HERE‘s a great collection of arguments to use against the disinformation campaigns of global-warming deniers.
Each of these quick responses is accompanied by a link to a scientific article dealing with the specific subject at issue.
You might want to save this post for use when you come up against folks whose grasp of climate issues is limited to what they hear from Rush Limbaugh or Fox News....
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Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein WRITES HERE of a fascinating study conducted by Philip Fernbach and a team of academics at the University of Colorado whereby political extremists are turned into comparative moderates:
Their central finding is that if you ask people to explain exactly why they think as they do, they discover how much they don’t know — and they become more humble and therefore more moderate.
The study came in four stages. First, people were asked to state their positions on a series of political issues, including a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, a national flat tax, ...
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As you may already know, some of the vermin on the far, far right of the American political spectrum have been peddling theories that last month’s Boston Marathon bombings were a nefarious plot hatched by the Obama administration — a “false flag” operation, as the loonies like to put it — as part of some broader scheme to disarm decent folks or put all the true patriots in concentration camps or something.
Well, there’s BREAKING NEWS this morning that an FBI agent has killed a man who was said to have had connections with suspected Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ...
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THIS is pretty interesting:
GOP aides are criticizing the House Republicans’ partisan witch-hunt over the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya last year, arguing that the Party should focus more on substantive issues, such as lessons learned and how to recalibrate diplomatic security.
Roll Call reports that Republican aides are saying staffers are getting bogged down chasing bogus accusations.
“We have got to get past that and figure out what are we going to do going forward,” a GOP aide told Roll Call. “Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn’t believe ...
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Political analyst Charlie Cook, who’s widely respected in both parties, SAYS Republicans are too obsessed with their bitter battles against President Obama:
Red-faced Republicans, circling and preparing to pounce on a second-term Democratic president they loathe, do not respect, and certainly do not fear. Sound familiar? Perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s second term, after the Monica Lewinsky story broke? During that time, Republicans became so consumed by their hatred of Clinton and their conviction that this event would bring him down that they convinced themselves the rest of the country was just as outraged by his behavior as they were. ...
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David Sirota NAILS IT:
Was the severe weather system culminating in yesterday’s Oklahoma City tornado intensified — or even created — by climate change? That question will almost certainly be batted back and forth in the media over the next few days. After all, there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change intensifies weather in general, but there remain legitimate questions about how — and even if — it intensifies tornadoes in specific.
One thing, however, that shouldn’t be up for debate is whether or not we should be as prepared as possible for inevitable weather events ...
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The man SAYS the GOP needs greater diversity:
At a sold-out New Hampshire Republican Party dinner Monday night, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) encouraged the room of GOP supporters to embrace diversity and outreach if they want to take the White House in 2016, the Courier-Journal in Louisville reports.
“We need to be like the rest of America,” Paul said. “We’re going to win when we look like America. We need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with ponytails, without ponytails, with beards, without.”
Paul urged ...
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Why am I not surprised that the silly 1984 fantasy “Red Dawn” (above) tops THIS LIST?
After the December killings in Newtown, Conn., the National Rifle Association’s chief lambasted the the evils of violent movies and video games, saying they, rather than guns, were a source of the nation’s woes.
Now, less than six months later, the NRA’s “flagship publication,” American Rifleman, is celebrating cinematic savagery with a list of the top 10 “coolest gun movies” that unabashedly praises Hollywood depictions of death and crime.
“Who has not dreamed of having the power and respect of Michael Corleone? That ...
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Two major public-opinion polls released this week have lots of good news for President Obama and lots of bad news for the Republican Party.
The first of these is the CNN/ORC survey, which includes THESE RESULTS:
The new numbers indicate that Obama remains popular, with 79% of Americans saying the president is likable…
“This underscores just how important the president’s personal characteristics have been to him, and how useful it is to the White House that IRS, Benghazi, and AP controversies have not dimmed Obama’s personal popularity so far,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
The president’s handling of ...
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“Hypocrites” is the one word that comes to mind in light of THIS::
As frantic rescue missions continued Monday in Oklahoma following the catastrophic tornadoes that ripped through the state, it appeared increasingly likely that residents who lost homes and businesses would turn to the federal government for emergency disaster aid. That could put the state’s two Republican senators in an awkward position.
Sens. Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn [above], both Republicans, are fiscal hawks who have repeatedly voted against funding disaster aid for other parts of the country. They also have opposed increased funding for the Federal Emergency ...
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Here’s a 96-minute account of the historic Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.
Enjoy!
Each year, roughly 800,000 people are arrested for marijuana offenses. That amounts to one arrest every 42 seconds, which represents a great strain on the criminal justice system.
The irony in all of this is that Americans overwhelmingly oppose stiff penalties for marijuana offenses.
A new poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates shows that only 6 percent of Americans think pot-smokers should be jailed.
Moreover, a majority of respondents say they would support legislation that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting people who grow, possess or sell marijuana in states that have legalized it.
The Republican Party doesn’t often field black candidates for public office, but when it does, they’re usually wingnuts of the first order.
My favorite example is Alan Keyes, who was recruited from outside Illinois to carry the GOP banner against Barack Obama in a U.S. Senate race in 2004 (see HERE). But there have been others — Herman Cain and Allen West, to name just two.
And now there’s E.W. Jackson (above), a right-wing clergyman selected by the Republican Party of Virginia as its nominee for lieutenant governor.
Jackson is the homophobe’s homophobe, as he makes clear when he ...
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Writing in Scientific American, Patrick Mustain imagines THIS LETTER from the food industry to consumers:
Dear Consumers: A disturbing trend has come to our attention. You, the people, are thinking more about health, and you’re starting to do something about it. This cannot continue.
Sure, there’s always been talk of health in America. We often encourage it. The thing is, we only want you to think about and talk about health in a certain way—equating health with how you look, instead of outcomes like quality of life and reduced disease risk….
Whatever the current health trend, we respond by developing ...
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Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s detachment from reality is getting worse, as we see HERE:
While the Internal Revenue Service maintains it was not focusing on conservative groups out of political bias, Sen. Rand Paul claimed Sunday there was a “written policy” floating around the agency that said IRS officials were “targeting people who were opposed to the president.”
“And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy,” the Republican senator from Kentucky said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Pressed for more precise details about the memo he was referring ...
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James Rosen (above), who worked at WREX-TV in Rockford for a while in the 1990s, is SAID to have been the subject of a federal investigation of leaks of classified information:
When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.
They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department ...
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Most of us rabid political partisans, whether lefties or righties, take special pleasure in citing what we see as the excessive rhetoric of certain people on the other side of the spectrum.
And so it is with me when right-wingers like Republican State Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen (above) of Minnesota spout their particular brand of nonsense.
Gruenhagen has been in office for little more than two years, but already he’s made quite a reputation for himself.
For example, he held a news conference a couple of months ago to denounce legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage. Homosexuality, he said, is a ...
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The RESULTS of a new CNN/ORC poll are mostly good news for President Obama.
The principal take-aways from this survey are these:
Fifty-three percent of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.
“That two-point difference is well within the poll’s sampling error, so it is a mistake to characterize it as a gain for the president,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Nonetheless, an approval rating that has not dropped and remains over 50% ...
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Stephanie Koontz, one of my favorite social historians, WARNS HERE about the potential pitfalls of nostalgia:
In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth.
In society at large, however, nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways, making us needlessly negative about our current situation.
(Snip)
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, ...
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Despite suggestions from such conservatives as Charles Krauthammer and Newt Gingrich to temper their rhetoric, more than a few Republicans these days are claiming that the so-called scandals that currently beset the Obama administration are the worst in American history.
Let’s knock down that nonsense with just two examples of past scandals, shall we?
For starters, the notion that Obama’s problems are worse than Watergate hardly merits discussion. Richard Nixon, after all, needed a presidential pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford, to keep him safe from criminal prosecution.
There is no evidence that Obama has committed any crimes, much less ...
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