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Security

Wall Street Journal Graph Falsely Suggests Military Spending Is On The Decline

By Ben Armbruster on Feb 14, 2012 at 3:30 pm

When the Obama administration announced its new military strategy last month, and the correlating proposed spending reductions, conservatives tried to claim, in the words of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), that the President was trying to “gut the military.” But as CAP’s Larry Korb, Alex Rothman and Max Hoffman write in a new report today, President Obama’s defense budget “does little to bring the baseline budget back down from its current level, which remains near historic highs.” Indeed, the New York Times noted last month that “over the next four years, the Pentagon budget would rise each year, reaching $567 billion by 2017.”

But you might not know that by scanning the Wall Street Journal’s new budget analysis. According to one graphic, the Journal suggests that military spending will decline over the next few years:

While it may be true that military spending will decline as a percentage of GDP, framing the military budget in these terms hides the fact that defense spending will increase in the coming years. Why? As the aforementioned CAP report explains, “Because these ‘cuts’ come from projected increases in defense spending.” As such, “the baseline defense budget will fall by just 1 percent, or $5 billion, next year and resume its growth thereafter.” Here is what a chart of projected military spending actually looks like:

Korb, Rothman and Hoffman offer a number of “next steps” the Pentagon can take to trim more fat, including reducing F-35 procurement, cancelling the V-22 Osprey, shrinking the size of the nuclear arsenal and reducing the size of the carrier fleet from nine to eleven.

Security

Former Israeli Spy Chief: ‘I Don’t Think There Is An Existential Threat’ To Israel

By Eli Clifton on Feb 8, 2012 at 5:32 pm

Right-wing pundits and politicians are loudly declaring that diplomatic efforts to stop Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program have failed and the time has come for Obama to either participate in a military attack against Iran or stand back while Israel launches airstrikes. The argument increasingly hinges on a “closing window of opportunity” which, according to various reports, limit the Israelis to striking this spring or living with a nuclear weapons armed Iran.

While neither the IAEA nor U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, the IAEA has expressed concern about military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program. But right-wing hawks — from GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney to Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens — are repeating talking points that the Israelis are on the verge of unilaterally attacking in the face of an “existential threat” from Tehran.

Today, former Israeli intelligence chief Meir Dagan slammed Netanyahu’s government for representing fringe political positions, adding that Israel does not face an existential threat. The AP reports:

Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad spy agency said he does not believe Israel faces an existential threat from Iran, a view that contrasts with Israel’s prime minister and other leaders. [...]

At the launch of an electoral reform movement he chairs, he observed, “I don’t think there is an existential threat.” He did not specifically mention Iran, but the use of the phrase “existential threat” in Israel generally refers to Iran.

Dagan is joined by the current Israeli intelligence chief Tamir Pardo who reportedly told a gathering of Israeli ambassadors in December that Iran doesn’t pose an “existential threat” and “the term existential threat is used too freely.”

Last week, retired Israeli Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak told The Independent that the Israeli military’s leadership does not support a strike on Iran and the Associated Press reported that Israel’s new air force chief, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, is “less enthusiastic about a possible attack on Iran” than his predecessor.

There is no doubt that Iran’s nuclear program, if weaponized, is incredibly worrying and constitutes a threat to nuclear non-proliferation efforts as well as Israel’s security. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said recently that Iran can be dissuaded from nuclear weapons through diplomacy and economic sanctions.

NEWS FLASH

Rights Group On Bahrain Denying Journo Visas: ‘Hallmark Of A Repressive Regime’ | Bahrain denied visas to reputable international journalists seeking to cover the anniversary of pro-democracy protests and the subsequent brutal crackdown aided by a Saudi-led Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) military force. The government denied visas to journalists from the New York Times (notably including Nicholas Kristof, who was detained by Bahrain last year), the BBC, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. “This is the hallmark of a repressive regime — not allowing journalists into the country,” Human Rights First’s Brian Dooley told the L.A. Times. Two local journalists — Karim Fakhrawi and Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri — died within a week of each other last April at the height of the uprising, with the authorities suspected in their deaths. The journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranked Bahrain 173 of 179 nations on its press freedom index for 2011, 29 spots lower than its 2010 ranking.

Green

Climate Scientists Rebuke Rupert Murdoch: WSJ Denier Op-Ed Like ‘Dentists Practicing Cardiology’

By Brad Johnson on Feb 1, 2012 at 8:10 am

Rupert Murdoch

In a scathing letter to the editor, thirty-eight of the world’s top climatologists have rebuked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its publication of a “scientist” op-ed denying the threat of manmade global warming. The letter, authored by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the world’s top science institutions, tells the Wall Street Journal editors to “Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate“:

You published “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

The 16 climate deniers include a medical doctor, some engineers, and astrophysicists. One of the climate deniers who wrote the “No Need to Panic” op-ed, Richard Lindzen, questions whether smoking causes cancer, and another of the climate deniers, Claude Allegre, doesn’t believe asbestos is hazardous.

The climate scientists demolish the canard that global warming “stopped”:

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.

The Wall Street Journal published the denier op-ed after rejecting a letter on the threat of manmade climate change from fossil fuel pollution by 255 members of the National Academies of Science.

Read the letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, in full:
Read more

Green

WSJ Publishes Op-Ed From 16 Climate Deniers, Refused Letter From 255 Top Scientists

By Brad Johnson on Jan 30, 2012 at 1:45 pm

This letter, signed by 255 members of the National Academies of Science, was rejected by the Wall Street Journal.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, sixteen prominent global warming deniers with scientific backgrounds — such as tobacco apologist Richard Lindzen of MIT and ExxonMobil executive Roger Cohen — concede that manmade carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet, but argue that the effect is “small” and nothing to “panic” about. All the other scientists in the world who believe the science are part of a conspiracy to intimidate people like themselves, they write, just as Soviet biologists who believed in genes were “sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.”

As climate scientist Peter Gleick reports at his Forbes.com blog, those other scientists include 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences who wrote a letter about the scientific threat of climate change for the Wall Street Journal — but were turned down:

The most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal with respect to manmade climate change is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a scientifically accurate essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because 16 so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

The NAS letter was eventually published by Science magazine.

Even though the first decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, and 2005 and 2010 were the warmest years on record, the denier op-ed asserts “the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”

This op-ed was promoted on Fox News, Real Clear Politics, Alex Jones’ Infowars, and other right-wing political and conspiracy sites.

NEWS FLASH

Wall Street Journal Slams Norm Coleman For Health Care Repeal Comments | Conservatives are pushing back against former senator and Romney campaign surrogate Norm Coleman (R-MN) for claiming that a Republican president won’t be able to repeal the Affordable Care Act and are pressing the former Massachusetts governor to distance himself from Coleman’s assessment. This morning, the Wall Street Journal weighed in, describing Coleman as a counselor of “despair” who wants to “sign a health-care armistice before the battle lines are even drawn.” If Romney’s “real ObamaCare convictions are akin to Mr. Coleman’s—if Republicans ought to ‘repeal the bad and keep the good,’ as Mr. Romney once put it in 2010—then voters should know that now, before he becomes the nominee,” the paper writes, “If those aren’t his convictions, then Mr. Coleman shouldn’t be anywhere near his campaign.” All of this is pure bravado, of course, designed to whip up Republican votes in November. Like the Romney campaign, the WSJ understands that unless Republicans win a 60-vote majority in the Senate, outright legislative repeal of the law is practically impossible. Coleman’s slip-up was a rare moment of truth, no matter how much the GOP establishment would like to pretend otherwise.

Economy

Conservatives Pan GOP Strategy On Payroll Tax Cut: ‘A Fiasco,’ ‘Entirely Outplayed’ By Obama

By Pat Garofalo on Dec 21, 2011 at 9:35 am

Most of the House of Representatives left for the holidays yesterday after House Republicans rejected a bipartisan Senate compromise to extend the payroll tax cut that is expiring at the end of the year. Several Republican senators took the House GOP to task, with Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) calling the House’s action “irresponsible and wrong,” while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said the standoff is “harming the Republican party.”

Now their concern has migrated into the wider conservative movement. In an editorial today, the notoriously right-wing Wall Street Journal called the GOP’s strategy “a fiasco,” saying “the GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.”

On Fox News last night, both the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer continued the hand-wringing, with Krauthammer saying that “the Republicans have been entirely outplayed.” “Ultimately, the Republicans will cave,” Krauthammer predicted. Watch it:

Allowing the payroll tax cut to expire would, according to several economic analyses, knock a substantial amount off of U.S. GDP growth next year and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. While House Republicans claim that they are actually interested in extending the tax cut, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) assigned members who oppose the cut entirely to negotiate with the Senate.

Climate Progress

Two Big Utilities Debunk Wall Street Journal, Industry Lies about Clean Air and Reliability

By Joe Romm on Dec 12, 2011 at 12:13 pm

By Daniel J. Weiss

There are reports that on December 19th the Environmental Protection Agency will promulgate the long awaited standards to require coal fired power plants to reduce their mercury, arsenic, lead, and other toxic pollution.  The dirtiest utilities and big coal companies have launched an eleventh hour pressure campaign to convince President Obama to delay or weaken the implementation of these safeguards that would prevent 1,400 premature deaths per month.

One of the major false claims about these vital health protections is that they would make our electricity system less reliable.   On December 10th, two major utilities rebutted these claims in letters published in the Wall St. Journal in response to its misleading editorial.   Ralph Izzo, Chairman, CEO, and President of Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) responded

“As CEO of an energy company with nuclear, coal and natural gas-fueled power plants, I found the alarms raised in your editorial about a ‘looming threat to electric reliability’ to be exaggerated. You won’t get an argument from me about the importance of reliability. However, the report you cite concludes that the EPA’s proposed clean-air rules will have a modest impact on plant retirements.

“No one disputes that mercury is harmful to human health or that the technology is available now to reduce mercury emissions dramatically. Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. invested $1.5 billion in our coal-fired power plants, reducing emissions of mercury and acid gases by 90% or more. Those projects created jobs for 1,600 construction workers and added permanent positions at our plants. We are not alone. Nearly 60% of the U.S. coal fleet has mercury-control equipment installed or under construction. The EPA’s air rules will provide the certainty to move forward with large, job-creating investments to modernize America’s electric power infrastructure.”

Jack Fusco, CEO and President of Calpine Corp., with 92 power plants in 20 states, also rebutted the WSJ’s claims.

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Romney Threatens Iran: ‘If You Want Peace, Prepare For War’ | Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney threatened war with Iran in an oped set to appear in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. “I will back up American diplomacy with a very real and very credible military option,” wrote the former Massachusetts governor. He quoted a Latin phrase and said the Iranian regime would understand: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The Romney campaign’s foreign policy team is stacked with hawks that led the charge for the war with Iraq and have been pushing to launch one against Iran. One adviser has even advocated for a controversial Iranian anti-regime exile group that’s on the State Department’s list of terror groups.

Security

After IAEA Report, Right Wing Ramps Up Calls For Attack On Iran

By Ali Gharib on Nov 9, 2011 at 2:20 pm

After the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog released its periodic report yesterday, replete with rich details about possible military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program, conservative hawks — ranging from journalists to think-tankers and even a presidential candidate — stepped up their support for a military strike on the Islamic Republic. While many in Congress are pushing for draconian sanctions on Iran, those not on Capital Hill are pushing a step farther.

Here’s a quick round-up of statements supporting a U.S. or Israeli attack from GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, former Bush administration U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Wall Street Journal opinion and editorial writer Bret Stephens, and Council on Foreign Relations scholar Max Boot.

STEPHENS: [T]he policy debate… needs to abandon the conceit that there is a third way between allowing Iran’s nuclear drive to proceed effectively unhindered or to use military force to stop it…. A (bad) argument can be made that a nuclear Iran could be contained.

BOOT: Really stopping the Iranian program would require much tougher steps on the part of the U.S.–steps such as a naval blockade to cripple the Iranian economy and/or air strikes to cripple Iran’s military capacity.

GINGRICH: Well, if the Israelis decide as matter of national survival that they have to eliminate the Iranian nuclear capacity, I would strongly support them automatically… I think to ask them to take that risk is unconscionable.

BOLTON: The only alternative now is the potential for a pre-emptive military strike against their military program, either by the United States or Israel. Diplomacy has failed. Sanctions have failed.

Watch clips of Gingrich and Bolton:

It’s worth keeping in mind the right wing has been calling for an attack on Iran absent any evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and well before the IAEA’s report.

“Iran’s nuclear program has produced much demagoguery and dangerous speculation,” the Atlantic Council’s Barbara Slavin noted yesterday in a Politico op-ed. “Dozens of other countries, however, have conducted nuclear research without becoming nuclear weapons states,” she said, adding, “It’s not too late to dissuade Iran from building and testing a nuclear weapon.”

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