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Politics

Focus On The Family Board Member To Anthony Weiner: Seek ‘Atonement, Found Only In Jesus Christ’

By Lee Fang on Jun 14, 2011 at 7:44 pm

Focus on the Family board member Albert Mohler

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has faced a tidal wave of criticism, pundit-driven psychoanalysis, and calls to resign over the revelation that he sent lewd pictures and messages to women over the Internet. Now, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., a preacher with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky is adding his thoughts to the mix.

In a message last Saturday on his Twitter feed, Mohler condemned the news that Weiner planned to check himself into a treatment center. Mohler sneered that there is “no effective ‘treatment’ for sin.” Rather, Mohler suggested Weiner — a practicing Jew — should convert to Christianity for atonement:

“Dear Congressman Weiner: There is no effective ‘treatment’ for sin. Only atonement, found only in Jesus Christ.”

Cathy Lynn Grossman, a writer for USA Today, denounced Moher’s tweet. Grossman said Mohler’s tweet “reads as an evangelism tactic, riding in on the Weiner headlines but aimed at people like Jews such as Weiner, Buddhists like Woods, and many others, such as Weiner’s Muslim wife, who hold different ideas about salvation, different approaches to atonement.” On his blog, Mohler responded: “Salvation is found through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him alone.”

This isn’t the first time Mohler has landed himself in hot water over rhetoric toward the Jewish community. During a debate on MSNBC in 2002, Mohler told host Phil Donohue that all Jews must accept Christ for salvation, and that a Nazi prison guard would find salvation before any Jewish person who does not accept Christ as their savior.

Mohler, a board member of the powerful religious right Christian group Focus on the Family, did not return ThinkProgress’ call for comment.

Justice

Corporate Lobbyists Get What They Paid For As Wisconsin Justice David Prosser Reinstates Walker’s Anti-Union Law

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 14, 2011 at 7:42 pm

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser

Earlier this year, after Wisconsin voters lined up in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) assault on union workers, an unknown candidate named Joanne Kloppenburg started to rapidly close a 25 point polling gap against incumbent Walker ally Justice David Prosser. Realizing they could lose their corporate majority on the state supreme court, corporate front groups — some of with close ties to the Koch brothers — began dumping money into an effort to keep Prosser on the bench. Their corporate cash dump succeeded and Prosser won a narrow victory.

Today, Justice Prosser gave his corporate benefactors exactly what they paid for:

The 4-3 Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion upholding Gov. Scott Walker’s divisive union law shows a sharp partisan divide on the high court. . . .

Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson wrote a blistering dissent of the court’s ruling, accusing Justice David Prosser of appearing to have a “partisan slant” with his concurring opinion.

Although Prosser’s key vote in favor of Walker’s law is a clear victory for corporate union busters, this victory does not have to be permanent. Six of Walker’s GOP allies in the state senate are subject to a recall election next month, and Walker himself can be removed from office next year.

Economy

Cain Believes In The Tax Fairy: ‘The American People Have Been Lied To’ About Tax Cuts ‘Costing Money’

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 14, 2011 at 7:30 pm

Last week, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty revealed that he is a true believer in voodoo supply-side economics, saying on Fox News, “Keep in mind, whether it be the Bush tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts, or other tax cuts, they always produce an increase in revenue. There’s no dispute about that.”

This belief in the “tax fairy” — that revenues always increase after tax cuts, all evidence to the contrary — is pervasive among conservatives. Today, 2012 GOP candidate Herman Cain appeared on Fox News and showed that he is also a believer in the supply-side myth, claiming that “the American people have been lied to” when told that tax cuts cost something:

Unfortunately, the American people have been lied to about tax rates costing money. If you look at the decade of the ’60s, when JFK was able to get some dramatic cuts, tax revenues increased over 50 percent. When Reagan did it in the decade of the ’80s, tax revenues increased over 50 percent.

Watch it:

There’s definitely some lying going on here, but it’s all coming from Cain. As this graph shows, the 1981 Reagan tax cuts and the 2001/2003 Bush tax cuts were both followed by drops in revenue:

In fact, revenues did not increase over 50 percent during Reagan’s term; they increased by less than fifteen percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. But more importantly, revenue dropped after Reagan’s tax cut, and went back up after Reagan raised taxes in the face of an ugly deficit. Revenues also fell for two years following the Kennedy tax cut (enacted after his death).

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote, “The revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend. This is exactly what you would expect to see if supply-side economics were just plain wrong: revenues are permanently reduced relative to what they would otherwise have been.”

NEWS FLASH

Bahrain To Sue British Newspaper Over Critical Coverage | The government of Bahrain acquired legal counsel in London in order to sue the British newspaper The Independent for coverage critical of the Gulf sheikhdom’s violent crackdown against peaceful demonstrations. The government’s media flak singled out journalist Robert Fisk for his coverage, claiming that the paper “deliberately published a series of unrealistic and provocative articles targeting Bahrain and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Saudi Arabia sent in military forces to help put down Bahrain’s non-violent protest movement, one of many uprisings collectively known as the Arab Spring.

By Ali Gharib on Jun 14, 2011 at 7:15 pm

Climate Progress

U.S. Had Most Extreme Spring on Record for Precipitation

By Joe Romm on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:57 pm

Figure 1.  Nine states saw their heaviest precipitation in the 117-year record this spring, two saw their second wettest. Texas had its driest spring on record.

Meteorologist and Former Hurricane Hunter Jeff Masters has a comprehensive new analysis, “U.S. had most extreme spring on record for precipitation,” which I repost below.

Extreme weather disasters, especially deluges and floods, are on the rise — and the best analysis says human-caused warming is contributing (see Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding). Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in December, “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year” (see Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”).

I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for his comment on this spring:

The US has recently experienced (or is experiencing) some of the worst climate extremes in history: from drought and wild fires to floods, powerful storms and deadly tornadoes. When natural variability is compounded by human influences on climate, this is what we get. Records are not just broken, they are smashed! It’s as clear a warning as we are going to get about prospects for the future.

Of course it won’t happen this way every year, the regions most affected shift (last year Russia, this year Arizona; last year the Indus in Pakistan, this year the Mississippi and Missouri…), and some times will be benign, but the kinds of changes being recorded are just what we expect and have been predicted for the human influence on climate.

Here’s is Masters’ analysis:

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Number Of High-Income Households Paying No Income Taxes Almost Doubled Between 2007 and 2008 | As Republicans are already launching a fight to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy, an IRS study released today reports that the number of people with yearly incomes over $200,000 who paid no federal income taxes almost doubled between 2007 and 2008, which is the most recent data available. The tax breaks must be working for some; already the wealthiest 400 Americans hold more of the nation’s net worth than the bottom 50 percent of earners combined.

– Sarah Bufkin

By Guest Blogger on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:50 pm

NEWS FLASH

Alabama Governor Will Sign State ‘Fetal Pain’ Bill | After Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed the nation’s harshest immigration bill into law last week, the GOP-led state legislature tee-ed up another radical bill for his consideration: Alabama’s own anti-abortion “fetal pain” bill. The bill bans abortions past 20 weeks even for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Today, Bentley’s office stated that the governor supports the legislation and “is going to sign it” by the end of the week.

By Tanya Somanader on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:50 pm

Yglesias

The Value Of a Blog Post

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:30 pm

Erik Loomis has posted a pretty lengthy response to me on the subject of boycotting the Huffington Post, but reading his argument over, I actually think the disagreement between us is pretty simple. His view seems to be that if everyone boycotts the Huffington Post until they agree to stop using unpaid bloggers that what will happen is that currently unpaid bloggers will get paid. My view is that if everyone boycots the Huffington Post until they agree to stop using unpaid bloggers, what will happen is that currently unpaid bloggers won’t be writing for the Huffington Post anymore.

After all, it’s not as if the Huffington Post has some kind of across the board policy of refusing to pay writers. They pay Sam Stein. They pay Jason Linkins. They pay for the content that it’s worth it for them to pay for. They don’t pay their unpaid contributors because the unpaid contributors generate very little traffic, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile to pay them. A handful of the very most popular unpaid bloggers — people who are generally already established public figures like Robert Reich or Bob Kuttner — would get a bit of extra money, and the other unpaid bloggers would need to drift off to other outlets. That would reduce overall revenues at Huffington Post and, as discussed previously, depress the earnings of the site’s paid staff.

Loomis also says lots of other things that I agree with. America produces too many PhDs. There’s a lot of dishonest hype about the information economy. The blogosphere is no longer the kinda sorta open meritocracy that it kinds sorta was in 2004. The disagreement is that I don’t think refusing to read the Huffington Post until it stops publishing unpaid bloggers solves any of these problems.

Alyssa

Closing Credits and Netroots Nation

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:29 pm

I’m going. If you’ll be there and want to hang out, I imagine we could set up some kind of pop-culture happy hour thing. Or alternatively, if there are panels you’d like me to check out and report back on, holler. Regular posting may be mildly slower than usual, as I make up for lost time at the 2008 Republican National Convention and explore the great city of Minneapolis. But rest assured, there will be at least some of the usual complement of ridiculous mashups, nerd contemplation, and crankiness, with a potential extra helping of the Guthrie Theater.

-Ellie Kemper to be sprightly, adorable, in unnecessary remake.

-Not content with a Super Bowl ring, Aaron Rodgers has founded a record label.

-Journalists are the future!

-Did people really think Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was going to get better?

-Chris Dodd and Rupert Murdoch in Shanghai.

Climate Progress

Poll: Independents — and Even Republicans — are Still Concerned About Global Warming and Overwhelmingly Support Clean Energy Development

By Joe Romm on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:28 pm

Yale and George Mason University have released their latest polling analysis, “Public Support for Climate & Energy Policies in May 2011.”

Their polling “shows that despite political polarization in Washington D.C., public support for a variety of climate change and energy policies remains high, across party lines“:

  • 71 percent of Americans say global warming should be a very high (13%), high (27%), or medium (31%) priority for the president and Congress, including 88 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of Independents, and 50 percent of Republicans.
  • 91 percent of Americans say developing sources of clean energy should be a very high (32%), high (35%), or medium (24%) priority for the president and Congress, including 97 percent of Democrats, 89 percent of Independents, and 85 percent of Republicans.

This isn’t surprising to anybody who follows the actual polls — rather than the media’s and pundits’ and politicians’ misinterpretation of what they think the polling says.  Also, people still confuse polling on global warming and climate science with polling on whether/how the government should go about addressing global warming.

Americans want action — see links to a dozen polls at the end — no matter what they appear to say about climate science, which critically depends on how the question is phrased (see “Opinion polls underestimate Americans’ concern about the environment and global warming“).

Here are more findings from Yale and GMU:

Read more

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