As much as I love the professional climatologists who write RealClimate, they rarely let the anti-science crowd bait them into the kind of high dudgeon that makes PZ Myers or Tom Levenson so much fun to read.

Part of the reason for their patient tone is that most denialists are either too limited (e.g., Inhofe) or too mercenary (TechCentralStation, George Will) to absorb any correction. Since the debate opponent won’t even acknowledge that you exist most of the time, real climate scientists usually write for interested third parties. That is what makes the response from RC to the pseudo-denialist authors of Superfreakonomics (in truth, contrarians of the vanity kind that DougJ writes about), professionals with credibility to defend, so worthwhile to read.

I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

No more excerpts. The whole post is great so go read it.

Atrios.

[I]t’s weird how disconnected the media is from the reality of the unemployment situation. It’s not that there’s no coverage, of course, but overall there’s little sense of the economic reality for so many people. The double whammy of the recession and foreclosure crisis has caused immense pain.

I have miles of respect for Atrios, but I cannot agree with this statement at all. As always the Washington Post has kept its focus squarely on the hardest hit.

LONDON —In this land of inherited privilege and celebrity billionaires, it no longer pays as much to be rich.

Hobbled by soaring debt and ballooning public spending amid the global financial crisis, the British government is joining others around the globe in tapping the wealthy to cover massive shortfalls. As a result, the tax rate here for those making more than $250,000 a year is set to jump from 40 to 50 percent, leaving the likes of Charlie Mullins—the self-made king of London plumbing—fuming. He estimates that the new bill on his $2.5 million annual income, with exemptions, will jump by no less than $236,000.

Observers say it is part of a far broader campaign in the wake of the Great Recession—including curbs on bankers’ pay and a rigorous global hunt for tax cheats from Switzerland to Singapore—that is suddenly putting the world’s wealthy on notice.

Why the assignment editor at the Post goes back to this well day after day after day is a question that maybe DougJ can answer.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with some winning the rat race and others losing. The corrosive effect that I see here is that obsessively covering the winners’ concerns amplifies their relatively mundane problems and minimizes the issues facing truly desperate people. This is not a trivial point; weighing one concern or the other would lead a low-information press consumer to support policy positions that are almost opposite one another.

A two-digit percentage of Americans fall into the terrible position of being one rejected medical crisis away from homelessness. God knows how many more once-stable middle class families the recession has pushed right to that edge. Yet, mysteriously, my WaPo RSS feed seems to filter out their narratives.

Maybe the press thinks that Michael Moore already interviewed everyone who is barely hanging on. Maybe desperate people sell fewer papers. Who knows. All I know is that that stuff like this hardly makes an effective counterpoint to the hateful drivel on FOX. In the end it seems hard to blame some Americans for thinking that Obama has no agenda other than (1) making Republicans upset (what does Newt think about this?), and (2) modestly inconveniencing wealthy people.

***Update***

I see that Atrios had this post written well before I did.

This is what I have been waiting for:

I poked around with some law firms in California, and started to pick up the rumor that California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CALPERS) was going to drop the bomb on S&P, Moody’s and Fitch. No one would say anything on the record, but it was clear that litigation was being considered as an option against the Ratings Agencies…

Now, here comes the fun part: Calpers doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance) have defaulted on their payment obligations. The losses to Calpers are ~!$1 billion.

But that’s not what’s going on here: These Left Coasters want their pound of flesh. They don’t care for the Ratings Agency folks, and consider them a blight on the investment landscape.

The goal of the litigation (as I see it) isn’t to make the rating agencies pay a financial penalty; rather, it is to publicly try them just as the regulatory rules are being rewritten. I also predict that CALPERS is going to attempt to not just win, but humiliate these agencies, call them out in the most embarrassing way possible, trash the senior executives, and make things very uncomfortable in general for these firms.

If anyone can figure out any way we can contribute to the attorneys pushing this, please let me know. These ratings agencies were active and willing participants, and I’ve been waiting for this. Next against the wall should be the SEC regulators, who spent the last dozen years doing important things like investigating Martha Stewart.

(via)

I am sort of indifferent about what Bill Ayers has to say in an attempt to rehab his character after the attempted GOP smear campaign during the election, but I am really looking forward to the inevitable right-wing freak out over this editorial. That will be entertaining as hell, and you can monitor the progress of said tantrum at memeorandum.

And once again, as it has been said 1000 times but these folks never seem to figure it out, Obama’s real shortcoming in the eyes of many is that he is too establishment (you can see that in his cabinet picks so far- there is a general consensus among the talking heads that they are all “competent” picks, but as far as I can tell, I have not seen one pick that would represent out of the box thinking). The reason he knows Bill Ayers is not because he seeks out “unrepentant domestic terrorists” to “pal around with,” but because Bill Ayers is… part of the Chicago political establishment.

*** Update ***

Hilzoy. Underpants gnomes.

You really don’t want to miss Matt Taibbi’s take on the McCain campaign in Rolling Stone, which features gems like this:

John McCain and Sarah Palin, after all, represented two completely different approaches to Republican conservatism. McCain comes from the school of politicking that goes after as many votes as possible by waving a flag and saying as little as possible, which is to say he was basically a third-way Democrat with a Goldwater fetish. His basic plan heading into the general election seemed strikingly similar to that of the dipshit vice president character from the uninspiring but weirdly prescient Chris Rock movie Head of State, who ran on a platform of “I’ve been vice president for the last eight years, I’m a war hero and I’m Sharon Stone’s cousin.”

McCain’s shtick wasn’t exactly that, but it was close. He was a war hero who married an heiress to a beer distributorship and had been in the Senate since the Mesozoic Era. His greatest strength as a politician had up until this year been his ability to “reach across the aisle,” a quality that in the modern Republican Party was normally about as popular as open bisexuality. His presence atop the ticket this year was evidence of profound anxiety within the party about its chances in the general election. After eight disastrous years of Bush, they thought they had lost the middle — so they picked a middling guy to get it back.

Which made sense, right up until the moment when they stuck him with Pinochet in heels for a running mate. Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama’s presidency. She’s a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove’s wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.

I think I need a cigarette.

(via)

This is pretty rich:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

If there was a journalist out there who you wanted to talk to about media bias, would you start with Mark Halperin? Listening to Mark Halperin discuss media bias is like listening to Michael Brown opine on the benefits of good disaster relief. Halperin, you will remember, is the deep thinker who informed us all that McCain’s inability to explain how many houses he owned was… bad news for team Obama.

Was Howard Kurtz unavailable for comment? What about Brent Bozell? And really, being insufficiently hostile to Obama was the media’s biggest failure the past seven years? Really?

As some of you guessed, I am in San Diego. I just got done attending a few panels, and since all I had for breakfast was some yogurt and a coffee, and I have a party with finger food to attend at eight, thought I would have a late lunch ocean side. I ended up having ceviche tostada, a half-dozen raw oysters, and two mojito’s. It was, without question, excellent. I have some pictures, but for whatever reason, I can not resize them. I also took some photos of the Midway.

The panels I went to were amusing- they examined the rhetoric of the election, and especially after having just finished Bacevich’s book (review coming, I swear) and having my eyes opened to how well and truly screwed the nation is, and at a fundamental level, I snorted several times when the panelists referred to Obama as a tranformative figure and decidedly liberal. I swear to God the only people on the planet who have figured out that Obama is a rather mainstream moderate, center-left on some issues, center-right on others, but definitely not a wildly transformative character, are me and Daniel Larison. I seriously am beginning to think, reading some of the lefty blogs lately, that the only people who thought Obama was a radical liberal were the National Journal, a few talk radio hosts, and the progressive wing of the party. Obama has never once showed any inclination to up-end the establishment, he has consistently worked through the establishment. Harvard Law Review, anyone? Con. Law prof at the University of Chicago? This is not Ward Churchill we are talking about, folks.

Look at his picks for his cabinet. Thirty years ago when the country had not been near destroyed by three decades of brutal beatings from the Overton window, Obama might possibly have run as a Republican. As I had hoped, he is going to move slowly on gays in the military, so that he can build a consensus, which is good for a number of reasons. First, going about this methodically will not create an anti-gay backlash, leading to all sorts of shenanigans. It will let the folks most inclined to oppose the overturning of the rule become the actual change agents. Finally, the reversal will stand, as it was not just something the flaming liberal new President overturned just because he could, and future Republican administrations will not feel the need to change it back on the first day of their administration.

Say what you want about the way his election was run, because that truly was transformative. Elections will never be the same after the campaign Team Obama ran. But if you really think Obama is a screeching liberal, you haven’t been paying attention and are going to be really upset. They guy is a technocratic pragmatist, he is cool and calculating and calm, and he shrewdly picks his battles. Folks like Larison, and, most definitely Bacevich, worry he is entirely too establishment. I think he is the best we have, so we go with him

Stanley Fish:

Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.

In response, Obama explains his tax policy for the umpteenth time, points out that capitalists like Warren Buffet support him, details his relationship with Bill Ayers, lists those he consults with, observes that Senator McCain, by his own boast, voted with President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, and calls for change.

What he (or his campaign) doesn’t do is bring up the Keating Five, or make veiled references to McCain’s treatment of his first wife, or make fun of Sarah Palin (she doesn’t need any help), or disparage his opponent’s experience, or hint at the disabilities of age. He just stands there looking languid (George Will called him the Fred Astaire of politics), always smiling and never raising his voice.

***

What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”

How long before the following headline rockets across the wingnuttosphere: “Radical Leftist Academic Calls Obama Jesus, McCain the Devil.”

Some days it is a good thing these guys don’t read the NY Times.

Right now, outside my house somewhere, there is a cat in heat, and it is making the most unnatural sounds ever. So, you all know what that means. There is a rather freaked out fat white cat (screw it, I give up. He is fat.) charging around my house knocking things over and generally going crazy.

In other news, ever singled damned channel I have turned to for news has had Sarah Palin on sharing her deep thoughts. Here she is with Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: Are you ready to help him?

PALIN: Absolutely. Especially on energy independence, energy security that we need for this nation, being the governor of an energy-producing state knowing that we have the domestic solutions there in our state and in other energy-producing states.

I’m more than willing and able to help President-elect Obama to start tapping into the domestic solutions that we have now so we can quit being so reliant on foreign sources of energy.

I guess it is pointless to note that she doesn’t know what the hell she is talking about regarding energy matters:

“Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.”

Let me be the first to say “Thanks, but no thanks.” I think we can muddle through without her “expertise.” At any rate, several of you have mentioned this in the comments already, but didn’t candidates for President and Vice President used to go away after they lost? In fact, isn’t that kind of the point of elections- we, as a nation, got together on 4 November, looked at McCain and Palin and said, rather emphatically, “No. Go away.”

I really don’t remember this happening before. The only time I saw Bob Dole after the 1996 election was selling Viagra. Al Gore apparently holed up in a cheesecake factory for two years and grew a beard. John Kerry, well, I don’t know what he did, but it was probably treasonous and French-like- maybe he went wind-surfing in the Mediterranean or something.

The point being, they went away. Why won’t she just go away? I am tired of hearing all these grating, irritating sounds. And I am not talking about just the cat in heat outside.

You aren’t there yet, and it is clearly going to take some more time before you face facts, but there is a real simple reason why mean old McLame did not dispel all those rumors about Palin.

He knows they are true.

Marilyn Musgrave, keeping it classy:

Bitterness generated by the bruising battle between Betsy Markey and Marilyn Musgrave apparently lingers days after voters decided the winner of the 4th Congressional District.

Incumbent Republican Musgrave, who lost to Democrat Markey by a 56 to 44 percent margin Tuesday, has yet to call and congratulate Markey on her win.

Musgrave also hasn’t conceded the race, said Markey spokesman Ben Marter. “She has yet to admit defeat,” he said. “It’s a little bizarre.”

Calls to Musgrave’s campaign and congressional office went unanswered Friday.

She is probably waiting for God to intervene, and she isn’t about to give up on lost causes. Musgrave, if you remember, is the lunatic who said the following during the Schiavo affair:

“When we talk about a permanent vegetative state, I am offended by that. Terri (Schiavo) smiles and acknowledges the people that love her when they come to see her. She cries when they leave. How heartless are we to call somebody like Terri Schiavo a vegetable? What are we thinking?”

She was such an ass that Michael Schiavo took to campaigning against her:

The fireworks began before the candidates’ debate even started. Last week Michael Schiavo took a seat only 15 feet away from Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave—all the better to taunt her. She had been an outspoken advocate of what Schiavo considered government intrusion in his wife Terri’s right-to-die case last year. When Musgrave’s camp objected to Schiavo’s presence, one of the event hosts tried, unsuccessfully, to have a cop force him to change seats. Though Musgrave wasn’t asked about Terri during the debate, Schiavo had already met his goal—evoking his wife’s case, and the privacy concerns it raised, for the press and the public. “What you went through is the epitome of what’s wrong with the country,” one man told him afterward.

Maybe Musgrave thinks her bid for re-election isn’t dead, it is just in a persistent vegetative state. Regardless, she won’t be missed.

(via)

Mike Pence, today:

The Republican brand is still alive and well, Rep. Mike Pence said on Fox News Sunday.

When asked by Chris Wallace what “conservative solutions” the GOP would bring to their current minority-party status, Pence said social issues like “the sanctity of marriage” will remain the backbone of the Republican platform.

“You build those conservative solutions, Chris, on the same time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage,” Pence said.

The Indiana representative cited the ballot measures against gay marriage that passed on Election Day as evidence of the continuing presence of conservative values.

Matt Yglesias, discussing Mike Pence, last month:

There are very few members of congress with whom I’ve ever had the opportunity to discuss a substantive matter of public policy. But as it happens, one of them — the one with whom I’ve had the second-longest exchange — is Mike Pence (R-IN) who I’ve seen on television today repeatedly discussing the Republican Study Group’s “plan” for the financial crisis. And I can tell you this about Mike Pence: he has no idea what he’s talking about. The man is a fool, who deserves to be laughed at. He’s almost stupid enough to work in cable television.

This new GOP leadership is going to be awesome.

I read this yesterday, but forgot to comment about it until I saw a reminder in the comments:

The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska. The McCain campaign ordered her onstage at the next campaign stop, but she refused to acknowledge the two Republican candidates standing behind her.

Not that this should be a problem in the future. Both Sununu and Bradley lost, and with the defeat of Chris Shays, I believe you can count the number of Republicans from New England in the House or Senate using one finger- Susan Collins from Maine.

*** Update ***

Oops. Forgot Olympia Snowe. Every time I think of her, I think of the movie Moonstruck, for obvious reasons. Forgot Gregg, too. So three Senators, no Representatives. Impressive.

According to our fierce leader on the Alaska/Soviet frontline, holding back Putin from the lower 48, raising the top marginal tax rates from 36 to 39% will usher in a new era of socialism, but this is not socialist at all:

Ms. Palin, in an interview in her office on Friday, said she was ready to work.

“Now we kick in that fiscal conservativeness that needs to be engaged, and we progress this state with $57-a-barrel oil,” Ms. Palin said. She said the state would have to “be prudent with public dollars and provide services more efficiently than have ever been provided in the state of Alaska before.”

The price and production of oil determines state finances: taxes on oil bring in about 85 percent of state revenue. To balance the budget for the 2008-9 fiscal year, the price of oil needs to average $74 over the 12 months, said Karen J. Rehfeld, director of the state office of management and budget. If it falls below that average, the state could have to make emergency cuts or dip into a reserve account that contains several billion dollars. High prices early in the fiscal year may help keep the average up this year, but next year is another matter.

That is right. Taxes Alaska takes from oil and gas companies balance their budget, and that only happens if oil costs more than 74 bucks a barrel. In other words, in order for Gov. Palin to be that reforming mavericky fiscal conservative, you and I and every other American, real or not, needs to pay through the teeth for gas. If we don’t have high gas prices, Alaska doesn’t have a balanced budget. In a sense, Alaska is taxing YOU to pay for their budget. A nice gig if you can get it.

Also, while clearly not socialism, either, Gov. Palin gets to mail out big checks to every Alaska resident. In 2008, that was about $3300.00 big ones. That buys a fair bit of moose hunting ammo.

In addition to all this, Alaska is one of the largest recipients of federal aid to state and local government per capita. In 2006, it was 3600 per person, making them #2 in the nation. Only Dick Cheney’s Wyoming ranked higher. This fiscal conservatism is fricking awesome, and you almost have to wonder how she managed to get Wasilla 20 million dollars in debt.

This socialism thing is so hard to figure out these days. It is almost like the rules keep changing. And WTF was that sentence in the beginning of what I quoted (“now we kick in that fiscal…”)? That was worse than Bush.