Question of the day: Will GM ultimately pay back all of the taxpayers’ loans?
The NY Times story has one of the true glass-is-half-full headlines of our times:
G.M., Citing Progress, Reports Loss of $1.15 Billion
But these days, you take good news where you can find it, and the rest of the story is certainly a pleasant surprise:
Speaking to the Economist recently, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) told reporters that he questions the science underpinning climate change. Pawlenty explained that while the earth might be warming, it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.” As ThinkProgress has noted, Pawlenty has veered sharply to the right to appease a right-wing, tea party base. Although the tea party movement demands strict adherence to far right positions, as a Democracy Corps study shows, much of the movement sees political issues through a prism that is simply divorced from reality.
In appeasing the tea party base, Pawlenty not only dismisses the stark reality that human-caused carbon emissions are the largest contributor to climate change, but he also sacrifices his own credibility. Over the course of the last three years, Pawlenty has gone from an outspoken proponent of clean energy to a Glenn Beck pandering climate change denier:
Dec. 2006: Pawlenty lays out an ambitious clean energy program for Minnesotans to reduce their use of fossil fuels 15 percent by 2015. Cutting greenhouse gases, Pawlenty said, would “be good for the environment, good for rural economies, good for national security and good for consumers.” He also calls for a regional cap and trade program.
May 2007: Pawlenty signs the Next Generation Energy Act of 2007, requiring the state to reduce its emissions 15 percent by 2015 and 80 percent in 2050. At the signing ceremony, Pawlenty said Minnesota was “kicking-starting the future” by “tackling greenhouse gas emissions.”
Oct. 2007: Pawlenty declares that the climate change issue is “one of the most important of our time.” He also brushes off “some flak” from right-wingers who doubt climate change science.
Sept. 2008: During the election, Pawlenty backs away from his own cap and trade program, says such a system would “wreck the economy.” He then tells hate radio personality Glenn Beck (a climate change denier) that human activity only contributes “half a percent” to climate change.
Nov. 2009: Pawlenty backs away from acknowledging that any human activity is the cause of climate change.
Although Pawlenty has already earned a “Full Flop” from PolitiFact because of his cap and trade policy reversals, he deserves another for his politically motivated denials of science.
Tomorrow, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will unveil the merged Senate health care bill and the accompanying score from the Congressional Budget Office. The legislation, which should cost no more than $900 billion over 10 years and help lower the deficit, will include a new payroll tax, higher threshold levels for the controversial excise tax on Cadillac health care plans, and a national public health care plan that allows states to opt-out by 2014.
Reid has promised to give Senators at least 72 hours to review the legislation, and debate isn’t expected to begin before Friday, November 17th. Sixty senators will have to vote on a measure to begin what could be six weeks of debate, and 60 votes will stop it.
Before the Senate begins its marathon session — which could last many weeks and weekends — here is a summary timeline of some of how far reform has come, and how far it has to go:
June 2009: Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Releases ‘Affordable Health Choices Act’ and begins considering the legislation in committee.June 2009: The Senate Finance Committee’s “nothing-burger” proposal is leaked. The legislation does not include a public health insurance option or a requirement that large employers provide coverage.
June 19, 2009: House releases the first draft of its Tri-Committee proposal. The legislation includes a robust public option, a requirement that all large employers provide health insurance coverage, and a surtax on wealthy Americans.
July 13, 2009: After 13 days and more than 60 hours of debate the HELP Committee passed health care reform. Not a single Republican votes for the bill. Instead, they lie about it.
July 31, 2009: All relevant House Committees mark-up and pass the House health care bill by this date.
August, 2009: Republicans misrepresent the consequences of reform in town halls across America.
September 9, 2009: Obama pushes for health care reform before a joint session of Congress.
September 2009: Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) releases the Senate Finance Committee health care bill after 6 months of bipartisan negotiations. The bill is attacked from the left and the right. The Committee begins marking up the proposal.October 13, 2009: The Senate Finance Committee passes the health care bill 14-9. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) becomes the only Republican to vote for health care reform.
October 26, 2009: Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announces that the final health care bill will include a national public health insurance option, but gives states the option to opt-out of the plan.
October 29, 2009: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) unveils the merged House health care bill.
November 7, 2009: In a 220-215 vote, the House passes bipartisan health care reform legislation. Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) becomes the second Republican to vote for health care reform.
November 17, 2009: Reid will unveil the merged health care bill and the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis. Will promise to bring the bill to the floor on Friday.
November 20, 2009: At least 60 senators vote to begin debate on the health care reform bill. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) predicts that the legislation “will be on the floor for quite a long time.” “I think it ought to be on the floor at least as long as it’s been in Harry Reid’s office,” he said on Sunday.
December 21-23, 2009: The Senate passes health care reform bill.
January 2010: The Conference committee merges the Senate and House bills. Will it keep the Stupak language? What will happen to the public option and the employer mandate? How will the conference finance reform? Will it keep the Senate’s excise tax or opt for the House’s surtax on wealthy Americans?
February 2010: The House and will Senate vote on the final conference report.
February/March 2010: President Obama signs health care reform into law.
The Nashville City Paper reports that Sheriff Daron Hall of Davidson County, Tennessee has pulled out of an event hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Local immigration activists brought the group’s nativist history to his attention and Hall canceled his meeting with CIS so as not to “cause discord among the people [he's] trying to building bridges with.”
Hall was set to appear Thursday at a CIS event dedicated to perpetuating the myth that “immigrants have relatively high rates of criminality.” It’s unclear what position Hall was going to take at the event, but there certainly won’t be any dissenting opinions in his absence. The panel now solely consists of CIS staff: Director of Research Steven Camarota, Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan, and Executive Director Mark Krikorian. When questioned about Hall’s cancellation, Krikorian remarked that CIS’ nativist ties have been exaggerated as part of a “broader, concerted effort to delegitimize any skeptic of amnesty or increased immigration”:
“They don’t have the balls to describe us as a hate group, they have to do this McCarthyite kind of guilt by association thing…Their function is to provide information for this campaign of vilification…The sheriff can do whatever he needs to do, we’re going to be disappointed he’s not here but that’s his call to make. It’s the advocacy groups that are essentially lying to him that are at fault here.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes CIS as a “think tank [which] bills itself as an ‘independent’ organization,” despite the fact that it “has never found any aspect of immigration that it liked.” SPLC explains that “the organized anti-immigration ‘movement,’ increasingly in bed with racist hate groups, is dominated by one man, John Tanton.” CIS, along with its unofficial sister organizations, NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a designated hate group, were all founded by Tanton — the “nativist impresario.”
Hall faced “a firestorm of criticism” when he headlined a white supremacist event sponsored by the Middle Tennessee chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).
Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), a candidate for Senate in 2010, wrote a memo to Sarah Palin requesting that she endorse him during her visit to Chicago for the Oprah Winfrey Show. The Post noted that “Palin’s endorsement [of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman] helped force state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava (R) from the race” in the NY-23 special election, and that Kirk’s memo is “tangible evidence of the power of Palin’s endorsement in a Republican primary.”
The memo is also tangible evidence of Kirk’s willingness to dramatically switch positions in order to gain political power. Last year, Kirk panned Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) selection of Palin as his running mate, telling the Chicago Tribune, “I would have picked someone different.” Asked about Palin’s qualifications for office, Kirk said, “Quite frankly, I don’t know.”
However, it appears that Palin has rejected Kirk’s request for an endorsement. Recently, Kirk told ThinkProgress that he had been expecting her endorsement once she visited Chicago:
TP: How about Sarah Palin? How close are you to getting her endorsement?
KIRK: We sent a memo detailing the race, and she’ll be coming in to Chicago shortly.
Watch it:
However, Palin visited Chicago last week to tape an interview with Winfrey and made no mention of Kirk. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal noted that Kirk was “unsuccessful” in his bid for an endorsement, despite his detailed memo.
Facing a competitive challenge from businessman Patrick Hughes in the Republican primary, Kirk is attempting to veer to the right. After voting in favor of cap-and-trade clean energy legislation during the summer, Kirk quickly changed his mind and told tea party activists that he would vote against the same bill in the Senate. Speaking to another assembly of conservative supporters in April, Kirk suggested that people should shoot Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL) for raising taxes.
Permanent daylight:
— Noam Schieber on David Brooks and John Thune.
— The Cold Drank Summit will go down in history as a crucial moment in the history of the internet.
— Jessica Valenti follows up on “fourth wave” feminism.
— OED considering adding “teabagger”.
— There’s some CW out there that Europe’s efforts to implemented the Kyoto Protocol didn’t work, but in fact despite some initial snags everything’s one track.
— “China’s New Engagement With the International System”.
— I don’t really understand why Oregon’s economy is in such bad shape.
— Larry Coon’s indispensable NBA Salary Cap FAQ.
Does Women’s “Black Rice” just remind me of the Beetles in general, or is there some specific Beetles song that it closely resembles?
Appearing on PBS’s influential Charlie Rose Show last week, SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner expanded upon their destructively uninformed portrayal of climate science, even throwing into question man’s influence on global warming. When Rose asked him about the controversial “global cooling” chapter, Levitt fatuously claimed that “what we actually said is not even very controversial.” Levitt said that SuperFreakonomics is “not denying that the Earth has gotten warmer.” After Rose interjected, “And it’s man created,” Levitt stammered, “It’s harder to know whether it’s man created”:
I-i-i-i-it’s harder to know whether it’s man created. It’s always harder to know whether it’s some — you know, why something happened than whether it did. That’s not even our question.
Watch it:
Later during the interview Dubner attempted to justify the book’s claim that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain,” arguing that it was the decrease in sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that has caused global warming, rather than the accumulation of carbon dioxide.
This is of course utter nonsense — aerosols like sulfur dioxide certainly masked the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases, but global warming is caused by the greenhouse gases. If a methamphetamine addict is using alcohol to blunt the side effects of his meth habit, his hyperactivity isn’t due to a lack of binge drinking.
Dubner and Levitt’s quest to deny the reality of climate change and promote radical geoengineering to block the sun as a “sensible” alternative to reducing greenhouse gases is, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “horseshit.” Their strategy is like counseling the meth addict to become a full-blown alcoholic instead of reducing his drug use.
Despite Levitt’s argument that “it’s harder to know” whether global warming is “man created,” in reality the scientific evidence is clear and has been for years, according to the scientific organizations of the world: Read more
In February, when conservatives began protesting against President Obama with tea parties, the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel photographed a protester carrying a sign that declared, “tea bag the liberal Dems before they tea bag you!!” Soon after, the term “tea bagger” became a ubiquitous and often derogatory handle for right-wing protesters. Now, Mediaite reports that the term “teabagger” was a finalist in consideration to be the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year:
In a press release touting “unfriend” as the word of the year, the New Oxford American Dictionary may have unwittingly made a more controversial move than the New Oxford American Dictionary pretty much ever does.
No, it wasn’t another cutesy tech neologism: they included “teabagger” as one of their Word of the Year finalists.
According to the release, they define “teabagger” as “a person who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as ‘Tea Party’ protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773).”
So, I finished the Twilight saga last night. It’s the most absurd series of books I’ve ever actually finished, but I will give Stephenie Meyer this: Breaking Dawn is absolutely crazy, and deeply disturbing, but it is a significantly better book than Twilight. Even that improvement doesn’t make any of the books outright good, or the overall narrative compelling, but Meyer deserves credit for learning how to write a plot, even if she’s incapable of actual drama or climax. There can’t actually be *SPOILER* a genuine showdown between the theoretically badass vampire authorities in the Twilight universe and the bland-beyond-belief Cullens over Bella Cullen-nee-Swann’s freakish half-vampire baby. Nope, there has to be a lot of conversation. And then Vampire Authorities go away, and Bella and her sparkly vampire get to live happily ever after, and Bella’s sexy werewolf ends up with her rapidly-maturing daughter because that’s not remotely awkward, and everyone is So Very Happy. *SPOILERS OVER*
Maybe I would have understood it ten years ago, or fifteen, when sex seemed distant and dangerous but desirable, and men seemed like objects to watch rather than people to interact with. But I’m not sure it would have been the case even then. Really all I can bring myself to feel is sorry for Kristen Stewart, who I find sort of delightfully guarded, and smart, and internally complicated. And who seems in danger of being devoured by her fans, in the same manner that her character wants to be devoured by her vampire inamorato. I hope she makes it through the next couple of years and couple of movies, which sound like an excruciating experience, so she can go on and continue to do the interesting acting work she’s clearly very capable of. For me, Twilight was about a week of sporadic reading. For Stewart, it’s going to be a much longer, immersive, more unpleasant experience.
The good news about this Ben Bernanke speech to the Economic Club of New York is that he shows no sign of wanting to join David Ignatius in tightening monetary policy. The bad news is that he sounds awfully blasé about the prospect of a prolonged period of double digit unemployment:
Jobs are likely to remain scarce for some time, keeping households cautious about spending. As the recovery becomes established, however, payrolls should begin to grow again, at a pace that increases over time. Nevertheless, as net gains of roughly 100,000 jobs per month are needed just to absorb new entrants to the labor force, the unemployment rate likely will decline only slowly if economic growth remains moderate, as I expect.
The outlook for inflation is also subject to a number of crosscurrents. Many factors affect inflation, including slack in resource utilization, inflation expectations, exchange rates, and the prices of oil and other commodities. Although resource slack cannot be measured precisely, it certainly is high, and it is showing through to underlying wage and price trends. Longer-run inflation expectations are stable, having responded relatively little either to downward or upward pressures on inflation; expectations can be early warnings of actual inflation, however, and must be monitored carefully. Commodities prices have risen lately, likely reflecting the pickup in global economic activity, especially in resource-intensive emerging market economies, and the recent depreciation of the dollar. On net, notwithstanding significant crosscurrents, inflation seems likely to remain subdued for some time.
Now if you were just asking my opinion, I’d say something very similar to what Bernanke is saying here. But Bernanke isn’t just offering an opinion, he’s the country’s top monetary policymaker. And he’s telling us that his vision of recovery involves a long period of labor market weakness and low inflation. He says that this situation is “likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period” but the very high level of unemployment seems to clearly militate in favor of further easing. Bernanke acknowledges that he has a “dual mandate to foster both maximum employment and price stability” but he’s also acknowledging in this piece that he hasn’t fostered anything close to full employment, and doesn’t think his policies are likely to achieve anything close to full employment any time soon.
But then why isn’t he doing more?
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