Our guest blogger is Jake Caldwell, Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade, and Energy at American Progress.

Ensuring Egyptians have access to a reliable and affordable food supply during its political turmoil is an urgent priority for both Egypt and the United States. Regrettably, conservatives in the House of Representatives appear headed in a different direction and are slashing funding for international humanitarian assistance. This includes funding for emergency food aid, investments in women and small landholder farms, and efforts to combat climate change in some of the most vulnerable countries in the world.

Any effort to stabilize food prices in Egypt must be led by Egyptians to identify and meet local needs. But the United States has a role to play to support the Egyptian people, collectively the world’s largest importer of wheat. In the short term the United States should:

– Temporarily reinstate a program to provide low-cost financing that enables the Egyptian private and public sector to purchase commodities to fill strategic reserves and maintain full and transparent wheat stocks beyond Egypt’s current six-month minimum.

– Support low-cost loans to Egyptian farmers to increase agricultural output.

– Work directly and through the U.N. World Food Program to identify and provide targeted emergency food aid to Egypt’s school-feeding programs and most vulnerable populations.

– Arrange for the upgrade and expansion of grain-storage capacity at major ports, including Alexandria, to facilitate relatively rapid investment in Egyptian food-distribution infrastructure.

– Mitigate shipping risk and provide further technical assistance to improve the efficiency and transparency of Egyptian financing, customs, and tariffs procedures to make sure that arriving overseas grain is offloaded efficiently and can get to where it needs to be in the shortest time possible.

– Ensure the Suez Canal operates at full capacity to ensure global grain shipments reach their final destinations expeditiously.

In the midterm to long term, the United States must increase its investment in Egypt’s agricultural development. Agriculture directly employs one-third of Egypt’s labor force and cost-effective and strategic agricultural investment in Egypt can produce lasting dividends while minimizing the impact of uncertainty on food markets.

This increased U.S. and private-sector investment and technical assistance should be used to strengthen yields in key domestic food commodities such as wheat, edible oil, sugar, and dairy to bridge Egypt’s food gap. A focus on women farmers and small landholders and the production of high-value export crops such as fruits, vegetables, and livestock can boost incomes and employment and take advantage of Egypt’s proximity to potential markets.

Food prices are at record levels partly due to population growth and increased demand from a recovering global economy, tight supplies, high oil prices, and weak agricultural production attributable to climate change-induced weather disasters and crop loss in key producing nations.

Climate change is causing extreme weather events such as massive flooding in Australia, Pakistan, and Brazil; unprecedented heat waves and drought in Russia, Ukraine, and now China; heavy rains in Iowa and Illinois; and dry conditions in key U.S. wheat-growing regions such as Kansas and Colorado. These are all affecting food production and have injected a level of doubt into forecasts for upcoming harvests, current stockpiles, and the prospects for the spring planting season. Read more

Protests over the radical Tea Party agenda have spilled over from Wisconsin into Montana, where hundreds rallied on the state capitol steps on Monday. Republicans gained control over both chambers of the state legislature in 2010, and, like their colleagues in other states, are challenging Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) with budgetary plans to cut health, environmental, and labor programs in order to pay for corporate tax cuts. Supporters of a safe and healthy middle class rallied in Helena yesterday to protest the “unprecedented GOP attacks on public services and education and laws that protect land, air, water and wildlife”:

Conservationists, sportsmen, firefighters, teachers, correctional officers and others gathered for a pair of rallies on the Capitol’s north lawn and demanded that Republicans focus more on creating jobs and less on ramming through controversial bills and budget cuts aimed at slashing government employees and rolling back bedrock environmental laws.

Montana Republicans are pushing:

– A bill by State Sen. Chas Vincent (R-MT) to gut the Montana Environmental Policy Act because, Vincent says, it’s what “venture capitalists” need.

– A bill by State Rep. Scott Reichner (R-MT) to slash workers’ compensation insurance because “businesses are being crushed.”

– A bill by State Rep. Walter McNutt (R-MT) to close the Montana Veterans Home in Columbia Falls.

– A bill by State Sen. Jason Priest (R-MT) to prevent the establishment of a state health insurance exchange.

– Bills by State Rep. Joe Read (R-MT) to declare global warming “natural” and “beneficial,” and to prevent the EPA from enforcing climate pollution rules.

– Bills to slash health programs like vaccination, water safety, anti-smoking, child nutrition, and the Montana Healthy Kids health insurance program for children.

– A $32 million cut to higher education in the state.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing bills to cut or eliminate taxes on corporations.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

50 million ‘environmental refugees’ by 2020, experts say

Fifty million “environmental refugees” will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday.

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The New York Times has a good editorial today on the “The dirty energy party” aka the GOP.   It only makes one historical error:

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Paul Gilding: “The Great Disruption has arrived”

Darwin, Australia suffered its greatest 24-hour rainfall in its history [last] Wednesday, when a deluge of 13.4 inches (339.4 mm) hit the city when Tropical Cyclone Carlos formed virtually on top of city and remained nearly stationary. Carlos has now dissipated, and brought only an additional 1.50″ (38 mm) of rain yesterday to Darwin. Over the past four days, Carlos has dumped a remarkable 26.87″ (682.6 mm) of rain on Darwin (population 125,000), capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. Australia’s west coast is also watching Tropical Cyclone Dianne, which is expected to remain well offshore as it moves southwards, parallel to the coast.

How extreme was the latest Australian deluge, which Dr. Jeff Masters described above?  The Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson said:

Over 420 ml of rain in that catchment in less than 24 hours is off the charts since records began and certainly that combined with a six metre high tide, that water came up very, very quickly. So a really one in 500 year event; nobody’s experienced anything like this before.”

I asked Paul Gilding, author of the forthcoming book The Great Disruption, to comment on the implications of the off-the-charts weather Australia has been suffering though.  He wrote:

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This is a Skeptical Science repost on one of the latest denier talking points.

Dr. Roy Spencer, like Dr. Richard Lindzen (the subject of a few recent articles), is one of very few climate scientists who remain unconvinced that most of the the recent global warming has been caused by humans (anthropogenic).  Dr. Spencer has grown frustrated with the fact that most of his climate scientist colleagues conduct research under the premise that the recent warming is anthropogenic, and in an article on his blog, has thrown down the gauntlet:

This challenge is problematic for a few reasons.

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Obama has failed to lead on climate, but his clean energy achievements are impressive. CAP’s Bracken Hendricks and Jorge Madrid look at his biggest success in a repost.  Don’t miss the chart below comparing the U.S. stimulus with that of other countries

If the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) had been an energy bill, it would arguably have been the single-most important piece of clean energy legislation in our nation’s history. It drove unprecedented new investments — both public and private — into modernizing America’s clean energy infrastructure. And its clean energy provisions alone have already saved or created 63,000 jobs and are expected to create more than 700,000 jobs by 2012. Now that ARRA has run its course, we need to stay committed to these investments to keep building the U.S. clean energy industry and remain globally competitive.

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Part 4 — Extended metaphor: How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address

Metaphors are the Rolls Royce of figures. Or, to put it more aptly, metaphors are the Toyota Prius of figures because a metaphor is a hybrid, connecting two dissimilar things to achieve a unique turn of phrase.

Metaphor, like verbal irony discussed in the previous post, is a trope, because it alters or enhances a word’s literal meaning. The headline quote is from Aristotle, who writes in Poetics, “To be a master of metaphor is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”

A 2005 study on “Presidential Leadership and Charisma: The Effects of Metaphor” examined the use of metaphors in the first-term inaugural addresses of three dozen presidents who had been independently rated for charisma. The remarkable conclusion:

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