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Federal Judge Katherine Forrest to Milt Shook- You’re Clueless

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Those evil lefties and their whining about about the indefinite detention aspect of the NDAA (and the ridiculous, Jonah Goldberg level stupid arguments made by Shook). Wait? What? You mean they were right:

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction late Wednesday to block provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone it accuses of knowingly or unknowingly supporting terrorism.

Signed by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve, the 565-page NDAA contains a short paragraph, in statute 1021, letting the military detain anyone it suspects “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces.” The indefinite detention would supposedly last until “the end of hostilities.”

In a 68-page ruling blocking this statute, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest agreed that the statute failed to “pass constitutional muster” because its broad language could be used to quash political dissent.

“There is a strong public interest in protecting rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Forrest wrote. “There is also a strong public interest in ensuring that due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment are protected by ensuring that ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention.”

***

Guardian journalist Naomi Wolf read testimony from Jonsditir, who prepared a statement saying that she would not visit the U.S. for fear of detention.

Forrest alluded to this testimony in her decision.

“Hedges, Wargalla, and Jonsdottir have changed certain associational conduct, and O’Brien and Jonsdittir have avoided certain expressive conduct, because of their concerns about § 1021. Moreover, since plaintiffs continue to have their associational and expressive conduct chilled, there is both actual and continued threatened irreparable harm,” she wrote.

“In addition, it is certainly the case that if plaintiffs were detained as a result of their conduct, they could be detained until the cessation of hostilities – i.e., an indeterminate period of time,” Forrest continued. “Being subjected to the risk of such detention, particularly in light of the Government’s inability to represent that plaintiffs’ conduct does not fall with § 1021, must constitute a threat of irreparable harm. The question then is: Is that harm immediate? Since the Government will not say that the conduct does not fall outside of §1021, one cannot predict immediacy one way or the other. The penalty we know would be severe.”

The judge added that she did not make the decision lightly.

“This court is acutely aware that preliminarily enjoining an act of Congress must be done with great caution,” she wrote. “However, it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights. As set forth above, this court has found that plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits regarding their constitutional claim and it therefore has a responsibility to insure that the public’s constitutional rights are protected.”

Although I caution you all to keep an open mind, because none of this changes the fact that Glenn Greenwald is longwinded and *GASP* lives in Brazil. Also too, JANE HAMSHER!

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A Little Wager

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I thought about this guy the other day when I attended a college fair in Rochester and saw that UC Davis had a booth. They were the most distant school by at least a thousand miles, and there’s no need to wonder why: parents don’t want to send their precious snowflakes someplace where this could happen.

The independent report on the pepper spray incident came out last week, (via) and it’s a scathing tale of incompetence pointing directly at Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Even so, I’ll bet that she isn’t going anywhere. Freddie’s a lot closer to the issues with universities than I am, so perhaps there’s something more subtle than my simple view that Katehi is a typical administrator and therefore a survivor. In other words, she’s an ambitious, smart academic who got bored with her chosen discipline and instead decided that she wanted to make a big salary and taste a little bit of power. So, she learned to mouth the appropriate platitudes about “the sense of community” and “consensus” while at the same time sending the right signals to the cash cows on campus that she wouldn’t get in the way of the ethically dubious tactics they use to entice government and industry to funnel money into their programs.

Until those patrons tire of her, Katehi will hold on to power, and this report will have accomplished her aim, which was to delay the day of judgment until a time long after everyone had forgotten her role in one of nastier incidents in the whole Occupy saga.

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It Was All a Lie

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And I fell for it:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”

US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.

Although simply saying “I fell for it” isn’t exactly right, and lets me off the hook. I was caught up in the pathology of the time, and wanted to believe it. There was lots of evidence this was nonsense, and I just ignored it. And the sad thing is that if a Republican wins the Presidency, there’ll be another Curveball out there leading the charge for us to invade Iran.

I guess this is as good a time as any to re-post what I think is the greatest blog post in the history of blogging, RonK’s Operation Desert Snipe from 2003.

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Things To Think About Before We Blow Sh*t Up

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James Fallows pointed me to this depressingly smart piece by Stephen M. Walt, up now at the Foreign Policy website.  Walt gives us 10 lessons we should learn from our Iraq fiasco, from number 1 — we lost — through the point Fallows highlights, number 3, in which we learn what happens when the political and media Villages rush to outdo each other in feckless groupthink and morally bankrupt cheerleading folly.*

Me, I’ll  pony up Walt’s conclusion:

Because it is not clear if any U.S. approach would have succeeded at an acceptable cost, the real lesson of Iraq is not to do stupid things like this again.

The U.S. military has many virtues, but it is not good at running other countries. And it is not likely to get much better at it with practice. We have a capital-intensive army that places a premium on firepower, and we are a country whose own unusual, melting-pot history has made us less sensitive to the enduring power of nationalism, ethnicity, and other local forces.

Furthermore, because the United States is basically incredibly secure, it is impossible to sustain public support for long and grinding wars of occupation. Once it becomes clear that we face a lengthy and messy struggle, the American people quite properly begin to ask why we are pouring billions of dollars and thousands of lives into some strategic backwater. And they are right.

So my last lesson is that we shouldn’t spend too much time trying to figure out how to do this sort of thing better, because we’re never going to do it well and it will rarely be vital to our overall security. Instead, we ought to work harder on developing an approach to the world that minimizes the risk of getting ourselves into this kind of war again.

In between Walt’s insistence that we honestly confront our loss in Iraq and this rather pious last hope, this short essay examines many important, depressing truths.  Read the whole thing.  We’ll need to keep reminding selves and others of these desperately hard-won realizations, given that the usual suspects, only to willing to spend somebody else’s blood, are urging us into the next war.

<div align=”center”><iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/5vUDmFjWgVo” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

(And yes. I know I’ve posted this tune before. You gonna make something of it?)

*No matter how often I watch the Mustache of Understanding talk about “American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Bagdad,” his faux-macho willingness to send other folks kids to blow up still other folks and their kids makes me mouth vomit.

Image:  Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, (attr.) Laughing Fool, c. 1500.

[Cross posted at The Inverse Square Blog]

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Don’t Crack Open A Coaled One Just Yet

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The EPA’s new regulations on building new coal-fired power plants are expected to go into effect today, requiring strict new pollution controls that energy companies say will make it “impossible” to build the plants, only that’s not actually true.

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.

“This standard effectively bans new coal plants,” said Joseph Stanko, who heads government relations at the law firm Hunton and Williams and represents several utility companies. “So I don’t see how that is an ‘all of the above’ energy policy.”

Except for you know, the coal plants being built anyway.

The rule provides an exception for coal plants that are already permitted and beginning construction within a year. There are about 20 coal plants now pursuing permits; two of them are federally subsidized and would meet the new standard with advanced pollution controls.

Oops.  It’s like the Obama administration is actually doing something to help the energy industry transition and to make sure new plants meet the new pollution standards.  Funny how that works.  And hey, natural gas plants are half the pollution and natural gas is cheap right now, because we produce so much of it.  It’s better than coal, and I say this living in a state where you can get “Friends of Coal” license plates.  From the state.  Official and everything.

Somehow, the dire predictions of the end of America over these rules keeps failing to come true.

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Coming Clean Under A Hard Rain

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Cue the “abyss staring back” and “ends justify the means” soul-searching on the case of HuffPo’s Peter Gleick admitting to less than forthright methods to obtaining the right’s game plan on pushing climate change denial in schools.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Of course, pearls a-clutch’d at the Gray Lady, Andrew Revkin:

One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).

The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.

Let’s keep in mind that the far broader tragedy is that the lack of “rational public debate” with the climate change denial side existed for years before Gleick, with a massive, multi-billion dollar effort to convince the world that setting the place on fire is fine and that science itself is suspect.  As bad as Gleick’s admitted actions are, he’ll face the consequences for it.  He’s owned up to what he’s done and is now presumably ready to deal with the results of his actions.

That’s far more than I can say for the folks who are trying to push ignorance and cynicism as “critical thinking in the classroom.”  Sadly, the result of this will be the right yelling PETER GLEICK ARGUMENT OVER WE WIN as victory shorthand at every climatologist, published paper, data compilation, graph, chart, scientific conference, public testimony and collected journal showing of the slow demise of our environment, so in that respect Revkin is at least somewhat correct.

The effort to paint Gleick’s misconduct as ultimately damning the entire preponderance of evidence in favor of man-made climate change will be overwhelming in the days and months ahead.  What Gleick did does not “call into question the validity of the science” no matter how badly the deniers want to think it magically does, any more than the “Climategate” emails did last year.  Resistance to such an effort has to begin here and now.  Journalists who should know better however will probably not be able to resist the temptation.  What Gleick did was wrong, but it doesn’t make the deniers right.

[UPDATE] Tbogg nails it.

You can’t have a”rational public debate” with people whose whole reason for existence is to obfuscate the truth by paying big bucks to scientist/whores for whom ‘scientific inquiry’ means first posing the question “How much does it pay?” to be followed (after a brief period of haggling) with “What do you want it to say?”. From there corporate fronts like the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation take the scientific 3-card monte game that has been handed to them and they round the edges, smooth out the rough spots, couch the language  and cherry-pick the most easily digestible nuggets of bullshit which they dole out on 3×5 cards to Fox News, English tabloids, and an assortment of conservative bloggers and lesser whores who are paid to appear objective and thoughtful. What completes this Puke Funnel Circle Of Life is for national writers (like, for example:  Andrew Revkin) to write very concerned why-can’t-we-all-get-along columns bemoaning the fact that, even though we know the world is round, there are those who believe otherwise and, in all fairness and with all due respect, their voices must be not only heard but given equal weight.

My mistake is once again making a rational argument designed for rational actors, when the denier side is just there to take any and all “rational” anything and club it to death like a case of baby seals, grunt loudly, and demand that their rights for clubbing baby seals are being infringed upon.  They’re not here to rationally discuss anything, they’re here to bury it under a mountain of manure, dump thermite on it, and dance around the flames while making shadow puppets on the teevee box.

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Blowing Emissions Up Your Ass

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Power utilities companies in Kansas are warning of Armageddon in 2012, saying Kansans will face rolling blackouts, millions in lost productivity, staggeringly high power bills and even complete outages in the summer months due to Evil Job-Killing EPA Pollution Regulations(tm).  These brave souls are suing the EPA in a DC appeals court to…umm, what do you mean that’s all compete garbage?

Kansas utilities say that the rules have come so quickly and are so stringent that they won’t be able to comply in time. As a result, thousands of Kansans will experience rolling blackouts or brownouts, which will also cost jobs when the plants shut down. In addition, customers will face higher utility bills to pay for more than $100 million in new pollution control expenses and other costs.

“The adverse effects from such reductions caused by the 2012 emission limits are dire, concrete, substantial and imminent,” attorneys for Kansas utilities told a federal appeals court.

EPA says that’s nonsense. The costs will be far less — between $5 million and $30 million — and Kansas utilities will have more than a year to implement the emission controls.

“Kansas has failed to show that the lights will go out in Kansas,” attorneys for the EPA wrote.

In fact, the EPA says the benefits of the transport rule — prevention of 83 to 210 deaths annually in Kansas and a savings of $700 million to $1.7 billion annually in health care — far outweigh the utilities’ costs.

So these regulations would actually save Kansas taxpayers in the neighborhood of a billion dollars a year or so.  You would think Kansas would go “Hey, this is a pretty great deal for us.  Let’s help you guys with the costs of reducing your emissions.  Here’s some money.  Make this happen.”

You of course would be completely wrong, because Republicans are involved.  They’d rather spend the money on suing the EPA.

The utilities and the Kansas attorney general joined a handful of states and several dozen utilities in filing lawsuits in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., asking for a stay and further review of the rule.

The disagreement between Kansas, the utilities and EPA is so contentious that the two sides can’t even agree when the new rules were known and when they go into effect.

They say the EPA is only giving them until January to comply.

“No one expected that,” said Greg Greenwood, senior vice president of strategy for Westar.

They said the new rules would force them to shut down coal plants in midsummer.

“Unfortunately the new … requirements will substantially cost our members and those they serve,” said Cindy Hertel, a Sunflower spokeswoman. “Sunflower estimates that installing upgraded emission technology … will now cost our members nearly $21 million, and we expect to face additional costs” to meet the requirements.

Nope, we have to pass the costs on to the consumers!  It’ll cost a hundred million and Kansas will become an electricity-free third world hellhole this summer!  YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES WILL SUFFER!

Look, even if the utilities are completely right on the $100 million figure, and the yearly health care cost savings are overestimated by a factor of ten and Kansas Republicans immediately passed a law that gave all the cost savings to the utilities until they had these new standards paid for as the ultimate in corporate welfare…that still means Kansas would be able to pay the utilities to cover their costs in just two years and Kansas taxpayers would save the difference every year after.  Deficit reduction?  Not for these guys.

It’s insanity, but the Republicans in Kansas are too busy serving the utilities to serve Kansas.

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Back To The Middle And Around Again

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As the Occupy movement struggles to stay in place with winter and multiple pepper spray fronts lashing the countryside, the Right screams that the dirty, criminal hippies deserve to be kicked out of “private property” unlike the law-abiding owners of Zuccotti Park.  Oh wait.

It turns out that the owners of Zuccotti Park — the historic site of Occupy Wall Street — have been engaged in some of the very same tax-dodging that many of the protesters were enraged about. The “city Finance Department says park owner Brookfield Properties and its parent company, Brookfield US Corp., currently owe the city more than $139,000 in unpaid business taxes from 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.”

Never you mind that unpaid tax bill thing and dating the Mayor.  Them hippies need a-punchin’, so a-punchin’s gonna git done.

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These are the good old days

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I don’t know why this annoys me so much, but it does. George Packer did a profile of OWS protester Ray Kachel and libertarian island guy (and early Facebook investor/now rich guy) Peter Thiel (via):

Half a century ago, Thiel would have been a Goldwater Republican, a churchgoer, and a paid-up member of a local business group. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to launch a fellowship program in order to induce young entrepreneurs to leave college. Education wasn’t one more “bubble” back then. Kachel would have been a Kennedy Democrat and perhaps, like his late father, an employee of the city of Seattle, living on a salary that could support a family of four. Neither would likely have felt a strong urge to escape from politics, like Thiel, or to join in the creation of a new community, like Kachel. But the past few decades have destabilized and eroded the institutional identities that used to bind Americans.

Half a century ago, Thiel, who is openly gay, would be stuck in the closet, subject to God knows what emotional, and possibly physical (given the barbarism of homophobia) torment. I think Thiel’s politics suck, but I am glad that he can live as openly gay man. That’s what I call progress. It’s strange to me that Andrew Sullivan heh-indeeds Packer without nothing this fact.

A commenter at Kevin Drum says of Ruth Marcus’s anti-obscentity jihad:

Back in my day teenagers weren’t uppity — and blacks sat in the back of the bus where they belonged, and women shut the hell up and did what they were supposed to, and those damned gays didn’t rub their sex lives in my face, and Jews didn’t join my clubs. That’s what you’re missing.

None of this has anything to do with reality — it’s a cri de coeur for past times when things were the way they were supposed to be before the damned dirty hippies destroyed the golden age. The fact that this makes zero sense if the complainer is black (Herman Cain?) female (Ruth Marcus), Jewish (half the “intellectuals” in the Republican party) doesn’t change it — people are morons, and the sorts of people who believe there once was a golden age are even more moronic.

Go back another generation or two past that and Nooners and Pat Buchanan — the undisputed king and queen of the awesomeness of the gold old days — didn’t join nice clubs either. My grandparents were among the earliest Irish-Catholic members of a fancy Cape Cod country club 50 or so years ago. (In another 20 years, their Jewish friends would be able to join.)

A lot of things have gone wrong the past fifty years, but a lot of things have gone right, especially with regard to discrimination. Moreover, a lot of the “dislocation” and “dysfunction” of contemporary American politics is caused by the right-wing response to the dirty hippies’ efforts to curtail ethnic/racial/gender/orientation discrimination.

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And Then He Repeatedly Attacked the Cop’s Fist With His Face

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Your liberal media at work again. Here’s the picture from AP:

Here is the caption:

An Occupy Wall Street protestor draws contact from a police officer near Zuccotti Park after being ordered to leave the longtime encampment in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011, in New York, after police ordered demonstrators to leave their encampment in Zuccotti Park. At about 1 a.m. Tuesday, police handed out notices from the park’s owner, Brookfield Office Properties, and the city saying that the park had to be cleared because it had become…

Amadou Diallo wasn’t shot! He just drew contact with a lot of police bullets!

The lengths our media will go to excuse and provide cover for a police state is kind of breathtaking. I guess the only thing left for this story is for Ron Fournier to write breathless love letters to the NYPD.

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He’s a hippie, hippie Jerry

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The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik writes:

Doug, it’s ALWAYS about the Hippies. ALWAYS, FUCKING ALWAYS. There’s nothing in this country you can’t blame on hippies and get away with it seems, because Americans can’t suffer a hippie to live.

I don’t think EVERYTHING can be blamed on hippies, there are also things can better be blamed on strapping young bucks. Though it’s also true that it was hippie social welfare programs that turned all the strapping young bucks into moochers and looters.

Sometimes I wonder, though, who will be blamed for everything when no one can remember hippies anymore. Any ideas? I have noticed a lot of inexplicable hate towards hipsters (my own two cents here: I do dislike hipster music, but I like hipster food, coffee, and cocktails), but I’m not sure they’ll ever make such great scapegoats.

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Queen City Shuffle

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Across the river in local election results, Cincinnati voters made some major changes to the City Council in the wake of city and Hamilton County employees taking major budget cuts over the last year.

Voters ousted four incumbent Republicans from Cincinnati City Council on Tuesday night, choosing instead seven Democrats, a majority of African-Americans, the first openly gay candidate and enough support to move forward with the streetcar project.

The outcome clearly was the result of the turnout generated by Issue 2, the measure to repeal the collective bargaining reforms of Senate Bill 5. The issue was expected to draw a lot of Democrats and union supporters to the polls.

Issue 2 lost in Hamilton County big, the Nos getting nearly 60% of the vote, and it was a bloodbath for Republicans on the ballot, but they’re blaming Issue 2 for their crushing loss and rightfully so.

Ousted: Chris Bortz, Leslie Ghiz, Amy Murray and Wayne Lippert.

“Issue 2 seems to be dragging the Republican Party down,” said Lippert. “This is transformational, but not in a positive way for the city.”

Hamilton County Republican chairman Alex Triantafilou said the results left him “concerned for the future of the city.”

“No question that Issue 2 played a significant role in this,” he added.

The new council means Cincy’s streetcar project can finally move forward unimpeded by Republicans and that the city can now take steps to fix the city budget without sacrificing police, firefighters, and teachers.  It’s a start.  We’ll see what Mayor Mark Mallory can do with the kind of support he’s always wanted, like from Cincy’s first openly gay council member, Chris Seelbach.

He worked for former Vice Mayor David Crowley and modeled his candidacy after the lessons Crowley taught him. He promises to carry on the goals of his mentor, who died early this year of cancer. Crowley taught him to look for “issues of justice in everything you do.”

All he hears out of City Hall, he says, is what should be cut and not cut. He wants to turn the debate more toward what council can do to make Cincinnati more of a place sought out by young professionals and young families. He worked in 2004 to help defeat Article XII, which banned naming gay people as a protected class. He wants to make public transportation the top priority and move toward a fixed-rail system connecting all neighborhoods.

He’s 31, vice president and chief financial officer of The Seidewitz Group, a marketing and consulting firm. He lives in Over-the-Rhine, is an endorsed Democrat, and is the city’s first openly gay council candidate.

And that’s just how big of a disaster Issue 2 was for Ohio Republicans last night.  Expanding on what Kay was saying below, Kasich is toast, folks.  The failure of Republicans to coalesce around this issue not only backfired miserably, it had the completely opposite effect, creating an off-year grassroots surge that knocked the blocks out from under Cincy conservatives.  He cannot be jettisoned fast enough in the Buckeye State and Republicans in Ohio are now in a deep hole.  The network to bring Ohio back into the blue column next year is already in place.  The overreach was brutal, and a significant number of Ohio GOP voters jumped ship on this measure and mobilized Democrats to boot.

The coattails on the Issue 2 No vote completely reworked the government of one of the more conservative cities in the state and made it overwhelmingly progressive, not to mention creating a majority African-American council to back Mayor Mallory.  Between this and Dems rolling to wins in Kentucky as mistermix mentioned, yeah, Tuesday was a pretty good day for our side ’round my neck of the woods.

Also, the latest PPP numbers in Ohio are looking really good for the President, but I’m waiting to hear how the Issue 2 vote was meaningless because TEH YOONYUN THUGZ created tens of thousands of fake cardboard standee voters after raiding every Office Depot and Staples in the tri-state over the weekend for art supplies…

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Whether Men, Underground

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A funny thing happened on the way to the Koch Brothers’ latest “scientific triumph” over the nefarious forces of global warming mind control.  First, the story as K-Drum rolls this out:

Physicists are notorious for believing that other scientists are mathematically incompetent. And University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is notorious for believing that conventional wisdom is often wrong. For example, the conventional wisdom about climate change. Muller has criticized Al Gore in the past as an “exaggerator,” has spoken warmly of climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and has said that Steve McIntyre’s famous takedown of the “hockey stick” climate graph made him “uncomfortable” with the paper the hockey stick was originally based on.

So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? “Muller’s views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics,” said Scientific American, “and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results.” The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.

House Republicans and energy companies pinned a lot of money and time on BEST as the ultimate weapon to permanently cloud the “debate” on climate change.  But the problem is the skeptical physicist who said “yes, I’d like to take a look at those numbers!” has run them and discovered that hey, they’re right:

But Muller’s congressional testimony last March didn’t go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. [3] (Ocean studies will come later.)

Oops.  Hey, Muller centered his entire debate on running the numbers correctly and with complete integrity and guess what?  The vast group of scientists working on it were pretty much right all along.

In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.

I’d be laughing if the deniers in Washington and K Street hadn’t killed any efforts for the US and the world to do anything substantial to save the planet.

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Looks Like OWS Won One

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Yesterday, Bloomberg and the NYPD informed OWS that they would be evicted today at 7 AM so the park can be cleaned.   OWS sent out a notice on Facebook asking for cleaning supplies and also asked for a show of support at 6 AM.  A few minutes ago, the owners of Zucotti Park backed down.  Here’s the Mayor’s office’s first tweet acknowledging the existence of OWS (via):

According to the AP, Bloomberg’s girlfriend is on the board of directors of Brookfield Properties, the private company that owns Zucotti Park.

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You Don’t Need A Weatherman…

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…to tell which which way the wind blows.  Not when even Marty Feldstein marches in with a more aggressive mortgage forgiveness plan than we’ve seen out of either Congress or the administration.

I don’t love the plan as offered, to the extent that an 800 word op-ed. offers much in the way of a fine-grained proposal.  Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s head of the Council of Economic Advisors, calls for forgiving out-of-the-money mortgages down to 110% of the homes’ value — a threshold that would touch 11 million out of the 15 million  homes in the United States.  Lenders would absorb half the loss and the government would cover the other half, at a cost Feldstein asserts would be less than $350 billion.

I don’t have much to say about that part of the plan.  Why 110%?  Is there any data that suggests that’s the number to encourage underwater mortgagees to stick with the loan?

Or…how much of the current foreclosure crisis is driven by unemployment, and hence at this moment is unlikely to be touched by a payment reduction that still leaves the house underwater?

No clue, here (and no expertise to justify a guess), but these are empirical questions that could be answered…and in any event Feldstein — now at Harvard — is at least trying to come to grips with that insane number of 15 million houses that embody enormous financial loss.

The part of the this proposal that I think is almost certainly a bad deal is the price homeowners would pay to get their mortgage reduction:  Feldstein would transform these loans from non-recourse status —  in which the lender can claim the collateral, the house, but no other assets if the borrower defaults — into an instrument that puts all the borrowers assets are at risk.  To me, taking financially vulnerable people in the midst of  a bad economy and placing them at still greater economic risk seems to me both cruel and stupid.

Much better, in my view, are the proposals that place the government — the taxpayer, you and me, baby — into financial partnership with both the borrower and lender.  In these approaches, the borrower who gets mortgage relief has to share with the lender (and/or the Feds) any gain made from an ultimate sale of the property.  Everybody’s incentives align, and the borrower is not one layoff away from utter ruin, as he or she would be in the Feldstein scheme.

But what really stood out for me is not that Feldstein has come up with the least middle-class-friendly version of mortgage relief out there — that’s how he rolls — but that even such an old Reagan hand has driven to the core of the matter:

…As costly as it will be to permanently write down mortgages, it will be even costlier to do nothing and run the risk of another recession.

Yup, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore — or perhaps, pace  Thomas Frank, even in Kansas they’ve starting to grasp the most brutish of brute fact.

Yes, it sucks that the taxpayer must bail out over-extended borrowers and the reckless (criminal) financial institutions that placed those loans.  But life does blow sometimes — as most actual grown-ups understand.  Increasingly, those able to recognize the difference between ought and is accept that it’s better to deal with that fact than to watch the entire fiscal structure of our economy swirl down the toilet of whinging infant Congressional Republican orthodoxy.

Feldstein concludes by restating that same message.  Better the nation take its medicine than seek to extract the pleasure of righteousness amidst the rubble:

I cannot agree with those who say we should just let house prices continue to fall until they stop by themselves. Although some forest fires are allowed to burn out naturally, no one lets those fires continue to burn when they threaten residential neighborhoods. The fall in house prices is not just a decline in wealth but a decline that depresses consumer spending, making the economy weaker and the loss of jobs much greater. We all have a stake in preventing that.

That’s DFH talk, of course.  Without quite saying it out loud Feldstein here offers the suggestion that society has both values and obligations that trump the every-man-a-wolf-to-his-fellow-man cult of the individual that passes for  contemporary GOP “thought” on the social compact.

When you’ve lost Marty…

Image:  John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821

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