Got a lovely email from my Senator, Mark Kirk. Back when he was a House member, he was actually a moderate. No more. His latest missive is a beautiful work of obfuscation. He sent me this poll question…
U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois - Washington Post image
As your Senator, should I…
___ Stand with my fellow Republicans in protecting social security
___ Break ranks and support the President in raiding the Social Security Trust Fund in order to try yet another stimulus to create jobs
Isn’t that just lovely? And you can bet – in another week or so – he will be on the Senate floor announcing the results of this survey. The very notion that Republicans want to protect Social Security is like saying the Colonel wants to protect chickens. I let him know that, for all the good it will do.
Will Sen. Kirk actually make the bizarre claim that Democrats want to raid Social Security for unemployment benefits? Would he post such a claim on his website?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Impressive. Schneider explains, to Australian “skeptics,” how CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, why that’s bad, what the urban heat island effect is and why it does not negate temperature measures that show global warming. He savages the argument about CO2’s “logarithmic” absorption characteristics negating scientists’ findings.
Peter Sinclair comes through with a good explanation of the history of concern about global warming — how the warming trend was discovered.
It wasn’t scientists trying to get government grants. It was the U.S. Air Force, trying to beat the commies and keep America safe for democracy and, ironically, safe for dissent from such applications of science.
9,996
Real history couldn’t be published as fiction, which is one way we can tell real history from the stuff that gets made up. In the story told in this video, note carefully the serendipity of figuring out the CO2 issues: Who could invent a story about warfare leading to the discovery of global warming? As with the coincidence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both dying on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, no editor of fiction would accept it as believable.
Meeting in Durban, South Africa, government officials from many nations worked to find solutions to human causation of destructive climate change, in the framework of proposed treaties under United Nations aegis.
Negotiators at the COP17 Climate Conference in Durban work late into the night to reach agreement on a roadmap to a legally binding deal, 10 December 2011. UKDECC photo and caption
Did anyone expect good reports out of these meetings?
From the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, we get this press release, dated Sunday, December 11, 2011:
Road open to new global legal climate treaty
Global agreement achieved on a roadmap to a legally binding deal
Second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol to be agreed next year
Green Climate Fund to be set up
The UN climate talks in South Africa have been heralded a success after a climate change deal was struck in the early hours of Sunday morning.194 parties have spent the past two weeks in Durban discussing how to cut emissions to limit global temperature rise to below two degrees to avoid dangerous climate change.
In a major realignment of support, well over 120 countries formed a coalition behind the EU’s high ambition proposal of a roadmap to a global legally binding deal to curb emissions. African states together with the least developed countries such as Bangladesh and Gambia, and small island states vulnerable to rising sea levels, like the Maldives, joined with the EU to put forward a timetable which would see the world negotiate a new agreement by 2015 at the latest.
The talks resulted in a decision to adopt the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol next year in return for a roadmap to a global legal agreement covering all parties for the first time. Negotiations will begin on the agreement early next year.
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said:
“This is a significant step forward in curbing emissions to tackle global climate change. For the first time we’ve seen major economies, normally cautious, commit to take the action demanded by the science.
“The EU’s proposal for the roadmap was at the core of the negotiations and the UK played a central role in galvanising support. This outcome shows the UNFCCC system really works and can produce results. It also shows how a united EU can achieve results on the world stage and deliver in the UK’s best interests.
“There are still many details to be hammered out, but we now need to start negotiating the new legal agreement as soon as possible and there are still many details to be hammered out.”
Also the conference agreed to get the Green Climate Fund up and running, this will help deliver financial support to developing countries to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Notes to editors:
Further details on the Durban climate talks can be found at: www.unfccc.int
Call me skeptical that this report is completely accurate, but as I refuse to be “skeptical” of the reality that the Earth warms, call me hopeful, too. It’s an agreement to keep talking.
Perhaps, dear followers of Christ, there is no war on Christmas. Perhaps the war is on the world, a war that YOU are waging on other religions, other cultures, and those who have equal faith, and equal right to express their faith (or lack there-of). Perhaps you feel that even acknowledging that there are other ways to believe, (God help anyone who says “Happy Holidays”) is an attack on you, but isn’t acknowledging your holiday while acknowledging that there are others the loving and peaceful solution? Why does the Hindu, the Jew, the Muslim, the Atheist, HAVE to wish you a Merry Christmas, and ignore their own faiths and the faiths of others?
There’s more, and you can buy a nice t-shirt to give to your genius daughter or son, at Kate’s site. (Or maybe this shirt.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Perry imagines a “war on religion,” based on his bigoted, anti-liberty views and some gross disinformation about what the rules are for kids praying in school.
What are the odds that, if elected, Perry would say, “Oops, I was wrong; I won’t do what that ad suggests?”
Perry’s offensive and erroneous text:
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.
As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.
Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.
I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.
I’ll take Barney Frank over Rick Perry any day. Barney Frank is twice the man Rick Perry is, especially in standing up for the Constitution and freedom for all Americans.
I’ll take Barbara Jordan over Rick Perry. She was twice the person Rick Perry is. It seems to me that Perry plays with fire when he makes an ad that targets genuine Texas heroes like Jordan.
Is Perry going negative just because he’s losing, or is it really going to be that dirty a campaign? This man shouldn’t be governor of Texas, and he has no business running for president.
Christmas at the White House with the Obamas takes on a particularly merry glow of the better spirits of the season.
"WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 30: The official White House Christmas tree, the centerpiece of the Blue Room, is on display during the first viewing of the 2011 White House Christmas decorations November 30, 2011 in Washington, DC. Honoring Blue Star families, the 18-foot 6-inch balsam fir tree is decorated with framed military medals and handmade holiday cards created by military children living on installations around the world. The theme, 'Shine, Give, Share,' runs throught the White House with a 400-pound White House Gingerbread House and 37 Christmas trees." Getty Images
How that must frost people who blindly and often stupidly oppose the president.
37 Christmas trees in the Executive Mansion, reflecting the Obama Christmas theme, “Shine, Give, Share”
Two trees honoring veterans and military service, one Gold Star tree, one Blue Star tree, to promote awareness of the meaning of the blue and gold star traditions
Two trees honoring veterans and military service, one Gold Star tree, one Blue Star tree, to promote awareness of the meaning of the blue and gold star traditions
Lots of kids — receptions for children of servicemen have provided a parade of cheeriness
Bo, the dog, stars in a variety of ways, including a recyclable replica of the dog made from trash bags
85,000 holiday visitors
Entertainment for 12,000 volunteers, Congressmen, staff, Secret Service, and others
The 2011 White House holiday guidebook distributed to visitors, created by eight students from the Corcoran College of Art and Design (the Corcoran Gallery is just around the corner)
Christopher Monckton, Orly Taitz, Bill O’Reilly and John Boehner will deny, or lament, all of it. If living well is the best revenge, celebrating the holidays well comes close to the best rebuttal of the hoaxes.
The first thing I gleaned from this little tutorial will probably not surprise you: There really is a textbook way to fix our current mess. Short-term stimulus works to help an economy recover from a recession. Some kinds of stimulus pay off more quickly than others. Once the economic heart is pumping again, we need to get our deficits under control. The way to do that is a balance of spending cuts, increased tax revenues and entitlement reforms. There is room to argue about the proportions and the timing, and small differences can produce large consequences, but the basic formula is not only common sense, it is mainstream economic science, tested many times in the real world.
So what’s the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear. Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.
Is reasoned discourse such that much a lost art in America today? Keller extends his point to cover several areas of discussion — President Obama’s birthplace, global warming and what to do about it, vaccines, etc. He could as easily have added whether Rachel Carson murdered more people than Mao Zedong, cures for our education woes, and the designated hitter rule.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man has value; but in the land of the knee-walking turkeys the one-eyed man is just one more roost to crap on.
What is a rational person to do?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
No time at the moment to tell my story on this topic (the punchline of the thing that got me in trouble starts, ” . . . or next to Christopher Columbus, the greatest New Dealer of all time . . .”).
This has creeped me out for a couple of days, and it’s just getting more bizarre.
So, with no sense of irony of the Orwellian nature of what they were doing, Brownback and his staff complained to the school of the girl about what she wrote — which, while stupidly offensive, was nothing major.
Plus, the Governor’s office asked the school to discipline the girl. Alas, the principal complied with the request. (When do teachers and administrators stand up for their students? Why not this time?)
Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag said her office had forwarded a copy of Sullivan’s tweet to organizers of the school-sponsored event “so that they were aware what their students were saying in regards to the governor’s appearance.
Did the governor’s staff keep copies of all the Tweets they monitored? Did they suggest accolades for the kids who gushed over Brownback’s . . . positions on the issues?
Wholly apart from the obvious free speech issues, which could well be decided against the girl since various courts have ruled students park most of their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door (not religion, though), I was a little creeped out at someone professing to be an adult monitoring the teen’s Tweets for her friends.
What other teen aged girls is he monitoring? What part of Kansas law gives him that authority? Which borderline of “child abuse” or “stalking” did he really intend to walk?
Sam Brownback, stop stalking Kansas teenagers. It’s ugly, and creepy, and it reveals you to be small . . . and creepy.
(Yes, I know — it technically doesn’t fall under the Kansas stalking law. But Kansas stalking law didn’t anticipate cyber stalking, either. A version of the Kansas statute, below the fold.)
Business and politics drift so slowly and amicably in Kansas that Brownback has time and thinks it worth the trouble to monitor Tweets from teenagers? There’s a bigger judgment issue here than Emma’s little lapse of it.
Christmas gets underway at the White House, with a special guest appearance by Bo, the dog:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
One long-standing American Christmas tradition is the Christmas hoax about the president. Probably the most famous, if not the first, was H. L. Mencken’s column in December 1917, in which he claimed Millard Fillmore a failure as president, whose only achievement was putting the first bathtub in the Executive Mansion — all of it make up, whole cloth fiction.
Since the election of Barack Obama we’ve seen claims that Obama had banned Christmas trees, claims that Obama required only Marxist and communist ornaments, and other wild stories that only a fool, a victim of lobotomy, a Bill O’Reilly fan or Michelle Bachmann would believe after the second cup of coffee in the morning.
What will the hoax claims be this year? ABC posted this raw footage of the delivery of the Christmas tree, but that alone will not inoculate us from a Yule-tide hoax.
What atrocious inventions will the Obama-haters send our way this year? If it’s a claim that there’s no tree, you know better already. You’ve seen the video.
Even writing an article like this one carries risks; opponents of the president will excerpt the criticism and strip it of context.
But in this case, the President has reality on his side. The scientific consensus is far stronger today than at any time in the past. Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real. It is time to act.
Some more of the emails stolen from the Climate Research Centre in 2009 have been released. This time they are accompanied by a readme with out-of-context quotes that asserts the purpose of the release is information transparency, but that’s an obvious lie, since they’ve sat on them for two years and released them just before Durban conference. The timing suggests that the people behind the theft and release have a financial interest in preventing mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. It is most unlikely that there is anything incriminating in these emails — if there was, it would have been released two years ago.
Especially, the last round revealed no data to show warming is not happening, nor any data to show anything but righteous and noble concern to mitigate or stop the human contribution to the pollution that causes unnatural global warming. This round of releases will do the same, I predict.
Drew Sheneman, Newark Star-Ledger, on politics around findings of global warming; polar bears won't read the stolen e-mails, refuse to be convinced findings of warming comprise a hoax
(Does anyone have the date on that cartoon? Is it, like this one from Tom Toles, so old it indicates denialists do nothing new under the sun?)
How many times do we allow the miscreant to call “wolf” falsely? Why would we believe him on any other issue?
More, Resources:
Here’s one site where you can read and search the stolen e-mails; in classic denialist fog-the-issue fashion, the site is named “FOIA,” though it has absolutely nothing to do with a legitimate use of any Freedom of Information Act. FOIA is not stealing stuff.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 