Republican Denialism, Noted for the Record

From a few days ago, via LGF, here is how your Republicans on the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee voted:

House GOP rejects amendments that say climate change is real

House Republicans rejected amendments offered Tuesday by Democrats that called on Congress to accept the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, it is caused in large part by human activity and it is a threat to human health.

[...]

Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) offered an amendment Tuesday that called on Congress to agree that climate change is occurring. The amendment failed on a party-line vote of 20-31. No Republicans voted for the amendment.

The amendment says that "Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that 'warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.'"

[...]

The broad consensus among scientists is that climate change is occurring in large part because of human activity.

House Republicans also rejected an amendment offered by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) Tuesday that called on Congress to accept the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring in large part due to human activity. The amendment failed in a 21-30 party-line vote. No Republicans voted in favor of the amendment.

DeGette's amendment says “’the scientific evidence is compelling’ that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions ‘are the root cause of recently observed climate change.’”

[...]

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) offered a third amendment that says human-caused climate change is a threat to public health and welfare. That amendment also failed on a party-line vote of 21-31.

Republicans, in response to the amendments, took issue with climate science Tuesday.

(x-posted)

[Added] Phil Plait has a good post on this.

If you can't Google it, it doesn't exist, Chapter MMXI

There's a mildly interesting post over on Threat Level, hyping "10 Ways the Government is Opaque."

Some of them are going to be never-ending battles over transparency versus the government's (at times) legitimate claim that it has to be able to do a little business without having to deal with an endless stream of fauxtrage junkies looking to make their cable teevee bones by playing gotcha over some inanity. And make no mistake: some of them are righteous criticisms. But the ones on the list that just kill me, because I am a nerd, are the ones about information that has already been mandated by law to be made public, and so the way the law is "complied" with is?

Head, meet desk:

• U.S. senators do not file campaign contributions electronically, because they are not required to. Their reports are printed and mailed to the Secretary of the Senate where they are scanned into nonsearchable images and e-mailed to the Federal Elections Commission. The FEC posts the images on its site and snail-mails the data to a government contractor, which manually inputs the data into a searchable database …

Shouty voice added.

Somewhere on these Internets, Don McArthur is snickering at me. Nonetheless, I will persist in my perhaps unrealistic optimism on this front, and insist that it is not ALL politicians trying to hide stuff, but is in some cases just pure bureaucratic boneheadedness -- they've got a process in place that complies with the law, and that's the easiest thing to just keep on doing.

I grant that when it comes to Senators' munnies, this optimism is exceedingly unwarranted. But I doubt this scan, post-as-image, retype the data process is unique to this aspect making public information "accessible" to the public.

Hey, all you Republicans who want to make the government More Efficient™ and Run More Like A Business™: who's with me?

Phase I of the invasion is declared a success!

Charlie Stross passes along some good news:

MESSENGER Begins Historic Orbit around Mercury

At 9:10 p.m. EDT, engineers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., received the anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around the planet Mercury.

The spacecraft rotated back to the Earth by 9:45 p.m. EDT, and started transmitting data. Upon review of these data, the engineering and operations teams confirmed that the burn executed nominally with all subsystems reporting a clean burn and no logged errors.

MESSENGER’s main thruster fired for approximately 15 minutes at 8:45 p.m., slowing the spacecraft by 1,929 miles per hour (862 meters per second) and easing it into the planned eccentric orbit about Mercury. The rendezvous took place about 96 million miles (155 million kilometers) from Earth.

But what does the real expert have to say?

(embiggen)

(x-posted)

Remember that Jon Chait "Taxophobia" piece ...

... I linked to yesterday?

Paul Campos reacts:

The Future of an Illusion

Jon Chait has a great new piece on the historical sources, hidden motivations, and overall incoherence of the contemporary GOP’s anti-tax dogma.

One implicit feature of Chait’s analysis is that it throws light on the extent to which “the Left” in America now means something like “people who think massive increases in wealth inequality are actually undesirable.”

(x-posted)

Respect our majoritah!

They say "milestone," I say watershed:

More than half of Americans say it should be legal for gays and lesbians to marry, a first in nearly a decade of polls by ABC News and The Washington Post.

This milestone result caps a dramatic, long-term shift in public attitudes. From a low of 32 percent in a 2004 survey of registered voters, support for gay marriage has grown to 53 percent today. Forty-four percent are opposed, down 18 points from that 2004 survey.

[...]

(h/t: Scott Lemieux)

So, which bill from today's Republicans did you enjoy more? [Updated: correction]

The one where Minnesota Republicans want to make it illegal for poor people to carry cash? [Added2: Not true.**] Or the one where the Republicans in the US Congress want to require the IRS to carry out abortion audits? (Remember to ask your rapist for a receipt, ladies!)

Details here, if you haven't already heard.

[Added] PZ:

So that's what they mean by the “War on Poverty”

---

** [Added2] Correction: This turns out not to be true. The bill says the people in the assistance program are "prohibited from withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine or receiving cash from vendors with the EBT debit card." And later: "EBT cardholders may opt to have up to $20 per month accessible via automatic teller machine or receive up to $20 cash back from a vendor." (via, via.)

And now here it is, your moment of subtle

from | via

Running out of address space

You've probably heard talk about how we're about to run out of so-called IPv4 addresses -- the numeric designators (like 64.233.169.132) underlying URLs that actually tell packets of information where to go on the Internet. This problem of increasing scarcity could easily be resolved by switching to IPv6 addresses, which span an enormously larger range, and no doubt, that will eventually be what happens. But in the meantime, inertia means opportunity!

There's an interesting article on this wheeling and dealing from Maria Farrell over on Crooked Timber: "IPv4 endgame; following the money."

The Rancho Cucamonga Quakes are now in second place

I have a new favorite baseball team.

(previously)

(h/t: some cricket fan)

The Looming Nuclear Worldwide Sharia Apocalypse NY Times Paywall

Pretty soon now ("Beginning March 28"), the NYT will be demanding your money if you want to read more than a few of their articles. But don't worry! They're going after the worst of the worst first:

The 20-article limit begins immediately for readers accessing NYTimes.com from Canada …

Ken Layne simply does not care for this new plan, although he does not say how he feels about Canadians.

Ken does do us a solid by pointing to Juli Weiner. She has lots of helpful advice, including a link to a page on the NYT's site that shows you how many articles you have recently stolen …

Above: profile* of a grand larcenist
______________________________
* Not his actual PROFILE profile

... and she also provides the endings to all those articles that you soon will only be able to read the beginnings of, while you are hunched in a corner of your dark kitchen, eating cold gray spaghetti with a pair of tweezers.* Highly recommended.

---

* Even if you are not named Oscar Madison.

---

[Added] Felix Salmon has a thorough post on the matter.

Mitch Daniels: "That money's already been spent."

I wonder if that will become his new campaign slogan.

"The Triumph of Taxophobia"

A good piece recounting the development over the past three decades of this most important of mindsets on the right and in the Republican Party, from Jon Chait in the latest issue of Democracy.

(x-posted)

Is there some reason for Salon to be asking this question?

Sharron Angle Refuses To Let Joe Miller Hog The Entire News Cycle

One of your other favorite teabaggers who did not manage to win election in 2010 wants into the news, too. Contrary to last week's speculation that she would seek the Senate seat of retiring-in-disgrace John Ensign (R-NV), we are now informed by Ken Layne that she is running for the House!

(Above: what she looked like when she ran for the Senate)

From her site, the PDF:

Angle Announces Run for Congress
March 16th, 2011

Four-term Assemblywoman Sharron Angle (R-NV) today announced her intention to run for the seat in the House of Representatives being vacated by Dean Heller (R-NV) …

The rest is the standard yelling about Obama, the Constitution, and taxes.

But!

She has made an exciting announcement video, too! And here is a fine measure of how much faith she has the American people:

• "This video is unlisted. Only those with the link can see it."
  
  
• "Adding comments has been disabled for this video."

Clearly, what she is saying is, "Make moar screen grabz plz."

(x-posted | Wait, what about Joe Miller?)

Joe Miller scrambles to distance himself from accused terrorists

Remember Sarah Palin's old favorite candidate, Joe "The Goon" Miller, who just wouldn't accept that he lost the election for the Senate?

He's back in the news!

Joe Miller in hot water for ties to militia leader

As we noted elsewhere, this militia leader, Francis "Schaeffer" Cox, was arrested late last week, along with four others, "in connection with a plot to kidnap or kill Alaska state troopers and a local judge."

(h/t: Ken Layne | x-posted)

So this is what earning $2 million looks like

When you're getting paid by a guy who not only owns the teevee station you shill for, but a newspaper or fifty:

(embiggen)

(h/t: Betty Cracker)

I don't even think Sarah Palin would say something this stupid

Michael J. Totten, as quoted by Roy Edroso:

This may be a good time for Arab leaders and opinion makers to ask themselves what they can do to win over the hearts and minds of Americans.

We may take some comfort from the Freudian slip in his bio at the bottom of his op-ed, though.

I guess they forgot the C.

Oh, snap!

(Considering the source, I mean.)

Daniels poked both Palin and Mike Huckabee with a single punch, raising the former Arkansas governor’s gaffe in which he claimed inaccurately more than once that the president grew up in Kenya.

“Sarah Palin pounces and says, ‘Wrong, Mike — he’s never been to Europe,” said Daniels, according to a guest on hand for the event, which was off the record to the White House pool.

Came across this after link-hopping from post to post, following some starting links offered by Ed at Instaputz, on three (=trend!) recent examples of the Indiana governor and potential GOP candidate for president dissing major elements of the Republican Party (union haters, birthers, forced pregnancy obsessives, Palinistas, and teabaggers).

Who knows. Maybe he's dipping his toe in the water to see how it feels to play a moderate on teevee. Relative to the rest of the pack, of course.

I'll believe him when he says he likes having sex with his Muslim boyfriend from Mexico. Who believes in global warming.

(x-posted)

Unleash the populist hordes! Uh, wait a minute now, people ...

It's a bit anecdotal, but this article on how the Mormon teabaggers simply do not care for their top Mormon politicians -- Romney, Huntsman, and Hatch -- because they are not conservative enough, should meet nonetheless fulfill your RDA for schadenfreude.

They have already collected one scalp (ex-Senator Bob Bennett), so now their sense of themselves has only grown.

(x-posted)

Top conservatives against Palin?

One of the anti-Palin Alaska blogs, The Immoral Minority, has a dishy/it-would-be-irresponsible-NOT-to-speculate piece about about some rumblings of late among the movers and shakers on the right.

His (I'm guessing at the blogger's gender) starting point is Palin's apparent no-show on the launch of the new Lou Dobbs show. (Yeah, I missed the big news of that launch, too.) He then mentions, among other bits of gossip, NY Mag's report that Roger Ailes was/is mad about Palin's refusal to follow his advice to keep quiet after the Tucson shootings, a leak by someone that said Palin was added to McCain's VP short list only because she was a woman, and a prediction on Morning Joe by Mika Brzezinski that Ailes is going to dump Palin. He's got several links to support these.

Looking around elsewhere, I came across a longish piece, dated 14 March 2011, on the GOP's press release reposting service headlined:

'She's becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition'

This line was attributed to Matt Labash of the biased liberal Weekly Standard. George Will, Heather MacDonald, and Peter Wehner, "a top strategist in George W. Bush’s White House," also go on record with disparaging remarks. Also name-checked for recent comments made elsewhere are Barbara Bush and Charles Krauthammer. Basically, they don't like her non-stop playing of "the victim card" and her "culture of aggrievement."

Oh, go on and click those links. You know you want to. Everyone needs a silliness break when the real news is so bad.

(h/t: @LJSearles | x-posted | pic. source)

[Added] I see Blue Texan was ahead of me on noticing this collective top-down finger-wagging. (No surprise there, as Instaputz readers will recall -- he's been tracking this for a while now.) He also adds something I didn't notice: Judd Gregg's diss. Yes, Gregg is so 2009, but remember that he's from New Hampshire, and probably still has some back-room clout there.

I hope this guy doesn't have to eat his words ...

... (which depends, I guess, on how much radioactivity gets out), but so far, this is a useful, if mildly coldhearted, reminder:

Putting the Problem in Perspective

Updated March 14, 2011, 10:55 PM

Bernard L. Cohen is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Pittsburgh.

The very elaborate earthquake design requirements for U.S. reactors recognizes that a large enough earthquake would defeat any precautions.

As a fallback, the requirements are designed such that the consequences of the earthquake from reactor failures should be negligible relative to the non-nuclear consequences of the earthquake. That is certainly fulfilled in the Japanese earthquake with thousands of deaths from non-nuclear consequences and, considering the evacuations, very few if any deaths from the reactor failures. From costly property damage, the non-nuclear damage is far greater than any possible damage from reactor failures.

The Japanese earthquake was 10 times more powerful than what is considered to be the most powerful credible earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

Some other nuggets of opinion here.

(x-posted)

Lots of horrible news in the headlines, for sure ...

... but at least spare a few moments' thought for our poor put-upon banksters and their brave public servants.

That part about Bank of America's shenanigans in Nevada is just … how do those people sleep at night?

A slice of life

Seen on the Twitter, RTed by @carlzimmer and "100+ others," all of whom have exquisite taste:

seanmcarroll A joke by Wittgenstein: "... 9, 5, 1, 4, 1, 3. Done!" "What were you doing, God?" "Oh, just reciting all the digits of pi backwards."

(x-posted)

"What if we’re not broke?"

E.J. Dionne asks a hard question.

"Hard" as in flying in the face of Republican talking points, and therefore, what's repeated on your teevees and front pages, I mean.

(h/t: Uncle Eb)

Well, I guess if your site is going to be down a lot ...

... it makes sense to get a nice piece of artwork, at least.

I don't like Tumblr being inaccessible when I have very important bragging to do thereon (oh yeah, it's not just this blog), but I do like this:

If you're frustratedly trying to click that link at the bottom there and only getting a larger picture, try this: The Oatmeal. Among other items that caught my eye, an interactive quiz: "How many Justin Biebers could you take in a fight?"

__________

[Update] The results are in!

"Welcome to the Shari'ah Conspiracy Theory Industry"

Probably you're already generally familiar with "How the American right demonizes Islam for political gain," but Sarah Posner's article is worth reading for the specifics. Especially in light of the GOP's total support of this industry.

Never mind that Obama loves torture! At least we still have freedom of the ...

... press?

Oh, never mind.

[Added] The blogger responds to the verdict.

The Sad State of our Union

Ken Layne:

It’s a muddled up, mixed up, shook up world when your Wonkette quotes Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald quoting Matt Yglesias and David Frum, all in the same post and not for the intrinsic humor value in quoting such people.

I'll stop well short of echoing his position that we should let the Republicans take the White House back in 2012, but the rest of his criticism is righteous.

The bottom line for me is that no matter what one thinks of the actions for which Bradley Manning has been detained, he is being punished, right now, without having been convicted of anything.

Hope fades eternal.

(previously)

(x-posted)

An "Endangered Species" Acts Talks

Hey, remember that guy David Jenkins we were snickering about a few days ago?

Looks like Andrew Revkin has asked him a few questions. For what it's worth (approximately nothing), he does have a few good things to say; e.g.:

I would agree that the Republican Party has been hijacked. I maintain that it is being unduly influenced by what I call “pretend conservatives.” These are the radical libertarians that dominate right-wing talk radio and outlets like Fox News. If you listen to people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck you cannot really find any traditionalist conservative ideas in their world view.

The policies being peddled by these folks reflect a live for today-let me do what I want mentality that has nothing to do with the conservative notion of protecting the interests of future generations. Their support for fiscal restraint is primarily due to their desire to starve and weaken the federal government, not to protect our children and grandchildren from debt. Otherwise, they should be able to recognize the fiscal stewardship and environmental stewardship are equally conservative. Their energy and environmental views promote waste, pollution, and overdependence on finite resources. Is there anything less conservative than waste?

Of course, he hastens to show you why he works for a group called Republicans for Environmental Protection:

I personally would call them liberal, because their attitude reminds me of the liberal “if it feels good do it” mantra of the 1960s, only the vices are different.

Yeah. Smoking a little weed and having premarital sex are Just Like™ killing the planet.

So, he'll be announcing his bid for the Republican nomination any day now, right?

Evidently, the big-time lobbying gigs at McGuireWoods and Apollo Global Management, picked up after he oozed through the revolving door a few months ago, aren't generating enough cash to keep him in the comfort that is the birthright of all true Republicans. Hence, one supposes, this HuffPo headline, via @pourmecoffee:

Fox News Signs Former Senator Evan Bayh As A Contributor

Evan Bayh is the Joe Lieberman of all Zell Millers.