Santorum: ‘We Will Never Have… Smart People On Our Side’

By Judd Legum on Sep 15, 2012 at 5:20 pm

Speaking Saturday at the Values Voters Summit, Rick Santorum said that “smart people” would never side with conservatives. Watch it, via RWW:

Santorum also claimed “the media” and “colleges and universities” would not be “on our side” because “they want to tell you what to do.”

Rather, according to Santorum, the conservative movement will be supported by “the church and the family.” This summer, however, a group of Catholic nuns have launched a bus tour “to shed light on the effects the House Republican budget would have on the poor.”

()

Climate Progress

Blinded By The Right: House GOP Deletes Climate Change ‘Concern’ From Anti-EPA Bill

By Joe Romm on Sep 15, 2012 at 11:50 am

It’s bad enough the House GOP keep passing legislation aimed at blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from enacting any climate change regulations.

But the new version of the House anti-climate bill omits a “sense of Congress” statement that was in the April 2011 bill the House passed:

“There is established scientific concern over warming of the climate system based upon evidence from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.”

Even that uber-mild statement is now apparently too much for the blinkered anti-science crowd in the U.S. House.

In fact, “concern” is about the weakest possible word you could use to describe how most climate scientists view our current predicament (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”).

Ironically, or tragically, the one way to remove most uncertainty about future climate impacts is to keep doing nothing. That way, CO2 emissions — and feedbacks — will be on the high end of the spectrum and even in the very unlikely event the climate system has a sensitivity to CO2 on the low end, overall impacts will still be catastrophic.

The earlier version, as The Hill reports, also had said America has a “role to play in resolving global climate change matters on an international basis.” But hey, if there’s nothing to be concerned about, then there’s obviously no need for any U.S. role.

As the Washington Post put it in April 2011, “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.”

(15)

Climate Progress

NGOs And Facebook: How To Become More Effective Climate Messengers

By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 15, 2012 at 10:41 am

by Philip Newell, via Climate Access

While social media has been successful in some respects to raising awareness and participation in any number of issues, there are many groups across the spectrum struggling for attention. This may be due to their misuse of social media, relying on it as more of a one-way avenue of communications.By treating Facebook more like a newsletter than a conversation, and by engaging as an organization instead of as individuals, the NGO community may be missing out on the full potential of this medium. For the basics, Climate Access has already put together a handy Tip Sheet.

Here at Climate Nexus, we are focused on communicating the science of climate change through both traditional as well as new media sources. As a communications associate, part of my job is figuring out how to best utilize these new forms of media to bring as much attention to the science as possible. In the ideal world, we’d make the science of climate change as well known as the latest celebrity divorce.

Let’s step away from our communications positions and take a minute to remember the reason most people use Facebook.

Remember when you were in high school, and there was that person you had a crush on, but they didn’t know you existed? Facebook is for finding … and impressing them. You find their profile, and thus their interests. “Oh, he’s big into motorcycles?” You then join the Harley page and find something to post to Mr. Right’s wall, thereby getting him to notice you AND showing him that you two have something in common. Of course, you’ve never ridden (helmet hair? No thanks) but, if he ever asks, you get to fish for an invitation for a ride!

What’s that mean for people like us, who are certainly not using Facebook to woo our dream dates? It means that in some ways, we need to find … and charm the public into “like”-ing our page as though we were pursuing a crush.

To do this, we must remember that people don’t just post things to talk about who they are; they post things to show who they want to be, to show who they want others to think they are. Keep this in mind as you stalk out your future followers and speak to their aspirations, their hopes and dreams. If you want something shared, it’s got to be something that makes the share-er look cool or sexy or (most important on the Internet) clever or snarky! Reposting something funny makes YOU look funny. (And as we all know, a sense of humor is often top priority in a relationship!)

But don’t feel too much pressure! Just posting something original allows people to feel like part of the “inner circle,” the group first to see some picture, or to get the real scoop on the latest story. Keep in mind that any original content will enable people to think “Pfff, I knew about that before it was cool!” (Because deep down, everyone on the Internet has that hipster mentality.)

We’ve found from our [Warning: obligatory shameless self-promotion link follows] I <3 Climate Scientists FB page that while some people share around news stories, more tend to share some of the professional comics that we post. Surprisingly, sometimes our in-house creations are even more popular — and those are basically just cute animal pictures with some mildy-punny text! After a quick search for the animal in the picture, we found a variety of groups that shared our interest in, say, polar bears, so we posted it there. Lo and behold, people who “liked” a polar bear fan page also became fans of ours! We had found new followers simply by reaching out to a different group with similar interests. This can be repeated with just about anything, since almost anything you can imagine has its own Facebook page already!

Economy

STUDY: Media Campaign Coverage Almost Never Addresses Poverty

By Jeff Spross on Sep 15, 2012 at 9:00 am

The Census Bureau recently found that the poverty rate stalled at 15 percent in 2011, unchanged from the year before, when analysts had expected an increase. That still means, however, that one in six Americans are living in poverty — a level the country has only briefly reached twice since 1970.

The bad news is that poverty remains virtually invisible in the media, particularly when it comes to campaign coverage, according to a new study from Extra!, the magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting:

Extra! looked at six months of campaign coverage (1/1/12–6/23/12) by eight prominent news outlets: CBS Evening News, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered, and the print editions of the New York Times, Washington Post and Newsweek. [...]

FAIR’s study found poverty barely registers as a campaign issue. Just 17 of the 10,489 campaign stories studied (0.2 percent) addressed poverty in a substantive way. Moreover, none of the eight outlets included a substantive discussion of poverty in as much as 1 percent of its campaign stories.

Discussions of poverty in campaign coverage were so rare that PBS NewsHour had the highest percentage of its campaign stories addressing poverty—with a single story, 0.8 percent of its total. ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Newsweek ran no campaign stories substantively discussing poverty.

If the search was widened to include non-substantive as well as substantive mentions of the issue, that figure rose to 3 percent. If the search was expanded further to include mentions of “poverty,” “low income,” “homeless,” “welfare” or “food stamps,” it got to 10 percent. Meanwhile, “debt” and “deficit” were mentioned 18 percent of the time.