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Yglesias

NRA In Need of Funds

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 21, 2008 at 12:11 pm

As longtime readers will know, I’m not really one for gun control. Consequently, I’ve been glad to see this issue be one on which the mainstream view in the Democratic Party has evolved enormously over the past ten years toward a position that’s much more sympathetic to gun rights, and much less invested in the notion that a ban on “assault weapons” is a silver bullet to stop crime.

Under the circumstances, things like this where the National Rifle Association’s phone calls are trying to stoke people’s paranoia are incredibly disappointing. Colin McEnroe reports for The Hartford Courant:

After some more of this talk, a different human being comes on the line and tells me that Obama is appointing “a cabinet full of gun haters.”

“Could you please tell me the name of at least one of the gun-haters?” I ask.

Pause.

“Well, Nancy Pelosi …”

I interrupt, “Nancy Pelosi is not in the cabinet, nor is she appointed by Barack Obama. You and Wayne LaPierre both told me Obama is appointing a lot of gun haters. Now I’m asking you for the name of at least one.”

Gun-owners and supporters of gun rights need to understand how poorly their interests are being served by a group that behaves in this manner. This is good for the GOP and good for NRA fundraising, but an effective interest group needs to be able to take yes for an answer and reward the other side for coming around to its position. But of course a decrease in the temperature around the gun control issue would be bad for NRA finances, so instead they’re going after Obama full-tilt.

Politics

Cheney Echoes Nixon: If The President Does It During Wartime, It Is Legal

By Matt Corley on Dec 21, 2008 at 11:10 am

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.

Cheney went on to defend the administration’s actions over the past eight years:

CHENEY: There are bound to be debates and arguments from time to time and wrestling back and forth about what kinds of authority is appropriate in any specific circumstances, but I think that what we’ve done has been totally consistent with what the Constitution provides for.

Watch it:

Cheney’s answer is eerily reminiscent of former President Richard Nixon’s claim that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Nixon made the comment in his famous interview with David Frost, responding to a question about whether “there are certain situations” in which “the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.”

Though Cheney thinks the administration’s actions have been “totally consistent with what the Constitution provides for,” numerous courts have ruled that the Bush administration has overstepped the bounds of the Constitution:

– In June 2004, The Supreme Court dealt a setback to the Bush administration by refusing to endorse the claim that “the government has authority to seize and hold suspected terrorists or their protectors and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers while interrogating them.”

– In June 2006, the Supreme Court “rolled back the sweeping powers appropriated by the Bush administration in the war on terror, ruling it could not order military trials for Guantánamo detainees without the protections of the Geneva convention and American law.”

– In August 2006, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that “the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program is unconstitutional, delivering the first decision that the Bush administration’s effort to monitor communications without court oversight runs afoul of the Bill of Rights and federal law.”

It’s ironic that Cheney’s Nixon comment came during an interview with Chris Wallace, considering that Cheney recently thanked Wallace for defending the Bush administration against comparisons to Nixon.

Transcript: Read more

Politics

Cheney: I told Leahy to ‘f*ck’ himself because ‘I thought he merited it.’

By Ryan Powers on Dec 21, 2008 at 10:44 am

This morning on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney about his now infamous June 2004 exchange with Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), when he told Leahy to “f*ck yourself.” Cheney confirmed that he used the obscenity, saying, “I thought he merited it at the time”:

WALLACE: Did you tell Senator Leahy, “bleep yourself”?

CHENEY: I did.

WALLACE: Any qualms, second thoughts, or embarrassment?

CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time and we’ve since patched over that wound.

Later in the program, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol remarked that he thought Cheney’s comments represented “a beautiful statement, really, of justice.” “Dick Cheney is going out defending justice in the end,” Kristol concluded. Watch a compilation:

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Yglesias

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative?

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 21, 2008 at 10:42 am

Canada has, relative to the small size of the country’s population, a pretty sizable auto industry. But that’s an industry that’s very much tied-in with the Detroit-based industry. Consequently, Detroit’s troubles are too kinds of problem for Canada. On the one hand, the companies might go bust eliminating tons of Canadian jobs. On the other hand, the companies might get rescued by the US government in a way that encourages them to eliminate jobs in Canada in order to save jobs in the US. Hence, auto bailout, Canadian edition: “Moving to pre-empt a possible shift of auto production to the United States, the governments of Canada and its Ontario province offered the industry 4 billion Canadian dollars in emergency loans on Saturday.”

The issue here, as with Sweden’s rescue packages for Ford- and GM-owned Swedish brands Saab and Volvo is that for all the same reasons we don’t want the collapse of the Midwest’s auto industry, nobody anywhere wants to see their local auto industry collapse. Instead, they want someone else’s auto industry to collapse, leaving the survivors in better shape. But not everyone can get their way on this. And at the moment, even Toyota seems to be losing money.

Climate Progress

Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path

By Joe Romm on Dec 21, 2008 at 10:07 am

Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change predictions at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, writes in the UK Times that

In a worst-case scenario, where no action is taken to check the rise in Greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures would most likely rise by more than 5°C by the end of the century.

It may be “a worst-case scenario” for rational people like her, but right now even Hadley understands it is better described as the “business-as-usual” case.

Update: Thanks to WestCoastClimateEquity for pointing out this figure.

This staggeringly grim conclusion shouldn’t be news to anyone. After all, the traditionally staid and conservative International Energy Agency annual noted in its World Energy Outlook released last month said, “Without a change in policy, the world is on a path for a rise in global temperature of up to 6°C.”

Thanks in large part to poor messaging by scientists (and environmentalists and progressives) and generally lame media coverage, the public thinks there is some broad range of temperature rise we face, from pleasant to maybe a tad too toasty. That’s because scientists mostly analyze and talk about a range of emissions scenarios that almost exclusively assume very strong emissions reductions efforts — efforts that aren’t happening and don’t look to be happening anytime soon because of the lack of urgency brought on in part by that poor messaging (and by a major disinformation campaign led by conservatives and energy companies).

The consequences of 5.5°C warming by 2100, which Hadley says is “likely” on our current emissions path are all but unimaginable — mass extinction, devastating ocean acidification, brutal summer-long heat waves, rapidly rising sea levels, widespread desertification. But they are rarely studied or articulated by scientists who can’t imagine humanity would be so stupid as to let this happen. I have tried to piece them together them together from the scientific literature (see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“).

A 5.5°C warming would inevitably lead to the mid- to high-range of currently projected sea level rise — 5 feet or more by 2100, followed by 6 to 20 inches a decade for centuries (see “Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100“). That means 100 million or more environmental refugees by century’s end alone.

Then we have desertification of one third the planet and moderate drought over half the planet, plus the loss of all inland glaciers that provide water to a billion people.

Read more

Yglesias

Home Alone

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 21, 2008 at 9:36 am

Funny movie concept, not-so-hot social policy concept:

In the Prince George’s County community of Riverdale Park, town officials have noted a distressing sign of the national economic downturn: more children left home alone to fend for themselves by working parents too strapped to afford child care.

The problem was discovered by code enforcement officers who inspect apartments in the town of 7,000. They used to come across such cases once every couple of years. Then, six months ago, they found one child left alone, followed by another and another.

Have I mentioned that in Finland there’s a commitment to making high-quality child care services universally available and universally affordable?

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