distressing. As Felix Salmon says:

Looked at this way, the combination of letting banks bid on each others’ toxic assets, along with the weakening of mark-to-market rules, will serve to maximize opacity, minimize the chances that insolvent banks will be revealed as such, and render the government’s stress tests an exercise in rubber-stamping utterly unrealistic balance sheets. The risks of a Japan-style lost decade seem higher than ever.

Meanwhile, this look at Larry Summers’ multi-million dollar income mostly derived from financial firms in exchange for vaguely defined services is once again a reminder that the people running our policy have a level of personal ties to and affinity for the world of big finance that the rest of us lack.

Economy

Mortgage Modifications Hitting Roadblocks, As Cram-Down Bill Languishes In Senate

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 4, 2009 at 12:02 pm

ap080827022858.jpgThanks to the efforts of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and others, a bill allowing bankruptcy judges to cram-down mortgage payments for troubled homeowners hasn’t seen the light of day since it passed the House in early March. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is actually thinking of pulling the cram-down provision from the legislation, since it has met such fierce resistance, fueled by a misinformation campaign based on Mortgage Bankers Association talking points.

Cram-downs were meant to go hand-in-hand with the rest of the Obama administration’s housing plan. Under the Obama plan, lenders and servicers are given incentives to modify mortgages, while the threat of a cram-down would encourage them to make modifications that actually helped homeowners stay out of bankruptcy.

According to new data released on Friday, lenders are not yet doing a bang up job on the modification front. First, the Wall Street Journal noted that Obama’s housing plan “has hit a stumbling block: a fight over how to aid borrowers who have more than one home loan”:

The Treasury Department, scrambling to address the problem, is trying to persuade lenders to forgive or greatly reduce so-called second liens. But that effort has sparked a fight between investors who own securities backed by first mortgages and banks that hold second mortgages over how losses should be shared. A failure to resolve the impasse could blunt the impact of President Barack Obama’s housing plan.

Meanwhile, in “the most detailed and broad analysis to date” of the efforts to stem foreclosures, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found that “fewer than half of loan modifications made at the end of last year actually reduced borrowers’ payments by more than 10 percent“:

The report helps explain why many loans are falling back into default after being modified. Many borrowers and consumer groups contend that the modifications offered by the lending industry aren’t very generous, despite more than a year of public prodding from regulators. For instance, nearly one in four loan modifications in the fourth quarter actually resulted in increased monthly payments.

A study released last week by the Center for Community Capital found that the Obama housing plan combined with bankruptcy reform allowing cram-downs can significantly lower the rate of mortgage defaults. But instead of working to get cram-down legislation through Congress, Bayh and his merry band of agenda-less “moderates” are cutting taxes for the heirs of multi-millionaires.

Yglesias

A Bayh-less Bayh Bunch?

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 4, 2009 at 10:40 am

bayh.jpg

Ed Kilgore offers the provocative suggestion that perhaps the “practical caucus” would be better off without its fearless leader:

Best as I can tell, Bayh’s vote was motivated by a sincere horror of deficits and debt, which is so strong that he doesn’t mind abandoning his party and indeed, his fellow “centrists” on what was, after all, the most epochal budget vote since at least 1993 and probably since 1981. For that very reason, he ought to step back from his leadership role in the Senate “centrist” group, in favor of senators whose agreement with and loyalty to the Obama agenda is much less in question. If this group remains the “Bayh group,” it will struggle to achieve the credibility it needs to become anything other than a crude power bloc looking to shake down the administration and the congressional leadership for personal, ideological, and special-interest favors.

Still not sure about this explanation of Bayh’s “no” vote. After all, someone horrified by the prospect of increased deficits wouldn’t be pushing for estate tax cuts. More broadly, someone specifically horrified by deficits would be concerned not only about reducing spending but about increasing revenues. I, for one, am inclined to agree that the long-term deficits envisioned in the Obama administration’s budget plan are too high. I would advocate lower spending on the defense side than Obama’s envisioning, and more revenue through any of a number of possible mechanisms. Bayh, by contrast, seems to have a rather one-sided aversion to spending on domestic programs.

That’s not a unique sentiment in the United States congress, but it’s a curious belief set for a Democrat.

Climate Progress

George Will’s Latest Denier Column Links To Global Boiling Document

By Brad Johnson on Apr 4, 2009 at 9:02 am

A day late for an April fool’s joke, George Will returned Thursday to Fred Hiatt’s editorial pages at the Washington Post to attack climate science and lightbulbs. He repeats a variant of his lie about the U.N. World Meteorological Organization’s temperature record, writing that “according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization [WMO], there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.”

In a marked improvement from his previous lie-filled columns, this misleading claim now includes a link to the WMO’s latest publication about the status of global climate (2007), which states:

– The size of the uncertainties is such that the global average temperature for 2007 is statistically indistinguishable from each of the nine warmest years on record.

— January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.

– The linear warming trend over the past 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the past 100 years.

– Global averaged sea level continued to rise through 2006 and 2007.

– At the end of the melt season, the Arctic sea ice extent was 39 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 and 23 per cent below the previous record set in 2005.

– Since 1960, the thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice caps are the largest contributions to sea-level rise. There has also been an increasing contribution from surface melt from the Greenland ice sheet over this period. These contributions are directly related to recent climate change.

Furthermore, the WMO recorded the “record-breaking temperature anomalies throughout the world,” “severe to extreme drought,” “extreme flooding,” a “new worldwide record rainfall,” and “unusual sea-surface temperature patterns”:

WMO Climate Anomalies 2007
Significant climate anomalies and events in 2007. Click to enlarge. Chart: WMO. Data: NOAA.

While the Washington Post takes right-wing oil money to syndicate George Will’s lies in carbon-based newsprint across the nation, the World Wide Web has responded.

This column, Media Matters notes, comes less than two weeks after Fred Hiatt published a letter from the WMO Secretary-General calling Will’s “no recorded global warming for more than a decade” claim “a misrepresentation of the data and of scientific knowledge.”

“I’m all for newspapers giving their columnists latitude,” Jon Chait opines, “but at some point I wonder if some very basic, low level of factual knowledge ought to be required to propound upon a topic in their pages.”

Turning up the heat, Joe Romm calls for Hiatt to be fired, and Matt Yglesias argues that “anyone working at The Washington Post or in conservative journalism who has a shred of intellectual conscience has a duty to stand up to this kind of nonsense.”

Update

At Get Energy Smart, A. Siegel relates how Will’s new discussion of compact fluorescent light bulbs is riddled with errors and misinformation.


Update

,FAIR‘s Peter Hart asks: “Is it possible for the Washington Post to be embarrassed by George Will?”

The Way Things Break asks a different question: “Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt and George Will: Stupid, lying, or craven?”


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