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Two Senate Climate Hawks Team Up for a Must-See Colloquy

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 28, 2011 at 8:00 pm

by Nick Sundt, cross-posted from the World Wildlife Fund blog

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat, Rhode Island) and Al Franken (Democrat, Minnesota) recently spent an hour on the floor of the U.S. Senate repudiating climate change denialists and arguing for serious U.S. action on climate change.

“Ignoring or flatout contradicting what climate scientists are telling us about the warming climate and the warming planet can lead to really bad decisions on natural energy and environmental policies here in Congress,” said Senator Franken. “So today Senator Whitehouse and I want to take some time to talk about climate science and about the fact that a scientific consensus on climate change has been reached. Climate change is happening and is being driven by human activities.”

See the video of the proceedings below; and here is the full transcript of the colloquy [PDF] as published in the Congressional Record. Read more

NEWS FLASH

POLL: Hispanic Voters Favor Obama Over Romney By Nearly 3:1 Margin | Months of extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric from Mitt Romney and his GOP rivals seems to be taking its toll, with Hispanic voters going to President Obama in a landslide according to a new Pew Hispanic Center poll released today.  Despite overwhelming disapproval of his administration’s handling of illegal immigrants, President Obama still leads Mitt Romney 68 percent to 23 percent among Hispanics.  Romney recently told TIME Magazine that he wants “to do as well as [he] possibly could” among Hispanic voters; however, today’s poll shows Romney is highly unlikely to reach the record 40 percent share of the Hispanic vote George W. Bush attracted in 2004 and that he may well do far worse than the 31 percent share John McCain took in 2008.

Politics

ALEC-Linked Group Revealed As Major Secret Donor In Referendum On Maine Voting Rights

By Scott Keyes on Dec 28, 2011 at 5:00 pm

Last month, Maine voters delivered a major rebuke to Gov. Paul LePage (R) and the Republican-held legislature when they approved a referendum restoring election day voting registration rights in the state. Earlier this year, state legislators passed a bill repealing the state’s 38 year-old law allowing citizens to register at the polls on election day.

Tens of thousands of Mainers responded by petitioning for the matter come to a referendum. Issue 1 was one of the most-anticipated votes on election day this year, with pundits watching closely to see how citizens would react to the Republican-led war on voting, which ramped up in states across the country this year.

Recognizing the referendum’s importance, voting rights opponents poured money into the campaign to repeal election day registration. In fact, just two days after the state’s campaign finance reporting deadline, a secret conservative donor funneled $250,000 into the race, allowing the No On 1 campaign to make significant TV ad buys in an inexpensive media market.

Per state law, however, the identity of donors must be revealed within 45 days after the election. In fact, the entire $250,000 worth of late money came from a single source: the American Justice Partnership.

The AJP is a conservative legal organization based not in Maine, but in Michigan. On their website, the group states they are fighting against “the scheming George Soros money machine” which is “trying to sabotage your right to vote,” a claim apparently made without a hint of irony. Though the AJP doesn’t disclose where its funding comes from, the Bangor Daily News notes that it has partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the past, a group that has been instrumental in the proliferation of voter ID laws across the country.

The AJP’s secret $250,000 contribution ultimately accounted for over 78 percent of all the money raised by the No On 1 campaign. In other words, over three-quarters of the funding for opponents of election day registration in Maine came from Michigan. (This money was then used to run ads decrying “outsiders from other states” who were influencing the Maine election.) With Mainers of all stripes explaining to ThinkProgress why they cherish having the option to register at the polls on election day, it’s not altogether surprising that the predominance of financial support for No On 1 came from out of state.

Though AJP’s website correctly warns that “Your right to vote is at stake”, it’s groups like AJB and ALEC that are threatening that right in the first place. Maine voters stood up to the influence of voting rights opponents in November, however, passing Issue 1 by an overwhelming 61-39 margin and restoring election day registration in the Pine Tree State.

Alyssa

Tom Coburn: Not a Video Games Fan

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 28, 2011 at 2:51 pm

Sen. Tom Coburn is displeased that a museum that charges admission is getting federal money to preserve old video games for future study. In his annual list of wasteful government projects, he complains:

According to the grant notification, the $113,277 in federal funds will be used to ―conduct a detailed conservation survey of approximately 6,900 of the 17,000 e-games in [the museum‘s] collection to determine the current condition of both the physical artifacts and their virtual content. The study is designed to ―better position the museum to make its International Center for the History of Electronic Games collection available to visitors, researchers, and a broad public audience by providing images, videos of e-game play, and interpretation of the collection via exhibits and the Online Collections feature of its Web site. Admission to the museum costs an adult $13.

Things like this drive me crazy for two reasons. First, they don’t assume that there are new investment costs a museum might want to make, like storage equipment and facilities, that might not be covered by an admissions fee that covers operating costs. Building storage that actually preserves artifacts, rather than sticking stuff on Ikea shelves, costs money. As does cataloguing. As does bringing in researchers. As does designing exhibits. And second, just because video games are comparatively new doesn’t mean that they’re not worth studying. There’s technology there that’s applicable elsewhere. There’s interesting storytelling and visual art. And if nothing else, there’s the question of what it was that fueled a big industry and took up a lot of Americans’ time. That all sounds like a pretty reasonable use of $113,277.

Security

Rights Groups Criticize Arab League For Choosing Sudanese General To Lead Syria Mission

By Ben Armbruster on Dec 28, 2011 at 2:46 pm

Mustafa al-Dabi

Arab League monitors arrived in Syria this week to begin inspecting parts of the country where the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has unleashed its bloodiest crackdown on pro-democracy activists. Yet rights groups are criticizing the Arab League’s decision to appoint Sudanese Lieutenant-General Mustafa al-Dabi to head the delegation because of his links with allegations of Sudan’s own human rights violations:

Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, who studies Sudan and has written strong criticisms of its government, said the choice of a Sudanese general was a sign the Arab League might not want its monitors to produce findings that would force it to take stronger action.

“There is a broader question of why you would pick someone to lead this investigation … when he is part of an army that is guilty of precisely the sort of crimes that are being investigated in Syria,” Mr. Reeves said.

“I think a Sudanese general would be one of the least likely people in the world to acknowledge these findings even if they are right there before him… It doesn’t make any sense unless you want to shape the finding. They want it shaped in ways that will minimize the obligation to do more than they already have.”

Reuters notes that Dabi has held senior Sudanese military and government posts, including four positions in the Darfur region, where the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court says the army carried out war crimes and the U.N. says as many as 300,000 people may have died.

Human Rights Watch Sudan researcher Jehanne Henry said Dabi “certainly would have been in a position to know what the security services were doing at that time,” adding, “He obviously does not fit the profile as a human rights monitor.”

Omer Ismail of the Center for American Progress’s Enough Project also criticized the Arab League’s decision, calling it “perplexing.” “Instead of heading a team entrusted with a probe of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity by Syria, the general should be investigated by the ICC for evidence of similar crimes in Sudan,” he said.

Climate Progress

Satellite Photos Illustrate Dramatic Expansion of Canadian Tar Sands

By Stephen Lacey on Dec 28, 2011 at 1:40 pm

Extraction of Alberta’s energy-intensive tar sands has expanded steadily in recent years, with about 232 square miles now exposed by mining operations at the Athabasca River site. Tar sands production is expected to double over the next decade, which could mean the destruction of 740,000 acres of boreal forest and a 30% increase in carbon emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector.

New satellite images show the dramatic expansion that has taken place from 2001 through 2011. (Photos by Robert Simmon, NASA/Landsat/USGS.)

So what’s the actual impact on the ground? Here’s what happens when you turn a carbon sink like the Boreal Forest into a carbon-spewing pit of tar sands. (Photos from VisionShare and Co-op Financial Services via Flickr. Note: These are not the same patch of land.)

Related Post:

NEWS FLASH

Federal Judge Orders Sheriff Arpaio To Stop Arresting People Simply Because He Thinks They Are Undocumented | Less than two weeks after the Department of Justice found widespread lawlessness and abuse of Latinos by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies, an Arizona federal judge ordered Arpaio to end one of his most abusive practices — detaining and arresting people who have committed no crime merely because his office suspects them of being undocumented. The court also certified this lawsuit against Arpaio as a class action, thereby empowering any Latino stopped or detained by Arpaio’s office since 2007 or at any point in the future to enforce the court order.

Politics

GOP Senator Says Tea Party Influence ‘Killed Off’ Republican Chances For Senate Majority

By Marie Diamond on Dec 28, 2011 at 1:15 pm

Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN)

After Republicans reclaimed their majority status in the House in the 2010 election, many pundits predicted the party would have an easy time capturing the Senate in 2012. There are, after all, only 10 GOP senators up for reelection, compared to 23 Democrats. And Republicans seemed to be successfully riding a wave of anti-government sentiment to victory against an embattled president.

But as one political showdown after another has illustrated just how beholden congressional Republicans are to extreme right-wing interests, their prospects for retaking both chambers have grown dimmer.

Republican Sen. Dick Lugar (IN) recently reinforced that sentiment in an interview with CNN, explaining that the Tea Pary’s insidious influence has pushed out moderate elements of the party:

LUGAR: Republicans lost the seats for Nevada, and New Jersey, for example, and Colorado. There were people who claimed that they wanted somebody who was more of their Tea Party aspect. But in doing so they killed off the Republican chances for a majority. This is one of the reasons we have a minority in the Senate right now.

Watch it, courtesy of Mediaite:

Lugar is facing his own Tea Party primary challenger. If Republicans lose his seat, their chances of winning a Senate majority become even shakier.

NEWS FLASH

Perry: U.S. Should Buy More Canadian Oil So ‘We Don’t Have To Buy From A Foreign Source’ | The New York Times today has a quick run down of the biggest applause lines Rick Perry receives out on the campaign trail in Iowa. The Times reports that the crowd at one of Perry’s speeches “perked up” when the Texas governor talked energy and oil. “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Perry said, adding that buying so much energy from foreign countries is “not good policy, it’s not good politics and frankly it‘s un-American.” (HT: JerAHolden)

Justice

Perry Pledges To Openly Defy A Supreme Court Decision Striking Down An Anti-Choice ‘Personhood’ Law

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 28, 2011 at 11:26 am

At a radio forum sponsored by the anti-abortion and anti-birth control group Personhood USA, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that he would refuse to obey a Supreme Court decision striking down the group’s signature anti-choice proposal:

QUESTION: You have agreed to “endorse legislation making clear that Fourteenth Amendment protections apply to unborn children” . . . . What happens if the U.S. Supreme Court attempts to strike down this legislation, and replace it with one of its own edict denying the inalienable right to life for all persons born or unborn? Would you enforce the inalienable right to life or the Court’s opinion as the law?

PERRY: Well, obviously you enforce the right to life opinion.

Listen:

Perry’s promise to openly defy the Supreme Court is disturbing, but it is also far from original. Fellow candidates Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich have also pledged to treat binding Supreme Court opinions as if they were merely optional, and Gingrich even supports legitimizing his radical view of the Constitution through a campaign of intimidation against judges who disagree with him.

Nevertheless, the GOP’s burgeoning love affair with Jim Crowesque defiance of the judiciary is very strange, considering that activist judging is the backbone of their policy agenda. Republicans almost universally support the ridiculous idea that the Affordable Care Act should be tossed out by the Supreme Court, and their presidential candidates have almost unanimously promised to appoint more justices modeled after the ones that authorized unlimited corporate money in American elections. If President Perry has the power to flout Supreme Court decisions that he disagrees with, there’s nothing preventing President Obama from ignoring the Supreme Court’s clearly erroneous opinion in Citizens United.

But, of course, such an attack on the Roberts Court’s misguided opinion would run headlong into the GOP’s first rule about interpreting the Constitution — the Constitution says whatever you want it to say, so long as it’s conservative.

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