The “debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”

Cue the FoxNews denunciations.

David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, has dared to call out his own party for creating our current economic problems.  His NYT op-ed, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse,” begins:

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing.

Given our long-term deficit problem, Stockman said it is “unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.”

UPDATE:  Huffpost reports that in an interview today on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said that the push by congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the costs elsewhere could end up being ‘disastrous’ for the economy.”

Here are some more excerpts from Stockman’s must-read piece:

Read more

This week, New York Times reporters noticed that the world is hot, but they keep their readers in the dark about the real story, a sad example of the decline of its climate coverage from earlier days. Even in stories about the increasingly catastrophic impacts of global warming, they ignore the scientific understanding of our climate system and the deadly influence of fossil fuel pollution. In Thursday’s “From Fires to Fish, Heat Wave Batters Russia,” investigative reporter Clifford Levy describes the devastation of a superheated Russia:

Much of Russia has been reeling. Forest fires have erupted. Drought has ruined millions of acres of wheat. More than 2,000 people have died from drowning in rivers, reservoirs and elsewhere in July and June, often after seeking relief from the heat while intoxicated. In Moscow alone, the number of such deaths has tripled in comparison with last year, officials said.

In “Fires and Storms Kill at Least 28 in Russia,” Russian correspondent Andrew Kramer at least notes that the record heat in the largest country on earth is part of an even larger geographic trend: “Russia, like much of the Northern Hemisphere, has been baking in a heat wave this summer.” Other stories about record-breaking climate disasters abound: “Floods in Pakistan Kill at Least 1,000,” write Salman Masood and Adam B. Ellick, caused by “record-breaking rainfall.” “Iowa Dam Ruptures Under Torrential Rain,” Christina Cappecchi files. In “Water Vendors Profit From the Heat,” Sam Dolnick describes “July’s historic heat wave” in New York. At no point do any of the writers mention the existence of global warming, or that it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

In the case of the Russian heat wave, we’re talking about a record, destructive, continent-wide climate event within the context of record destructive heat waves across the northern hemisphere — in North America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe — within the context of global warming during a solar minimum. And we’re not just seeing heat waves, but the full suite of climatic changes linked to the increase of heat trapped in the climate system, as the other stories demonstrate — more extreme precipitation, intensified droughts, shifts in seasons, fiercer storms, more frequent extreme floods.

But these are just reports on the ground — not mentioning the context of global warming is merely a sin of omission. The toxic reporting this week is from New York Times green editor Tom Zeller Jr, who kills the nation’s collective brain cells in the Week in Review piece, “Is It Hot in Here? Must Be Global Warming.”

In the article, Zeller accuses yours truly of the “absurd” crime of “invoking the local weather” to declare the “debate over climate change” over, comparing my mention of the record-breaking “global heat wave” as the Senate gave up on climate reform to Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) warming-denial igloo, constructed during a record-breaking snow storm in Washington, D.C. this past winter.

Zeller’s comparison is based on the fatuously false premise that there is a legitimate “debate about climate change.” Inhofe tried to overturn a decades-long mountain of scientific understanding with an event entirely consistent with climate change — as I pointed out in this blog at the time. Zeller buries the truth in the sixteenth paragraph:

There is a not-insignificant caveat: Those pointing to hot weather as evidence of global warming are, in the broadest sense, more likely to be right.

If Zeller had wanted to enlighten his readership instead of feeding them manure, he could have written that scientists cannot explain the global accumulation of heat waves and changes in weather patterns that the planet is seeing without the man-made accumulation of greenhouse gases. As the years go by, we live in an increasingly manufactured climate. At first our suicidal path was unintentional, but now it’s by choice. The scientific understanding that fossil-fuel burning would change the climate has been well established for decades now — the real reason people like me are “more likely to be right.”

The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan now “regrets” being duped by Watts

As long as Anthony Watts keeps a website “hits” counter on his sidebar and keeps bragging that his hits are evidence of his blog’s popularity, that will provide the most irrefutable evidence of his innumeracy and his willful statistical deception.

One thing is very safe to say about any quantitative analysis you see from Anthony Watts:  It is, with high-probability, pure BS.  See, for instance, Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts.

Worse, Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared climate scientists and others.  Yet in a post touting the most meaningless statistic on the web — his 50 millionth hit — he has the nerve to write, “I’m really growing tired of the vociferous and voluminous name calling and people bashing, on both sides. It’s palpable.”  What’s palpable is his hypocrisy.

On Memorial Day, for instance, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see “Peak readership for anti-science blogs?“) leading Tamino to write, “This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.”

Watts also keeps reposting the disinformation of The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, even though  TVMOB is the leading purveyor of outright hate speech among the disinformers (see Lord Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists).  Since he reposted TVMOB a number of times last month alone, one can only assume he fully supports TVMOB’s methods.  Indeed, after Prof. John Abraham eviscerated TVMOB in a must-see video, Watts reposted a shameless effort by TVMOB to “censor” Abraham, as Skeptical Science noted.  Deltoid put it this way: “Monckton, supported by Anthony Watts, is trying to suppress Abraham’s presentation. Over at Watts Up with That? Monckton defames Abraham and asks for help in suppressing Abraham’s speech.”

But this is standard operating procedure for Watts.

Read more

From Joel Pett, of Lexington Herald Leader and the Cartoonist Group:

Read more