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NEWS FLASH

Rick Piltz On Climate Change, Obama, And The Kochs | Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz believes President Obama needs to do more to fight the right-wing fossil industry that is preventing action on climate change pollution. In an Al Jazeera segment on the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study — Richard Muller’s Koch-funded confirmation that global warming is real — Piltz says, “The right wing is dug in on being against government regulation and really denying the science, and even in the White House, you don’t have the President talking about the problem.”

By Brad Johnson on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:30 pm

NEWS FLASH

18 Arrested In Wisconsin Legislature For Using Cameras, Guns Still Allowed | Eighteen activists were arrested on Tuesday for using cameras in the gallery of the Wisconsin General Assembly. The arrests were part of a “Concealed Camera Day” event, planned to coincidence with the implementation of a new law that allows Wisconsinites to a concealed firearm, including inside the Assembly building. The Assembly does not allow cameras in the gallery, which the protesters — including the editor of a local progressive magazine — say is a violation of the First Amendment and of Wisconsin’s open meeting laws.

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:30 pm

Security

Accused Domestic Terrorist Arrested In Georgia Ranted About Health Reform On Erickson’s RedState.com

By Lee Fang on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:30 pm

CNN's Erick Erickson, editor of RedState

Earlier this week, FBI agents arrested four men in Georgia for plotting a series of domestic terror attacks on government officials and other people across the country. The FBI press release states that the men were caught on tape planning to purchase pounds of ricin, a biologic agent, as well as silencers and explosives. While the men claim to be part of a militia group, online postings identified by ThinkProgress make clear that at least one of the men had railed against President Obama, health reform, and regurgitated right-wing conspiracies on the popular conservative blog, RedState.com.

In a document filed with the Northern District of Georgia, parts of the transcript of the alleged domestic terrorists were released. “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” said one of the accused terrorists, Frederick Thomas. Thomas also planned to target the ATF and the IRS. “We’d have to blow the whole building like Timothy McVeigh,” said Thomas, according to the Associated Press. The AP also notes that court documents accused Samuel Crump, a co-conspirator, of suggesting ricin could be “dropped from an airplane or blown out of a car along an interstate highway to attack people in Washington, Newark, NJ, Jacksonville, FL, Atlanta and New Orleans.”

Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a broader picture of the four men accused of the terror plan. Dustin Baker at the blog GAPolitico flags one important part of the AJC story: that accused terrorist Fred Thomas blogged on RedState.com, the website edited by CNN’s Erick Erickson. The Thomas blog post highlighted by Baker and AJC revealed that at one point, he did not “advocate a general rebellion against the U.S. Government for cause,” but seemed conflicted about the idea of violent revolution. Something apparently changed between that unpromoted post, published in July of 2008 and this year, when the alleged plot began taking shape.

A ThinkProgress examination of Thomas’s online writing in the following years shows that the alleged terrorist grew more and more upset, and expressed sympathy with the anti-Obama conspiracies posted on RedState. Last year, he posted a comment to a popular RedState post about the evils of health reform. Thomas claimed that the “ObummerCare Bill” not only “won’t be forgiven,” but will lead to “TYRANNY of the worst order” and “civil war.” (view a screenshot of the comment here)

The other blog Thomas mentions in his RedState comment is apparently the militia website run by Mike Vanderboegh, who gained infamy for calling for violence over the health reform bill and for writing an online series advocating a new civil war against President Obama. ThinkProgress has covered Vanderboegh, who recently signed up as a commentator for Fox News, here and here.

Thomas posted other comments on RedState, and indicated he was a regular reader. In one comment, Thomas asked how to gain promoted posts on the website, to which RedState editor Neil Stevens responded with a link and suggestion on the guidelines (view a screenshot here).

As GAPolitico notes, RedState editor Erick Erickson has a long history of fostering a blog filled with violent rhetoric and unhinged conspiracy theories. Earlier this year, Erickson suggested that “mass bloodshed” may be necessary if Roe v. Wade isn’t overturned, as Media Matters reported. During the health reform debate, when Thomas was an apparent fan of the site, Erickson promoted the debunked “death panels” smear, that health reform would give Obama the power to kill his political opponents and the elderly.

Erickson is not responsible for every comment left on his site, and he has no connection at all to the alleged terrorist plot in Georgia. His RedState website’s rhetoric of health reform “tyranny” and calls for violence, however, were embraced by at least one of the alleged conspirators.

Climate Progress

Clean Energy Reaches Deployment Stage So Late-Stage VC Funding Soars. That’s the Kind of Crisis We Like.

By Stephen Lacey on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:28 pm

A new debate is picking up within the clean energy industry: Is the sector facing a crisis? Or is it still on an upward curve?

The bankruptcy of Solyndra and the political wrangling over the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program have heightened the debate, causing people to ask if there are deeper troubles below the surface. That, combined with a shift in the venture capital community away from early-stage investments, is raising concerns.

Are they founded? Yes and no. But it would a stretch to call this a crisis.

Earlier this week, the think tank Third Way released a report called “Nothing Ventured: The Crisis in Clean Tech Investment,” which calls the shift away from early-stage VC investments a “quiet but severe crisis” that “suggest stark consequences” for the future of the industry.

The report’s goal — to raise awareness about the need for VCs to make bolder moves in cleantech — is certainly an important one. But right after it was released, the latest figures for venture investments in clean energy showed a 73% jump in Q3 over last year’s figures, which showed that “confidence in cleantech continues,” according to Ernst and Young, the firm tracking the figures.

Yes, a lot of that money is going into later stage rounds for more mature companies. But as Ernst and Young Cleantech Director Jay Spencer explains, that’s because “cleantech has reached its deployment phase,” making new sets of investments far more capital intensive than in the past. In the energy market, you don’t make a dent until you get to the billion and trillion dollar scale.

“VC Money does not indicate the success of this industry,” said Jigar Shah, CEO of the Carbon War Room, in an interview with Climate Progress. “There is a huge pipeline of projects and technologies that are now scaling and will continue to drive down costs in the next decade. We are already approaching $2 a watt installed for solar PV — when you get there, you’ll be able to supply up to 30% of global electricity needs cost-competitively.” (For a detailed talk with Shah on deployment strategies, listen to our interview on the Climate Progress podcast.)

Third Way sees things quite differently:

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Economy

Bachmann Would Eliminate Tax Credit That Kept Three Million Children Out Of Poverty Last Year

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:25 pm

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who is campaigning for the 2012 GOP presidential nod, has already made it quite clear that she intends to raise taxes on the poorest Americans if elected. Today, she rolled out a new plan to hike taxes on those at the bottom of the income scale: eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit.

In an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, Bachmann said she would “do away with the EITC,” and force someone who made only $3 to pay taxes on it:

This would be through the income tax system because the problem is, and this is where I deviate from Reagan, he instituted the Earned Income Tax Credit, it’s known as the EITC, and that effectively took many many Americans out of even having to pay any tax liability at all. I would do away with the EITC and if a person has $3 in income they would be subject to something. Obviously, no one has $3 in income. But they would have to pay something through that system.

Watch it:

The EITC is a tax credit for those at the lowest end of the income scale, going to families with children that make less than $36,000 per year (though the income level can vary depending on year and number of dependents). Individuals making less than $18,000 annually can also qualify for a small credit.

President Reagan called the EITC “the best antipoverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.” According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “research indicates that families mostly use the EITC to pay for necessities, repair homes, maintain vehicles that are needed to commute to work, and in some cases, obtain additional education or training to boost their employability and earning power.” And in recent years, the EITC has been essential in lifting families out of poverty:

The EITC reduces poverty by supplementing the earnings of workers with low wages and low earnings. There has been broad bipartisan agreement that a two-parent family with two children with a full-time, minimum-wage worker should not have to raise its children in poverty. At the federal minimum wage’s current level, such a family can move above the poverty line for an average family of four only if it receives the EITC as well as SNAP (food stamp) benefits.

In each of the last two years, the EITC kept 3 million children out of poverty. But Bachmann would eliminate it in order to tax those who make the least amount of money. At the same time, she has said that she is “open to” eliminating the corporate income tax.

LGBT

NOM’s Anti-Gay Lawyer Is A Partner At A Law Firm Committed To ‘Diversity’ And ‘LGBT Attorneys’

By Igor Volsky on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:23 pm

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) “has tapped tea party attorney Cleta Mitchell as the organization’s Minnesota lobbyist during the state’s contentious 2012 battle over a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage,” the Minnesota Independent’s Andy Birkey reported yesterday. Mitchell — a partner at the D.C. firm Foley & Lardner LLP and a veteran of past campaigns against marriage equality — specializes in “helping candidates and groups exploit loopholes” in existing campaign finance laws and will lead the NOM’s effort in challenging disclosure rules surrounding ballot initiatives.

However, she’ll be leading the effort to undermine equality for gays and lesbians while working for a firm that prides itself on “commitment to diversity.” Foley & Lardner LLP devotes multiple pages of its website to highlighting its acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender attorneys and says it is “fully committed to an environment that attracts and sustains diversity of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion.” Below is a snapshot of just one of its diversity pages:

Alyssa

The Pay Gap In The Arts: We’re Second Least Worst!

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 3, 2011 at 5:22 pm

Richard Florida has been getting a lot of attention for a breakdown that illustrates how big the gender pay gap is for workers across all sectors of the creative class: in all of those professions, men make $82,009 on average compared to the $48,077 women pull in. And the situation’s not much better in the arts. In the arts, design, media, entertainment, and sports, 47.5 percent are workers and 52.6 percent are men. And women in those fields make an average of $35,141 each year, compared to men who make an average of $50,382 — women earn 69 percent of what their male counterparts make. It’s true that some of this could be explained by a difference in the amount of work they’re putting in: women in arts, design, media, entertainment, and sports work an average of 34.4 hours per week, while men work an average of 39 hours per week. But women in the field also have slightly more education than their male counterparts, an average of 14.7 years to men’s 14.5. The rest of that adjusted-for-working-hours $9,400 disparity is coming from some place other than working mothers. And it’s a pretty sad distinction that it’s the second-smallest adjusted pay gap in all the fields Florida and his collaborators surveyed.

NEWS FLASH

70 Corporations Come Out Against Defense of Marriage Act | Seventy U.S. businesses are part of an amicus brief opposing the Defense of Marriage Act in Gill v. OPM. The companies point out that DOMA forces them to treat their employees differently based on their sexual orientation, and as a result, the businesses assume an administrative financial burden to correct the inequity. Several health insurance providers, as well as well-known nationwide companies such as CBS, Microsoft, Google, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Time Warner Cable have joined the brief. Here is the complete list:

Climate Progress

Waxman Slams Solyndra Subpoena Fishing Expedition: ‘No Wonder The Public Holds This Congress In Such Low Regard’

By Brad Johnson on Nov 3, 2011 at 4:34 pm

House Energy and Commerce ranking member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) slammed Republicans for taking the extreme step of issuing subpoenas to the White House for all communication related to the solar company Solyndra. At the committee’s business meeting, Waxman noted that the Republican chairs, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL), rejected offers from the White House Counsel to offer all communications related to specific accusations lobbed by critics of the Department of Energy loan guarantee to the bankrupt solar company. “Our focus should be jobs,” he said:

Apparently what the committee really wants is a confrontation with the president, not information for the investigation. No wonder the public holds this Congress in such low regard. Our focus should be jobs. Our attention should be on rebuilding our economy, not manufacturing controversies with our president.

Watch it:

Waxman also criticized the extraordinary decision to subpoena the White House, something he never did as chair of either the House oversight committee or energy committee during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. With the House in Republican hands, public approval of Congress has plummeted to 9 percent.

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