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NASA: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010″

By Joe Romm on Mar 19, 2010 at 11:10 pm

Must-read draft paper: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a draft paper “Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis.”  It is a must read for warming junkies, but, as James Hansen notes in an e-mail, “it is too long for popular use.”  So Hansen offers “some of the main conclusions,” as well as a description of a rather shocking hack of the GISS website (all of which is reprinted below).  The first conclusion is:

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Politics

Boehner Claims Student Loan Reform Will ‘Eliminate Every Bank In The Country’

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 19, 2010 at 6:42 pm

This weekend, Democrats plan to vote on their health care reform reconciliation package, which also includes student loan reform. The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), which would cut billions of dollars in senseless subsidies to private student lenders, passed the House last year. As of yesterday, it has a corresponding senate counterpart, which will be included in the reconciliation bill.

Currently, the federal government gives billions of dollars to student lenders to originate loans, and then guarantees loan repayment up to 97 percent, so the lenders are essentially useless middlemen that aren’t exposed to any of the loan risk. This is corporate welfare at its finest. So in order to build opposition to the bill, both the lenders and Republicans in Congress have been borrowing a tactic from the health care debate by falsely characterizing student loan reform as a “Washington takeover” of lending.

But House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) took this a step further last night, saying that student loan reform would actually “eliminate every bank in the country and all student loan lenders,” replacing them with the government:

Well, if you look at this student loan provision in there, they eliminate every bank in the country and all private student loan lenders so the government can do it instead.

This is just astoundingly wrong. On a very basic level, it could only be true if the sole thing banks did was make student loans, which is obviously not the case. The day after student loan reform passes, banks will still be there, cashing checks, taking deposits, making home loans, and on and on.

But the greater point Boehner was trying to make is that student loan reform is somehow a new expansion of government into the private economy. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) echoed this sentiment yesterday, saying that student loan reform amounts to “seizing control of industries and squeezing out private competition.” But the government already provides the money for the loans and guarantees the lenders against loss, in addition to directly making millions of loans every year. So student lending is, for all intents and purposes, already a federal program.

In fact, the subsidized private program that Boehner and Enzi want to preserve is called the Federal Family Education Loan Program. By cutting the middlemen out of the process, the government will not only save billions of dollars to be used for deficit reduction, but will also have the money to increase Pell Grants and thus boost the number of college graduates. According to an analysis by CAP Senior Fellow Ulrich Boser, the boost in incomes due to student loan reform will top $100 billion.

And at the end of the day, the bill doesn’t even cut private lenders completely out of the loop, as they still would be contracted to service the loans (collect payments, etc.). But Boehner has decided that this is his week to go all out for the bankers — telling them to stand up to “punk staffers” trying to write new regulations — so it’s really not surprising that he’s willing to distort student loan reform to argue for his bank-friendly policies.

Cross-posted at The Wonk Room.

Health

Republicans Should Have Listened To Grassley, CBO Is ‘God’

By Igor Volsky on Mar 19, 2010 at 6:30 pm

Ezra Klein has a good thorough take down of the GOP’s attacks against the CBO, which I’ve tried to present in video form below. Basically, Republicans are trying to argue that the CBO numbers are invalid because Democrats fooled the agency with legislative trickery. Rather than reducing the deficit by $138 billion, the bill increases the deficit by shifting the spending to 2013, double counting savings and leaving the sustainable growth rate unfixed.

Now say what you will about the CBO and the process of scoring, but it’s fairly clear that the Democrats invested a lot of time in playing by the rules and working with the agency to actually pay for reform. As Klein explains, “Democrats changed their legislation so the subsidies grew more slowly over time and the excise tax would grow faster. In other words, CBO said that they’d need to do hard things their constituents wouldn’t like if they wanted to cut the deficit more, and they did them.”

They did all this because the CBO is, for better or for worse, the non partisan arbitrer of cost. Don’t believe me? Just ask Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Here he is explaining why CBO is GOD:

- “I say all the time that CBO is God around here, because policy lives and dies by CBO’s word. Like the Bible, a CBO document can mean different things to different people and it’s easy to pull things out in isolation to justify a position. I hope everyone will take the full picture into account before rushing to judgment.” [March 6, 2006]

- “Do you question the work of the CBO and JCT? Well you shouldn’t because they’re like God around here.” [December 9, 2009]

Watch a compilation of Grassley’s remarks, followed by GOP attacks on the CBO:

So to be clear, after insisting that health care reform must not add to the deficit, Republicans are responding to the bill’s deficit reductions by arguing that CBO’s scores can’t be trusted because 1) they don’t score provisions Democrats excluded and 2) Democrats are feeding legislation that is tricking the models to produce deficit reductions. The argument has descended into the bizarre with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) asking the CBO to include the SGR fix — a provision not part of health care reform — in the deficit projections. No word yet on whether he’s asked them to calculate the cost of purchasing candy for every child in America.

Yglesias

Self-Executing Rules

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 19, 2010 at 5:46 pm

If you go over here you can download PDF’s of the House Rules Committee’s “Survey of Activities” document for each congress. Inside the PDF you can find the listing of all the self-executing rules that have been used in each congress. Pulling a comprehensive list together is tedious, but here’s a grab of the 22 items voted on via “deem and pass” during the 108th Congress, i.e. the last GOP Congress:

selfexecute108

Look up the rest if you like.

Climate Progress

Next Health Care Battle: The Clean Air Act And Carbon Hotspot Deaths

By Brad Johnson on Mar 19, 2010 at 5:40 pm

The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set standards for plants, cars, and factories that emit greenhouse gas pollution. Because global warming is by definition a global problem, there is support for scrapping individual source standards for a national cap-and-trade system that limits the collective pollution, instead of local emissions. However, new scientific research by Mark Z. Jacobson, finds that carbon dioxide pollution is a two-fold killer — causing not just global warming but also forming “domes” that trap other pollutants in urban areas:

Jacobson found that domes of increased carbon dioxide concentrations – discovered to form above cities more than a decade ago – cause local temperature increases that in turn increase the amounts of local air pollutants, raising concentrations of health-damaging ground-level ozone as well as particles in urban air.

Jacobson’s study, “Enhancement of Local Air Pollution by Urban CO2 Domes,” published in Environmental Science & Technology, estimates that “reducing local CO2 may reduce 300-1000 premature air pollution mortalities/yr in the U.S. and 50-100/yr in California, even if CO2 in adjacent regions is not controlled.” The deaths represent a small fraction of the population who are suffering increased respiratory problems from carbon domes.

Right-wing polluters have launched a multi-pronged assault on Clean Air Act regulation of global warming pollution, including petitions by state legislatures, lawsuits from governors and industry trade groups, resolutions in Congress, and propaganda campaigns by Astroturf groups. Despite the growing damage of climate change, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson has weakened and delayed implementation of global warming rules to be phased in from 2011 to 2016, decades after the United States ratified the Rio Treaty in 1992.

Left unclear in the rumors about the proposed Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate legislation is whether it will preempt existing Clean Air Act rules. Considering that over forty senators, including three Democrats — Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) — support Sen. Lisa Murkowski‘s (R-AK) Dirty Air Act resolution to nullify the EPA’s scientific endangerment finding entirely, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) wants to suspend Clean Air Act enforcement until 2012, it appears that minds will have to be changed if the Clean Air Act is to be protected in climate legislation. With luck, senators will pay more attention to the health and welfare of their constituents than to the size of their corporate campaign contributions.

Yglesias

My Whip Count

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 19, 2010 at 5:28 pm

I appreciate the hard work folks like David Dayen have been doing on health care “whip counts” over the past few weeks. At this point, though, I think it’s probably become pointless. This is one of these situations where now that the vote has been called, the votes will be there to pass the thing. The leadership “doesn’t have the votes” but in this kind of situation you never have the votes until you have the votes.

Monday, Nancy Pelosi told a bunch of us bloggers that she couldn’t say whether or not she had the votes. She said “first you lock the bill down,” then she punched into the palm of her hand, “then you get the votes.” And throughout the meeting she was serene and confident. Which is to say that there’s some critical mass of votes you need, short of a majority, at which point you start the doomsday countdown. Now that the count is underway, you can’t change the bill. So there’s no point in holding out for changing. And you “scale the bill down” or “start over” either. You have a victory, or you have a humiliating defeat. And everyone’s in the same boat. At that point, the votes will materialize.

Politics

Cuccinelli: Homosexual ‘acts’ are a ‘detriment to our culture.’

By Amanda Terkel on Mar 19, 2010 at 5:17 pm

This month, far-right Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli “urged the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, arguing in a letter sent to each school that their boards of visitors had no legal authority to adopt such statements.” The move was so controversial that even Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) slightly backed away from supporting it. In a new interview with CBS 6, Cuccinelli says that gay “acts” are harmful to society:

Q: Do you think that gays — the practice of homosexuality — is a detriment to our culture?

CUCCINELLI: The acts are. You certainly want everybody in your society to be integrated into your society. So, that’s a focus I’d like to take, but there’s a distinction. And it’s one that the General Assembly seems to be wrestling with every year, and we’ll leave that one to them for now.

Watch it:

 

(HT: Right Wing Watch)

Related Posts

Security

Three Senators Call For Bipartisan Action On START

By Max Bergmann on Mar 19, 2010 at 4:50 pm

With Secretary of State Clinton in Moscow today pushing to wrap up a new START treaty, three Senators – Robert Casey, Al Franken, and Ted Kaufman – took to the floor of the Senate last night to lend support to the treaty effort. The Senators sent a clear signal that, despite some reported chatter about START being DOA, taking up the START treaty will be a major legislative priority.

But since the final text of the treaty has not been finalized, these three Senators also explained what the treaty had to include for them to support ratification. Senator Kaufman laid out his four “red lines” for supporting a new treaty, saying a treaty must include “an intrusive verification system” and allow for “modernization of our existing nuclear capabilities,” while not including “any other weapons systems, including antiballistic missile systems provide no limits on missile defense.”

What is interesting about these red lines is that they are virtually identical to the red lines offered by arms-control skeptic Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), as well as Senators McCain (R-AZ) and Lieberman (I-CT). This means that Senate Democrats and Republicans are on the same page when it comes to whether they will or will not support a new START treaty.

Therefore, assuming the treaty meets these clearly defined standards – which by all accounts it will – there should be overwhelming bipartisan support for the treaty. Senator Casey said forcefully that past treaties of kind received overwhelming bipartisan support, “There is no reason–no reason at all–why this START agreement should be different…I am confident that at the end of the process, we will have a strong agreement that in the proud tradition of the Senate will garner bipartisan support.” Watch Casey and Kaufman:

Nevertheless, while a new START treaty will have met all of the stated red lines of Kyl, McCain, Lieberman, and others, the crucial question is whether they squirm out of their original positions and find some new argument to oppose the treaty. In other words, will Kyl and others betray the Senate’s bipartisan arms-control tradition, as there is overwhelming bipartisan support for a new START treaty and Obama’s nuclear agenda from high ranking national security officials.

However, thus far bipartisanship in the Senate has been a mirage on almost every issue, as an obstructionist GOP has sought to oppose the President and Senate Democrats at every step of the turn. In order to ratify this treaty, bipartisanship is required, since 67 votes are needed to ratify all treaties. We will therefore soon find out if the Senate GOP is capable of putting the security of the country ahead of their crass obstructionist political strategy.

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