Romney Smears Obama, Falsely Claims He Filed Lawsuit To Restrict Military Voting In Ohio

By Judd Legum on Aug 4, 2012 at 4:15 pm

Today on Facebook, Mitt Romney claims that the Obama campaign is trying to “undermine” the ability of members of the military to vote in Ohio:

President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage. The brave men and women of our military make tremendous sacrifices to protect and defend our freedoms, and we should do everything we can to protect their fundamental right to vote. I stand with the fifteen military groups that are defending the rights of military voters, and if I’m entrusted to be the commander-in-chief, I’ll work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them.

This certainly sounds outrageous, but it is not true. Since 2005, Ohio has had in person early-voting in the three days prior to the election. This year, however, the Republican legislature in Ohio eliminated early voting during this period, except for members of the military. The Obama lawsuit is attempting to restore voting rights for all Ohioans, not restrict them for the military or any other group. From the Obama lawsuit, filed in federal court:

Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit to restore in-person early voting for all Ohioans during the three days prior to Election Day – a right exercised by an estimated 93,000 Ohioans in the last presidential election. Ohio election law, as currently enacted by the State of Ohio and administered by Defendant Ohio Secretary of State, arbitrarily eliminates early voting during the three days prior to Election Day for most Ohio voters, a right previously available to all Ohio voters.

The Obama campaign’s request for a preliminary injunction does not seek to restrict military voting. Rather, it simply is asking that the full early voting period be open to all citizens, as it was under the law before this year.

Even Fox News acknowledges the purpose of the suit, noting “the lawsuit does not restrict the ability of military personnel to cast their ballots early.”

Update

The Romney campaign is totally unable to back up their candidate’s claim:

Romney’s spokesman, Ryan Williams, in an interview Saturday could point to no place in Obama’s lawsuit that seeks to restrict the rights of military voters…

Romney’s legal counsel, Katie Biber, said creating two separate classes of Ohio voters does not violate the 14th Amendment, though she also did not offer evidence that Obama’s lawsuit would make it tougher for members of the military to vote…

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Climate Progress

Must-Read Hansen: ‘Climate Change Is Here — And Worse Than We Thought’

By Joe Romm on Aug 4, 2012 at 2:24 pm

The nation’s best-known and most prescient climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has a must-read op-ed in the Washington Post.

Here’s how “Climate Change Is Here — And Worse Than We Thought” opens:

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

I first wrote about this back in January when Hansen posted the draft of his findings, which made use of a detailed climatological analysis (see “Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming”).

Hansen has a good figure to show what’s happening:

Frequency of occurrence (vertical axis) of local June-July-August temperature anomalies (relative to 1951-1980 mean) for Northern Hemisphere land in units of local standard deviation (horizontal axis). Temperature anomalies in the period 1951-1980 match closely the normal distribution (“bell curve”, shown in green), which is used to define cold (blue), typical (white) and hot (red) seasons, each with probability 33.3%. The distribution of anomalies has shifted to the right as a consequence of the global warming of the past three decades such that cool summers now cover only half of one side of a six-sided die, white covers one side, red covers four sides, and an extremely hot (red-brown) anomaly covers half of one side.

Hansen’s climate analyses and warnings need to be heeded for two reasons. First, this analysis is supported by other recent papers, such as “Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming” and “Nature: Strong Evidence Manmade ‘Unprecedented Heat And Rainfall Extremes Are Here … Causing Intense Human Suffering’.”

Second, Hansen has been right longer than almost anyone else around (see “Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels” and “Lessons From Past Predictions: Hansen 1981“).

Hansen’s mastery of climate science is quite literally what gives him climate prescience. We ignore him at our grave peril.

UPDATE: The AP’s excellent climate reporter, Seth Borenstein has a good piece up on Hansen’s new analysis, “New study links current events to climate change.” The AP has quotes from some credible independent experts:

The science in Hansen’s study is excellent “and reframes the question,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was a member of the Nobel Prize-winning international panel of climate scientists that issued a series of reports on global warming.”Rather than say, ‘Is this because of climate change?’ That’s the wrong question. What you can say is, ‘How likely is this to have occurred with the absence of global warming?’ It’s so extraordinarily unlikely that it has to be due to global warming,” Weaver said….

Another upcoming study by Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, links the 2010 Russian heat wave to global warming by looking at the underlying weather that caused the heat wave. He called Hansen’s paper an important one that helps communicate the problem….

White House science adviser John Holdren praised the paper’s findings in a statement. But he also said it is true that scientists can’t blame single events on global warming: “This work, which finds that extremely hot summers are over 10 times more common than they used to be, reinforces many other lines of evidence showing that climate change is occurring and that it is harmful.”

… Granger Morgan, head of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, called Hansen’s study “an important next step in what I expect will be a growing set of statistically-based arguments.”

Here’s more from the Hansen op-ed:

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Climate Progress

Arctic Death Spiral Continues: Record Low Sea Ice Volume Appears Likely

By Climate Guest Blogger on Aug 4, 2012 at 10:13 am

by Neven, via the Arctic Sea Ice Blog

The PIOMAS people are early this month with updating the numbers (probably so that the SEARCH people have some extra info for their SIO).

Here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center:

I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’re going to have a new record volume low, although the difference with 2010 and 2011 has become smaller. Right now it’s 1249 and 730 km3 respectively.

Here is Wipneus‘ version with the calculated “expected” 2012 values (dotted lines), based on the same date values of 1979-2011 and an exponential trend.
A caveat from Wipneus: “Note that the statistical error bars are quite large.”

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Economy

FLASHBACK: Romney Economic Advisers Predicted Bush Tax Cuts Would Lead To Huge Job Growth

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 4, 2012 at 9:30 am

Mitt Romney and his economic advisers have spent the week claiming that Romney’s economic plan will create 12 million jobs, as they attempt to change the subject away from a Tax Policy Center report showing that Romney’s tax plan would mean a big tax increase for middle-class families.

A Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis shows that, far from creating 12 million jobs, Romney’s economic plan would kill 360,000 jobs in 2013 alone. But this discrepancy is perhaps less surprising considering that the same advisers who gave Romney his number — including economists Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, who both worked for former President George W. Bush — estimated that the Bush tax cuts would lead to massive job growth:

Back in 2001, as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, Hubbard predicted that tax cuts slanted disproportionately to Americans in the topmost tier of income and wealth distribution would “quickly deliver a boost to move the economy back toward its long-run growth path,” starting with adding 300,000 more jobs and half a percentage point to the 2002 growth rate.

Then in early 2003, as President Bush proposed another round of tax cuts, Hubbard predicted these would add another 1.4 million jobs to the U.S. economy, over and above the 3.1 million jobs the economy would create on its own from natural economic growth in that time. Mankiw — who took over for Hubbard as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers later in 2003 — co-signed a letter with Hassett (then-economist at the American Enterprise Institute) to President Bush “enthusiastically” endorsing more tax cuts because “it is fiscally responsible and it will create more employment [and] economic growth.”

Unfortunately for American workers, these rosy predictions failed to pan out. In fact, total employment in the U.S. economy created only 2.4 million new jobs by the end of 2004, or less than half of what Hubbard predicted. By 2007 the economy was running nearly 8 million jobs short of what Hubbard predicted.

The Bush tax cuts, instead of leading to the millions of jobs Hubbard promised, led to the weakest job growth of the post-war era. So not only does Romney’s tax plan fail to add up, but his job growth plan is going to fall far short of its goals, if history is any example.

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NEWS FLASH

Feds Report Drop In Marijuana Plant Eradication | The number of live marijuana plants “eradicated in outdoor and indoor grow operations has dropped in most states over the past three years,” the Associated Press notes, even as “the amount of bulk processed marijuana seized has doubled in that time.” Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials attribute to drop to a multitude of factors, including, shifts “in tactics from growers, weather patterns and budget cuts to local and state enforcement agencies.”