Romney Feigns Ignorance Of A Popular Tax Proposal He Openly Criticized A Month Ago

By Travis Waldron on May 1, 2012 at 6:00 pm

In March, Vice President Joe Biden floated a tax proposal known as the global minimum tax while campaigning in Iowa. The proposal, a feature of President Obama’s budget aimed at companies that use offshore tax havens to reduce the amount they pay in income taxes, would force multinational corporations based in the United States to pay a minimum tax rate, thereby adding trillions in lost revenue that is shifted to individual taxpayers and small businesses.

At the time, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney slammed Biden’s proposal. “Instead of promoting pro-growth tax policies that provide businesses with the economic freedom to grow and prosper, he is backing a ‘global tax’ that would harm American competitiveness,” Romney said. At a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday, however, Romney feigned ignorance of the proposal:

ROMNEY: And the vice president says he wants to do a global tax on multinationals. Not sure what that is, but it doesn’t sound very good.

Watch it:

Under the global tax plan, the 26 corporations that haven’t paid taxes in the last four years would actually have to pay taxes. So would Apple, which used offshore tax havens to dodge $2.4 billion in taxes last year. Romney’s plan, by contrast, would cut corporate taxes and the tax on profits corporations bring from overseas. His justification: America’s high corporate tax rate hurts competitiveness, and the lower repatriation rate will boost job growth. In reality, American corporations pay one of the world’s lowest tax rates, and the last repatriation holiday was a complete failure.

It’s no secret why Romney doesn’t want to talk about the global minimum tax. While his plan would provide a massive giveaway to American corporations, the plan Biden floated would actually raise corporate tax revenues — something a vast majority of Americans support.

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LGBT

Amendment One Funded Mostly By Religious Right, Anti-Gay Groups

By Zack Ford on May 1, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Jeremy Hooper points out that almost all of the top donors supporting North Carolina’s discriminatory Amendment One, which limits what relationships the state can recognize, are from radically conservative religiously-affiliated groups. It’s true that opponents of the measure have raised twice as much money, but it’s telling that they have raised four times as much money from individual donors. Over 70 percent of Vote FOR Marriage NC’s campaign fundraising has comes from Religious Right institutional support. By contrast, about 62 percent of Protect All NC Families’ fundraising has come from individual donors.

Joe Jervis notes that Phil Drake, the third’s most generous donor, owns a conservative Christian radio station and bookstore. AMDG Medical is not a religious organization, but it is known to have Catholic ties in its other giving. And the National Organization for Marriage is religious in everything but name, run almost entirely by Catholic Right figures with daily blog posts defending against “attacks” on Christianity. The American Family Association makes no effort to downplay its radically conservative, anti-LGBT religious mission.

Add to this context the fact that all of Vote FOR Marriage NC’s ads have included references to “Biblical” marriage, and it’s clear that the entire Amendment One campaign is about writing far-right religious dogma into North Carolina’s constitution. Watch two of the campaign’s recent ads:

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Climate Progress

Bad Headline Mars Good NY Times Story Debunking Lindzen’s ‘Discredited’ Cloud Theory. Can You Do Better?

By Joe Romm on May 1, 2012 at 5:58 pm

Your not-so-impossible mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a headline that better reflects the actual content of today’s NY Times article, which redebunks long-debunked disinformer Richard Lindzen.

Headlines are important because research shows that most newspaper readers don’t get much beyond them. And NY Times headlines sweep across the internet through twitter, facebook, news aggregators and search engines. Probably 10 to 50 times as many people see the headlines as read any substantial portion of the story.

So when the New York Times publishes a front-page piece eviscerating Dr. Richard Lindzen and his “discredited” theory — the NYT’s word — that the cloud feedback could somehow save us from catastrophic global warming, it ought to have a better headline than “Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters.”

Even worse, the heavily-trafficked front page of the NY Times website has this teaser for the piece:

Again, far more people are going to read this teaser — written by the editors, not the reporter — than actually read the story. What they are going to come away with is the notion that climate skeptics aka deniers aka disinformers have legitimate arguments that might “save us.”

Obviously nothing could be further from the truth, especially when it comes to the discredited Dr. Lindzen. As the article notes:

When Dr. Lindzen first published this theory, in 2001, he said it was supported by satellite records over the Pacific Ocean. But other researchers quickly published work saying that the methods he had used to analyze the data were flawed and that his theory made assumptions that were inconsistent with known facts. Using what they considered more realistic assumptions, they said they could not verify his claims.

Today, most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited. He does not agree, but he has had difficulty establishing his case in the scientific literature. Dr. Lindzen published a paper in 2009 offering more support for his case that the earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is low, but once again scientists identified errors, including a failure to account for known inaccuracies in satellite measurements.

Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.”

Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal.

The reporter, Justin Gillis, has done a fine job here. What could be clearer than “most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited”?

But why should a reader have to wade through many, many paragraphs to learn that this “last bastion” is nothing more than a “Potemkin village”? Again, “bastion” is a very strong image that should not be applied to something as flimsy as the house of cards that is Lindzen’s discredited theory.

Indeed, the recent scientific literature includes multiple studies that conclude clouds are likely to be an amplifying feedback, not one that reduces impacts:

Lindzen himself has been debunked by some of the leading climate scientists in the country (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”). Climatologist Kevin Trenberth said in 2010 of one paper co-authored by Lindzen that the flaws “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got.”

This is hardly the first time the NY Times has ruined a good climate story with a lousy headline — see “Crappy Headline” Ruins New York Times Story on Link Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather. In that case, the headline was “Scientists See More Deadly Weather, but Dispute the Cause.” The author of that piece, John Broder called it a “crappy headline.” He said of the two scientists he spoke to and quoted — NOAA’s Thomas R. Karl and NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth — “they don’t dispute the cause.” Doh!

I get that even the NY Times is under pressure to write headlines that will appeal to the most people, headlines that suggest controversy and dispute. But such headlines are inappropriate for articles whose actual content does not reflect controversy and dispute. It is time for the paper to review its headline policy, at least on climate, and, I think, give reporters some sort of a veto power.

We’ve seen the lousy headlines. What headline would you suggest?

One final point. The other reason that only slashing greenhouse gas emissions — not having your head in the clouds — can “save us” is that there are many, many more documented amplifying feedbacks poised to kick in if we keep taking no action:

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Politics

Lindsey Graham Helps Win Permits For $10B Nuclear Plant, Gets Rewarded With Cash

By Josh Israel on May 1, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

For years, the SCANA Corporation and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have enjoyed a mutually beneficial alliance. Graham backs the company’s nuclear power interests and the company provides him with campaign cash.

The level of symbiosis between the two became especially evident in recent weeks.

The $13-billion Cayce, SC-based energy company has long wanted a permit to build two new nuclear reactors at its Jenkinsville, SC, facilities. Graham, one of the Senate’s strongest supporters of nuclear power, actively backed their efforts.

In February, the U.S. Nuclear Research Commission voted to approve the country’s first nuclear reactor construction permits in more than 30 years. Graham celebrated it as “a major step on the road to a nuclear renaissance,” adding, “I am hopeful SCANA and [its state-owned partner] Santee Cooper will be the next in line to receive permits for Jenkinsville.” He reiterated the message on Twitter the next day.

On March 31, much to Graham’s delight, SCANA received its Jenkinsville permits. The South Carolina Republican boasted:

We worked for years to see these reactors approved and I’m very pleased this long-sought goal has finally been achieved. The construction of two new reactors will be an over $10 billion dollar project and represents one of the largest investments in South Carolina history.

Two weeks later, when Graham’s “Team Graham” Senate campaign committee filed its quarterly lobbying disclosure form, just one name appeared. SCANA Corporation, the committee revealed, had given the Graham $54,575 in bundled campaign contributions between January 1 and March 31 — raising money for him as he worked to secure their $10 billion project.

The Center for Responsive Politics ranks SCANA as Graham’s second-biggest source of campaign donations, dating back to his 1994 House of Representatives camapign. According to their tabulations, he received at least $37,725 from SCANA’s political action committee and at least $67,380 from SCANA employees over that time. Their support for Graham was relatively cheap, compared to the $260,000 the company reported spending on federal lobbying in the first quarter of 2012 alone.

A Graham spokesman reiterated Graham’s longstanding support for the nuclear industry — noting that he’s been called “the #1 pro-nuclear member” of the Senate — but did not address the industry’s campaign contributions. “Senator Graham has long pushed for a renaissance in nuclear energy. We are ecstatic that the NRC go-ahead was finally secured,” Graham’s communications director told ThinkProgress. SCANA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ties between these donations and the Senator’s efforts on the company’s behalf.

Graham claims that “the renaissance in American nuclear energy has begun.” Sadly, so has the renaissance of lobbyists bundling large amounts of campaign cash for those who back their interests.

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Justice

Poll: Supreme Court Favorablity Reaches Lowest Point In A Quarter Century

By Ian Millhiser on May 1, 2012 at 5:15 pm

A poll taken after the Supreme Court’s highly partisan oral arguments in the Affordable Care Act case but before the Court heard arguments on Arizona’s harsh immigration law finds that public opinion of the Supreme Court has fallen to the lowest point in more than a quarter century:

This poll aligns with numerous other polls showing declining public faith in our increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Indeed, the Roberts Court’s most significant opinion to date — it’s election-buying decision in Citizens United — is so unpopular that more Americans believe in “spells or witchcraft” than agree with the Court’s reasoning in that case.

And, of course, Citizens United is just once of many cases where the Roberts Court’s conservatives placed ideology over the law. The Court effectively immunized corporate America from countless lawsuits in its forced arbitration decisions. It gave them similar immunity to class actions nearly a year ago. And it thumbed its nose at precedent to undermine women’s right to equal work for equal pay and older workers’ right to be free from age discrimination.

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Health

Minnesota Senator Who Sponsored Vetoed Anti-Abortion Pill Bill Calls Viagra A ‘Drug For Life’

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on May 1, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) has vetoed an anti-abortion bill that would have required a doctor to be present for a woman to take the abortion-inducing drug RU-486, effectively banning “tele-med” abortions and disproportionately affecting women in rural communities. Dayton wrote in his veto letter that patient safety should always be a concern, but “a veto is warranted on legislation because it is driven by a specific political ideology rather than a broad-based concern for protecting all patients.”

Indeed, during debate about the legislation, a Democratic state senator asked why RU-486 should be regulated instead of erectile dysfunction medication. Sen. Paul Gazelka (R), the bill’s sponsor, said Viagra is a “wonderful drug” that “helps create life.” RH Reality Check’s Robin Marty asked Gazelka to clarify his comments about Viagra, and he said in response:

comparing Viagra to RU-486 was comparing apples and oranges or more like comparing life and death. Viagra is a wonderful medical advancement in that can help couples with sexual disfunction issues…it can even help in producing life. RU486 always destroys life by taking the life of the unborn child.

Gazelka did not respond to Marty’s questions about whether he would sponsor a bill to collect information about men who are prescribed Viagra, similar to “databases created in various other states to gather information on women who obtain abortions.”

Gazelka’s bill and his ensuing comments about Viagra highlight the unfair burden placed on women who seek abortions and related health care. State regulations continue to add additional hurdles women must overcome to access abortions and contraception, while no similar measures block the availably of Viagra for men.

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Alyssa

Miss Delaware Maria Cahill’s Pro-Life Advocacy and the Fading Relevance of Miss America

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 1, 2012 at 5:06 pm

Maria Cahill, Miss Delaware 2011, has become the latest pageant contestant to make right-wing news hay by suggesting that, during her run as her state’s representative, she was told it would be better for her not to express her pro-life views while she was representing the Miss America organization.

I can see why the Miss America organizers might think that way. The days of the pageant’s cachet as a mass cultural event are long over—the first hour of the pageant’s been playing to about 2.5 million people, numbers so bad that even NBC couldn’t find a way to spin them. The competition’s been slagged for its retrograde gender politics for years, and having outspokenly conservative candidates might confirm the impression that Miss America is an organization that represents a small ideological segment of the population rather than celebrating the broad-based best of American womanhood.

But one of the reasons beauty pageants seem boring, as laid out Miss Congeniality, which both poked fun at and redeemed the whole concept of pageants, is because they’ve been bludgeoned into bland inoffensiveness:

I’d be way more interested in watching the pageant if the contestants had actual opinions and personalities that were expressed by things beyond their swimsuit choices. I think it would be reasonable if pageant organizers wanted to counsel candidates on the reactions that have greeted contestants with outspoken opinions, left or right, in the past, and had a plan to connect candidates who become controversial with PR advisors who can help them decide what to do. But they shouldn’t advise them not to speak at all.

In any case, Cahill appears not to have heeded the warnings she was given. And she seems well on her way to becoming the kind of conservative spokeswoman she entered beauty pageants precisely to become. The charges that she was silenced seem pretty thin—it sounds more like she was given advice by unnamed people rather than officially shut down by pageant organizers. But it doesn’t take much to let someone present herself as a martyr. If Miss America is really about the best in American womanhood, the contestants should be offering clear and competing versions of that ideal.

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Security

Romney Joined Bush-Cheney Smear Campaign On John Kerry’s National Security Record In 2004

By Ben Armbruster and Igor Volsky on May 1, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Mitt Romney doesn’t like it that President Obama’s re-election campaign in a new video decided to tout the president’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and to question — based on his comments from 2007 — whether Romney would have done the same thing. Here’s Romney complaining about the video ad on CBS this morning:

ROMNEY: And the idea to try to politicize this, and to say, “oh, I, President Obama would have done it one way and Mitt Romney would have done it another,” is really disappointing. Let’s not make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden a politically divisive event. There are plenty of differences between President Obama and myself. But let’s not make up ones based on, “Well he might not have done this.” It’s disappointing and it’s unfortunate and it’s taking an event that really brought America together.

Back in 2004, President Bush ran a smear campaign against challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) which undermined his service in Vietnam and questioned Kerry’s ability and determination to protect the United States — just three years removed from the 9/11 attacks — from another terror strike. “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” then Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

And while Romney complains about Obama’s alleged “politicization” now, he willfully participated in the Bush-Cheney smear campaign on Kerry in 2004. During an August 9, 2004 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis) interview on Fox News, Romney suggested that Kerry would “twiddle his thumbs” when dealing with terrorism and in September 2004, also on Fox News, Romney said Kerry is too much of a flip-flopper to protect the country:

ROMNEY: [M]ost has already been said about John Kerry. I think people know pretty well that he’s a guy who has a hard time finding which side of a position to come down on. But I’m going to focus on the fact that our nation needs strong leadership. We’re under attack, militarily, economically. Our very way of life is under attack. And we need to have the kind of steady, strong leadership, which is represented by Dick Cheney, and by of course, President George W. Bush.

In his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, Romney said “America is under attack from almost every direction,” later adding, “On the just war our brave soldiers are fighting to protect free people everywhere, there is no question: George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First’ crowd is wrong.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also notes that during his speech at the 2008 RNC, Romney “blasted Obama as untrustworthy when it comes to combating ‘the threat from radical, violent jihad,’ which he contrasted with John McCain, who, apparently unlike Obama, understands that ‘radical, violent Islam is evil,’ and will do everything he can to defeat it.”

“Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is ‘politicizing’ an important national event,” Jon Meacham writes today, noting that Obama’s alleged “politicizing” might be a bit different from what the GOP knows. “In this sense,” Meacham writes, “‘politicizing’ might be best translated as ‘beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.’”

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Climate Progress

10,000 Americans Criticize Discovery Channel’s ‘Frozen Planet’ CO2 Censorship

By Climate Guest Blogger on May 1, 2012 at 4:53 pm

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

by Brad Johnson

When the Discovery Channel aired “On Thin Ice,” its Frozen Planet episode documenting changes in the Arctic, it conveniently left out human causes. The show’s producer told the New York Times she didn’t want people saying “don’t watch this show because it has a slant on climate change” – illustrating everything wrong with the conversation around climate change in America. This afternoon, I and other members of Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Discovery offices with 10,000 signatures demanding the organization correct this unscientific self-censorship:

We are deeply disappointed by your decision not to explain the science, and human causes, of global warming in the “On Thin Ice” episode of the Frozen Planet series. As the world’s leader in environmental programming, your decision sends a dangerous message to media companies around the world — that it is better to censor yourself than risk criticism by global warming deniers. We call on you to immediately acknowledge this error and to conduct a review of all Discovery programming decisions to ensure no such self-censorship happens again.

As I and other members of Forecast the Facts, scientists Steve Scolnik and Clarence Maloney, entered the Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, we were greeted by a security officer in the vestibule. Corporate Security Manager David Sterner told us that no-one in communications, production, or viewer relations was or would be available to accept the petition, nor were we welcome even into the main lobby. However, he did personally guarantee that the 10,000 signatures and the letter addressed to Discovery chairman John Hendricks would be delivered on our behalf.

It is an essential fact that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the melting poles. As Bill McKibben noted, “On Thin Ice” is no different than a documentary on the ravages of lung cancer that censored mention of cigarettes. The pursuit of profit is not a valid excuse for the censorship of science. Neither is the fear of reprisal from well funded polluters.

Faced with a gross failure of leadership on climate pollution by those in power, average citizens are mobilizing to demand honesty and action. But they’re not the only ones. Today also marks the start of the inaugural science policy conference of the American Geophysical Union, a response by the leading organization of earth scientists to the increasing disconnect between the facts of science and the decisions made by politicians and corporations. The central topic of today’s sessions? The rapidly changing Arctic.

Brad Johnson is campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

NEWS FLASH

AFA’s Bryan Fischer Declares ‘Huge Win’ Over Romney Spokesperson’s Resignation | Today, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer declared a “huge win” in response to the news that Mitt Romney’s openly gay foreign policy spokesperson Richard Grenell had resigned. According to Fischer, Grenell’s resignation is evidence that Romney is catering to social conservatives, expressing great confidence that Romney “is not going to make this mistake again. There is no way in the world that Mitt Romney is going to put a homosexual activist in any position of importance in his campaign.” Watch it:

Fischer had led the charge against Grenell’s appointment, attacking him for being a “homosexual activist” whose behavior is “offensive to God.” (HT: RightWingWatch.)

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