CDC Approved H1N1 Shots For Wall St Firms; Massive Shortages Elsewhere

In contrast to this diarist, words don’t fail.  It’s the same thing over and over again.  The $12Trillion bailout with taxpayer money wasn’t enough.  Despite vaccine shortages across the country, someone at the CDC made an immoral decision: staff at Wall St. firms were somehow cleared to receive some of the sought-after vaccine doses.

159 million shots are needed to cover every at-risk person in America.  To date, only 32.3 million have been manufactured.  The diarist was correct about this: Someone should be fired.  Immediately.

Oh, these same firms are planning on issuing Billions more in bonuses to executives who created the Great Recession, the worst economy since the Great Depression.  I supported Obama with some reservations.  This is why I had reservations.  Where is the change?

 

Corporate-Dems Trying to Take Wrong Lesson From 2009 Elections

The 2009 election is now behind us. The 2010 election is moving toward us quickly. What have I picked up from this year’s election results? That Democrats, especially those which I label CorporateDems, who run away from the Democratic base will lose, and deservedly so.

If CorporateDems want to chase down Con votes, I say go for it. The Cons won’t vote for them and there’s now proof that progressives won’t turn out to help them. Having a (D) after their name isn’t enough.

Sen. Inouye (D) to Gut Sen. Franken’s Anti-Rape Amendment?!

Republicans obviously don’t have a lock on immoral legislative maneuvers to satisfy war contractors.  Here’s what you need to know:

An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

The Senate is considering taking out a provision known as the Title VII claim, which (if removed) would allow victims of assault or rape to bring suit against the individual perpetrator but not the contractor who employed him or her.

In what world is preventing someone who was raped the right to a court case a bad thing?  There’s being a war contractor lackey and then there’s this.  This defies explanation or excuse.  It’s sickening.

Good Thing Harsanyi Is An Op-Ed Columnist and Not a Journalist

If there’s one thing the Cons have demonstrated perfectly for years, it’s that one doesn’t have to think to have an opinion. One should be able to think to form a news story, but this is too often not the case in today’s media world where entertainment corrupts journalism.

Some snippets of what has become standard drivel from Harsanyi:

Dunn went on to assert that when the president “goes on Fox, he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition.” Who knew debating the future of the nation was such a ghastly thought?

In this opinion piece, Harsanyi asks many questions that he should have asked of the Bush “administration” (they weren’t a legitimate administration any more than Fox is a legitimate news source). What about Bush’s policy of establishing invite-only events that were funded by taxpayers? Democrats, Unaffiliateds and Cons alike paid for these events, but only people who agreed not to debate Bush were invited. Bush definitely thought debate was ghastly. Crickets from the right-wingers’ bench.

Just like every other Con whining and gnashing about the obvious unfairness of the Obama administration labeling Fox as opinion-based, Harsanyi wastes plenty of pixels (ink, too) on how anyone could possibly think that the executive branch should be able to decide who’s legitimate and who’s not. Just like every other Con, Harsanyi tries to hide his hypocrisy from public view. Where was his concern when Bush did the exact same thing to MSNBC? More crickets.

Obama’s Admin: Fox Not Legitimate

It’s time to throw some parties!  It’s not the first time it’s happened, and I don’t at this point think it will be the last either.  Two Obama advisers went on two different Sunday TV talk shows and stated unequivocally what most rational people have thought to themselves for years:

Fox is not a legitimate news outlet.

They’re an biased entity with access to the airwaves.  They have opinions, which everyone and every entity has a right to have.  But having an opinion doesn’t make one a journalist or a news network.  They can think of themselves as whatever they want, but it’s impressive and encouraging that the Obama administration is forcefully keeping Fox away with a 20′ pole.  After all, there are thousands (millions?) of opinion-holders out there.  They can’t all get into Presidential press briefings.  Those should be reserved for widely accepted news outlets.

The difference between this administration and the Bush cabal in this arena is stark.  Bush’s cronies used Fox and other non-serious groups (remember the non-credentialed gay prostitute who was allowed into press briefings to lob softballs to the Boy King?) to push their agenda on America by force.  Obama and his staff are serious about actually governing the country.

Cheney’s Daughter Is A Serious Foreign Policy Expert?

The Cons live in a very strange world.  It’s a world in which the “free-market” supposedly fixes everything by itself and so is pursued with religious vigor that would make Orthodox followers scratch their heads.  It’s a world in which every dark-skinned person in a viable, current threat to the safety and security of the Cons’ gated communities, except for the ones that are rich (see: Saudi Arabian royalty, etc).  It’s a world in which the term climate-change is a far-left conspiracy theory that has somehow grabbed power in nearly every country’s government, that nearly every scientist is somehow a part of and that nearly every media outlet is somehow a part of to boot.  It doesn’t have to make sense to the rest of us – the Cons excel at cognitive dissonance.

In this fantasy land, the daughter of the last Vice-President Puppet-Master is somehow considered to be a leader in developing Con opposition to President Obama’s foreign policy initiatives.  Never mind that saying the President’s foreign policies weren’t in America’s interests got you labeled “traitor” and “terrist-lover” by the same Cons just one short year ago.  The difference was the “President” was a Con, so his directives comes down from up-high, don’tcha know?  Now that the President is a half-black man, all that is out the window.  Nothing President Obama can or will do will ever be good enough for these rigid ideologues.

Gun Dealers Break Laws; Conservatives Don’t Care

I always wondered how airtight the federal law to require a background check be done on potential gun purchasers were.  I wasn’t sure private gun sellers would actually, you know, follow the law.  More on that in a sec.  Well, it turns out, a majority of private gun sellers in an investigation didn’t follow the law!  The law is quite simple, you see.  If a private seller “knows” or “has reason to believe” the buyer is a criminal, it is illegal to sell the gun to them.  So let’s set up a crazy hypothetical situation: imagine if a potential gun buyer told a private gun seller that they wouldn’t pass a background check.  According to the law, what do you suppose the seller is supposed to do?  Not sell them the freaking gun!!!!!

Now, I didn’t suppose that a majority of private gun sellers would break the law, knowingly or otherwise, but reality has a mean way of breaking you down.  A full 63% of private sellers at gun shows tested were all too willing to sell to buyers who admitted up front that they would fail the background test.  When conservatives talk about “American values”, it would be nice if they would occasionally include following laws.  But as has become all too clear, conservatives don’t think laws actually apply to them.  They’re special!  Laws are for dirty liberals, not country-loving patriots, dont’cha know?  The video at this link demonstrates how many true patriots this country really has.  Watch it in all it’s glory.

A quick question: how many convicted felons have acquired guns this way?  How much extra crime has been committed in this country thanks to law-breaking gun “rights”-as-a-religion fanatics?

On a related note, pay attention to the sellers.  Do you detect a pattern?  Aside from the fact that too many of them laugh when they’re told the buyer wouldn’t pass a background check, that is.

Oh, the 2nd part of the lede?  That’s an acknowledgment to the diarist’s point that conservatives hosed their shorts getting ACORN’s funding revoked.  Where are they on real, excessive law breaking?  Looking for their next mythical liberal conspiracy to break up, probably.

Climate Bill Action In The Senate – 9/30/09

The Senate version of the 2009 energy and climate bill, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, has made some small progress this week.  The draft version of their version of the legislation, largely constructed thanks to Sen. Boxer and Sen. Kerry, is reported to include a 20% reduction of 2005 GHG emissions by 2020, which is slightly better than the 17% goal in the House ACES bill.  This version should have been released after a 11:30A EDT press event in D.C. today.  Like the House bill, a cap-and-trade system is established.  Also, pollution allowances will be generated, but no distribution plan has been laid out yet.

It is well worth noting that GHG emissions are estimated to have been reduced by 6% below 2005 levels thanks to the Republican’s Great Recession.  So the 20% reduction is really an additional 14% reduction, according to the Senate version, and an additional 11% reduction according to the House version.  Which means it is very, very doable.  Energy efficiency measures alone would likely help us achieve those reductions in time for the 2020 goal.  Between now and then, as climate change effects continue to take hold, and political willpower to do something about climate change hopefully grows, technologies will be developed and marketed and it will become normal to reduce our greenhouse forcing.

Why Climate Action Is Lacking

From Paul Krugman’s Sunday op-ed [emphasis mine]:

But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.

Indeed.  The G20 summit meeting that just ended failed to come up with any kind of viable plan or steps toward establishing a plan wherein developed nations would pay for the low-carbon development and emissions reductions their actions necessitate.  The result is the continuation of an immoral failure of the U.S. and other nations.  We are not the greatest nations on Earth.  We are countries of unsustainable resource consumers hell-bent on leaving future generations a severely depleted planet.

Study: $1240 TRILLION In Costs Due To Climate Change With No Adaptation

Many scientists and activists have stated, with good reason, that the 2007 IPCC 4th Assessment Report (4AR) didn’t look deeply enough into the potential costs of doing nothing to change the globe’s GHG emissions.  The good news is that in addition to developing a more robust research methodology to dig into the unknowns of the science surrounding climate change, work has also taken place to assign realistic figures of the costs of adapting to climate change.  The figures available for the past few years were viewed as having major shortcomings: unrealistic assumptions, not accounting for enough of the effects (which have interdependencies and feedbacks of their own), etc.

A new study was issued earlier this month by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) that worked to address some of those concerns.  For reference, I’m going to discuss the Section 8 material.  It is not without its own set of caveats and disadvantages: it looks at the IPCC A2 scenario, for instance, even though our actual emissions have already outpaced this mid-range emissions scenario.  There’s another equally out-dated caveat that I’ll talk about more below.  So, take the results with a grain of salt – realize that these costs continue to be an underestimate of what we’re likely to face!

With that in mind, what are some of the results of this study?  Without adaptation, the mean net present value of climate change impacts under the A2 scenario is $1240 Trillion.