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Barbour Says Mitt Romney Should Release More Tax Returns | During an appearance on CNN’s Situation Room Monday evening, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) appeared to agree with Democrats who are calling on Mitt Romney to release more tax returns. Asked, “should he release the tax returns,” Barbour quipped, “I would, but should it be an issue in a campaign? I don’t think it matters to diddly.” Watch it:

Climate Progress

U.S. Sees Hottest 12 Months And Hottest Half Year On Record

By Joe Romm on Jul 9, 2012 at 6:49 pm


The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its chart-filled “State of the Climate Global Analysis” for June 2012:

The big stories are the heat and drought:

How off-the-charts has the last year been? NOAA has done the math:

  • During the June 2011-June 2012 period, each of the 13 consecutive months ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895-present record. The odds of this occurring randomly is 1 in 1,594,323.

As meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters puts it, “Thus, we should only see one more 13-month period so warm between now and 124,652 AD–assuming the climate is staying the same as it did during the past 118 years. These are ridiculously long odds, and it is highly unlikely that the extremity of the heat during the past 13 months could have occurred without a warming climate.”

UPDATE: NOAA did the math inappropriately in multiple respects. Obviously, individual months in the US temperature record are correlated (weather persists, though not as much as you might think). So simply taking 1/3 (one third) to the 13th power as NOAA did is not the right way to do the calculation. Doing the calculation correctly isn’t easy, but Lucia of The Blackboard says “I am getting a probability less than 1 in 100,000.” That said, it is also wrong for NOAA to do the calculation assuming each of the last 13 months was merely in the top one third — when 6 of the last 13 months were in the top 4% warmest months (you can find all the rankings here by stepping through month by month). Most likely the probability of this particular heat wave in an alternative universe America where the climate that isn’t warming is less than 1 in 1.6 million, but it is a very tricky calculation to do. I have emailed Tom Karl, director of the National Climactic Data Center, and will post any change they make. Masters has added a correction here.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our atmosphere has been “juiced” with human emissions of greenhouse gases, which means we are going to be breaking heat records at an “unnatural” pace for a long, long time.  Climatologist Richard Alley offers a different analogy in a column today:

Humans have made some extreme weather events more likely, and they are happening.

Just as a back-street gambler might beat someone in an honest game but has a better chance with loaded dice, Nature might have caused this summer’s weather but we gave it a boost. More importantly, under business as usual, today’s children may one day think of this summer as cool.

How extreme has the weather been in 2012?

  • The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (USCEI), an index that tracks the highest and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones across the contiguous U.S., was a record-large 44 percent during the January-June period, over twice the average value. Extremes in warm daytime temperatures (83 percent) and warm nighttime temperatures (70 percent) covered large areas of the nation, contributing to the record high value.

Here’s the chart:

Unfortunately, NOAA offers little near-term hope for alleviating the drought. Here’s their forecast through the end of September:

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Gov. Chris Christie: The War On Drugs ‘Has Been A Failure’ | New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) spoke out against the country’s decades-long War on Drugs during a speech at the Brookings Institution today, saying, “The war on drugs, while well-intentioned, has been a failure. We’re warehousing addicted people everyday in state prisons in New Jersey, giving them no treatment.” Christie is a proponent of mandatory drug treatment programs rather than jail time for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders. Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D) also recently described the War on Drugs as a “failure.”

NEWS FLASH

Elizabeth Warren: Health Care Reform ‘Isn’t A Political Issue’ | Ahead of the 31st House vote to repeal Obamacare on Wednesday, Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) writes in Massachusetts’ MetroWest Daily News that, for those who benefit from provisions of the Affordable Care Act, their health “depends” on the law. “For millions of people this isn’t a political issue, it’s a personal one,” she writes. Warren, who is running against Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) describes the regulations that expand health care access for millions, like allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26. Hundreds of thousands of patients in Massachusetts have benefited from preventive services being available without a co-pay, she writes, but “Republicans want to take that away.” Warren is one of a growing number of Democrats who are campaigning on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act — a sharp break from 2010 when Democrats were reluctant to embrace the law.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jul 9, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Economy

Study: A Large Financial Sector Can Impede Economic Growth

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 9, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Over the last several decades, the financial sector has made up a larger and larger percentage of the U.S. economy, eventually accounting for 40 percent of corporate profits before the financial crisis of 2008. By the end of 2011, even as Americans on Main Street were still grappling with the effects of the Great Recession, finance made up a larger percentage of the economy than it did before the crash.

The financial sector is supposed to promote growth by allocating capital to useful parts of the economy, but is that what it’s really doing? In a new working paper for the International Monetary Fund, Ugo Panizza, an economist with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and two other economists found that a smaller financial sector can actually be good for economic growth:

In a new Working Paper titled “Too Much Finance?” and published by the International Monetary Fund, Jean Louis Arcand, Enrico Berkes, and I use various econometric techniques to test whether it is true that limiting the size of the financial sector has a negative effect on economic growth. We reproduce one standard result: at intermediate levels of financial depth, there is a positive relationship between the size of the financial system and economic growth. However, we also show that, at high levels of financial depth, a larger financial sector is associated with less growth. Our findings show that there can be “too much” finance. While Greenspan argued that less credit may hurt our future standard of living, our results indicate that, in countries with very large financial sectors, regulatory policies that reduce the size of the financial sector may have a positive effect on economic growth.

The authors add that “our analysis suggests that there are several countries for which smaller financial sectors would actually be desirable,” as a financial sector that is too large increases the odds of a crisis and increases the misallocation of capital to less useful sectors of the economy. But of course, any efforts to shrink some of the financial behemoths in the U.S. — or to separate out risky trading from more traditional lending — are met with howls from conservatives.

Security

FLASHBACK: Conservatives Hyped Islamic Extremist Takeover Of Libya

By Zack Beauchamp on Jul 9, 2012 at 5:22 pm

Scene from a polling station in Tripoli. By @davidpoort/Twitter.

This weekend, a coalition led by Libyan former interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril soundly defeated Islamist opponents in the country’s first election since Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster. While a full transition to democracy is by no means assured, the elections and their outcome suggest Libya is on a better path than one might expect. The results also demonstrate that fears the country was being taken over by al Qaeda sympathizers and ultra-conservative Islamists were massively overblown — fears, of course, that were being pushed to the fore by the American Right:

  • Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): “We don’t know who the next leaders [in Libya] will be…it could be a radical element. It could be the Muslim Brotherhood. It could be elements affiliated with al Qaeda. …[U.S. intervention in Libya] is a very bad decision and it’s created more instability in the region, not less.” [Fox News, 8/23/11]
  • Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX): “Our president used our treasure, put our military members at risk … now we’ve got the al Qaeda flag flying in Libya in Benghazi, over the historic courthouse that was the headquarters during the assault on Gadhafi.” [The Hill, 11/04/11]
  • Sean Hannity: “I am fearful that these rebels that we’re helping in Libya with these al Qaeda connections, we are ignoring what our own State Department says about them and we can potentially be making a big mistake.” [Fox News, 3/30/11]
  • Andy McCarthy: “NATO’s war of aggression is already inuring to the benefit of America’s Islamist enemies.” [National Review, 8/27/11]
  • Fox News op-ed: “[T]he emir of a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization is edging closer to securing a leadership role in Libya’s new government. … [T]he post-Qaddafi era might very well retain certain features of the legacy left by a dictator whom Ronald Reagan once famously called the “mad dog of the Middle East.” [Fox News.com 7/07/11]
  • Herman Cain: “Do I agree with saying that Gaddafi should go? Do I agree that they now have a country where you’ve got Taliban and Al Qaeda that’s now going to be part of the government?” [11/18/11]

Of course, hand-wringing about overblown threats of a radical Islamist takeover of Libya took place with full knowledge of the massacre that likely would have occurred in Libya had the U.S. and NATO not intervened. What’s more, the speculation flies in the face of what actual experts had been saying all throughout the Libyan crisis. And a recent study by two al-Qaeda experts for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point concluded that “armed jihadists — especially those sharing al-Qa’ida’s extreme ideology — do not appear to be in a position to contest the fragile Libyan state.”

Justice

STUDY: In 2008, Voter ID Laws Blocked 1200 Votes in Two States Alone

By Aviva Shen on Jul 9, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Just in time for the Texas voter ID law’s court date today, the Associated Press has released a study finding that hundreds of legitimate votes have been rejected due to strict voter ID laws:

As more states put in place strict voter ID rules, an AP review of temporary ballots from Indiana and Georgia, which first adopted the most stringent standards, found that more than 1,200 such votes were tossed during the 2008 general election.

During sparsely attended primaries this year in Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee, the states implementing the toughest laws, hundreds more ballots were blocked.

The numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent. Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.

Voter ID’s supporters justify them by claiming they are necessary to prevent voter fraud at the polls, but such fraud is so rare that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. One study, for example, found just seven examples of voter fraud out of the three million votes cast in Wisconsin during the 2004 election, a fraud rate of 0.0002 percent. Similarly, the Supreme Court could only identify one example of in-person voter fraud in the past 143 years in a decision approving Indiana’s ID law in 2008. Even a Heritage Foundation expert arguing for voter suppression laws could not cite a single example of voter fraud during a TV interview on the subject. And as a 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice found, many allegations of individual voter fraud can be chalked up to clerical errors like typos in names or addresses.

So voter ID laws target no legitimate problem, but they are effective in skewing the electorate rightward. Voter ID laws disproportionately affect young, poor and minority communities. Indeed, in 2005, the sponsor of the Georgia law, Rep. Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta), defended the discriminatory effect, saying if black people in her district “are not paid to vote, they don’t go to the polls,” and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, then they were blocked from casting fraudulent ballots.

More than two dozen states have some form of a voter ID law, with 11 passing new rules over the past two years.

Health

Health Insurer-Backed Group Urges Republicans To Repeal Health Reform

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 9, 2012 at 5:08 pm

A picture from AAN's anti-Obamacare flyer

The conservative think tank American Action Network (AAN), a lobbying group partly funded by insurance companies, is pushing for repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And to back up that effort, the group today announced a $1.2 million advertising campaign that urges Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. AAN will have a full force push for repeal in the coming weeks, with insurance companies footing the bill:

The national initiative includes direct mail, print advertising and robocalls, as well as web videos targeted at “select liberal members.”

“The Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare,” reads the mailer. “Congress has only one option: Repeal the President’s government takeover of your healthcare. In addition to billions in new taxes, Obamacare also includes over $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. If the Obama government takeover of healthcare is not repealed, seniors across America will suffer.” [...]

AAN is planning to spend at least $10 million during the 2012 election cycle in districts where there are “competitive House races but state parties with little ability to provide a lift,” Politico reported on Sunday. The group already has organizers on the ground in specific districts, and it plans to build out “a broader, issues-specific grassroots network with endurance.”

The ad blitz is the latest in a trend of insurers, like Aetna, who seem to be hedging their bets on either side of the repeal debate.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce experienced a similar divide during the run-up to the health care vote: The largest insurer lobbying group in the country, America’s Health Insurance Plans, gave $102.4 million in just 15 months to prevent the law from passing.

But AAN isn’t known for successful advertising — just two years ago, the group was forced to pull two ads after they were found to be false or misleading. One ad claimed that the ACA would allow rapists access to Viagra.

Alyssa

Wired’s Adam Rogers on the Science Fiction We Need, and Why We Need It

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 9, 2012 at 5:06 pm

Wired’s Observation Desk videos are meant to be quick takes on important issues, which is kind of too bad, because I could listen to Adam Rogers talk all day about ecological post-apocalyptic science fiction and why it matters.

This, I think, is the important takeaway: as Rogers puts it, “We hope that science fiction can be, in some cases, better at teaching us things than science.” By this, I don’t think he means that science fiction communicates the facts better than a biology or climate science textbook, but that fiction can give visceral life to concepts that feel abstract even when they’re clearly laid out with facts and figures that should be intellectually and emotionally comprehensible to us. Beasts of the Southern Wild, which he talks about, does a terrific job of communicating what it is like to ride out a hurricane in insufficiently hardened shelter, and what it’s like to see a landscape we’ve come to know radically rearranged in the aftermath of the storm. Educating people is one thing. Getting them emotionally invested and activated is a second step, one which art is particularly well-suited.

And that’s the reason why I get so frustrated with science fiction that is conceptually lazy or sloppy, or oriented towards spectacle rather than making an idea visceral for the audience. Not everything has to be sober, or substantive, or educational, of course. But I hate watching people make science fiction, in particular, that’s intended to leave the viewer with absolutely nothing, no connection to the things going on around them, when they leave the theater or turn off the television set.

Media

Drudge Pushes Conspiracy That President Obama Was Secret CIA Agent In Pakistan

By Adam Peck on Jul 9, 2012 at 5:05 pm

Matt Drudge, founder of The Drudge Report

The Drudge Report, Mitt Romney’s preferred news outlet, continued its habit of linking back to preeminent birther website World Net Daily, this time to lend credence to the theory that President Obama took a leave of absence during his time at Columbia Law School so he could serve as a special agent for the CIA in Pakistan.

The WND article, written by washed up fiction author Jerome Corsi, alleges that there is a discrepancy in Columbia University’s records which “casts doubt” on Obama’s well-documented two year tenure at the New York school. He then inexplicably suggests that the reason for the “missing year” is that Obama spent it in Pakistan as an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency:

Swirling amid the black hole of information are a host of theories about Obama’s whereabouts – particularly during the 1981-1982 school year – including speculation he was working for the CIA in Pakistan.

The story more closely resembles a Saturday Night Live parody of birther conspiracy theorists than an actual news report, yet Matt Drudge, former darling of assignment editors in newsrooms across the country, found it worthy of a link on his highly-trafficked home page.

It’s the latest in a long and growing line of conspiratorial headlines that Drudge has heavily promoted, including links to 9/11 truthers, birthers and more.

The Mitt Romney campaign’s public decision to forego actual journalists in favor of pandering to gossip sites like Drudge Report and Breitbart.com has raised concern that voters won’t actually be exposed to thorough reporting on a top presidential candidate.

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