bluegal Totally not making this up: A group has formed on the Wall Street Journal Community Page, whose purpose is to complain that there are too many pictures of Barack Obama (The President of the United States, that Barack Obama) on the WSJ website.
Think Progress: Powell responds to Limbaugh and Cheney: They have their own ‘version’ of the GOP.
Earlier this month, Rush Limbaugh declared, “What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat.” Days later, Dick Cheney said that he would rather have Limbaugh in the GOP than Powell. “My take on it was that Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican,” Cheney said. Yesterday, Powell responded to the duo, issuing a sharp rebuke to them for attempting to marginalize his role in the party:
“Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again,” Powell told the crowd.
Benen: HOW MAVERICKY...
Even during the 2008 presidential campaign, no matter how far he shifted to the right, John McCain was generally pretty good about acknowledging the climate crisis. "We need a successor to Kyoto, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner," McCain said in 2008.
Now, the specifics of McCain's cap-and-trade proposal were pretty absurd -- it was basically cap and trade without the cap -- but at least he'd occasionally talk a good game. Now, the Arizona Republican is poised to help kill a compromise measure that the nation really needs.
Sen. John McCain now appears to oppose climate-change legislation, an abrupt switch that could seriously threaten any movement on such a bill.
"Nearly 1000 page Climate Change legislation -- appears to be a cap & tax bill that I won't support," McCain wrote in a Twitter message Monday, a reversal of the position he took on the Senate floor in March.
Two months ago, McCain and his close friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, took the floor in strong support of climate-change legislation. This marked a return to form for McCain, who co-sponsored a 2002 climate-change bill with longtime friend Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), but had tamped down his rhetoric during the 2008 presidential campaign.
"Let me just say to my colleagues, I'm proud of my record on climate change," McCain said in March. "I've been all over the world and I've seen climate change, and I know it's real, and I'll be glad to continue this debate with my colleagues and people who don't agree with that."
Keep in mind, while reconciliation rules are in place for health care, center-right Democrats made it so that Republican obstructionism can kill climate-change legislation. To get to 60, Dems are going to need quite a few votes from those handful of Republicans who take science and global warming seriously.
McCain was supposed to be one of them. That now appears unlikely.
McCain had an opportunity to help bolster his tarnished reputation, regaining the stature he enjoyed after the 2000 campaign. Instead, he's throwing the opportunity away. He's gone through a variety of personas over the years, but it now seems he's sticking with the one rejected by the country in 2008.
Think Progress: Barton: We Shouldn’t Regulate CO2 Because ‘It’s In Your Coca-Cola’ And ‘You Can’t Regulate God’
Yesterday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee began its markup of the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The work is expected to continue through the week, as Republicans plan to stall movement on the bill by offering more than 400 amendments.
Discussing the bill on C-Span’s Washington Journal this morning, Rep. “Smokey Joe” Barton (R-TX) defended his head-in-the-sand approach to climate change by fundamentally misunderstanding the science, misstating the reality of carbon dioxide emissions, and mocking fuel-efficient cars. Some highlights:
– “I would also point out that CO2, carbon dioxide, is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term. … I am creating it as I talk to you. It’s in your Coca-Cola, you’re Dr. Pepper, your Perrier water. It is necessary for human life. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, does not cause asthma.”
– “And something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that is created in the United States is naturally created. You can’t regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the US Congress can regulate God.”
– “If you think greenhouse gases are bad, life couldn’t exist without greenhouse gases. … So, there is a, there is a climate theory — and it’s a theory, it’s not a fact, it’s never been proven — that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere somehow interact to trap more heat than the atmosphere would otherwise.”
— “You know, that life style is going to become more and more difficult if you get these vehicles smaller and smaller and less and less efficient in terms of being able to travel distances without having to recharge or refuel.”
Watch a compilation:
The idea that since CO2 is “natural” it cannot, by definition, be harmful is a popular one among the conservative climate-denying set — though totally irrelevant. Barton ignores the harmful effects of climate change itself, which will allow diseases to spread more easily, for example. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency found that climate change “is expected to worsen regional ozone pollution, with associated risks in respiratory infection, aggravation of asthma, and premature death.”
His complaint about smaller vehicles is also bizarre. He claims these cars will be “less and less efficient” because they will require more refueling stops. But the standards announced by President Obama today will create an average fuel economy rate of 35.5 miles per gallon — meaning cars can go farther between fueling, on less gasoline.
At one point during the C-Span segment, a caller told Barton he sounded like a spokesman for Big Oil. It’s no coincidence: Barton operates a “philanthropic” foundation that actually serves as a front group to funnel energy company funds.
- Benen: GO, SPEED READER, GO....
Conservative Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have threatened to do everything imaginable, and perhaps a few measures beyond imaginable, to delay progress on a Democratic climate-change bill. Most notably, Rep. Joe Barton (R) of Texas, arguably Congress' most enthusiastic fan of pollution, has raised the specter of forcing the committee to consider several hundred proposed amendments, all of which will fail, and all of which would be introduced solely to slow down the process.
To their credit, the committee's majority came up with a clever idea.
Democrats in the House Energy and Commerce Committee have taken a novel step to head off Republican efforts to slow action this week on a sweeping climate bill: Hiring a speed reader.
Committee Republicans, who largely oppose the measure, have said they may force the reading of the entire 946-page bill, as well as major amendments totaling several hundred pages. So far, Republicans have decided not to use the procedural maneuver, but Chairman Henry Waxman of California is prepared. [...]
A committee spokeswoman said the young man, who's doing door duty at the hearing as he awaits his possible call to the microphone, was hired to help career staff. After years of practice, the panel's clerks can certainly read rapidly, but she says the speed reader is a lot faster.
"A lot" is key here. Those of you who know me personally know that I tend to speak pretty quickly. But I'm a rank amateur compared to this guy, who speed reads professionally.
The new "staff assistant," who declined to give his name, told the WSJ, "Judging by the size of the amendments, I can read a page about every 34 seconds." That's damn impressive.
And under the circumstances, probably necessary. It's a huge bill, and by the speed-reader's estimation, he'd about nine hours to read the entire thing.
Waxman intends to finish committee work by end of business tomorrow, so it can be sent to the floor by Memorial Day. That's certainly ambitious, if not wildly unrealistic.
Expect the speed reader to get a real workout.
In which Steele embraces the teabag as the symbol of the GOP.
Circle of Steele May 19: RNC chairman Michael Steele spoke to members of the party in a speech billed as a new starting point for Republicans. So why did it seem like the same ideas were repeated? Rachel Maddow talks about Steele's speech with WashingtonMonthly.com's Steve Benen.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Well this should go over well. As the Utah state representative explained in a Web posting that was quickly removed - unfortunately for him, Google lives on - soon to be US Ambassador to China, Republican governor of Utah Jon Huntsman, himself a Mormon, is under ecclesiastical mandate to proselytize to the Chinese when he goes to there to be Obama's ambassador. He has no choice.
Let Huntsman deny it. Let Obama deny it. It doesn't matter. Our next Ambassador to China will be using his post to try to convert the Chinese to Mormonism, and more generally, to let the Mormons into China where they can then run around the country and spread their ideology.
I suspect the Chinese, not know for their tolerance of dissident groups trying to indoctrinate their people, are going to flip.
Here is what the Utah state rep. wrote:This is a big deal for the Governor, Utah, the United States, and…the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).And let me explain one more time. We are not dealing with a religion that believes in "live and let live." We are not dealing with people who tell the truth when they say "don't worry, we won't really impose our views on you." The Mormons have spent the past two decades secretly baptizing dead Jewish Holocaust victims and forcibly converting them to Mormonism against the wishes of their immediate families, even though they promised publicly that they'd no longer do it. This is a group of people who think nothing of dropping tens of millions of dollars to impose their views on people who live far away from them in distant lands.
Although the LDS church’s missionary program has an ecclesiastical presence throughout many parts of the world, the countries with the largest population bases (China and India) are not currently open to the church’s missionary efforts. Huntsman served his LDS mission as a 19 year old young man in the Taiwan Taipei Mission in the early 1980’s. He has since been back to the Far East on a number of occasions. Huntsman not only takes to China his political acumen but also a lifetime of membership in the LDS church. This should bode well for the LDS church’s mission to spread the gospel throughout the world, since all members of the LDS faith are under divine mandate to…”Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…” (Matt 28:19)
Huntsman’s ambassadorship not only puts him in an excellent position to address US-China relations, it puts him in an even better position to teach the gospel…in Mandarin.
It doesn't matter what Huntsman now tells us. This is a group of people who have a tenet in their faith called "lying for the lord." It means they outright lie when asked about their church, in order to protect and promote their church. And as we've seen with their treatment of the Holocaust victims, and their absurd excuse for why they secretly baptized President Obama's mother only last year, in matters concerning their faith, they have shown that you cannot trust them at their word. Their promises come second to their faith.
If Jon Hunstman is required by God to secretly help the Mormons infiltrate China - and he is - then that is what Jon Huntsman will do as our next Ambassador to China. You can bet on it. Pity the poor Chinese. They have no idea what's about to happen to them.
Welcome to our world.
Benen: CONTINGENCY PLANS....
Jon Chait ponders a scenario I've been kicking around.I'm not saying the economy will recover or that Obama will stay popular. Quite possibly, four years from now we could still be mired in a worldwide depression and Obama could be facing dismal -- who knows, even Bush-like -- popularity ratings. The world is unpredictable. But isn't there a pretty decent chance that the economy will have recovered, and Obama's policies will look fairly wise in retrospect? Do Republicans want to make any political plans for this contingency?
The answer, I suspect, is "no." In fact, I'm not even sure if the GOP has given itself any feasible options.
If Obama remains popular, Republicans assume that Democratic congressional candidates will do fairly well and the president will win a second term in 2012. If conditions deteriorate and Obama's popularity crumbles, Republicans assume that they'll be well positioned to take advantage.
In this dynamic, there's no upside to cooperating with the president, because there's minimal payoff. Republicans are limited to a strategy based entirely on "hope" -- hope that the country is worse off, hope that the president fails, hope that voters see the GOP as a credible alternative should everything fall apart.
I'm not even sure what choice the party has. One path has Republicans growing up, rediscovering the benefits of taking policy matters seriously, presenting a sane agenda, and engaging in good-faith cooperation with the majority on key policy measures. This probably wouldn't do much to bring down the president, but it would position the GOP to present itself as a reasonable, mainstream alternative. Under this scenario, many who left the Republican Party might be willing to give it a second look, which would give the GOP stronger long-term prospects.
But the party is almost certain to ignore this path, in large part because the shrunken party base won't consider it.
So they're left with several eggs, one basket, and no contingency plans in the event of Obama success.
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