Framing and Messaging: Republicans Get Them, Democrats Don’t

Democrats continue to refuse to look at how important framing and messaging is in driving a core set of principles.  Republicans figured out their importance decades ago and that’s a big reason why this country has taken such a radical turn to the extreme right since.

Why is these two abstract concepts so important?  Take the recent health care debate as an example.  Specifically, let’s look at the public option and what Republicans did about it internally:

At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News’ controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network’s journalists not to use the phrase “public option.”

Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox’s reporters should use “government option” and similar phrases — wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats’ reform efforts.

Did this doom the public option all by itself?  Of course not.  But these phrases resonate with folks who have been purposefully trained to think of anything the government does as inefficient and wasteful (on the nice side of the spectrum).  Republicans have mastered the two-word soundbite culture.  The phrases that pass through Luntz’s playbook and into the Republican machine are some of the most recognizable and effective in our political lexicon today.

Democrats do themselves and this country a disservice by continuing to brush framing and messaging off as something beneath their notice.  They think if they fully explain every nuance of every policy, the facts by themselves will win over enough of the public to implement their ideas.  It hasn’t worked in decades and it will be less effective in the future.

China Is Cleaning Our Climate Action Clock Today

China recently released plans to get 500GW of renewable power tied into their grid by 2020 – just 9 short years away.

The United States, in comparison, decided to let the dirty energy industry control its government in the 2nd half of the 20th century.  Even under the Obama administration’s Recovery Act plan, renewable energy in the U.S. will only provide 16GW by 2020, and that’s if Republican Teabaggers don’t block any funds once they take back the House next month.

China’s approach is clearly more serious than the U.S.’s when it comes to acting on global warming.  Even if they don’t implement the 500th GW by or during the year 2020, does anyone seriously think they’ll get too far away from that goal?  This is the same country that revolutionized its industry in dramatically less time than it took the U.S. or any other nation to do the same.  China will soon have more modern renewable energy infrastructure than the U.S. will have.  Once that happens, we will no longer be able to use China as an excuse to continue inaction.  Of course, if we are inactive until that time, it will likely be too late to prevent catastrophic global warming anyway.

State of the Poles – 12/5/10

The state of global polar sea ice area at the beginning of December 2010 remains well below climatological conditions (1979-2008).  Sea ice in the Arctic continues to track far below average while Antarctic sea ice stayed slightly above average.  Overall, the rate at which Arctic sea ice is refreezing and Antarctic ice is melting is not out of the ordinary.  The locations where freezing and melting is occurring is news this month.  Global sea ice is rapidly decreasing, as is normal for this time of year due to Antarctic environmental conditions.

Sens. Udall, Bennet Fail Again To Secure Bipartisan Republicans

In the past couple of years, Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado have touted their intent and ability to “work across the aisle to get things done”.  Instead of standing firm on Democratic principles and working overtime to secure the policies their base wants enacted, they have yielded time and again to the more disciplined but less principled Republican Teabaggers who are under no such illusions to work with the other side.  I’ve met and talked with with the staff of Sen. Udall many times since he was elected, trying to convince him to fight for what Colorado majorities and not corporate majorities want.  Each and every time, I was told by his staff that Sen. Udall values my opinion but feels it is important to represent everybody.  I have never received a sufficient explanation why it is more important to pay attention to what a minority of Coloradans want than what the majority wants.  A similar story emerged with Sen. Bennet.  So I have changed the way I evaluate the Senators’ performance.  If they want to be judged based on their ability to work with the other side, I’m happy to do that.

The issue of whether or not to continue or let expire the 2001 and 2003 Bush Regime tax cuts has been in the news recently.  Yesterday, Senators worked a rare Saturday session into their schedule to vote on those cuts.  Faced with the opportunity to extend tax cuts for earners of less than $250,000 permanently but allow tax cuts to expire on those making more than that, Sens. Udall and Bennet had the chance to demonstrate their acumen in bringing bipartisanship to the table.  If you look at this issue from the vantage point that Democrats hold the majority and a majority of Americans wanted the first $250,000 of every Americans’ income subject to continued tax breaks, Sens. Udall and Bennet failed.  Only 51 other Senators voted with them.

Obama Administration: No Offshore Drilling In E Gulf of Mexico Or Off East Coast

President Obama finally took a tough stand on something that Republican Teabaggers expected him to yield on, and on which he initially did yield.  Reversing an earlier decision, the Obama administration has taken steps to stop offshore fossil fuel drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico as well as off the east coast of the U.S. Those areas were opened by the administration in an effort to gain a Teabagger vote or two on the Senate climate and energy bill.  When the Teabaggers Obama was seeking decided to take their ball and go home instead of bring the bill to the Senate floor, endangering this country and indeed everyone on Earth, climate activists were rightfully angry with the President’s pre-negotiation capitulation on the drilling issue.

In a to-date rare move, the Obama administration has taken back the prize that was freely given to Teabaggers and their dirty energy corporate masters.  Deep-sea oil and gas drilling remains dangerous to the environment and to our national security.  Only the development of renewable resource infrastructure will stop the spigot of American energy tax dollars going to petrodictators, most of whom use the money to fund anti-American activities.  The Republican Teabaggers might enjoy supporting these tyrannical regimes, but most Americans do not.  This is but one tiny step in stopping that morally outrageous practice.

Arizona Gov Cut Transplant Patient Financing; AZ Gov Blames Obama For Results

Death Panels are alive and well.  Of course, ignored by the corporate media, death panels have been created by Republican Teabaggers like AZ Gov Jan Brewer.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.

You see, Republican Teabaggers think poor people want to be poor, so they have no one to blame but themselves for not being able to afford transplant operations that will keep them alive.

But the story has an added bonus: Jan Brewer is now blaming Obama and his health care reform insurance giveaway for killing these people.

The Republican governor has in turn blamed “Obamacare,” meaning the federal health care overhaul, for the transplant cuts even though the Arizona vote came in March, before President Obama signed that bill into law.

To uninformed Americans, this might resonate, since Republican Teabaggers have dishonestly attacked the legislation for 2 years now.  What Brewer and other Teabaggers will never discuss is how forcing Americans to buy private insurance translates into an Arizona state health program deciding to save $14 million per year while poor people die for lack of transplant organs.  Of course it doesn’t make sense.  Nothing the Teabaggers propose as policy actually makes sense.  This is simply what follows after millions of greedy, selfish old white people decide to exert their influence on politics.  Wake up America: these kinds of policies are coming to a neighborhood near you if you allow the Teabaggers to take this country back to the 1750s.

I could advocate that the President finally wake up too, if I thought it would make any difference.  Brewer’s cowardly assignment of blame is what results when you capitulate to everything extremists like her want.  By all means, keep capitulating though.  As long as Sarah Palin is the 2012 Republican Teabagger nominee, the President might be able to eek out a 2nd term.

U.K. Paper: Analysis Indicates 2C Warming All But Inevitable

A set of papers were temporarily made available to the general public in advance of the COP16 meeting in Cancun.  They present quite a sobering view on just how close we are to locking the planet into dangerous global warming scenarios.  One of the papers has this critical set of statements:

The analysis suggests that despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2◦C. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2◦C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2◦C now more appropriately represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change. Ultimately, the science of climate change allied with the emission scenarios for Annex 1 [industrialized] and non-Annex 1 nations suggests a radically different framing of the mitigation and adaptation challenge from that accompanying many other analyses, particularly those directly informing policy.

The significance of that first statement cannot be overstated.  For the first time, a research group has made the assessment that, despite the climate research community’s decades’ worth of warnings, policy makers have nearly locked the globe into a significant warming scenario.

As additional effort has been undertaken to determine in more detail what 2◦C warming entails, it has become clearer that even that seemingly small amount of warming is extremely dangerous to human societies and the planet’s ecosystems.  We are now at the threshold past which radically new approaches to reduce the threat that global warming presents will begin to no longer be voluntary, but required.

Because policy makers have thus far refused to seriously assess the risk associated with various levels of warming, efforts to quantify the probability of exceeding those levels of warming have unfortunately been biased too low.  To date, the probability of surpassing 2◦C have resided between 5% and 33%.

This paper investigated a range of emissions scenarios, maximum cumulative CO2-equivalent values and assorted distributions of those max CO2-e values by industrialized and non-industrialized nations.  The majority of the scenarios and maximum values are physically unrealistic (CO2-e emissions peaking for industrialized nations in 2007, for instance), and yield probabilities of exceeding 2◦C between 36% and 52%.  Of the remaining scenarios, there is an 88% probability of exceeding 2◦C.  Unfortunately, those scenarios include industrialized nations’ emissions peaking in 2017 – even that isn’t likely to happen in the country that is the world’s largest contributor to emissions, the U.S.  I haven’t seen realistic evidence that other industrialized nations’ emissions reductions will be enough to offset the U.S.’s emissions in the next 5-10 years.  I would be pleased to discover that is the case, of course.

The paper does offer this incredibly blunt statement in its conclusion:

However, given the CCC acknowledge ‘it is not now possible to ensure with high likelihood that a temperature rise of more than 2◦C is avoided’ and given the view that reductions in emissions in excess of 3–4% per year are not  compatible with economic growth, the CCC are, in effect, conceding that avoiding dangerous (and even extremely dangerous) climate change is no longer compatible with economic prosperity.

“Avoiding dangerous climate change is no longer compatible with economic prosperity.”  How economically prosperous will anybody be once extremely dangerous climate change is affecting the globe?  What this means in the real world is that the time frame during which economic prosperity would not suffer is likely to be over.  Any actions we take to meaningfully deal with global warming will, at least in the short term, be economically painful to undertake.  Better that though, than letting global warming run rampant and destroying economies along with our civilizations.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

House Republicans Kill Climate Change Committee

Republican Teabaggers take another step to lock in catastrophic global warming.  House Republican Teabaggers will kill the Select Committee on Global Warming.  Their excuse is utter b.s. as evidenced by their total lack of action on billions of dollars wasted on mercenaries in our foreign occupations.

When future generations are forced to live on a planet wrecked by global warming, they can do so secure in the knowledge that Republican Teabaggers did everything they could to bring about that global warming.

Health Care Reform Already Being Weakened?

If the deficit peacocks get their way, Medicare could be seriously weakened.  Why?  Because the $519 Billion program is expected to grow to $929 Billion by 2020.  And since CorporateDems and Incrementalists insisted that the 2009-2010 Health Insurance Giveaway could be easily strengthened “the next time around”, a Medicare buy-in in place of single-payer in place of a public option, was never seriously considered, the growth in the cost of Medicare moving forward presents a nice, fat target for which the D.C. establishment can aim.

Opening Medicare up to a larger pool of customers would have helped keep the program’s overall costs down.  But the “serious people” involved with health care reform couldn’t allow that to happen.  That was too much change too quickly.  The health care apple cart might get tipped over, or some such nonsense.  Well, I would love to hear from the Incrementalists how accepting crumbs in the reform gutter will save Medicare or ensure more Americans have access to quality health care.  And no, insurance coverage doesn’t not equate to quality health care.  It should become obvious soon that forcing people into private insurance coverage doesn’t mean existing health care systems will get the changes they need.  There was a critical question that the Incrementalists could never answer during the health care debate: how will their version of “reform” be strengthened moving forward?  It turns out that it won’t.  The health care system doesn’t need tweaks at the edges, it needs revolutionary, fundamental change.

How disgusting will it be when a Democratic President oversees privatization of portions of Medicare?  How about Social Security?  The Incrementalists were dead wrong – the only thing their approach will accomplish is taking steps toward privatizing the social safety nets brought into existence by liberals and progressives in the 20th century.  This isn’t “Change we can believe in”.