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Rick Santorum: Rick Perry’s Attack On Ben Bernanke ‘Completely Out Of Bounds’

By Lee Fang on Aug 16, 2011 at 9:40 pm

Yesterday, ThinkProgress caught Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) on video threatening Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during a trip to Iowa. Perry, the latest Republican to announce a campaign for the White House, called any effort by the Fed to provide monetary stimulus “treasonous in my opinion” and added that he would treat Bernanke “pretty ugly down in Texas.” On CNN this afternoon, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), another candidate in the race, slammed Perry’s comment and said any suggestion of treason is pure politics:

KING: What do you mean by he stepped on it?

SANTORUM: Well his comments about Ben Bernanke, they were completely out of bounds. I don’t agree with Ben Bernanke’s policies… but to me the rhetoric that Rick Perry used was sort of the rhetoric I would expect from a John Conyers, talking about President Bush and saying he should be impeached. We don’t do that. We don’t impeach people, we don’t charge people with treason because we disagree with them on public policy. You might say that they’re wrong, you might say lots of things about how misguided they are, but you don’t up the ante to that type of rhetoric. It’s out of place, and hopefully Gov. Perry will step back and recognize that we’re not in Texas anymore.

As Politico’s Alexander Burns notes, “Santorum’s point is that Perry sounds radical and irresponsible. Bringing impeachment into the picture may not be the best rhetorical choice, given that Santorum voted to convict Bill Clinton in impeachment proceedings back in the day.”

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Climate Progress

With No End in Sight for Texas Drought, ABC News Explains: “Every Farmer in the World Will Be Affected by Climate Change”

By Joe Romm on Aug 16, 2011 at 7:22 pm

The driest 10-month period on record for Texas has devastated the state and its crops.  The National Weather Service warned Monday:

THERE IS LITTLE TO SUGGEST ANY END TO THE DROUGHT

Every state — along with much of Asia — has been hit by record temperatures this summer.  And thanks in large part to extreme weather around the globe, food prices are stuck at record levels, causing hardship for tens of millions:

http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/home_graph_3.jpg

Dr. Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, emailed TP Green, that while Gov. Perry may deny climate science:

There are dozens of credible atmospheric scientists in Texas at institutions like Rice, UT, and Texas A&M, and I can confidently say that none agree with Gov. Perry’s views on the science of climate change. This is a particularly unfortunate situation given the hellish drought that Texas is now experiencing, and which climate change is almost certainly making worse.

Global warming is certainly making the drought hotter, which creates a vicious cycle, since the higher temps dry out the earth, but the drier it gets, the hotter its gets, as the NWS explains below.

Yet, the dots aren’t being connected for the public by and large.  “In Coverage of Extreme Weather, Media Downplay Climate Change” as a Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting analysis recently concluded.

Indeed, I just saw NBC Evening News tonight, which explained that we are seeing record food prices and that extreme weather is a major contributor, but had no mention whatsoever of climate change.

The dividing line between good climate reporting and bad climate reporting is almost always whether the reporter talked to real climate scientists.  Typically, the more a reporter talks to, the better the story.

That’s a key reason why ABC News has been one of the few major media outlets to explain the connection between extreme weather and global warming (see links below).  And they did so last night.  Indeed, they went beyond the connection between global warming and extreme weather to the key climate impact on crops and food prices:

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Economy

Bachmann Still Claiming Income From Federally-Subsidized Farm She Insists She Doesn’t Benefit From

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 16, 2011 at 7:15 pm

A few months ago, the Los Angeles Times pointed out that virulenty anti-government spending Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was receiving income from a farm that collected federal subsidies. Bachmann responded by claiming, “the farm is my father-in-law’s farm, it’s not my husband and my farm. My husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm.” However, Bachmann claimed income from the farm on her 2009 financial disclosure form.

As McClatchy noted today, Bachmann — all her protests aside — claimed income from the farm again in 2010, which were filed last week:

Despite repeatedly asserting that she has never received income from a family farm that has drawn federal subsidies in the past, Rep. Michele Bachmann again listed the farm as a source of income when she filed her 2010 personal financial disclosures late last week. Bachmann, R-Minn., also reported that the farm had more than doubled in value since 2009. [...]

Bachmann’s financial disclosures paint a different picture. Since 2006, she has reported receiving between $37,504 and $120,000 in income from the farm, including between $5,001 and $15,000 that she disclosed for the 2010 calendar year.

Bachmann also reported that her farm doubled in value over the past year: “In 2009, Bachmann listed the farm as an asset worth between $100,001 and $250,000. In her 2010 forms, Bachmann valued the farm between $500,001 and $1 million.” The counseling clinic that Bachmann runs with her husband has also received federal funding.

Alyssa

Magic, Elitism, And Power To Transform The World

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 16, 2011 at 6:38 pm

David Liss, whose Benjamin Weaver novels are favorites of mine both as introductions to economics and stories about badass Jews in London, has a wonderful meditation up at io9 about how magic became elite and inaccessible, at least in fiction:

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan. Anyone could learn magic as long as he or she had access to the knowledge or could make a connection with the right supernatural entity. The important point is that in theory, the gates of magic were open to everyone, and what I find most interesting is how that has changed in popular culture. [...]

Magic has gone from being an open system to a closed one. Their massive popularity make the Harry Potter novels and films the most glaring example, but it’s everywhere, and has been for decades now: TV shows like Charmed and Wizards of Waverly Place, books like those of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. More often than not, magical practitioners are born, not made. Magic is an exclusive club. You can watch and be envious, but you can’t join.

I wonder if a sense of biological magic also correlates to a sense of unease about how much power we have to impact our lives and to change the world. Believing that you can put the evil eye on someone, or that you can summon the devil, means believing in your own capacity to learn, hold, and wield power. Biological conceptions of magic are a way of explaining your own powerlessness. We can’t change our lives — but we’re also not responsible for changing the world — because we’re not Harry Potter, or the Slayer, or the Halliwell sisters. And as entrancing as our magical worlds are, we also tend to put our magical elites through a lot: both Harry and Buffy die and are resurrected, lose parents, and have to give up their first loves in the name of perfecting the world. The Halliwells die, marry the Source of All Evil and become Queen of the Underworld, give birth to demon babies, and experience various other misfortunes. Better to be ordinary — and safe. There’s something conservative in that acceptance of our own powerlessness, but I think it speaks to very real anxieties especially in an age defined by terrorism and recession.

Media

Fox’s Bolling: ‘We’re Keeping An Eye On’ Chris Christie’s Muslim Judge Appointee

By Ben Armbruster on Aug 16, 2011 at 5:51 pm

Fox Business Host Eric Bolling

Yesterday on Fox Business, host Eric Bolling ran an entire 7-minute Islamophobic, fearmongering segment hyping the myth that Sharia law is creeping its way into the United States. As evidence, Bolling cited a Muslim American who in 2009 “ran over the daughter because of her unwillingness to partake in an arranged marriage.” Bolling also referenced New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) decision to appoint a Muslim judge to the state’s bench:

BOLLING: We have a judge right across the river, Chris Christie is appointing a Muslim judge, and this may or may not happen, he may have a completely objective view on American case law. It remains to be seen. We’ll keep our eye on it.

Bolling’s fear-mongering panel featured Fox’s go-to Muslim basher Bo Dietl, whose contribution to the segment included expressing his concern that “judges who are from the Islam can become judges in America.” Media Matters has the video:

Bolling doesn’t seem to be phased by the fact that the “creeping Sharia” canard has absolutely no basis in reality. But beyond that, he should also check the facts in his evidence. Here’s what actually happened with the father who killed his daughter for refusing an arranged marriage:

On Feb. 22, Faleh al-Maleki was convicted of killing his daughter. … Prosecutors had pressed a first-degree murder charge. They characterized his actions as an “honor killing,” a controversial term that refers to a family member or members killing a relative, usually a girl or young woman, whose behavior is judged to have tarnished the family honor. … The jury found Faleh guilty of the lesser charge of second-degree murder, finding that he didn’t plan the act in advance.

As for Christie, he said recently that he’s “disgusted” by the “ignorance” of the right-wing attacks on him for appointing a Muslim judge. “This Sharia Law business is crap,” he said, “I’m tired of dealing with crazies.”

NEWS FLASH

Washington Post Shills For Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline | Fred Hiatt’s editorial board at the Washington Post, despite claiming to support a “shift away from the use of energy sources (oil, gas and coal) that are endangering the world” this May, published an editorial last week promoting the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, arguing that if the tar sands crude “is to be burned anyway, there’s little reason for America to reject it.” Climate scientists have warned that for there to be any reasonable likelihood of preserving a livable climate, the tar sands must remain in the ground. Building a pipeline designed to shuttle the tar sands not to American consumers but onto the global market will serve neither the planet nor U.S. citizens, which is why thousands are prepared to protest at the White House this month to ask President Obama to cancel the project.

Update

“This is one of the laziest, ill-reasoned editorials I’ve ever seen in the Post,” Mike Tidwell, the director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network tells ThinkProgress Green.

By Brad Johnson on Aug 16, 2011 at 5:49 pm

NEWS FLASH

Bachmann Brings Back Death Panels | The Iowa Straw Poll winner told a town hall meeting in South Carolina this afternoon about some law that ends Medicare and puts seniors at the mercy of a 15-panel board charged with making coverage decisions. At first, it sounded like a pretty honest description of Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization scheme, but ultimately morphed into some fun house mirror version of the Affordable Care Act. Watch it:

Yglesias

Incentives and Obviousness

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 16, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Julian Sanchez has an excellent post about the conceptual and practical oddities of the “obviousness” standard for patentability or non-patentability. But if you back up to an earlier step of his analysis I think it points the way toward a better standard: “Patents are not supposed to just be a pointless monopoly granted to the first person who happens to file a description of a particular invention with the Patent Office; the justification for granting the monopoly is that it (in theory) elicits innovations that would not exist but for the incentive a patent provides.”

It seems to me that a more rigorous idea about where it does and doesn’t make sense to grant time-limited monopolies is just to forget about the issue of how “obvious” something is and ask instead how capital intensive it is. If the only way to make something is to invest a ton of up-front capital in making it, then the monopoly grant serves as a way of attracting the capital. But if you’re talking about something that can be made with relatively little in the way of up-front capital, then you’re not so much incentivizing creation as you are raising the cost of innovation. This is what makes the burgeoning software patents category so pernicious. The pharmaceutical patent system is not without its problems, but the basic logic of “nobody would invest all this money in R&D if there weren’t windfall profits at the end of the rainbow” makes sense. That’s why proposal to change pharma patents always involve replacing the money with prizes or with direct public funding or something. But software’s not like that. Hiring a couple of programmers and buying them computers is trivially cheap compared to the equipment and manpower you need to develop a new chemical.

Talking about obviousness makes it seem as if the relevant issue is how much pure genius you need to pour into a new invention. But the relevant consideration here is actually financial incentives. You need large financial incentives in fields where innovation requires large up-front capital investments. When you don’t need the large investment, then what’s the incentive and incentive for?

Alyssa

‘Deadwood’ Late Pass: Survival Instincts In ‘Bullock Returns To Camp’ And ‘Suffer The Little Children’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 16, 2011 at 5:23 pm

One of the things that’s fascinating about this embryonic society in Deadwood is the way that class works in multiple directions. Brom Garret’s wealth and pretensions labeled him a tenderfoot and a potential victim, someone whose rigidities about honor and general impracticality were laughable rather than honorable. His widow, Alma, has some of the weaknesses, and in these couple of episodes, we see her overcome them as she shakes off both laudanum and the restrictions she’s placed on herself in the name of propriety. “I had better manners before I began to abstain,” she tells Bullock. But as she defies expectations, she also begins to gain admirers in the camp for sticking it out. “I’d have bet a month’s wages that burial would be taking place in New York City,” Jane says of Alma. “That is, if I had a fucking paying job.”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t make errors — Alma’s not entirely a frontier woman yet. When she offers to send Trixie to New York City with a recommendation that would get her work as long as she’ll take care of Flora, Alma misunderstands how vulnerable that prospect makes Trixie feel. “I got no people anywhere,” Trixie snaps at her. “What the fuck? What would keep you here? Do you want to fuck this man? Then fuck him…I know my place, you rich cunt. And I’m going back to it.” Despite that toughness, Trixie’s got her own kind of vulnerability. She may be able to tell Al why she’s helped Alma get clean even as he’s sexually assaulting her: “Her being high wasn’t going to have nothing to do with whether she sold you the claim. And she wanted to get off the dope. And that little one needs someone to care for her, and maybe get her the fuck out of here, and I knew it wasn’t going to be me.” But she still tries to overdose, telling Alma, who’s apologizing for her emotional distress that “I don’t remember you being the one who made me a whore Mrs. Garret.” Life for women in Deadwood is a constant negotiation between the kind of sensitivity that can induce Sofia Metz to speak her own name for the first time and the kind of fortitude that will let you stand up to both of your employers and survives.
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