“ Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out.
“ Talking to people who are very close to Sarah Palin, I have been told that she has told her supporters that she is out of politics, period. She is fed up with politics. She doesn’t like her life. She feels like she has to raise her family. She’s sick of the commute from Wasilla to the capital and she really does not want to run for higher office. This is not the case where she is stepping down in order to figure the way for a presidential run. In fact, she has told some of her biggest backers in the national Republican Party that they are free to choose other candidates for 2012.
Muddied, Discredited Arguments Not Helpful
sds:
Ken Caldeira (via azspot):“Climate science has reached the point that plate tectonics reached 30 years ago. It is the basic view of the vast majority of working scientists that human-induced climate change is real. There is a real diversity of informed opinion on how important climate change is going to be to various things that affect humans, and there is a diversity of opinion on how to address this problem, but the debate over human-induced climate change is over.”Then came the backlash. The Global Climate Coalition (funded by over 40 major corporate groups like Amoco, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and General Motors) began spending millions of dollars each year to derail the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to help reduce global warming. They held conferences entitled “The Costs of Kyoto,” issued press releases and faxes dismissing the scientific evidence for global warming, and spent more than $3 million on newspaper and television ads claiming Kyoto would mean a “50-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax.”†
The media, in response to flurries of “blast faxes” (a technique in which a press release is simultaneously faxed to thousands of journalists) and accusations of left-wing bias, began backing off from the scientific evidence.† A recent study found only 35% of newspaper stories on global warming accurately described the scientific consensus, with the majority implying that scientists who believed in global warming were just as common as global warming deniers (of which there were only a tiny handful, almost all of whom had received funding from energy companies or associated groups).†
It all had an incredible effect on the public. In 1993, 88% of Americans thought global warming was a serious problem. By 1997, that number had fallen to 42%, with only 28% saying immediate action was necessary. 1 And so Clinton changed course and insisted that cutting emissions should be put off for 20 years.
US businesses seriously weakened the Kyoto Protocol, leading it to require only a 7% reduction in emissions (compared to the 20% requested by European nations) and then President Bush refused to sign on to even that.† In four short years, big business had managed to turn nearly half the country around and halt the efforts to protect the planet.
And now, the principal on Bainbridge Island, like most people, thinks global warming is a hotly contested issue — the paradigmatic example of a hotly contested issue — even when the science is clear. (“There’s no better scientific consensus on this on any issue I know,” said the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”)2 But all this debate about problems has kept us away from talk about solutions. As journalist Ross Gelbspan puts it, “By keeping the discussion focused on whether there is a problem in the first place, they have effectively silenced the debate over what to do about it.”† So is it any wonder that conservatives want to do the same thing again? And again? And again?Typically, when I encounter such a sentiment, I refrain from immediately labeling such a viewpoint as anti-science (though, it is true for a sizable segment, especially Christians, who are anti-science in a number of realms, i.e., embracing doctrine of young earth creationism over evolution). I figure that the malformed opinion is due to the incessant ignorance transmitted by right wing hucksters, neoliberal/conservative/libertarian think tanks, fossil fuel industry public relations flacks and corporate propagandists.
Yes, there is some dissent to the scientific consensus, but it’s not a “debate”. More like a few naysayers, amplified exponentially, by a “he said, she said” media, eager to sell controversy in lieu of informing the citizenry.
But I am amazed at the steadfast insistence to contrarian doctrine, despite the preponderance of empirical evidence and the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable scientists.
While I will not attempt a comprehensive write-up here, let me just cite that all of the major Science journals and periodicals have pronounced “global warming” as a real phenomenon. And here are a few links here from Discover, New Scientist, National Geographic, and Scientific American, all weighing in with affirmative assessments on the reality of global warming:
Discover: The State of the Climate — and of Climate Science
National Geographic: Is Global Warming Real?
Signs that the earth is warming are recorded all over the globe. The easiest way to see increasing temperatures is through the thermometer records kept over the past century and a half. Around the world, the earth’s average temperature has risen more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) over the last century, and about twice that in parts of the Arctic.
National Geographic: Global Warming Fast Facts
New Scientist: Climate Change, A Guide for the Perplexed
Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.
Scientific American: Is Global Warming a Myth?
But scientists have not been able to validate any such reasons for the current warming trend, despite exhaustive efforts. And a raft of recent peer reviewed studies—many which take advantage of new satellite data—back up the claim that it is emissions from tailpipes, smokestacks (and now factory farmed food animals, which release methane) that are causing potentially irreparable damage to the environment.… …To wit, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences declared in 2005 that “greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise,” adding that “the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.” Other leading U.S. scientific bodies, including the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union have issued concurring statements—placing the blame squarely on humans’ shoulders.
The typical denialist redress in response — crackpots, foreign billionaire propagandist respites, oddball theorists far removed from sanity (though to be fair, all new science results from such “kooky” outliers), scientists outside their realm of expertise and of course, vile baseless money grubbing corporate shills.
Cash vs. I.O.U.
(via crazynutjob)
IOU Rules Everything Around Me
I. R. E. A. M. Get the money, promissory notes, y’all
"Watch what you wish for" indeed
Under the House leadership bill, people who have coverage through their employers are ineligible. So the proposed, head-to-head competition between the public plan and private competitors is left to employers, not individuals.
What’s distressing is that progressives have put all their eggs in this leaky basket. It’s clear that Jacob Hacker’s original inspiration — that over time the superior efficiencies of a true public plan would crowd out private alternatives — is being undermined by the politics of compromise. Even Sen. Max Baucus, not exactly a lefty, remarked the other day that he wished that single-payer hadn’t been taken off the table, if only for tactical reasons.
In public opinion polls and in liberal advocacy, the badly flawed public option has become a kind of proxy for what most Americans really want — national health insurance. That’s the true public option. It would be far more cost-effective, because it would eliminate so many industry middlemen and would remove the incentive to put health dollars into profit centers. Politically, protecting the public option from industry mischief is no less a heavy lift than single-payer. It’s a pity that all the progressive energy that’s gone into defending the public option hasn’t gone to advocate national health insurance.
“ As for the bill itself, 37% of all Americans at least somewhat favor it, while 41% are at least somewhat opposed to it. Twenty-two percent (22%) are not sure what to make of it.
Rasmussen: 42% Say Climate Change Bill Will Hurt The Economy
Our congress at work.
The actual top story at Drudge, right fucking now.Awesome
Well doggone it, people like him.
May his best role be as 60th vote.
Progressivism and the battle of ideas
Jeffmiller defends Libertarianism and emphasizes its points of overlap with Progressivism (which we’re treating rather loosely here). He then insists that Libertarians are not bad people, and that while acknowledging the world is imperfect they oppose things like progressive health care reform out of a belief that it will result in worse outcomes. Specifically, more people will die.
We don’t oppose the government healthcare because we’re cold and heartless; we oppose it because we care about people.
I believe Jeff is sincere. And I believe such motives may indeed apply to a nontrivial number of libertarians. I just don’t think that this is the motivation of many of the people standing (from my perspective) in the way of reforming our health care system in a way that makes things better off for more people. I don’t think that the defence of the free market I hear from Jeff comes from the same place as the (nominally identical) version coming from the insurance executives testifying on Capitol Hill.
I find the attempts to excuse the failings of the American health care system laughable. I have lived overseas. I have friends in other countries. The voices saying “America is too fundamentally different” and “all those places with ‘socialized’ medicine are worse off,’ etc… those voices sound to me like the pleadings of the status quo.
If I didn’t ascribe to Jeff good faith, the hypothetical provocation that “Your progressive health care proposal will kill a lot of people” would seem rather like fighting words, especially considering the demonstrable agony the lack of an acceptable system already creates in this country, and the fact that a substantial majority of the people who live here want the debacle of a system reformed.
My point wasn’t that libertarians are evil people. It’s that the nature of progressives’ causes puts them in conflict with conservative tendencies to glorify the status quo, and that in America, The Church of the Free Market happens to be a sect of the Church of the Status Quo.
Me saying that “Free Market Forever!!!” is the hammer to a constellation of policy decisions that include many things which are not nails should not be construed as me not believing in the free market, or that Libertarians are evil, etc. And Obama saying he won the election is not the same as progressives being able to declare victory in the contest of ideals.
Progressivism seeks not to create utopia, but to ever strive for it. To quote Teddy Roosevelt, “A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.” We must fight to make things better in the face of the violent inertia of the status quo. That is why you will never, ever find a true progressive who says the battle is won.
As If It Were Possible To Have Won
“The marketplace provides the best health care ever! Hooray for free markety-ness!”— Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics: Health Care stories from the United States
I can’t think of an area with more convoluted regulation than the intersection of the health-care and insurance industries in the US. Is there really someone out there arguing that the current system is free market driven?…
Progressives seem to think it’s still the 1880s, and that their enemies are Rockefeller and Carnegie. Guess what?—we free-market types lost the argument around 1900, and the coffin was nailed shut when FDR threatened to pack the Court in 1937. This world around us?—it’s heavily regulated. You won. You got zoning, and wage and hour laws, union protections and antitrust, the FDA, OSHA, CERCLA, and RCRA, wetland protections, an endangered species act, automobile standards, light bulb legislation, and five million other acronyms, rules, regulations, laws, edicts, and orders. You got medical licensing and Medicare and Medicaid and pharmaceutical testing. Yes, sometimes a little bit of all of this gets peeled away, but it’s always ten steps forward for every one step back. Every year, there are more rules and regulations on the books than the year before. And yet, when things go wrong, it’s always us free market advocates to blame.
Memo to the Progressives: We’ve been living in your regulatory state for over a hundred years. It isn’t our fault. Free-market libertarians have never held an important office; the only libertarianish Presidential candidate lost in a landslide. If you want a villain, and if you can’t bear to look in the mirror, then look to corporatist Republicans—the ones that write regulations and laws for moneyed interests, the ones who carve exceptions, the ones who dole out favors to their friends, and punishments to their enemies. These are your villains, because these people have actually had power.
Stop acting as if we won. We didn’t. You did. I’m sorry that you’re shocked that a hundred years of regulation haven’t brought us to utopia. And we’ll all be sorry that you think things will get better with more of the same.
All of the things progressives have achieved, every battle won for women’s suffrage, fair trade, civil rights for all, social justice and welfare, environmental protectionism, dignity in the workplace… were won over bitter opposition from people who didn’t think we needed the government to interfere. Who said we’d already done too much.
It’s disingenuous to suggest that progressives blame the market for any problem that arises when post-Reagan conservatives of nearly every stripe blame government for anything that even looks like a problem. You may read opposition to Free Market Worship in a lot of progressives’ arguments, but you’ll hear precious little of that, actually, from the mouths inside the beltway. Conservatives’ declaration of distrust of government, on the other hand, rolls off the tongue like punctuation. No sentence is complete without it.
Do you think the an allergy free market is what leads us to push for universal health care? No. IT’S THE EMBARRASSING STATE OF HEALTH CARE IN THIS COUNTRY, especially compared to the rest of the world’s industrialized economies. Free Market Worship is merely the argument that libertarian-minded conservatives use to thwart it, and corporatist Republicans co-opt to defeat it.*
It wasn’t some campaign against Free Market Worship that has led to governmental intervention in the FIRE sector. When everybody was making money, no alarms were raised. It was the impending immolation of our entire economy thanks to investment practices liberated from regulation and oversight to accommodate an excess of global capital.
If you want Progressives to stop talking shit about your beautiful free market, stop putting it forward as the solution to every problem (or at least as the solution to problems Free Market Worship exacerbated if not created). Otherwise don’t be surprised when we take a swing at your pitch, okay?
Yet Jeff says that the Progressives won the battle long ago and that this country is definitively a regulatory state. But the battle is still being waged, and it’s on your home field. If anything, while it is nearly de reigeur for our leaders to kneel at the alter of the market (Obama has repeatedly called himself a “pro-growth, free market guy”).
The notion of democracy in the Progressive Era meant a reasonable standard of living for everyone and that the freedom each of us deserves is only meaningful after poverty, inequality and powerlessness had been banished. If that were the conventional wisdom of today then I might agree progressives had “won.” It is not. Today we talk as if democracy and the free market are more than coincident; they are identical. How on earth could we act as if these ideas were settled long ago?
How we run our civilization is not a zero sum game, so stop acting as if we won.
*To CNJ’s point, the health care industry’s failings by no means just the failings of a free or efficient market. Though I think if you put the comparable systems on the free market spectrum it would be the well towards the right.
