Take my problem to the United Nations:
— “Evolving Structure Of US Economy And The Employment Challenge”.
— Laura Ingraham commands $30-50,000 per appearance as a speaker.
— I’m against Koran burning and even more against murderous mob violence.
— Rebecca Black, Miley Cyrus, and rent seeking.
Multilateral! PJ Harvey, “The Words That Maketh Murder”.
Climate hawks are starting to take a strong stand against the Senate frenzy to cripple Clean Air Act rules on behalf of global warming polluters. Four anti-climate amendments have been attached to unrelated small business legislation now under consideration. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), with the support of nearly the entire Republican caucus, submitted the Upton-Inhofe climate denial bill, while Democratic senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Max Baucus (D-MT), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) introduced their own bills to hogtie the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) have been leading the fight against limits of Clean Air Act enforcement of greenhouse pollution rules. Today, spokespeople for these climate hawks confirmed to ThinkProgress that they are committed to opposing any and all of these pollution riders, no matter which party has introduced the legislation.
A vote on at least the McConnell amendment is expected next week.
To call your senator and find out the stance on the four anti-science, pro-polluter amendments, check out the Credo whip count page.
A spokesperson for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) confirms that he is joining the other climate hawks to vote against any anti-EPA carbon amendment.
Tomorrow, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) will hold a press conference to announce if he will run for Arizona’s Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). (Current rumors indicate Franks may pass on a bid.) Whether or not he announces a Senate campaign or remains in the House of Representatives, Franks has built a record as one of the most extreme voices in the Republican caucus.
For instance, during the Tea Party Patriots Policy Summit in February, Franks told ThinkProgress that he supported impeaching President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder if they did not reverse course and defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. The day after the story broke, Franks’s office released a tepid backtrack, claiming the question was “distorted.” (ThinkProgress released video of the full question and answer.) Notably, the Arizona Republican did not recant his call for impeachment.
However, Franks’s alarm over President Obama went beyond just impeachment. According to the Arizona congressman, the fate of the country hangs in the balance. After calling him “the most pro-abortion president in the history of the country,” Franks warned that if Obama wins reelection next year, “I don’t know that the country can survive that”:
KEYES: I’d love to get your reaction to President Obama ordering the Department of Justice to not defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, what your thoughts are on that?
FRANKS: President Obama has been the most pro-abortion president in the history of the country. And so his commitment to family is already in serious doubt. But to then say he won’t defend the law that protects marriage itself, it shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. But it just further indicates that he is a left-wing ideologue of the first magnitude, and if we don’t understand that now, then I’m afraid that somehow he may get back in in two years, and I don’t know that the country can survive that.
Watch it:
Earlier this year, Franks also sat down with Mike Stark, where the two discussed the effects of abortion on African-Americans. Franks argued that blacks were actually better off during the time of slavery than they are now because of abortion: “Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today, than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.”
Very interesting historical note from David Beckworth about the monetary systems during the Civil War. Here’s a chart showing the value of confederate dollars, which tended to fall both because of excessive monetary inflation and because of growing doubts that the country issuing the notes would continue to exist:
One interesting thing you can do with this data is look at 1864 as a proxy of market expectations of Lincoln’s re-election. In the absence of polling, we’re normally left with conjecture as to the state of this campaign and when sentiment turned in his favor, but with the currency data we can spot the turning point quite precisely.
A new bill in Tennessee would prevent local municipalities from extending their nondiscrimination statements to include sexual orientation and gender identity (PDF). To rally support for it, a conservative group has recycled an anti-trans commercial used in a similar (failed) campaign in Florida. The Family Action Council of Tennessee rehashes the “bathroom meme,” claiming that protections for transgender people would allow child predators into public restrooms:
Do gender difference matter to you? They won’t if Memphis or Shelby County mandates “gender expression” policies on private employers. …
Is that the kind of Tennessee you want?
Watch:
Not only has there never been a reported case of this bathroom fear coming to fruition, there is also nothing that currently prevents a child predator from entering a bathroom as it is.
A recent groundbreaking study found that discrimination against transgender people is exorbitant, including in housing, healthcare, and treatment by law enforcement.
A similar bill preventing local non-discrimination ordinances failed in Montana last week.
The Tea Party Congress doesn’t just hate EPA rules that protect against industry destroying our country with greenhouse pollution, mercury, coal ash, and mountaintop removal. By a veto-proof margin, the U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to prohibit Clean Water Act limits on pesticide pollution of lakes, streams, and rivers.
Lobbyists for industrial agriculture polluters cheered the 292-130 vote for H.R. 872, which “will amend the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and the Clean Water Act to clarify Congressional intent and eliminate the requirement for National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits for applications of pesticides approved for use under FIFRA.” The California agribusiness lobby Western Farmers Association praised the “practical, bipartisan example of eliminating government regulations that needlessly increase farm business costs“:
The measure would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from requiring farmers or companies to comply with the Clean Water Act when using pesticides on or near water sources. The bill’s supporters said pesticides are adequately regulated by other laws. The bill passed 292 to 130 on Thursday. The 130 negative votes came from Democrats. Fifty-seven Democrats joined 235 Republicans in supporting the bill, which has yet to see Senate action.
Clean Water rules against pesticide pollution are hardly “needless.” The waters that are home to fish and that feed our drinking water supply are being poisoned. Agribusiness uses hundreds of millions of pounds of FIFRA-approved pesticides like atrazine, metolachlor, cyanazine, alachlor, acetochlor, metribuzin, bentazon, and trifluralin a year. These pesticides, linked to cancer, birth defects and neurological disorders, are found in nearly every single stream in the United States.
Following a 2006 USGS report on the nearly ubiquitous pesticide contamination of our streams, rivers, and the fish that live in them, the EPA under Bush tried to establish a loophole-ridden rule that was thrown out by the courts. The EPA was given until April 9, 2011 to establish new rules, but was granted a delay until October 31 on Tuesday.
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.
The next step in the DC voucher farce, it seems, is that not only will House Republicans push for the DC scholarship program, John Boehner will propose supporting it as the sine qua non of “serious” education reform.
This is, plainly, nonsense. The underlying model of the program—deploy federal dollars to send some poor kids to private school over and above the existing public school system—plainly doesn’t work at any kind of meaningful scale and its Republican proponents have no interest in attempting to scale it up. As a DC resident, I’m happy if congress wants to send extra cash our way, but as my colleague Theodora Chang writes the real task is tackling systemic issues in American education like some of the nutty funding disparities allowed by current Title I rules:
“Getting serious about education” requires addressing the deeper funding issues that affect all students, starting with fiscal equity. Equal opportunities for students are hindered by inequitable funding formulas at the state and district level as well as under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Studies show that students attending high-poverty schools actually need more funding to achieve at the level of their wealthier counterparts, but reality shows us shortchanging our students.
One key issue here is the comparability loophole that instead of equalizing actual staff funding between rich and poor schools merely mandates “comparable” staffing. That means that if one school has three math teachers and another school has three math teachers, they’ve both got a “comparable” number of math teachers. This, however, is perfectly compatible with School A having a giant budget to pay veteran teachers while School B is stuck with a rotating cast of novices. Its like saying the LA Lakers and the Cleveland Cavaliers are “comparable” because they both have full rosters of basketball players without noticing that LA has $38 million more in payroll that they use to hire Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol instead of Daniel Gibson and JJ Hickson.
President Bush’s presidential library hosted a conference this week in Dallas focusing on promoting women’s freedom in Afghanistan and “advancing their economic opportunity.” Promoting the conference on Fox News last night, Bush said that the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan to protect women’s rights:
VAN SUSTEREN: It is a big event isn’t it, sir?
BUSH: It is. It is big because it will have an impact over the years. The idea of liberating women, empowering women, encouraging women, educating women in Afghanistan is all part of laying a foundation for lasting peace.
My concern of course is that the United States gets weary of being in Afghanistan, it is not worth it, let’s leave. And Laura and I believe that if that were to happen, women would suffer again. We don’t believe that’s in the interests of the United States or the world to create a safe haven for terrorists and stand by and watch women’s rights be abused.
Watch it:
So it seems that Bush — who started the war in Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago and took much needed resources away from it to start the strategic blunder in Iraq — thinks it should continue on, endlessly, to protect the rights of Afghan women.
While protecting women’s rights in Afghanistan is laudable, especially considering women there have been severely repressed and brutalized by men for decades, committing the U.S. military indefinitely to do it is another story. As Gen. David Petraeus noted when assuming command in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is there to advance political and security goals, not to promote social and cultural norms.
This debate surfaced last year when Time Magazine published a photo of a Bibi Aisha, an Afghan girl defaced by the Taliban for violating social customs, on its cover with the caption: “This is what happens if we leave Afghanistan.” Time received widespread criticism for the cover, with some calling it “emotional blackmail” and even “war porn.” Moreover, the attack on Aisha occurred with U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Their presence there didn’t prevent the attack and moreover, these kinds of local customs aren’t limited to the Taliban either. “The Taliban’s poor treatment of women often comes up as a sub-point here to illustrate the theme that the Taliban are bad,” Matt Yglesias noted last year. “But actually altering social conditions in southern and eastern Afghanistan isn’t on the list of war aims.”
There are other ways to promote the social and economic well-being of Afghan women, but deploying military divisions indefinitely isn’t one of them.
Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs’ subcommittee on Africa, wondered whether the U.S.’s intervention in Libya means we might “go into Africa next.” Libya is, of course, in Africa. Jay Leno joked last night, “You see why he’s not on the intelligence committee. Even Sarah Palin’s going ‘get a map!’”
Marino’s office scrambled to respond to our story, telling reporters that the congressman was making a distinction between our aerial bombing of Libya and the potential deployment of ground troops — a point that was not made clear in his original statement. “We are not ‘in’ Africa by any means,” a Marino spokesman said. “We do not have ground troops there and, as far as we know, there are no plans to go into Africa.” In fact, the U.S. has bases in Africa and troops on the ground.
As Marino staffers were undertaking efforts to defend their boss’s competency, they were simultaneously undermining that cause. Yesterday, “about a dozen” tea party protesters showed up outside Marino’s district office in Tunkhannock, PA. At the time, Marino, who also sits on the House Homeland Security, was participating in a hearing on the “U.S. Homeland Security Role in the Mexican War Against Drug Cartels.” Marino decided to ditch the hearing and go talk to tea party protesters instead:
During the rally, Renita Fenick, Mr. Marino’s director of communications, came out to hear what the tea party members had to say. She told them the congressman would appreciate knowing he had that kind of support and would pass on their comments.
Ms. Fenick said after the rally she was able to get Mr. Marino on the phone from Washington to speak with those at the Tunkhannock office.
“We pulled him out of a Homeland Security meeting to do it,” she said.
If foreign affairs and homeland security don’t interest Marino, perhaps he should recuse himself from those committees and devote more of his time to tea party rallies.
The usual rules apply: spoilers through chapter twenty-six below the jump, though not beyond. Previous installments of the book club appear here and here. And I’m finding this a quick read (and honestly, I’m eager to get on to Spin) so why don’t we finish this for next week?
So…what do we think this novel is about, folks? Is it meant to be a searing portrait of a failed society? A delivery vehicle for a myth about a society’s creation? I can’t tell you how frustrated I was when I hit the point where our hero, having a fairly bad day, declares that “I wanted him to die first; Fischetti and then Sybilline. Then I’d kill Waverly while I was at it, and piece by piece I’d dismantle the entire apparatus of the Game. In that same moment, I realised that I hated them more than I hated Reivich. But he’d get his too.” This gets at the core of why I think this book is so irritating. Whether he’s supposed to be the main point, or the delivery mechanism for Sky’s story, Tanner Mirabel is as astonishingly flat character. He’s a stock figure who has stock figure feelings for stock figure babes, distinguished only by being a) married to a rich dude or b) independently wealthy and zebra-striped. I’m going to choose that he’s the latter so I can focus on the Sky Haussmann narrative, which is honestly the only reason I’m finishing this novel.
And even then, it’s driving me crazy. I’m not immune to the stories about great men and their terrible deeds. I think Peter Wiggin is one hell of a character. But I have a lot of problems with this one.
As I wrote last week, it’s entirely unclear why we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in this society, or societies. They’re ill, perhaps fatally, with addictions to war, with terminal boredom, with permanent and inert class division. Because Reynolds establishes this fairly clearly before we have any sense of what we’re dealing with in Sky, it becomes hard to feel invested in the emotional and moral complexity of whatever it is he’s achieved before we even realize the magnitude of his crimes. Once we get there, they seem even more pathetic, if not despicable. This was the new world he gave birth to?
But worse than that, Hausmann’s not even a particularly interesting young sociopath. In Ender’s Game, our sense of what Peter truly was grew gradually, as did our understanding of why he was the way he was. He was genetically engineered, loved less, hugely intelligent, genuinely mad, faking madness, in need of an intellectual partner. Whatever else he was, Peter was a person.
Sky’s not really a person. We know by this point that he’s immortal, that he’s not really his father’s son. He’s a sick bastard, for sure, someone who gives a semi-human robot the tools to kill his father, who kills the captain of his ship, who hangs out with a psychotic dolphin and is guided by a childhood hallucination. He’s also, uh, fairly obviously Cahuella, right? The dolphin signally is a little obvious. But whatever he is other than a person, it’s not particularly interesting. The details are super-baroque, but they’re not meaningful. Couldn’t an infant awakened from deep freeze, raised by loving parents, turned out to be a fairly normal, well-adjusted childhood? Is there something inherently corrupting about immortality that explains why everyone we meet in this novel is such a complete and utter asshole or stereotype? If so, I would sort of like that explained at some point, preferably not in an insanely didactic way please.
If you’re going to have me wade through a bunch of deviant behavior, there better be something rewarding at the end of it, be it world peace or aesthetic revelation. I know I’m not getting the former. I hope I’m getting something other than cheap noir as the latter.
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