“Daily sea ice extent as of July 21. The solid blue line indicates 2009 … the purple line shows 2008; and the solid gray line indicates average extent from 1979 to 2000.”
The blogosphere and scientific community are all abuzz as to whether 2009 will beat 2007 in minimum Arctic sea ice area. See, for instance, RealClimate’s “Sea ice minimum forecasts.” But while the Arctic ice’s two-dimensional measurements are easier to make, the more important record is the three-dimensional one, which looks to have been set in 2008 (see NSIDC stunner: Arctic ice at “Likely Record-Low Volume” and below).
G. Gordon Liddy, the man behind the first Watergate break-in and founding father of the “wacko wing” of the Republican party is now claiming that President Obama is an “undocumented illegal alien.” This afternoon, an oddly “catatonoic” Liddy told Chris Matthews that he has a written deposition from President Obama’s step-grandmother where she says that Obama was born in a hospital in Mombasa:
MATTHEWS: He [Obama] wasn’t born here and he’s never gone through a naturalization that you know of, right?
LIDDY: Not that I know of.
MATTHEWS: Therefore he’s here illegally. You’re saying he’s an undocumented alien.
LIDDY: Illegal alien.
MATTHEWS: You’ve said he was born in the Kenyan slums. That means he’s an illegal alien. That means he’s not only illegally president, he’s illegal in the US and he ought to be picked up…by your account he’s illegally in the country…how would you claim he was born in the Kenyan slums? You say that as if it were a fact…Do we have any evidence it ever happened?…
LIDDY: Yeah, I’ve got the deposition of the step-grandmother who said she witnessed it.
Watch it:
Liddy is the promoter of several anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Last year, he claimed that immigrants come from Mexico because “they want to reconquer America.” When discussing the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor earlier this year, Liddy criticized her membership in the Latino civil rights group, National Council of La Raza. He said La Raza, in “illegal alien,” [Spanish] means “race.”
Update
On his radio show, Liddy frequently hosts “birther” Jerome Corsi to discuss his conspiracy theories.
What Liddy was referring to is actually an affidavit filed by a street preacher named Ron McRae, who conducted an interview with Sarah Obama, the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather, through a translator. (Sarah Obama is not the president’s biological grandmother, but he calls her “Granny Sarah.”)
In that interview, Sarah Obama does in fact say at one point that she was there for her grandson’s birth. But that was a mistake, a confusion in translation. As soon as a jubilant McRae began to press her for further details about her grandson being born in Kenya, the family realized the mistake and corrected him. And corrected him. And corrected him. (The audio is available for download here.)
Today, ThinkProgress Editor-in-Chief Faiz Shakir appeared on MSNBC opposite the Washington Examiner’s J.P. Freire to discuss President Obama’s handling of the economy. During the segment, Faiz brought up the fact that many conservative pundits have a habit of blaming stock market downturns on President Obama, a charge which Friere said was “made up”:
FAIZ: Remember back in October, November, December, January of this year, when Karl Rove and so many Republican pundits were going on TV and saying the market is failing because of President Obama? That the market was reacting because President Obama was now in office? What happened to that? Have their memories just completely been forgotten here?
FREIRE: I think that’s a brilliant strawman you made up. I can’t remember anyone saying that.
FAIZ: Are you kidding me?
The set reacted with uproarious laughter to Friere’s convenient memory loss. “I can’t believe JP doesn’t remember that,” said MSBNC’s Tamron Hall. “People were tracking the stock market and how many days Obama had been in office and comparing the two.” Co-host David Shuster chided Freire’s “selective amnesia.” Watch it:
For J.P.’s benefit, here’s a reminder of some right-wing rhetoric regarding Obama and the stock market:
KARL ROVE: “How much of it is the market saying, ‘You know what? The economy is not in a good place and we’re looking at the future, and how much confidence should we have in the team that’s coming to make the economy better?’” [Fox News, 11/20/08]
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: “Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.” [3/9/09]
LOU DOBBS: “[T]he stock market has lost 20 percent since this president was sworn in. He has his own bear market. That’s the definition of a bear market, a 20 percent decline. This is now the Obama bear market.” [CNN, 3/9/09]
SEAN HANNITY: “Obama, since he’s elected, has tanked the markets.” [Fox News, 3/10/09]
Personally, I consider myself someone who enjoys nostalgia. But this article (via Alyssa Rosenberg) about the boom in twentysomething nostalgia mostly reminded me of bad times via the phrase “three of the biggest bands of the period — Blink-182, Limp Bizkit and Creed — have each reunited for summer tours.” What a bleak period! Those bands are terrible. Any time you have a list of bands such that Blink-182 is by far the best, you’re in big trouble.
Can’t we have nostalgia for other, better moments of fin de millennium music? Keep it Like a Secret, Emergency & I, and 69 Love Songs were all released in 1999.
Gingrich claims that “the following four tax cuts will help create jobs here and jobs now and fundamentally shift power from politicians to small business.” He also told Politico that he “has lined up the support of several members of Congress to introduce legislation incorporating his tax plan.” So here’s what we would be getting if Gingrich’s plan were enacted (all calculations after the jump):
1. Cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 12.5 percent.
As was extensively discussed during Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) failed presidential bid, cutting the corporate tax rate simply does not create jobs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a corporate tax cut “does not create an incentive for [businesses] to spend more on labor” and “is not a particularly cost-effective method of stimulating business spending.” This cut would cost about $2.1 trillion over ten years.
2. Abolish the estate tax.
Gingrich seems to be under the impression that Paris Hilton is a job-creating machine, as this tax cut primarily benefits ultra-wealthy families making up 0.2 percent of estates. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “repeal of the tax would add $798 billion to deficits over the first decade in which its effects would be fully felt (2012-2021),” while the Tax Policy Center points out that “the estate tax can’t have much effect on hiring by small business because hardly any owners ever face the estate tax.”
The payroll tax funds the Social Security and Medicare trusts, so Gingrich’s proposal hurts the fiscal condition of both programs. (The Making Work Pay tax credit in the Recovery Act accomplishes the same thing, without hitting Social Security and Medicare.) Meanwhile, the cut would result in $926 billion in deficits over the next two years. Gingrich claims that he will pay for this with $300 to $400 billion in repealed Recovery Act money and leftover TARP funds. But there is only about $80 billion left in TARP, so this would leave more than $400 billion in unpaid deficits. Plus, repealing the Recovery money is precisely the wrong thing to do now, as it is needed to do real, practical things for the economy.
In the end, Gingrich’s plan amounts to throwing money to mainly the well-off and hoping that it will have some positive effects. That’s not what is needed to get the country out of its economic rut.
There’s been some disagreement recently in left-of-center circles as to whether or not the failure to deliver on health care reform in 1994 contributed to Democrats’ political problems that fall. But one thing we can know for sure is that many on the right think killing health reform will help the GIP in the midterms. For example, my colleague Matt Corley found James Inhofe saying this:
INHOFE: Oh, I think so. I really do. In fact, there’ll be a lot of Democrats. You know, I liken it to the cap and trade thing. Now that’s the one that I’ve been kind of in charge of for ten years, and we know where we are on that now. We know that if, as long as people keep talking the way they are right now, we’re going to defeat it. They only have 34 votes. They need 60 votes. I’d say health care right now is somewhere in the neighborhood of, they have maybe 45 votes. But every day, they lose votes, because people find out what it is, what it’s going to do, and what it’s not going to do. When you tell people that the mortality rate in Canada is 25% higher for breast cancer, 18% higher for prostate cancer, you know, they say why in the world would we emulate a system like that? This is life threatening. And so we have all the issues on our side on this thing, and I think, you know, I just hope the President keeps talking about it, keeps trying to rush it through. We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.
The opposition’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. But I hope all the Democrats in congress understand what’s happening.
Last week, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) set off a political storm when he said that if Republicans can defeat health care reform it would be President Obama’s “Waterloo” because it would “break him.” Since then, some Republicans have sought to distance themselves from DeMint’s view that defeating health care would yield political advantages for the GOP.
But Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) isn’t shying away from revealing his honest feelings. Appearing on Janet Parshall’s radio show yesterday, Inhofe argued that the defeat of President Clinton’s health care reform “started the demise of Bill Clinton that led to the 1994 Republican takeover of the House and the Senate.” He then added that he is now “tracking the demise” of Obama’s health care plans and it is making him “optimistic”:
INHOFE: They ought to know, they ought to know from history. This is a losing proposition for them. And for those out there who believe, that would like to have something optimistic to look at, we are plotting the demise on a week by week basis of where Bill Clinton was in 1993 and where Obama is today and his demise ratio is greater than Clinton’s was in 1993. So, he’s trying to do the same things, except more extreme.
Listen here:
Inhofe also appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, where he was asked if Republicans had the votes “to block health care, the radical stuff in the Senate.” Inhofe said he thought they did:
INHOFE: Oh, I think so. I really do. In fact, there’ll be a lot of Democrats. You know, I liken it to the cap and trade thing. Now that’s the one that I’ve been kind of in charge of for ten years, and we know where we are on that now. We know that if, as long as people keep talking the way they are right now, we’re going to defeat it. They only have 34 votes. They need 60 votes. I’d say health care right now is somewhere in the neighborhood of, they have maybe 45 votes. But every day, they lose votes, because people find out what it is, what it’s going to do, and what it’s not going to do. When you tell people that the mortality rate in Canada is 25% higher for breast cancer, 18% higher for prostate cancer, you know, they say why in the world would we emulate a system like that? This is life threatening. And so we have all the issues on our side on this thing, and I think, you know, I just hope the President keeps talking about it, keeps trying to rush it through. We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.
Listen here:
Later in his interview with Hewitt, Inhofe also revealed why the GOP strategy to “slow down” health care is really an effort to “kill it.” “If he is unsuccessful — which I anticipate and will predict he is — on getting a vote prior to the August recess, then I would say there’s no way in the world they’re going to get this done this year,” said Inhofe. “And next year would not be any easier.”
Update
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) released this statement:
Slowly but surely the Republicans are revealing their true strategy on health care: partisans gamesmanship comes before getting something done. If Republicans believe doing nothing will ingratiate themselves with the American people, they have not learned a single lesson from the last two elections. Their do nothing approach is why health care costs have skyrocketed, and it’s why Republicans are in such a bad place today. This strategy is bad politics, but it is also a deeply troubling way to govern.
Roll Call reported today that Senate Democrats are “increasingly frustrated by the secrecy and duration of Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ (D-MT) bipartisan talks on health care reform.” One unnamed Senator appeared irritated that Baucus ” is unlikely to run any deal by his caucus before he shakes hands on an agreement with Republicans.” OpenLeft then wondered how Baucus’s campaigns are financed and found that from 2005 to the present, the health insurance industry has significant representation among his top-ten donors:
Also today, Politico reported that many of the industries opposing President Obama’s agenda are contributing heavily to the House’s 52-member Blue Dog Coalition, which has been consistently trying to weaken efforts to pass health care, clean energy, and economic recovery legislation.
You can read the whole tawdry tale here. It seems to me that the big problem with the Knicks’ dreams of scoring a top-notch free agent is the existence of the Miami Heat.
The Collective Bargaining Agreements gives guys like Bosh a pretty strong incentive to resign with the teams that already employ them. But if you’re not going to do that, then if you have responsible people working for you (admittedly an open question) they’re going to point out to you that a contract in Miami will result in substantially more after-tax income than an identical column in New York. And Miami has Dwyane Wade and basically nothing else on the books for the summer of 2010. Combine that with the fact that Pat Riley, loathesome as he is, and Heat management have some kind of track record of success, and you can see that looking like a very appealing options. The Knicks, to put it politely, have no such track record. It’s true that there’s some marketing advantage to being in New York City, but the biggest marketing edge of all is contending for championships and Miami seems like a better place to do that.
