Birther Billboard In Denver, CO

One thing that irritates me about the birthers (people who, despite objective proof to the contrary, insist that President Obama is somehow not a U.S. citizen) is they don’t understand the responsibilities that accompany their 1st amendment right of free speech.  It’s not terribly surprising that the same people who scream at liberals for not accepting responsibility for their actions are in fact guilty of what they’re accusing others of – it’s a hallmark of hypocrisy.

What’s disturbing is the level of racism and underlying hatred and fear of everything with which the right-wing doesn’t identify.  Today’s unfortunate example: Wolf Automotive, a Colorado car dealership, has donated space on a billboard they regularly pay for in Wheatridge, CO (a small suburb of Denver) for a poster questioning whether Barack Obama was a legitimate President or part of a jihad.

While people have the freedom of speech, this purposeful display of hatred clearly steps over bounds of civility.  Remember, these are the same people that demanded every American pay constant tribute to George Bush, who wasn’t elected in 2000, but instead selected by 5 Supreme Court members to his position.  Anybody who didn’t agree with Bush was instantly and then constantly derided as traitors by the faux patriots that cropped up around the country.  Now they’re trying to delegitimize Barack Obama’s position as President – a position that he cleanly and clearly won by a huge margin (a bigger margin than Bush ever enjoyed).

This billboard is a local result of the racist radio shock-jock Peter Boyles.  Peter could be the poster-child of the birther movement.  He’s an older, white, angry male who makes his living pushing hatred and fear.  It wouldn’t matter if President Obama went to Peter’s studio or house with his birth certificate, Peter would still stoke ignorant peoples’ fears.  Someday, somewhere, a birther will lash out and hurt or kill someone.  When that happens, Peter and everybody else like him will hide behind the 1st Amendment rights they so callously abuse today.

Colorado News Stories: Connecting Some Dots

Today was another day in which a number of news articles caught my eye.  They warrant additional context, especially the connections between some of them.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been working behind the scenes to talk with what the corporate media likes to term “centrist”/”moderate” Democratic Senators regarding health care.  He will continue to try to convince CorporateDems to vote to allow debate on the Senate health bill.  What’s the center position between corporatist lackeys and principled public servants anyway?  Another very popular Washington buzzterm came into play: Salazar is involved because he was involved in several bipartisan agreements while a Senator.  He was at the forefront of what I term the Gaggle of Gangs in the Senate – joining with other “centrists” to keep the filibuster around but ensure Democrats wouldn’t use it while in the minority.  Which is part of the reason why Salazar is being sent back to work on his former colleagues: the Cons are threatening to filibuster the health bill (though Democrats won’t actually force them to carry one out) and -gasp- Democrats might join them.  That’s the answer to “How did that bipartisanship end up working out”.  Whatever happened to the Cons’ “Upper-down-vote!” they couldn’t get enough of?  One person of concern is Sen. Lieberman, the man who campaigned for Sen. John McCain in last year’s presidential election and is doing everything he can to keep himself in the news this year.  Salazar was “mentored” by Lieberman when he joined the Senate, so I’m sure Lieberman can be convinced to play nice – aren’t you?  Oh, and after watering down the bill with nonsense to appease “centrist” Republicans, where are their votes to move to debate?  MIA?  Why did we negotiate with them exactly?  They’re not going to vote for the final bill.

How Declining Arctic Ice Volume Affects Northern Hemispheric Weather Patterns

Evidence continues to emerge regarding the effects of declining ice volume and areal extent in the Arctic is affecting weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere.  In a general sense, some kind of effects are of course to be expected.  But what kind, what are their magnitude, etc. need to be explored.  If it were up to the Cons, science would be defunded and we would have no idea what these emerging trends are.  This is the critical importance that science plays in our society.

I’m going to link to another diary and allow readers to explore the material there.  It’s decently written and links to science centers and refereed journals.  Here is the summary:

Today’s Arctic sea ice extent is hovering at the historic record low level for today’s date observed in 2007. Warm water entering the ice free zone from the Atlantic ocean is adding heat to the Arctic, changing the northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation pattern – the weather of the whole northern hemisphere. Even El Nino is different from what it used to be.

Enjoy.

U.S. Record High Temperatures Recorded At Twice The Rate Of Record Lows This Decade

A news release was issued last Thursday that I flat out missed, which was unfortunate (though I’m glad I eventually found out about it).  A study (submitted to Geophysical Research Letters for publication) was conducted by climate scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, Climate Central in Princeton, NJ, the Weather Channel, and the National Climate Data Center in Asheville, NC.  They examined trends in record high temperatures and record low temperatures over the past 6 decades, through 2006.  What they found isn’t terribly surprising: the ratio of record highs to record lows became unbalanced in the 2000s.  There were twice as many record highs as record lows across the continental United States.  That’s an increase from 1.36:1 for the 1990s and 1.14:1 for the 1980s.  Climate change is affecting us today.  Not tomorrow, not later this century.  Today.

Even Progressive Senators Don’t Grasp Importance of Climate Change

I read a blog post about progressive Senate Democrats pushing Sen. Reid for a public option.  I wholeheartedly support such a push for a number of reasons.  Because I’m like most Americans, I encourage the push because I want true health care reform legislation to pass.  Not the watered down health insurance “reform” crap that CorporateDems and Republicans have forced in the House, but real reform, which is increasingly more unlikely this year, to the detriment of our country.

Oil Peak: Fantasy or Already Here?

A whistleblower has said that the IEA has purposefully overestimated the future availability of oil.  Furthermore, the US has played a major role in the effort.

My take: I wouldn’t be surprised if the whistleblower is correct.  New fields have come online and have produced longer than previous estimates due to technological advances.  But that won’t last forever.  The biggest problem: we’ve put every egg in the oil basket.  There are no other sources of energy that could take oil’s place tomorrow if oil ran out today.  That’s not to say that that situation can’t ever change – we’re taking small but steady steps to alleviate our over-dependence on the finite dirty energy sources we depend on.  But if we’re as close as this whistleblower and other credible sources say we are, the price shocks and resultant massive economic disruptions that we’re trying like mad to avoid could still occur sooner than anyone would like to admit.

We need to develop our renewable energy infrastructure today, for multiple reasons.  Catastrophic climate change is the most important reason, followed by basic energy security as it relates to geopolitical stability.

On a related tangent: if peak oil is staring us in the face, it really makes the Iraq invasion and occupation look stupid.  How many trillions of dollars will we have wasted to secure a resource that is ever-dwindling?

Morocco To Invest $9 Billion To Install 200MW of Solar Power

As much good as America’s new President has already done, in a very short time, on energy and climate issues, the rest of the world, developed and developing countries alike, continue to surge forward toward 21st century energy technologies.  Morocco announced this week that they are prepared to invest $9 Billion to install 200MW of solar power in their deserts by 2020.  And:

The nation is vying with Algeria, Tunisia and Libya for 400 billion euros ($596 billion) of investments in solar-energy systems over the coming decades as the EU seeks to trim emissions from coal and natural gas power plants by importing clean power from the Sahara.

This announcement comes as part of plans with Germany to develop desalinization plants and electricity generators for the country.

[h/t Climate Progress]

Tidbits From the Blogosphere

Sometimes, others say what you wanted to, but oh so much better than you could.  Here are some of those from today.

From Hunter, who dishes out the best smackdowns around (emphasis mine):

A very large chunk of our greatest-deliberative-body Democrats don’t want to pass healthcare reform, they want to kill it. Our leadership, frankly, doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass either way, and all parties involved think we have the intelligence of doorstops, but I think what we would all really, really like most of all, in this ongoing and thoroughly asinine “debate”, is if this vaunted national leadership of ours would quit trying to blow smoke up our ass and tell us we’re hickory-smoked.

Fine, we get it, senators: you’re corporate whores, money-grubbing professional campaigners who don’t have the slightest interest in actually solving this problem. You seek any avenue to avoid the obvious, most cost-effective option, the one that will insure the most people and do the most to control costs, itself a mealy compromise offered to avoid plans that would work even better — but which none of the offending companies offering up their opinions and lobbyists for this debate would possibly tolerate.

I would add that they don’t have much, if any interest, in solving any problem that faces Americans.  The only problem they see: getting re-elected.

——————-

From math4barack, an admonition against the CorporateDem Blue Dogs, who only care about debt and deficits when their party proposes spending money.  Record debt was recorded under the last “administration” and they spoke nary a peep about it.  Republicans since St. Ronnie have deliberately run up the debt in the hope that programs created by Democrats and loved by the rest of America are cut from the budget.  The hypocritical Blue Dogs should switch parties and save everybody from the grief they cause.

Chrysler Shoots Itself In The Foot … Again. Good Riddance.

I haven’t been a fan of American auto manufacturing corporations for years.  By that, I mean the executives deigned worthy enough to run the companies … right into the ground.  I fully support the hard-working men and women employed by these over-sized behemoths.  The workers are the backbone of America’s middle class and receive my full support.  It’s not their fault their corporations have been run by greedy, immoral hypocritical liars for decades.

The latest proof?  Chrysler, who announced that they were dismantling their electric vehicle engineering team.  That’s the same team and program they promised American taxpayers would be in place as the begged for millions of our tax dollars to prop up their purposefully dysfunctional wasteland of a company.

This is obviously a very stupid move.  Regulations are now in place to force Chrysler and other car manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency (a standard Chrysler and the others paid millions of dollars to fight for years).  The cost of meeting these standards are not prohibitive.  Chrysler and the others exist in the European and Asian car markets, which have had more robust standards for years.  They chose to make inefficient vehicles for American customers.  Given the price of oil and gas, guzzlers are no longer profitable to make because the American public has shifted its buying habits.  Shutting down an electric vehicle engineering team as the marketplace transitions to more fuel efficient vehicles is an absurd move to make.

But it goes further than just that.  It hurts other corporations and other workers.  A123 systems manufactures electric batteries for use in vehicles, among other things.  They could be a viable American success story: using ingenuity and entrepreneurship to exploit a market need.  They contracted with Chrysler to provide batteries earlier this spring.  What are they supposed to do?  What happens if they fail because Chrysler’s executives decided they wanted to fail?  That unnecessarily hurts the entire hybrid and electric vehicle market.

Much like the Wall St. banks who gladly accepted trillions of taxpayer bailout dollars with few strings attached, Chrysler has spit in Americans’ faces.  By doing so, they cement the company as the most likely to fail moving forward.  They have continued their crappy decision making from the 20th century too far into the 21st century.  By doing so, I say good riddance.  One less non-responsive corporation in the marketplace will do nothing but benefit consumers.

[h/t Climate Progress]

I Love This Feature

An by feature, I mean regularly occurring diary series.  I remember the original piece the diarist refers to because I copied part of it here.  The following is a copy of the follow-up, written today:

Dear Conservative Free-Market Capitalism Muckety Mucks,

Ninety-one days ago I gave you thirty days to fix the U.S. economy that you broke:

I’m just a simple, average citizen who has listened to you jawbone for decades—amplified non-stop by Fox News, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal and right-wing radio—about how perfect your system of “unfettered everything” is. How greed is good and regulation is the devil’s work. And yet, you seem to be strangely ineffective at fixing it when it breaks. Could it be you’ve been bullshitting us all along? …

Fix the damn economy on Main Street already, you Ayn Rand-worshipping free-market capitalist wizards. Show us how it’s done. Be the heroes we’ve been holding out for.

Bummer. You couldn’t do it, even with a two-month extension. Not even close. Instead of rolling up your sleeves and getting to work, all you’ve done is continue pointing your fingers at the Big Bad Government—the one that statistics confirm single-handedly saved your asses from Great Depression II—and whine. Hell, even your Savior of All Things Economic, Grover “Ayn Rand With a Beard” Norquist, couldn’t convince voters in Washington and Maine that your ideas were worth a bucket of warm spit.

Oh, sure, Wall Street is thriving, in large measure because they’re up to their old backroom book-cooking tricks again. (I did challenge you to work your magic “honestly, ethically and legally,” remember?) But Main Street is still tanking. So I guess it’s true—you’ve been bullshitting us all along.

That doesn’t sit well with me. Because, see, I’ve been programmed by Frank Luntz and the GOP spin machine to think of two things when I hear the word conservative: fiscal competence and defense. You fucked up the defense part real good. And now you’ve failed to prove your worth on the economy. I mean, good gracious Gerty, I gave you 90 days and look at what you did: in what should’ve been your moment of triumph, you dithered.