I haven’t read the New Yorker piece on the demise of climate legislation yet, but Think Progress has found an interesting nugget on the role ABC’s sister network played:
But, back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’”
Sometimes I wonder what future civilizations are going to make of all of this.
jacy
You must be a closet optimist, DougJ. You’re assuming that civilization has a future.
Unless, of course, you’re talking about the civilization our soon-to-be giant-brained mouse overlords.
Ash Can
Jacy beat me to it.
PeakVT
They’ll think: “Morons – unlike the Easter Islanders, they knew what would happen.”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
They’ll kill us off long before you have to concern yourself with that.
SiubhanDuinne
Oh, DougJ, I’ve been waiting for you! I know this isn’t an open thread, but you HAVE to read this, especially the comments. I think you, as a mathematician, will find it very funny (and yeah, as it turns out, there really ARE only 10 kinds of people in the world!)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/04/0334211/The-Binary-Code-In-Canadas-Gov-Gen-Coat-of-Arms
Edited to clean up some dangling grammatical whatnots.
Mark S.
That’s the second time I’ve seen that today. What is it in reference to?
Michael G
Sometimes I wonder what
future civilizationsthe Thunderdome is going to make of all of this.beltane
It’s pretty sad that humanity is allowing a sleazy TV entertainment empire to destroy our future as a species. Fox News is a pestilence, and it is our failure to obliterate this pestilence that is the real problem here.
brendancalling
future civilizations, assuming there will be any after we cook the planet and wipe out our food and water sources, will point and laugh at the Reality Show stage of our collapsing empire.
The Raven
Much what we make of the collapse of Rome, or the failure of one of the Chinese dynasties. Happy corvids.
Alwhite
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Future generations will think of this exactly what they are told to think by the Masters of the Universe. Since we have lost the battle for the future of mankind & they have won.
fasteddie9318
Future civilizations will think “My, how quaint. They had TeeVee. Now hurry up and harvest what’s left of the uncontaminated water so we get get off of this shithole and back home to Praxis-5.”
MattR
@Mark S.: Not 100% sure but I think it is a reference to someone at ABC News (Jake Tapper perhaps) stepping up to defend Fox News from attacks by the Obama administration
Bob Loblaw
Oh, you’re missing out on the New Yorker piece. It’s a goddamn freak show.
“Heckled at home, Graham began to enjoy a new life as a Beltway macher. “Every lobbyist working on the issue wanted time with him, because suddenly it became clear that he could be the central person in the process,” Krupp recalled. All sectors of the economy would be affected by putting a price on carbon, and Graham’s campaign account started to grow. In 2009, he raised nothing from the electric-utility PACs and just fourteen thousand four hundred and fifty dollars from all PACs. In the first quarter of 2010 alone, the utilities sent him forty-nine thousand dollars. Krupp introduced Graham to donors in New York connected to the E.D.F. On December 7th, Julian Robertson, an E.D.F. board member and a hedge-fund billionaire, hosted Graham at a small gathering in his Manhattan apartment. Some New York guests gave money directly to Graham’s campaign account. Others, at Krupp’s suggestion, donated to a new group called South Carolina Conservatives for Energy Independence, which ran ads praising Graham in his home state. ”
“As a consequence of the long debate over that issue, climate change became, according to a senior White House official, Obama’s “stepchild.” Carol Browner had just three aides working directly for her. “Hey, change the entire economy, and here are three staffers to do it!” a former Lieberman adviser noted bitterly. “It’s a bit of a joke.” Heimbach attended meetings with the K.G.L. staffers but almost never expressed a policy preference or revealed White House thinking. “It’s a drum circle,” one Senate aide lamented. “They come by, ‘How are you feeling? Where do you think the votes are? What do you think we should do?’ It’s never ‘Here’s the plan, here’s what we’re doing.’ ””
“The K.G.L. coalition had two theories about how to win over Republicans and moderate Democrats. One was to negotiate directly with them and offer them something specific for their support. After a year of that method, the coalition had one Republican, and its next most likely target wanted to drill in ANWR. Other Republicans were slipping away. Shortly before Thanksgiving, George LeMieux, of Florida, approached Graham in the Senate gym and expressed interest in joining K.G.L. “Let me teach you something about this town,” Graham told him. “You can’t come that easy.” Graham was trying to give the new senator some advice, according to aides involved with the negotiations: LeMieux would be foolish to join the effort without extracting something for himself.”
“On March 31st, Obama announced that large portions of U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean, and off the East Coast—from the mid-Atlantic to central Florida—would be newly available for oil and gas drilling. Two days later, he said, “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.” From the outside, it looked as if the Obama Administration were coördinating closely with Democrats in the Senate. Republicans and the oil industry wanted more domestic drilling, and Obama had just given it to them. He seemed to be delivering on the grand bargain that his aides had talked about at the start of the Administration.
But there had been no communication with the senators actually writing the bill, and they felt betrayed. When Graham’s energy staffer learned of the announcement, the night before, he was “apoplectic,” according to a colleague. The group had dispensed with the idea of drilling in ANWR, but it was prepared to open up vast portions of the Gulf and the East Coast. Obama had now given away what the senators were planning to trade.”
“Just after noon, Rimkunas, Graham’s climate-policy adviser, sent Rosengarten an e-mail. The subject was “Go to Fox website and look at gas tax article asap.” She clicked on Foxnews.com: “WH Opposes Higher Gas Taxes Floated by S.C. GOP Sen. Graham in Emerging Senate Energy Bill.” The White House double-crossed us, she thought. The report, by Major Garrett, then the Fox News White House correspondent, cited “senior administration sources” and said that the “Obama White House opposes a move in the Senate, led by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, to raise federal gasoline taxes within still-developing legislation to reduce green house gas emissions.” Including two updates to his original story, Garrett used the word “tax” thirty-four times.”
“The E.E.I. already had almost everything it wanted: preëmption, nuclear loan guarantees, an assurance that the cost of carbon would never rise above a certain level, and billions of dollars’ worth of free allowances through 2030 to help smooth the transition into the program. Now the E.E.I. had two new requests: it wanted a billion dollars more in free allowances, and it wanted the start date of the cap-and-trade regime pushed back from 2012 to 2015.
Within minutes, the senators had agreed to almost everything that Kuhn and his lobbyists were asking for. Their three staffers were dumbfounded. The K.G.L. side huddled near a water cooler and the aides staged a mini-rebellion against their bosses. “We were, like, ‘I can’t believe you just gave them all of that! You’ve got to be kidding, this can’t be the deal!’ ” one of them said. “And they were, like, ‘Well, we did it!’ You can’t put that amount of allowances on the table and take it back. You’ve dangled it. The baby’s already eating the candy.” In return for the candy, Kuhn promised that the E.E.I. would provide “a very supportive statement” when the bill was released.”
“As the Senate debate expired this summer, a longtime environmental lobbyist told me that he believed the “real tragedy” surrounding the issue was that Obama understood it profoundly. “I believe Barack Obama understands that fifty years from now no one’s going to know about health care,” the lobbyist said. “Economic historians will know that we had a recession at this time. Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change.””
Those are the highlights.
cleek
nothing. nothing at all.
they’ll have different rules and different kinds of scandals, and people will be finding holes in those rules, the same way people have always done. they will have problems which we can’t even imagine now, but which will ultimately boil down to the same things that our current problems – and all past political problems – boil down to: human nature will find a way to subvert every set of rules we throw in its path.
if they look back to us it will only be to smile at how simple and straightforward our scandals are – not that they were, but because all the parts will be well-understood by then. you’ll be able to find concise explanations and diagrams in history books. but their own scandals will seem wild and crazy (and exciting!) because they’ll involve the breaking of new rules and laws and the moving parts will still be hidden.
/cynic
Roger Moore
@beltane:
Your mistake is the belief that Fox is just a sleazy TV entertainment empire. It’s not. It’s a carefully crafted propaganda machine that uses sleazy TV entertainment as a funding source.
Ash Can
@Mark S.: At one of Obama’s first press conferences as president, some boy genius from Fox “News” asked an almighty stupid question (surprising, I know). The prez laughed at him and hurt his feelings. Jake Tapper thought this was terrible, and chastised Obama for being mean to a fellow WH reporter from a “sister news organization.” Hilarity, of course, ensued.
On the other hand, we’re still hearing crickets on the subject of Abbie Boudreau. Guess she’s just not one of the kool kidz.
tkogrumpy
@Roger Moore: Bingo!
Ash Can
@Mark S.: PS — I should clarify that said chastisement took place the following day, in Tapper’s on-line column. Too bad — if it had taken place on the spot, at the presser, Hollywood would have fallen all over itself trying to get the movie rights.
beltane
@Roger Moore: Sleazy entertainment or carefully crafted propaganda; the point is that Fox News is a threat to human existance and there is no one with the courage to effectively deal with that threat.
I hope that there will one day be retribution against these people, and I hope I live long enough to see it.
MTiffany
Sometimes I wonder what future civilizations are going to make of all of this.
LOL. Like there’s going to be any future civilizations to look back at us if we don’t quit fucking around waiting for Jesus and His Magic Wand to come back and fix everything.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Mark S.:
Jake Tapper described Fox as a “sister organization” once .
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Bob Loblaw:
Interesting. I don’t think it ever had a chance of passing, not with every Republican opposing it (Graham would never have actually voted for it) and Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Lincoln Blance most likely opposing it too.
Bob Loblaw
@DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.:
Almost certainly not. Which just makes the process look even more insane. That LeMieux story just kills me.
Corner Stone
@Mark S.:
Political Punch
celticdragonchick
They will be too busy trying to grow something edible in the wasteland we will leave them to ever worry about things like why and how it happened…
ruemara
When the morlocks are through feasting on the few free range humans they keep in pens, I’m sure they won’t be at all critical of the galtian paradise that’s been ushered in.
mclaren
There won’t be any future civilizations. When the cropland roasts due to the global warming, you’ll get a Malthusian die-off.
The last bubble-headed bleached blonde at Fox News will be in the middle of explaining that global warming is yet another liberal socialist communist plot when the starving remnants of civilization break into Fox broadcast TV headquarters and come after her with flensing knives.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw:
The Senate is a strange place. Tell them a plan and they go apeshit; you can’t disrespect them like that. Don’t tell them a plan and they go apeshit; you can’t leave them twisting in the wind like that. Hey, whaddya know, that way it’s never the Senate’s fault why, like a black hole, not even light escapes! Fuck the fucking Senate.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Sometimes I wonder what future civilizations are going to make of all of this.”
Don’t worry, think-tanks funded by the legal AI avatar-copies of the Koch brothers will be arguing that boiling in the Caribbean isn’t anthropogenic but is all due to bias by the climatologists and oceanographers.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Sometimes I wonder what future civilizations are going to make of all of this.”
Their media will be covering whether XYZ trillionaire dynasty are going to remain in meatspace and build their survival facility underground in Alaska like the Bush-Putins did, or go for persistance as Artificial Intelligences in High Earth orbit like the Kochs.
Famine from the 9-year drought in British Columbia will be a human interest story at the end of the program.
Irony Abounds
Here’s a question. What will future generations look like? MadMax? The Postman? Waterworld? Escape from New York? Blade Runner?
Bob Loblaw
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, it’s as though I chose that specific excerpt for a reason.
Jamie
we’ll be grouped with Nero and his fiddle. They’ll probably look like very big cockroaches.