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NEWS FLASH

Romney whined that Fox News interview was ‘overly aggressive’ | Tonight on the O’Reilly Factor, Fox News anchor Bret Baier revealed that Mitt Romney complained to him repeatedly about his interview yesterday afternoon. After the interview concluded, Romney told Baier he was “overly aggressive.” According to Baier, Romney then returned to his green room, but sought Baier out again to complain some more and to say his questions were “uncalled for.” Watch it:

Last night, ThinkProgress covered Romney’s difficulty during the interview on immigration and other topics.

NEWS FLASH

U.S. Collects Third-Lowest Tax Revenue In Developed World | Despite Republicans’ constant protestations that the U.S. has “a spending problem, not a tax problem,” the U.S. actually collects the third-lowest amount of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to the OECD’s latest data, “Mexico (18.7% in 2010) and Chile (20.9%) have the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios among OECD countries. The United States has the third lowest ratio in the OECD region at 24.8% with Korea at 25.1% and Turkey at 26.0%.” Here are 10 other statistics proving that the U.S. is actually a low-tax country.

Politics

VIDEO: GOP Leaders Voice Support For Big Tax Increase On Working People

By Jeff Spross on Nov 30, 2011 at 7:30 pm

The latest evidence of the salutary effect the 99 Percent Movement and Democrats’ newfound populist aggression is having on the nation’s politics emerged yesterday when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) walked back the GOP’s opposition to an extension of the payroll tax holiday passed last December.

Despite the party’s stated opposition to taxes, up until that point, prominent Republicans had derided an extension of the holiday as “sugar high” economics, and a “bandaid” solution unworthy of the effort or of the cost in revenue to the budget. Not surprisingly, an offer by the Democrats to pay for an extension with a small surtax on millionaires did nothing to reverse the GOP’s aversion.

Given Republicans’ rabid and absolute opposition to tax increases in all other instances — and that the one distinguishing feature of the payroll tax holiday is that it provides relief heavily weighted towards the poor and the middle class — this particular stance was unusually reprehensible, even by Republicans’ standards. ThinkProgress has compiled a video report on the issue. Watch it:

Whether Republicans’ motivation in staking out their initial opposition was genuine disbelief that aiding the poor or the middle class is a necessary part of economic recovery, or if it was purely partisan opposition to a policy favored by President Obama, the GOP apparently felt sufficient pressure to back off. That pressure must be maintained, however, especially since the next crucial piece of economic policy Congress will consider is the extension of unemployment benefits for another year.

Alyssa

When It Comes To Female Superheroes, Logic Is Beside The Point

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 30, 2011 at 6:37 pm

Once again, someone has realized that putting male superheroes in the same positions as women reveals how ridiculous and sexually reductive those poses are in the first place. We’ve been here before, and recently. And we’ve seen it in the superhero-themed Victoria’s Secret fashion show, which had a number of outfits that were actually less revealing and more practical than the outfits comics artists give female heroes who have to do things other than walk down runways in them. But sometimes I wonder if practicality, dignity, and logic are beside the point here. It’s hard to think of another art form that’s so impervious to the idea that women exist for something other than male enjoyment.

Politics

Bachmann: Teaching Only Evolution Is ‘Censorship’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Nov 30, 2011 at 6:30 pm

At an education forum at the University of Northern Iowa this afternoon, GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said she favored the teaching of intelligent design and creationism in schools, saying that just teaching the science of evolution would be “censorship by government.” Asked by a Catholic student why it’s not a violation of the separation of church and state for a public school to teach the religiously-tinged theories, Bachmann said evolution is just a “theory” that even “evolutionists” are not sure of:

BACHMANN: I think what you’re advocating for is censorship on the part of government. So the government would prohibit intelligent design from even the possibility of being taught in questioning the issueof evolution. And if you look at scientists there is not a unanimity of agreement on the origins of life. … Why would we forstall any particular theory? Becuase I don’t think that even evolutionists, by and large, would say that this is proven fact. They say that this is a theory, as well as intelligent design. So I think the best thing to do is to let all scientific facts on the table, and let students decide.

Watch it:

Bachmann joins Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who said evolution was merely “a theory that’s out there.”

Of course, the difference here is that evolution is science — creationism and intelligent design are not. All of the world’s leading scientific organizations have affirmed evolution and dismissed intelligent design, noting that teaching it alongside evolution is counterproductive, as it would give the pseudo-science credibility. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science has repeatedly stated, “evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science;” teaching intelligent design “would undermine” the teaching of science, just as teaching false mathematics or alternative history would.

NEWS FLASH

SEC Now Seeks Power To Impose Greater Fines On Firms That Commit Fraud | Federal Judge Jed Rakoff dealt the Securities and Exchange Commission a serious reprimand when he rejected a $285 million settlement it reached with Citigroup, Inc. Smarting from the blow, the SEC is asking Congress to enact legislation that would give it “the power to impose much-larger penalties on financial firms and individuals that commit fraud.” In a letter to the Senate Banking Committee Monday, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro asked for the power to impose fines up to nine times greater than the maximum currently allowed; to increase the maximum penalty to triple the net profit made from the fraud; and to triple penalties for repeat offenders who have been subject to SEC action or criminal conviction in the preceding five years. Had these rules been in place for the Citigroup case, “the maximum penalty would jump to $1.44 billion from $160 million.”

Climate Progress

Arctic Sea Ice Hockey Stick: Melt Unprecedented in Last 1,450 Years

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 30, 2011 at 6:00 pm

JR: The Arctic sea ice Hockey Stick is more of a cliff…..

by Rob Painting, in a Skeptical Science cross-post

Many climate change “skeptics” obsess over the ‘hockey stick‘, and their discussion inevitably leads back to 1998, when climate scientist Michael Mann first published his paper indicating that current global warming was anomalous in the last 1000 years or so. In plain language, Mann’s work suggested that current warming was likely due to mankind’s carbon dioxide pollution, not any as-yet-unidentified, or yet-to-be-discovered or observed natural phenomenon.

Despite the “skeptics” cherry-picked focus on a  peer-reviewed paper more than a decade old, the science has moved on considerably since then. Paper after paper has basically affirmed that current warming is outside the bounds of natural variation, and therefore likely due to human activities. For example we have seen a sea level hockey stick, an underwater hockey stick, a South American hockey stick, an Arctic summer temperature hockey stick, a tropical glacier hockey stick, a North American mountain snowpack hockey stick, a glacier length hockey stick, and warming of Atlantic water into the Arctic hockey stick.

Into this league of hockey sticks, we have a just published scientific paper, (Kinnard [2011]), which shows that the Arctic sea ice retreat is also a hockey stick, and that the present rate of melt in the Arctic summer is unprecedented in the last 1,450 years. See figure 1. (Note that the hockey stick blade is facing down in this reconstruction).

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NEWS FLASH

Japanese Honda Employee Charged Under Alabama’s Immigration Law | A second foreign auto worker has been charged under HB 56, Alabama’s draconian immigration law. The Japanese Honda employee received a ticket at a routine roadblock police had set up, but he was not taken into custody like a German Mercedes executive arrested almost two weeks ago. The AP reports that the man had a valid Japanese passport and an international driver’s license with him when he was ticketed. Honda employs 4,000 people at a factory in Talledega County, Alabama, and last week, the company announced it will invest $300 million in the Alabama plant. Charges have been dropped against the Mercedes executive, but after his arrest, a Missouri newspaper suggested that Mercedes needed to move its investment to the “Show-Me State, not the ‘Show me your papers’ state.”

NEWS FLASH

Topeka City Council Rejects Proposed Domestic Partnership Registry | In a 5-4 vote yesterday, the Topeka City Council rejected a proposed domestic partnership registry that would have made it easier for unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, to access health benefits. Mayor Bill Bunten had spoken against the registry, calling it the “wrong road to go down” because it would ”minimize the need for a man and a woman to have a family” and suggesting he’s “too old” to support such a change. Lawrence remains the only Kansas city to recognize domestic partners.

Alyssa

What’s Next For Cable?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 30, 2011 at 5:22 pm

The word is grim: Credit Suisse revised its forecasts, and instead of expecting cable television subscriptions to increase by 250,000 next year, they’re now predicting that the number of subscribers will fall by 200,000. And it’s not just that families are cutting the cord because it’s expensive. The number will go down because of a larger cultural shift, younger consumers who have decided that cable isn’t worth the money at all and are declining to subscribe in the first place, so they won’t replace older ones who are exiting the subscriber universe. That should be a much scarier proposition for the cable industry, but it’s an intriguing one for networks.

I remain pretty convinced that even if it takes a very long time to unbundle cable, and even if a bunch of networks die in the process, a move towards a more flexible (if not entirely a la carte) multi-platform system is inevitable. The idea that choice is paying for precisely what you want, rather than getting an enormous number of things — some of which you want and some of which you’d gladly see die in a fire — for your money seems pretty well-entrenched in the music industry now, and has always been the case for books. If I were HBO, I’d be pondering a subscription option for HBO GO only: I’m pretty sure I’d pay the $9-odd dollars I pay for my HBO package now for HBO GO only if I didn’t have cable.

For networks that don’t have the same premium branding as HBO or Showtime baked into their business model, and thus would have more difficulty attracting a core of subscribers used to paying for them separately, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I can see something like Bravo making the jump to premium-lite status not because the content is astonishingly good but because the brand is so clearly defined. And I wonder if other networks will retrench their content offerings to try to keep the subscribers they have, or innovate to try to bring resistent cord-nevers into the fold. It’d be easier to do the former, but for the survival of the industry, much more important to innovate with everything to do the latter.

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