The terrific climate cartoonist Marc Roberts has a humorous take on this post: Scientists advising fossil fuel funded anti-climate group concluded in 1995: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of GHGs such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.” Click to enlarge.
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Last week, the White House increased the pressure to pass President Obama’s budget proposal this week by keeping the reconciliation language in place that would allow the budget — and the essential health care reforms it includes — to pass with 51 rather than 60 Senate votes.
Adding his voice to the conservative hysteria over the use of reconciliation, former senator Rick Santorum declared today that such a move would “short-circuit the process” and “has never been done before”:
SANTORUM: What the Democrats have done is to try to short-circuit the process on a major piece of legislation. This has never been done before. We have never seen a major, long-term, policy prescription, whether it’s Medicare, or go back throughout history and look at all the major pieces of legislation, none of them have ever been passed using this procedure. … This is truly an abomination.
Listen to it:
Of course, reconciliation has been used nearly 20 times since 1980, when it was first created. The New Republic notes that using reconciliation to pass health care reform fits into the historical pattern. “Whether reducing or increasing deficits, many of the reconciliation bills made major changes in policy. Health insurance portability (COBRA), nursing home standards, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increases in the earned income tax credit, welfare reform, the state Children’s Health Insurance Program, major tax cuts and student aid reform were all enacted under reconciliation procedures.”
Indeed, Santorum himself was the Senate Republicans’ point man in trying to push welfare reform through budget reconciliation in 1995, including it in a budget then-President Clinton opposed, as the Washington Post reported on Nov. 11, 1995:
But the welfare measures will be part of the overall reconciliation bill that Clinton has said he will veto.
Welfare reform may become a free-standing bill to be passed separately from the reconciliation measure. “This is a bill the president has absolutely no reason not to sign,” said Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who acted as an intermediary in negotiations between the House and Senate on welfare.
Arguing that budget reconciliation is the key to enacting meaningful health care reform, the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky wrote, “14,000 Americans are losing their health care coverage every single day and, instead of seriously considering the President’s proposal, Republicans are busy painting health care reform in red.”
Last week, House and Senate negotiators “struck a tentative deal” on the FY 2010 budget, including an agreement to use the reconciliation process to push through health care legislation. Under this process, the bill would be “protected from filibusters and passed by a simple majority vote.” Democrats have made clear that they would prefer to use the normal process, but are unable to proceed because of GOP obstruction. However, until recently, some Democrats — such as Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) — still resisted.
Conrad is one of the Democrats who has been chosen to serve on the budget conference committee, which is set to have a formal meeting today and then continue closed-door negotiations on Friday and through the weekend. “One outstanding question is what Conrad may get in exchange for not standing in the way of reconciliation provisions,” CQ wrote last week. Conrad, in reply, said, “Would I want things? Yeah.”
Ezra Klein worried that Conrad had “extracted promises that the administration would let him start tinkering with Social Security.” Yglesias pointed out that Rep. Allen Boyd (D-FL) is also a confereee, and was the only Democrat to support President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security in 2005. Klein added:
That gives means five of eight conferees — Conrad, Boyd, Gregg, Ryan, and Hensarling — would be inclined to muck about with Social Security. It’s not solid evidence that Social Security is vulnerable. But when combined with Conrad’s odd quote above, it’s suggestive.
Today, however, ThinkProgress interviewed Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), who was at the Center for American Progress to speak about Equal Pay Day 2009. DeLauro is also one of the eight budget conferees, and she said that the group would not be tinkering with Social Security:
DELAURO: As far as my understanding is concerned, is that there is not going to be any reference to Social Security. Social Security will be a discussion that will come in our overall health care debate, but my understanding is that at the moment, it is not part of the budget conference.
Watch it:
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) recently downplayed the threat of global warming by arguing that the harmful pollutant carbon dioxide is simply a “natural byproduct of nature.” Following the same logic, Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson writes:
There’s no evidence man-made CO2, even if it increases temperatures, is harmful. Indeed, some argue that warmer climes would benefit mankind by increasing crop productivity and reducing deaths from severe cold. None of that matters when government is intent on forcing change.
Climate Progress’s Joe Romm notes that the Washington Post op-ed pages also feature the rantings of global warming deniers George Will and Charles Krauthammer, in addition to Samuelson. The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson writes, “One wonders when their paymasters, Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt and Writers Group editor Alan Shearer, are going to get embarrassed.”
Following an inquiry by the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson, the Orange County Register updated the column’s attribution. The column was not written by Robert J. Samuelson, but was written by the Orange County Register editorial board. In his latest column for the Washington Post, Samuelson did not in fact deny global warming, but instead argued that the “selling of the green economy involves much economic make-believe.” Apologies to Mr. Samuelson.
A very interesting point from my CAP colleagues David Min and Joshua Picker who observe that the Obama administration’s decision not to publicly disclose the results of the “stress tests” has created huge potential opportunities for insider trading. This will be especially problematic since not only are the results of the tests unknown, but the public doesn’t know who has the results “or what proscriptions were placed on the communication of this information, other than that there was a ‘gag order’ against leaks to the press.”
Consequently, it’s hard to know who we should even be watching. At a minimum, this information needs to be forwarded to the SEC and to the TARP Inspector-General so that in the period between now and the May 4 release to the general public we can have some heightened scrutiny.
UPDATE: Because it seemed unusual that Samuelson had written a column only for the Orange County Register, the Wonk Room contacted the OC Register editors to confirm Samuelson was indeed the author of the denier column critiqued below. The VP of Commentary, Cathy Taylor, informed the Wonk Room that the Samuelson byline that appeared on the website was an error. This editorial was written by the OC Register board, not by the Samuelson. The Wonk Room regrets propagating the error.
Washington Post and Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson has aligned himself with George Will, Michele Bachmann, and Glenn Beck, utterly denying the reality of man-made global warming. In a column published by the Orange County Register, Samuelson attacked the California Air Resources Board’s (ARB) new low-carbon fuel standard as a “fanciful ‘solution’ to so-called global warming“:
This is government by administrative decree from unelected ARB board members, administrators and staff, who concocted a fanciful “solution” to so-called global warming, an increasingly disputed phenomenon that hasn’t occurred for at least a decade. Nevertheless, by a 9-1 vote the ARB deemed it urgent enough to demand a 10-percent reduction in carbon dioxide that fuel producers release into the atmosphere on the theory -– also unproven -– that CO2 increases temperatures. Reality inconveniently contradicts the theory. CO2 has risen over the past decade, but global temperatures have declined, precisely the opposite of what the theory contends.
Samuelson even goes farther, mirroring Michele Bachmann’s bizarre rant that carbon dioxide is “harmless”:
There’s no evidence man-made CO2, even if it increases temperatures, is harmful. Indeed, some argue that warmer climes would benefit mankind by increasing crop productivity and reducing deaths from severe cold. None of that matters when government is intent on forcing change.
Samuelson has decided to go from being “hackish” to loony — evidently believing that there is a global conspiracy involving the Bush White House, the Obama administration, the National Academy of Sciences, the governments of nearly every nation on Earth, and thousands upon thousands of scientists and economists. As the director general of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization wrote in the editorial pages of the Washington Post, “The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.”
H/T Climate Progress, where Joe Romm notes that Washington Post columnists Samuelson, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer are all global warming deniers:
So this now means the Washington Post has three major columnists who are all global warming deniers — a record that must be the envy of the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal.
One wonders when their paymasters, Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt and Writers Group editor Alan Shearer, are going to get embarrassed.
With Democrats holding out the possibility that they could use the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform by a majority vote, conservatives have been hypocritically decrying the tactic as “as an act of violence” against the minority party. In a budget meeting today, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) compared the potential use of reconciliation to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s strong-arm tactics:
With a mix of cutting terms and dire warnings, Republicans expressed outrage over the prospect of employing the procedural process known as reconciliation to pass such a major policy initiative.
Senator Judd Gregg, alluding to the recent encounter between President Obama and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, accused the White House and Congressional Democrats of abusing their power. “I can understand shaking Hugo Chavez’s hand, but I can’t understand embracing his politics,” said Mr. Gregg of New Hampshire, the senior Republican on the Budget Committee.
As ThinkProgress has previously noted, Gregg supported the use of reconciliation when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House. “We are using the rules of the Senate here,” said Gregg in 2005 as he defended using reconciliation to open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. “Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don’t think so.”
Dayo Olopade reports on the slow rollout and diminished stature of Barack Obama’s once-promising Office of Urban Policy inside the White House. She observes that this especially matters in the context of the Recovery Act:
But the urgency of dealing with the recession in these first 100 days has made the slow rollout of the office worrisome for some local officials. Caroline Coleman, federal relations director of the National League of Cities, says cities have been pummeled by the economic downturn. For the first time in the 24-year history of the organization’s City Fiscal Conditions report, the three primary sources of revenue for urban centers—property, sales and income taxes—all experienced a quarterly decrease. “What we’re seeing reflected in the national news is hitting hometown urban America every day,” says Coleman.
Under the Recovery Act, federal funding is flooding state governments—by formula and through competitive grants. A robust and powerful Office of Urban Policy, local leaders say, could handle city-specific conflicts that currently fly under the White House’s radar.
One big institutional issue in American life is that while any number of state governments are primarily oriented toward rural issues basically all of the states that include large cities are primarily suburban in their orientation. Consequently, the tendency is for money to flow through state capitals that refract it out to the fringes of metropolitan areas. A strong voice for cities in the White House could do a great deal to correct that, but it looks like we don’t yet have one up and running.
Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) asked President Obama to release several classified memos referenced in a recent interview by former Vice President Dick Cheney, claiming that the memos could show that the Bush administration’s torture program was effective in gathering intelligence.
Over the weekend, however, McClatchy reported that the CIA Inspector General (IG) found in a still-classified 2004 report “that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any ‘specific imminent attacks.’” The IG concluded that “waterboarding was riskier than officials claimed and reported that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services thought that the risk to the health of some prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit.”
In response to the McClatchy piece, Greg Sargent asked Boehner’s office if the Minority Leader would be requesting that Obama also declassify the 2004 IG report. Boehner’s office responded by suggesting that such a request would be “cherry-picking for political purposes“:
Decisions about whether or not to release information regarding our bipartisan efforts to gather intelligence on the terrorist threat over the past eight years should be based on what’s best for our security, not cherry-picked for political purposes. The American people deserve to make their judgments based on the full set of facts.
In refusing to endorse releasing any documents that might demonstrate that his support for the Bush administration’s use of torture was misguided, Boehner is himself ensuring that Americans won’t be able to “make their judgments based on the full set of facts.”
More to the point, Boehner’s accusations of “cherry picking” come on the same day that he called for the CIA to release classified documents showing when and what Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew about the Bush administration’s use of torture. As Glenn Thrush reports, in calling for the Pelosi details to be released, “[t]he GOP is hoping to spotlight the fact that Pelosi and other Democrats raised few objections when told about details of the Bush administration ‘enhanced interrogations’ of terror suspects.” In other words, Boehner wants to declassify the documents for the “political purposes” that Boehner’s spokesman decried earlier today.
To be sure, the public should know exactly what and when the congressional leadership knew about the Bush administration’s use of torture. But the public should also know what the CIA’s IG had to say about it as well. Anything less is not the “full set of facts.”
The Centers for Disease Control sensibly suggests that in these times of swine flu, if you get sick you should stay home rather than spread the disease to your coworkers:
Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people. If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
Which is nice for those people whose employers provide them with paid sick days. But as Pat Garofalo points out not that many people have employers who provide them with paid sick days:
Currently, nearly 50 percent of private-sector workers have no paid sick days. For low-income workers, the number jumps to 76 percent, and climbs to 86 percent for food service workers. These workers have to decide between the health of themselves and their co-workers, and the wages that they lose by staying home.
In other words, on any given day a large proportion of sick food service workers are going to find themselves unable to afford to take the day off, endangering the health of everyone else. This bill from Ted Kennedy and Rosa DeLauro would “guarantee workers up to seven paid sick days a year to recover from an illness or care for a sick family member.”
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