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Senator Of Katrina-Ravaged Louisiana Collaborates To Block Climate Action

By Brad Johnson on Jan 20, 2010 at 7:30 pm

Mary LandrieuToday, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) announced that she is the previously unnamed Democrat joining Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in her campaign to prevent Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gas pollution. Because she “believes the Clean Air Act is not meant to be applied to carbon dioxide emissions,” Landrieu is collaborating to craft what environmentalists are calling the Dirty Air Act:

“I am considering that right now,” Landrieu said when asked whether she backed Murkowski’s plan. “I have been working with her on it.”

Landrieu, like Louisiana’s Republican governor Bobby Jindal and Senator David Vitter, has pledged allegiance to the pollution interests who have given her over $1.5 million instead of her own people. Last month, Jindal “filed objections with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson” over the proposed climate rules, claiming the standards would have “profound negative economic impacts on the state of Louisiana.” In September, Vitter submitted an amendment to block funding for centers that study and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Landrieu’s actions are quite simply morally indefensible. The Mississippi Delta is under extraordinary threat from global warming, as seas rise and storms intensify. According to a recent analysis published in Nature, “an additional 2 degrees of global warming” — to which our business as usual commits the planet — would cause “6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise,” which would “permanently submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana.”

This is not just a future threat. Climate change significantly intensified Hurricane Katrina, which cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people. As hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel has explained, “Probably if Hurricane Katrina had happened in 1980, the levees would have held.”

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Security

Why The Prospects For Immigration Reform Didn’t Change Overnight

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jan 20, 2010 at 7:30 pm

brownmacThis morning, Politico published a story aptly pointing out that “all is not lost” for Democrats following the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate. However, one issue which Politico did identify as “toxic” is immigration reform. According to Politico, the issue’s death is signaled by the fact that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) “isn’t playing ball” which means there are “fewer Republican crossover votes.” Yet, not only is Politico’s reasoning unrelated to the election of Brown, it’s also based on a superficial and inaccurate analysis.

To begin with, last night’s election results don’t represent a referendum on President Obama’s legislative agenda, which includes immigration. Exit polls show that only 38% of Massachusetts voters indicated that their vote was grounded in opposition to Obama’s policies. In fact, independent voters largely accounted for Brown’s victory. Those voters also support comprehensive immigration reform by a wide margin and overwhelmingly voted for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) — an avid champion of immigrant rights — year after year. If anything, Scott’s win represents a frustration with partisan-driven inaction. It also encompasses a collective sense of impatience with the lack of economic recovery. Immigration reform could speak to both.

Immigration reform and the economy are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the prospects for immigration reform have always been tied to its capacity to attract bipartisan support. McCain “isn’t playing ball” because the ball isn’t in his court this time around. While McCain co-sponsored the failed immigration reform bill of 2006, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is taking the lead in partnering with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) in crafting a bill that will have to avoid the major pitfalls of past failed pieces of legislation. Rather than drawing a line in the sand between Republicans and Democrats, immigration reform signals an opportunity for both parties to show voters they can work together to get something done in Congress.

Ultimately, it’s both in McCain’s and Brown’s interest to support comprehensive immigration reform. Almost 30% of Arizona’s immigrants (or 294,541 people) were naturalized U.S. citizens as of 2007 — meaning they are eligible voters with a close connection to the immigrant experience. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts foreign born population represents over 14 percent of state’s total population and 17 percent of the state’s workforce. They also make up about 12.7 percent (403,915) of registered voters. Neither Martha Coakley nor Brown campaigned heavily in Latino and immigrant communities. However, during a press call today, president of the National Council of La Raza Janet Murguía noted that ignoring the Latino community and the immigration issue could have devastating consequences:

Promises have been made on both sides on this issue…inaction means there will be consequences. That’s true not just for Latinos, but for swing voters…Campaigns need to engage the Latino community pro-actively if they want their support. We certainly didn’t see the outreach [from the Coakley campaign] to the Latino community that you would’ve expected in order to generate the support needed to make a difference…

SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina further pointed out that “we lost one vote that will make our job more difficult — but not impossible.” While the viability of reforming U.S. immigration laws doesn’t ride on Brown’s seat, Brown might find himself in a position in which he needs immigration reform more than it needs him.

Economy

Gregg: My Deficit Commission Would ‘Lead To Action,’ But Obama’s Commission Is ‘A Fraud’

By Pat Garofalo on Jan 20, 2010 at 6:15 pm

AP091223014043This week, the Senate is expected to defeat a proposal by Sens. Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) to form a commission charged with crafting ways to reduce the country’s long-term deficits. But the commission idea is not dead!

Instead, it looks like the Obama administration will create a commission by executive order, which will be “granted broad authority” to come up with a series of deficit reducing “changes” to the tax code and spending programs that Congress would then consider. But if you thought Gregg would be pleased with this development, you’d be wrong:

It’s a fraud among anyone interested in fiscal responsibility to claim an executive order could structure something that would actually lead to action.

This is pretty amusing coming from Gregg, whose “precedent for success” in this matter is the 1983 Greenspan Commission. According to Gregg, the Greenspan Commission was “the catalyst that drove the process” behind that year’s fix for Social Security. But the Greenspan Commission was created by executive order.

Gregg is a good example of what CAP’s Michael Linden is calling “deficit peacocks”: lawmakers who “like to preen and call attention to themselves, but are not sincerely interested in taking the difficult but necessary steps toward a balanced budget.” For instance, while Gregg is criticizing those he deems not sufficiently “interested in fiscal responsibility,” he’s voting to cut taxes for the heirs of multi-millionaires. As the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it, “if you want to hear politicians croon utter nonsense about the debt with their fingers crossed behind their backs, please listen to Sen. Judd Gregg.”

At the same time, the administration’s design for a commission is about the same as Conrad and Gregg’s. It would involve 18 commissioners — six appointed by Congressional Democrats, six by Republicans, and six by the administration, with the understanding that the administration would name at least two Republicans — and 14 of the 18 would need to agree before their proposal made it to the floors of Congress. So the odds of anything productive coming out of this process are exceedingly small (which means that, as Matt Yglesias pointed out, there’s little point in wasting a lot of energy opposing the commission’s creation).

The only way a commission like this can possibly work is if it’s given a concrete goal and told to find ways to achieve said goal. As Stan Collender pointed out, that’s why base closing commissions work: everyone agrees that bases need to be closed, but they don’t want to decide which ones. But even with an explicit budget goal, I don’t see Republicans on the commission agreeing to anything that even remotely resembles a tax increase, without which budget balance is impossible. It’s far more likely that the commission bogs down into gridlock, and if a solution does come around, it will be because of some agreements that are crafted outside of the commission structure — just like with the Greenspan Commission.

Climate Progress

NREL study shows 20 percent wind possible by 2024

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jan 20, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Half a million jobs, 25% drop in utility carbon pollution for just 2 cents a day per household

http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/wind-supply.jpg

Back in May 2008, I reported on an amazing study on U.S. wind potential by the Bush Adminstration (see “Bush DOE says wind can be 20% of U.S. power by 2030 “” with no breakthroughs).” The study concluded 20% penetration was straightforward:

  • Annual installations need to increase by only a factor of three from current levels by 2018.
  • Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
  • No material constraints currently exist.
  • This would require 300,000 MW of wind, delivering electricity for about 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, unsubsidized (i.e. no federal tax credit) and including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines within 500 miles of wind resource].
  • The 20% Wind Scenario could require an incremental investment of less than 0.06 cent (6 one-hundredths of 1 cent) per kilowatt-hour of total generation by 2030, or roughly 50 cents per month per household.

We are well on our way toward that target (see “EIA projects wind at 5% of U.S. electricity in 2012, all renewables at 14%, thanks to Obama stimulus!“).  In the rest of this post, Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at American Progress, updates the story with the latest study from the Department of Energy:

Read more

Politics

Brown victory party featured flag calling for a ‘second’ revolution, tea party-inspired civil war.

By Lee Fang on Jan 20, 2010 at 5:35 pm

State Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who won the special election to represent Massachusetts in the United States Senate yesterday, celebrated his win at the Boston Park Plaza last night. ThinkProgress attended the event and observed a variant of the original revolutionary war flag, which depicts a roman numeral II within the original thirteen stars, widely distributed throughout Brown party. Jeff McQueen, who designed the flag and sells it through his own business “USRevolution2,” explained that the flags means, “REVOLUTION . . . ROUND 2! I also thought the ‘II’ could have two meanings: ‘Second’ American Revolution and ‘Second’ Amendment.” McQueen, a tea party organizer, has repeatedly used tea party websites to call for a revolution. In one of his posts, he explains that the country would be better served by splitting states between Democratic and Republican:

We are now as divided as America was in the 1860s. When two people find they can no longer communicate, while living under the same roof, they often split apart and go there seperate ways. So what if . . . we took the United States and just split it in half . . . 24 states become The United States of the Democrats and 24 states become The United States of the Republicans (including Ron Paul supporters and Libertarians etc . . .). California and New York can be split in half and go the the side they choose.

Watch Brown supporters wave second revolution war flags at his victory party:

ThinkProgress also observed the same flags waved at Brown rallies in Boston, Worcester, and Hyannis.

Yglesias

Do House Democrats Realize They Already Voted for Health Care Reform?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 20, 2010 at 5:31 pm

23waxman_span 1

What’s baffling to me about the collective health care freakout happening on the Hill right now is that House Democrats don’t quite seem to be grasping the implications of the fact that they already voted for health reform back in November. Whether or not Massachusetts increases your perception of the political threat level a little or a lot, the essence of the matter is that there’s no increase in the threat level that comes from voting “yes” a second time.

Let’s put it this way, if I want to run an ad saying “Representative X votes for hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts” I am being 100 percent honest. If Barack Obama signs a health care bill into law, then Representative X can at least talk about the tough new regulations on insurers that his opponent opposed. He can talk about the end of medical bankruptcies. He can talk about reducing the deficit. He can talk about lots of stuff. Will he take a hit? Sure. But he’ll also be able to hit back.

And of course if health care dies, the instant CW becomes that health care was too left-wing. That America hates those lefty left-wingers who voted for it. Lefty left-wingers just like Representative X. If you pass the bill, you can try to make the case for it. If you don’t pass the bill, you’ve made your opponent’s case for you. Which might not be so bad except you already voted for the bill. Once you vote for something, you’ve got to try to pass it.

Omar says that if you come at the king, you’d best not miss. They’re wise words. Otherwise people are going to spend the fall talking about how they actually voted for health reform before they voted against it.

Climate Progress

Murky Democrat Revealed: Katrina-Ravaged Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu

By Brad Johnson on Jan 20, 2010 at 5:21 pm

Mary LandrieuYesterday, the Wonk Room profiled several candidates for the Democrat joining Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in her campaign to prevent Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gas pollution. Today, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has announced that she is the Murky Dem supporting the lobbyist-directed effort to prevent action by President Obama to slow global warming. Because she “believes the Clean Air Act is not meant to be applied to carbon dioxide emissions,” Landrieu is collaborating to craft what environmentalists are calling the Dirty Air Act:

“I am considering that right now,” Landrieu said when asked whether she backed Murkowski’s plan. “I have been working with her on it.”

Landrieu, like Louisiana’s Republican governor Bobby Jindal and Senator David Vitter, has pledged allegiance to the pollution interests who have given her over $1.5 million instead of her own people. Last month, Jindal “filed objections with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson” over the proposed climate rules, claiming the standards would have “profound negative economic impacts on the state of Louisiana.” In September, Vitter submitted an amendment to block funding for centers that study and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Landrieu’s actions are quite simply morally indefensible. The Mississippi Delta is under extraordinary threat from global warming, as seas rise and storms intensify. According to a recent analysis published in Nature, “an additional 2 degrees of global warming” — to which our business as usual commits the planet — would cause “6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise,” which would “permanently submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana.”

This is not just a future threat. Climate change significantly intensified Hurricane Katrina, which cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people. As hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel has explained, “Probably if Hurricane Katrina had happened in 1980, the levees would have held.”

Yglesias

Our Broken Institutions

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 20, 2010 at 4:44 pm

File-Ben_Nelson_official_photo

Mark Schmitt has a column which he opens with the sensible observation that the “filibuster-proof” 60 vote majority was largely an illusion anyway. You were never going to get 60 votes out of 60 for a climate/energy bill or an immigration bill or a deficit package, etc. But I think this goes off the rails:

Conservative writer Byron York left me sputtering in a recent episode of Bloggingheads when he observed — almost correctly — that no major piece of social legislation had ever been put through on a completely partisan basis. Yes — with the exception of the massive Clinton 1993 budget — but never had a minority party so completely opted out of governance. Having 41 votes makes nonparticipation just a little less credible. If the perceived lesson of Massachusetts, together with the practical reality of a Senate that no longer has a 60-vote majority, is that we need more bipartisanship, for which party does that create a greater obligation to change? The majority that has spent the entire year in what some thought was a futile quest to build bridges? Or the one that walked away?

Yes, yes, I know that’s a silly and rhetorical question because Republicans aren’t playing for legislative wins; they’re playing for total dominance. But the reality is that purely partisan governance in this country is almost always impossible, even using the budget reconciliation process. As much as the Bush administration used every possible partisan tool to enact its agenda, most of its major legislative achievements came with Democratic votes, even if Democrats were shut out of negotiations. When Bush won legislative victories, it was because he, together with Republicans in Congress, set an agenda that Democrats — sometimes just a few — felt they had to support. It was the power to set the agenda that Bush used ruthlessly, not just the power to pass bills.

Obama is in a fortunate position compared to Bill Clinton right before and after the 1994 Republican takeover. He, and Democrats in Congress, still has both the formal and the moral power to set the agenda. They should think carefully about setting it in a way that not only produces good results — because in times like these, results, not spin, are what matter — but also forces the Republicans to do more than stand on the sidelines. He can be bipartisan, but he has to force the opposition party to offer alternatives if they have them and cooperate if they don’t. If he does that, a return to productive progressive governance could be unexpectedly quick.

The problem here is that the Republican strategy of holding out for total surrender is working just fine. They had an interesting theory that if you refuse to cooperate with efforts to make the country better, things won’t get better and the out-of-power party will benefit. The theory appears to be true.

Politics

CBS Approves Focus On The Family’s Super Bowl Ad, Despite Its Policy Against Advocacy Spots

By Amanda Terkel on Jan 20, 2010 at 4:40 pm

Tim Tebow Last week, conservative organization Focus on the Family announced that it planned to air a 30-second “life- and family-affirming” television ad during the Super Bowl on Feb. 7. The ad will feature 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, who will “share one of their many positive personal stories.” Specific details about the ad haven’t been released, but the AP notes that it is “likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim.”

MediaDailyNews reports that CBS yesterday approved the Focus on the Family script:

CBS executives approved a script for a Super Bowl spot from evangelical group Focus on the Family, which suggests the ad will not carry a pro-life message — at least an overt one.

The network has a policy of prohibiting advocacy ads, even ones that carry an “implicit” endorsement for a side in a public debate. A CBS spokesman did say the network will review the video version of the spot before giving it the final green light, but does not anticipate any hurdles.

The networks and the NFL have repeatedly rejected advocacy ads — including by progressive organizations. In 2004, CBS rejected MoveOn.org’s 30-second ad about President Bush, which Salon called “a low-key attack on Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility that’s unlikely to make anyone very angry.” The network has said that it doesn’t accept spots where “substantial elements of the community (are) in opposition to one another.” Last year, NBC rejected a 30-second public service announcement about marriage equality. Anti-consumerist activist Kalle Lasn and PETA have also had their ads turned down under the “no advocacy” policy.

However, the policy is fuzzy enough that the networks have considerable discretion. As Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, explained:

The rules are exactly what the owner of the news medium wants them to be, and they are not rules, they are simply choices. For many news organizations, the rules are governed by such things as taste and accuracy. In the case of some, the question of taste slips over into finding the message disagreeable or believing that the audience would find that message disagreeable. The long and short of it is they don’t have to run any advertisement they don’t want to.

Indeed, the networks are also therefore able to run any ad they want — including ads that clearly advocate a position. Last year, ThinkProgress documented that NBC ran anti-smoking and anti-steroids ads, even though it rejected the marriage equality ad and a pro-life ad because it was supposedly banning all advocacy spots. In the past, CBS also approved “an anti-smoking spot, a public service announcement about AIDS, and a commercial from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy” during the Super Bowl.

So even though CBS accepted Focus on the Family’s ad and the network has a “no advocacy” policy, CBS may still allow the group to advocate a right-wing position.

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