It's On

President Obama officially began his reelection campaign with speeches before 14,000 in Ohio and  8,000 in Virginia.  With a slightly new color scheme, a new play-off song (The Boss singing "We Take Care of Our Own") and a new slogan, he wrapped the speech with the assurance that the campaign this time is also about hope and change--the change that he started, but needs to be completed.

He warned the crowds of the millions that would be spent on negative ads, and his opponent asking the question of whether you are better off now than before the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression (kind of a trick question.)  He said the question should be, will we be better off in the future?  His speech made the case that his policies, his achievements and his proposals for a second term would move the country towards a better future for all, not just the super-rich. 

Here's that part of the text:

"Over and over again, they will tell you that America is down and out, and they'll tell you who to blame, and ask if you're better off than you were before the worst crisis in our lifetime," Obama said. "The real question - the question that will actually make a difference in your life and in the lives of your children - is not just about how we're doing today. It's about how we'll be doing tomorrow."

Read more here: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2012/05/05/2056162/in-launching-2012-bid-obama-targets.html#storylink=cpy

He said that the Romney campaign is about turning back to the failed policies of the past (sometimes, as in the case of affordable contraceptives and equal opportunity for women, to the distant past), in the belief that in their dissatisfaction Americans won't remember the consequences of those policies from the Bush years.  But he asserted "We were there, we remember, and we're not going back."   In one of his strongest lines, President Obama linked this with the bloody battles he fought in his presidency to make progress, as well as the legacy of such struggles in the past that he called upon in 2008:  "We've gone through too much to turn back now."

The crowd in Ohio was larger because the venue held more people.  The Virginia crowd seemed livelier, responding more quickly and more loudly.  Among the lines that got the most applause in both places--but especially in Ohio--was about the clean energy future not only for an economic future but "for the safety of our planet."

The rallies also revealed that if President Obama is the best politician in America, Michelle Obama is a close second.  Her opening speeches were tremendously affecting and effective.  Once Bill Clinton gets out there, and with Joe Biden doing what he does best, this is a formidable team.

Then there's the Obama campaign, and for all the noise about it, the early indications are that it's just as smart and dedicated, and even stronger.  TPM drew a number of contrasts between Obama and Romney campaign events (including Romney's crowds being in the hundreds, and the Obama crowds being way more diverse), and here's a striking one:

Supporters at Obama’s rally in Virginia were given homework – the campaign and the speakers on stage (including Obama) urged them to sign up with the campaign and register voters. First Lady Michelle Obama even reminded the college kids in the audience to change their registrations if they’re moving over the summer. Everywhere you turned, supporters were being asked to hand the Obama campaign a phone number, address or social media account handle.

This is not the scene at a Romney rally, generally. While campaign staff often sign up supporters with clipboards, voter registration booths and social media stations (both fixtures of Obama’s Virginia rally) are nowhere to be found. And Ann and Mitt Romney rarely, if ever, talk about voter registration."

I keep thinking of that Times story about organized and funded  Obama campaign efforts to register voters even in states that have made this more difficult.  Even the League of Women Voters is too intimidated to register in Florida.  But not the Obama campaign.  That says a lot.

I've also been thinking that I want to enjoy this.  There is something to the "happy warrior" idea.  Hubert Humphrey got that nickname when he fought for civil rights and progressive causes, win or lose, he kept fighting.  With President Obama, there's not so much frustration with the message or the way it is articulated as I've sometimes felt in past campaigns.  I know who's side I'm on, and I'm all for taking in all the emotion of fighting the good fight.  I wouldn't be surprised if this is the last presidential campaign I'll follow closely.  So I'm going to embrace this one for every moment I can.    

                                     I still believe in global warming.  Do you?

The latest Rabid Right madness manifested as a billboard showing Ted Kacziynski (The Unabomber) with those words under it, "I still believe in global warming.  Do you?" It was sponsored by the increasingly notorious Heartland Institute.  It immediately drew more attention than any effort of say 350.org to publicize their Climate Impacts Day of action, which is today (Saturday May 5.)

What is actually newsworthy about this is that a firestorm of criticism--including from GOPers--forced the Institute to take it down.   And presumably to scuttle their announced plan to add to the series the faces of Fidel Castro, Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden.  I wish I could say this story is from the Onion, but it's from a Bangor, Maine newspaper.

But good marketing ideas never die.  I'm starting my own series right here, with the image above.

 Meanwhile, NASA has been studying the changes in Arctic ice:  "And it now appears that changes in Arctic sea ice affect everything from weather in Europe to the amount of sunlight the Earth absorbs. "The once seemingly insignificant and remote Arctic region is now understood to be intimately connected to the rest of the planet," noted Goddard Space Flight Center's Nathan Kurtz in a post from the field in late March."

A study of Greenland ice says that while melting is not at a worst-case-scenario speed, it has speeded up to a faster rate than UN projections from 2008, and threatens the world's coastal cities with a 3 ft. rise (together with other factors) by the end of the century. “’Glacial pace’ is not slow anymore,” said study author Twila Moon, a glacier researcher at the University of Washington.

As for Connect the Dots day, I wish I could say that I even understand what they're doing, but I am clearly not their demographic.  Best of luck to them anyway.  For the record, here is what Bill McKibben says is happening:

"We desperately need to put real human faces on climate change — to make sure that people understand it’s not an abstraction and a future threat, but a very present and very real crisis. And a crisis with solutions — in many places people are putting up green dots of hope, at their solar panels and windmills. (At my mom’s retirement home the residents are heading out to dig a big new community garden!)

So please: if you can spare an hour or two for the planet on 5/5, make sure you go to climatedots.org to find out where the nearest action is, and make sure you call a few friends and get them to come with you. We won’t solve climate change in a single day — but if we don’t manage to show our fellow citizens that it’s a problem, we’ll never solve it.

And here’s the thing — you’ll have a good time. On too many occasions we ask you to do really hard things, like get arrested. This action is crucial but simple — just lend your body for a little while to make the most important point we can make right now.

We’re asking everyone, at every local event, to take a photo of their “climate dot” and upload it to our website — and we’ll assemble those images into a global mosaic that puts a real human face on climate change. Our crew at 350.org will do everything we can to deliver your photos and stories to the media and decision-makers the world over. We can't let our elected officials pretend that this crisis is still in the future, and we’ll make sure our actions on 5/5 are a crucial first step to get global leaders to connect the dots on climate change."

The Depression They Believe In

Paul Krugman has a new book with a very provocative and timely title: End This Depression Now!  I haven't yet read it but here are the major points he's making in interviews:

We may no longer be in an economic recession, but we are functionally in a depression, though not as great as the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Krugman points out that within the Great Depression period were years when the U.S. economy grew, just not enough to rebalance the economy and in particular, not enough to re-employ enough people and otherwise end the misery.  This is the state of things now.

The stock market crash precipitated the Great Depression, and the financial crash of 2008 precipitated this one, though in both cases there was a long period of preparation.  One of the factors was the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, with a commensurate rise in real poverty at the other end. 

While figuring out all the right moves to make in 2009 in order to get the U.S. economy back on track was complicated, the way to pull the U.S. out of its current depression now (Krugman says) is relatively simple.  Government spending to stimulate the economy is what works, and smart government spending works better.  It might have been difficult in 2009 to identify what this money should be spent on, but now the situation makes it pretty clear.

State and local governments have been savaged during the Great Recession, and have shed about 600,000 jobs, most of them serving a public good, if not utterly essential to civic well-being and to both the short and long term economic future.  In this period, the natural growth in government jobs (responding to population growth etc.) would be an additional 700,000 jobs.

That adds up to 1.3 million jobs, and if the federal government would simply sign those paychecks for awhile, it would in itself generate enough economic activity to lower the unemployment rate to under 7% in 18 months.  This might well be enough to start the "virtuous circle" of people spending, and business responding to new demand by employing more people, who will spend that money, etc.  This would End This Depression Now!

What makes this especially possible now, Krugman said, is that some of the other weaknesses in the economy are healing.  Household debt was a huge problem, and it is down substantially.  The housing market is poised to come back because of pent-up demand.  Those additional paychecks and the economic activity they generate would likely to go spending (rather than paying down debt) and the pent-up demand for housing would be a natural place for some of that spending to go.  Since the housing market is a particular drag on the economy, that would be good.

What we cannot do, he says, is follow the European example and go for austerity.  Those governments that have cut back spending substantially have further weakened their economies.  The U.S. debt is manageable, and although federal spending on "entitlements" is an issue that may well need to be addressed, it doesn't require that spending be cut now or in the near future. 

Here's the Reuters report on Krugman's book that gives some of the economic background concerning Europe.

I'm sure Krugman makes fact-based arguments in favor of this thesis, but even without reading his book (and unfortunately not reading his column as much as I used to), all of this makes a lot of sense to me.

With high unemployment over the past three plus years and dropping slowly, the income of the very rich growing fast, and the incomes of the 99% stagnating or dropping, and especially with the extent of poverty in America--the highest percentage the Census Bureau has measured in 52 years--it's not much of a stretch to conceptualize this as a depression.

As for the solution, I've been noting the drag on the employment figures each month by continuing job losses in state and local governments.  Here in California, austerity in state government is crippling education, and ruining the state university system, a process over years that I've watched up close and personally.  Unemployment and insecurity for teachers, police, fire, EMTs, etc. is truly depressing to communities in all senses of the word.  And clearly these are overwhelmingly jobs that are necessary to the public good, and necessary to the short and long term economy.

I'm not sure if Krugman goes into the politics of this, but that's what's driving this.  Our current political polarization tracks neatly with the growing income inequality (as graph-happy Rachel showed on Tuesday.)  GOPers promoting federal austerity and trying to panic people about the deficit (which they by the way created entirely in the Bush years) are not just serving a high-sounding ideology.  Nor are they only trying to keep taxes low for the very wealthy (since that's where voters would want the government to look for the money necessary to pay for 1.3 million government workers), although that is certainly a mighty motivation.

No, there's very clear and present party- political motivation.  It should be remembered a day after May Day, the international workers day, that the once powerful economic and political force of labor unions have faded to almost nothing in the private sector.  The strongest unions represent workers in the public sector, especially state and local government employees.  Rabid Right GOPer legislatures and governors have been busy trying to end union rights for public sector unions quite directly in several states.  But the indirect method--or maybe it's the more direct method--is just as effective: get rid of the employees altogether, at least until you can get rid of the unions.

And in fact, that's where the biggest drops in government employment have been--in these very red states (doing nothing for their economies except weakening them, or or their state budgets, since they typically lower taxes for corporations and rich people.)  Unions of course are the largest financial backers of Democratic candidates, and their members provide a lot of political organizing.  It's another partisan political attack without conscience, without regard for other consequences, like the laws to make voting and registering harder for certain people.

Krugman's book comes at a fascinating moment--just as the Obama campaign is gearing up, and as President Obama is providing the rationale for the government's role.  It will be interesting to see if proposals like Krugman's become an explicit part of the President's agenda this summer.    

One more point.  Krugman mentioned that he hoped the entitlement problem (Medicare & Medicaid) can be addressed in the long run largely by bringing down health care costs themselves.  This was a major intention of the Affordable Care Act.  Even before the Act takes full effect, there are signs that health care costs are stabilizing, as cost containment mechanisms begin to take hold, and thousands of seniors are seeing billions in savings on their medicines.  

Where the Wars Will End

Tonight President Obama addressed the nation from Afghanistan, where he signed the agreement that leads to the end of the war, on the first anniversary of the action he ordered that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

Pundits swarmed afterwards to say how complicated and fraught the situation still is, and how many ways it could all collapse.  I don't think the American people actually care anymore what happens to Afghanistan.  They want the war to be over.

President Obama refocused Afghanistan as much as he could on dismantling al Qeda, and in his address he made it clear that this is the objective, and continuing a large U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan is no longer necessary to that end.  That's also what the American people wanted: the terrorist threat to be crippled.  Osama bin Laden's death or capture was probably necessary to allow a U.S. president to get us out of Afghanistan, and so this address was more than symbolic on this anniversary.

As I listened, I could feel the accumulated weariness of so much war.  Vietnam exhausted my generation to a point that has still not been fully reckoned.  Then El Salvador--does anybody remember the proxy war in El Salvador, the Contras?--further poisoned the poisonous 80s.  And the horrible Iraq aggression further sucked the life out of this country in so many ways. 

The military-industrial complex has been the most direct way the 1% has used government to enrich itself.  That as much as anything explains these awful years, and all the lives lost and ruined and diverted over these decades. 

It's still possible that this carefully geopolitical policy will yield some pleasant surprises, like an actual coalition government in Afghanistan.  But who really cares anymore?  Just so it is over.  For most Americans, it is over.  President Obama made sure to mention the country's obligations to the veterans who executed this policy, and paid for it in some very sad ways.  We must make sure they are not casualities of our exhaustion.  Otherwise, we're probably too tired and sick at heart to celebrate.  But it will be over.  And we have at least a chance--financially , politically and morally--to address our real problems, the real threats to our country and the world.   

The Dog's Tale

As effective a political video the "Forward" video is (see the post below), the fake campaign ad President Obama unveiled during his White House Press Association Dinner stand-up comedy is more subtle (and of course funnier) in registering the political differences.  It starts at 12:14 of this video of his entire speech, and it is ostensibly from a Romney-supporting independent group ( the Woofpac) criticizing Obama for how he treats his dog Bo and praising Romney for allowing his dog to ride on top of the car where he has the freedom to feel the wind in his fur.  Beneath the jokes, and with a pitch perfect imitation of actual GOPer attack ads--including footage they haven't yet used taking out of context President Obama's gestures while telling a children's story on the White House lawn-- the political metaphors are almost perfect.

 The ad criticizes Obama for coddling his dog, for government mandates, socialism, etc., while Romney supports a dog's freedom.  The last image shows what that freedom means--the dog in a pet carrier strapped to the top of Air Force One.  It is exactly the difference between the phony catch-all image of "freedom" as Romney uses it (freedom from taxes for the wealthy, freedom from government, its benefits and protections for everyone else, plus the freedom to pay the price for the consequences of what the greedy 1% does to steal wealth from everyone else.) It's the difference in the result for the 1% (the freedom to ride in luxury) versus what this brand of "freedom" means for the 99%--confined inside a kennel and strapped to the fast-moving vehicle, where--as everyone knows by now--Romney's actual dog got sick.  Get sick with Romney and you're on your own in your spacious kennel.  Don't bother the Romneys--they're going places, on a schedule, and everything else be damned.

 Not only does the fake ad draw this contrast--it brings out a little of why this story of Romney and his dog resonates on its own.  There's the clueless selfish disregard and lack of compassion for dependent companions, first of all. But there's also that feeling of separation, between the wealth winners (by any means necessary) and everybody else, the people that John Boener characterized Monday as "the losers."  That's a Romney word--a Richie Richney word--for the 99%.

The Past As Prologue

This seven minute video unveils the new Obama campaign slogan, but more impressively, it states the Obama record in a compelling way.  I watched it with an eye to the accuracy of its claims, and the only one that I could recall credible dissent on would be the claims on the extent of Wall Street reform legislation.  For some environmentalists, record oil and gas production might not be a big positive, and there's no direct claims on progress towards meeting the Climate Crisis challenge, although the factual claims on increased emphasis on green energy are substantive.  Otherwise the list of accomplishments and promises kept is kind of amazing.

 And if--as some pundits say--this isn't the political grounds for President Obama's reelection, then what's the point?  If there is no reward for keeping promises and effecting positive change--even if it isn't all you wanted--where's the motivation to risk anything to accomplish anything?  You can do what GOPers are trying to do--use the same putatively attractive phrases that were used to devastating effect when acted upon, and trust that the heaven they conjure in people's heads will blot out the hell they caused, which we're still experiencing?

     

Get Ready

The upcoming 2012 election is like none in my lifetime, and very possibly none in a lot longer than that.  It comes closest to 1964, when the ideological right wing of the Republican party captured the presidential nomination from its establishment centrists and nominated Barry Goldwater to challenge incumbent (though unelected) President Lyndon Johnson.

Now suddenly in the past 4 years, the Republican party has destroyed its centrist segment and has become the most ideologically driven party in a century or more.  This election looks more like a European parliamentary election (though the winner won't necessarily have the power to govern, as the European government would have to) or even more like an attempted elective coup.  But calling it an ideology is too generous.  It's a Dark Ages cult.  It is a party incapable of governing or participating in a democratic government.

It's not just me noticing this, of course.  Here's exactly what T. Goddard's Political Wire grabbed from Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein's analysis in the Washington Post: "We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party." "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." "When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges."  

The entire analysis, which is worth reading, supports this excerpt. 

Not content with screwing with the filibuster and other undemocratic tactics, not content with relentless systematic lying as a strategy to seize power, the GOPer zealots in the states have actually changed the law to limit the ability of citizens--especially of certain citizens--to be part of this democracy through the most essential and sacred method there is: voting. 

These laws are being challenged but that takes time.  The purpose was to win the White House in 2012, so it may not matter if the challenges succeed later.  However the Obama campaign is not ignoring this, nor is it sitting around moaning about it.  According to this report, the campaign is aggressively pursuing a "vote anyway" strategy, to obey the letter of these onerous laws to register new voters, and to educate voters on what they will need to do (like get and bring a photo ID) in order to vote. 

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.  Stick that up your legislatures, GOPer tyrants. 

Name That Majority

Rachel Maddow spotted and spotlit this paragraph in a Washington Post profile of two Rabid Right pols whose claim to fame is helping to create Rabid Right tyranny by scaring people about illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico: Kris Kobach and Michael Hethmon.  The graph quotes Hethmon:

Immigration is “on track to change the demographic makeup of the entire country. You know, what they call ‘minority-majority,’ ” said Hethmon, who is general counsel at the Washington-based Immigration Reform Law Institute. “How many countries have gone through a transition like that — peacefully, carefully? It’s theoretically possible, but we don’t have any examples.”

So if you were wondering why illegal immigration is such a big deal to these folks, apart from the usual cynical lying GOPer politics, you (as usual) won't find it in the facts.  Immigration from Mexico for instance is severely down from its peak, and because of demographics (fewer young Mexican men in the current and future generations) is unlikely to ever increase much. Border enforcement and other federal enforcement of illegal immigration is stronger. And (according to the new Pew study) at least as many Mexican families are leaving the U.S. to return to Mexico as are coming from Mexico to the U.S.  But the real "issue" is a certain political fear: a perceived threat to certain whites who are afraid of losing the "white" majority.

The economic impacts, good and bad, are highly debatable. So let's parse the racial issues.  Part of the impact of immigrants in a given town or city or region is cultural, if they are from unfamiliar places.  That's real, and it is also not new. Before the relatively recent waves of immigrants from southeast Asia and now from Mexico, there were the huge waves of poor people from Ireland, eastern Europe and Italy.

 Countries in Europe experiencing waves of immigration now, even greater in some respect than the U.S., are coping with the often difficult changes, especially when immigrants become the face of all the other change.  All this can inspire a panic turned into a principle of racial and national purity, which has its own ideologies or "pragmatic" fears (for Hethmon wants to sound pragmatic), along with lots of ugly history.  In its most obviously warped expression, it's behind the massacres that killed 77 people in Norway, most of them teenagers, by a man (now on trial) upset by the racial tolerance represented by broadcast of Roots and a popular children's song based on a Pete Seeger ditty about multiculturalism (which some 40,000 people sang to the murderer in Oslo on Thursday.)

But it's more than a racial rainbow that scares Hethmon, it's the end of the white majority, and therefore of white privilege and supremacy.  He is afraid of a "minority majority" in the U.S. caused by immigration.  First of all, he doesn't need to be afraid of new immigration--even without it, the minority majority is in the demographic cards.  The 2010 Census made it clear that we'll achieve this by the middle of this century.  There are already fewer white infants than non-whites.

To get a little personal, those of us of a certain age are watching the world we knew slip away, and it does cause anxiety.  We understand a world dominated by English-speaking white people, English/American institutions and culture.  Even those of us who welcome the wisdoms and liveliness of other cultures into the common culture, are nervous about being overwhelmed by intrusions, and by what we cannot understand.  But let's face it--that applies as least as much to the world of a thousand aps and computer viruses as it does to an influx of other languages and behaviors from other countries.    

But that's very minor stuff compared to the fears of people like Hethmon. What really scares Hethmon? I don't think it's what he says (societal stability, more or less), at least not directly.  What threatens Hethmon and GOPers is finally out in the open--it is the loss of their political control.  That's why this virulent anti-immigration scare stuff is of a piece with voter suppression and other efforts to maintain their control, to keep minorities out of democracy, and (in Michigan for instance) democracy out of minority communities.  That they are likely Democratic voters is of course the proximate reason but probably not the entire one.  White supremacy--their supremacy--is the motive, and he all but announces it.

  Hethmon refers to the lack of any precedent of a peaceful, careful transition.  Well, "careful" is about control, and we don't control who has children, at least not yet, although we can carefully manage any sort of transition--that's what governments are supposed to do, by matching support and solution  to need, with housing, community support, employment policies as well as law enforcement.  But peaceful?  No such transition is possible without violence?  There is no precedent for this?

In a way he's correct.  There was violence and people died--mostly black people--in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.  On the other hand, you could hardly call African Americans "immigrants." There was also violence involved in the 20th century union movement, mostly by police and agents of the 1%.   For the union movement was largely representing prior waves of immigrants, who were the workers in American industries--in the textile mills, the mines, the steel mills. 

But these were white immigrants, weren't they?  Not always by the definitions of the times.  Even in the 1920s, Italians--with dark skin, hair and eyes (like those in the top photo, or to the right)--were considered black.  Polish and other eastern Europeans may have been pale, but they were--in an expression that survived in Pennsylvania well into the second half of the 20th century--Not Quite White.  For Hitler, these folks weren't "white" or Aryan at all--they were racially inferior and planned for eradication.  The extermination of the Jews was to be just the first act, partly to test the equipment.

If you go by early 20th century definitions, the U.S. is already a minority majority country and has been for at least half a century--not entirely without trouble, but successfully.  Of course, many of the participants don't choose to see it that way.  Some of the most rabid oppressors of new minorities have been and are from these nationalities, previously scorned as Not Quite White.  This entire concept of "race" is fraught.  There's no more scientific justification for it.  It's all about other things now.  And one of those things is power-and-wealth.

But Hethmon and the white supremacist police state that the GOPers support is also congruent with their anti-Obama racism.  This is yet another test of the strength of the American constitutional system and the American culture in creating common ground as a civil culture, as a self-governing society.  In the end, all the issues about economic fairness, equal opportunity, tax equity, equality before the law, rights of women and members of all other groups--they all come down to this: the basis for self-government.  Because without these, we're seeing the future in Michigan (where state appointed dictators negate elected officials) and in the laws passed by GOPer legislatures and signed by GOPer governors that dictate to doctors how to treat their patients, that take away rights of individuals to govern their own bodies and lives, that substitute the rule of the few--including the wealthy 1%--for self-government.  That's the minority we really need to be worried about.

Oh Yeah

The Big Pivot

Leaving the other GOPer clowns weeping, Richie Richney cleaned up in Tuesday's primaries and made a speech billed as the beginning of his general election campaign.  It was the Big Pivot, to a generalized, positive, and severely poll-tested campaign.

Gone was the podium with "Obama Isn't Working" on it (among other things, another dog whistle for old white guys who remember the stereotype of the lazy Negro)--Tuesday it was "A Better America" begins today, presumably chosen after focus groups indicated that "A Worse America" wouldn't really sell.

MSNBC showed most of it, and afterwards their resident GOPer Steve Schmidt was psyched.  If Richney can keep to this, he can win, said Steve.  Rachel thought not--but Rachel's been paying attention, and Richney has already started contradicting his previously stated positions. 

For all the noise to be endured (or ignored) for the next several months, one basic question might well be: are people making up their minds now (there's some historical evidence that this happens in the spring before the election, and then people just turn the campaign off, or else just follow their candidate) or is the decisive slice of the electorate going to start paying attention in October and make up their minds the weekend before the election?

There's no way to answer this unfortunately.  Throw in variables like early voting (and the new limitations on early voting--or voting at all--in Florida and elsewhere) and the new data-rich Internet toys, and it's all pretty unpredictable.  But Schmidt could be right--if the economy is below a lot of expectations, and Richney can sell himself as a viable alternative, low-info voters may throw up their hands and vote for him as the Other Guy (not to mention The White Guy.) 

Right now the numbers are really against him.  President Obama may have a lock on Latino majorities, and they are a big factor in 7 of the 9 swingiest of the swing states.  Still, the movement towards Obama particularly among women was fast, and if those issues fade, who knows what will happen. 

If you're out of scary thoughts, though, here's one: for Richney to win, figures Ezra Klein,  it would take a GOPer surge that would mean a GOPer controlled Congress--and so Richney could actually enact big chunks of the far right agenda.  It could be like Wisconsin, or Florida, or PA, but for the whole U.S.!  Yippee!  On the other hand, Klein writes, if Obama wins he might well still be stuck with a GOPer House, and not enough Dems to deal with filibusters in the Senate.  Same old same old.

Yup, scary.  But once again I heretically suggest, a big Obama/Dem victory could mean returning control of the House to the Dems and retaining the Senate. No one knows what the political landscape would look like then, depending on how this election plays out.  And this campaign.  There's a lot at stake.  And President Obama knows it.  Despite the GOPer noise machine that the establishment media echoes religiously (Pew once again noting that the only candidate in the past few months to get more negative than positive coverage was President Obama), and all the monied mudslides ahead, President Obama is still the best campaigner out there.  This could even be fun.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“The task of astrology, as that of any helping or healing profession, is to teach us how to carry each moment elegantly, with dignity, for it is the manner in which we receive ourselves that determines whether we grieve or sing, whether what we hear in ourselves is a cacaphony or a melody, whether in that moment we stumble or we dance.”

Charles Ponce’

Addenda

  In my Earth Day post, I was less than optimistic about the news that Americans are increasingly believing that the Climate Crisis is real, and is intensifying the recent insane weather in many parts of the country.  But I don't dismiss the possibility that this could be the pivot point, when this country really begins to move in the direction of openly and directly confronting the causes and effects of the Climate Crisis.

It's also possible that this may happen more or less by itself, but it seems to me that it will take some expert moves by leaders who must do a much better job of talking about the Climate Crisis and the urgent need to confront it.  I'm not in position to talk about the effectiveness of twittering our way to that end, as my skepticism is obvious.  I don't get the political advantage to be gained by claiming credit where it is not due, as in the perhaps temporary defeat of the tar sands pipeline.  I've noticed that the Climate Crisis demonstrators around the White House have taken credit effectively enough to be given it in the media.  But as I've noted before, the pipeline failed to win approval for reasons other than the tar sands contribution to the Climate Crisis, and if that is not clear to them yet, it will make the politics of achieving a permanent solution all the more difficult, as well as becoming bewildering and painful for those protesters.

In an earlier post I awarded the white male vote to Romney, and suggested that pandering to this sector is a prime cause of the increasingly racist subtext of the Romney campaign.  This needs some elaboration. Romney has a slight lead among white males--largely because of his very large lead among older white males.  And as an older white male I am all too aware of real bias against older people (anyone over 50 is virtually unemployable in any new job or capacity) and the real suffering among older white men in particular.  The fact that the face of the 1% is old and white and male (though there are plenty of female members) doesn't justify stereotyping the rest of us in the 99%, even in the lower depths of it.  Nor does being white and male and older mean we are all racists and sexists and so on.  And don't get me started on the academic idiocies concerning Dead White Male writers... 

So I am not at all saying that white males can't delude themselves into believing Romney will make things better for them, without themselves being racists.  But the R campaign's attempt to encourage and inflame scapegoating is clear, and I still believe it's going to increase, perhaps to a very ugly and dangerously out of control level.

Finally, an addendum to several political posts in the past.  Months ago, the pundit priesthood was declaring that there were but three reasonable possibilities for the 2012 presidential election outcome: a close election with President Obama or the Republican nominee winning, or a GOPer landslide.  I had a different opinion: I saw a very reasonable possibility being an Obama landslide.  Well, it seems the priestly opinion has moved in my direction.

It's Take Your Planet to Lunch Day!

Earth Day--what does it mean anymore?  If Christmas is the day you eat too much and celebrate and maybe think a little about sharing etc. then Earth Day is a day to party in the outdoors while making Earth Day resolutions and maybe considering the planet as a priority.  For a little while.

That won't do.  But it is worth concentrating for a moment on what gets swept away in the swiftly shifting and inflated obsession of the moment, or even in the sustained effort (or sustained emotion) required to address some worthy and for the moment all-important goal.  But then there's the Earth perspective.  Which has a definite impact on the human civilization perspective.  So from that perspective, when there's not enough fresh water to drink and food to eat, it'll be nice knowing that you can be married to the person you're dying with, even if you're gay.  And when it's too hot to breathe or think, won't it be great if you've got  a middle class house that's powerless now because the system has melted and/or been eaten by rodents and cockroaches, or universal  health insurance for a health system in complete chaos due to rampant epidemics.

When it started, Earth Day was political first, personal second, in the sense that personal behavior, spirituality etc. was part of it but not the part that got people into the streets.  In recent years, it's the personal--all the ways you can save the Earth by recycling your plastic bottles (but heaven forbid anybody suggests you try holding onto your cell phone one minute after there's a new version--into the waste stream with that!)

The facts seem to be that both are necessary and neither can be neglected.  A lot of CO2 need not poison the atmosphere of the future if we'd insulate houses and build them in better ways.  On the other hand, more than 90% of the water that humans use is used by agriculture and industry (as Derrick Jensen pointed out recently.)  Residential consumption of energy is less than a quarter of the total.  And so on.  The consumption of energy, water, land, and the chemicals that are poisoning the planet as well as the production of waste is almost all by industry, including industrial farming.  How their buildings are built is far more destructive than residences, although the land use issues of how we organize where we live is itself a fairly big factor. 

So all of that requires political control, which of course is why we're told again and again--by these corporations and the politicians they've purchased--that government is bad, it stifles "freedom" and it wastes taxpayer's money.  (Whose money do you think the corporations are wasting, by the way? Or are you getting all your stuff for free?  Do you think it would cost less if you weren't paying for lobbyists, political donations and "issue" advertising? )

We could accentuate the positive.  A new poll shows that thanks to the unignorable extreme weather, more Americans believe that global heating is real and is making the weather more extreme.  On the other hand, I expect most Americans agree that massive oil spills, say in the Gulf of Mexico, that go on for months--those are bad.  But since the last one two years ago (as Rachel Maddow demonstrated on Friday), absolutely nothing has been done to prevent the next one, or to be better prepared for another such spill.

Meanwhile, the effects on the Gulf's ecology, on the fish, the habitat, etc. are still accumulating.  There are dire effects on human health as well.  The effects are expected to continue for decades, though the cumulative effects can't be predicted.  So--not great evidence for an adequate practical response to a catastrophe everybody saw unfold on their screens over months.  If the causes and effects of this oil spill haven't been addressed, what hope is there for the attention and will necessary to deal with the substantially by orders of magnitude greater Climate Crisis cause and effects? 

There's even practical good news: a study that says that carbon capture from power stations is feasible--but it will require longterm government commitment.  And that of course is the problem.  There's a lot of good news in fact---clean energy is becoming cheaper and more efficient and more powerful. (And no, those wind farms aren't killing off the birds.) With more research money almost unimaginable breakthroughs are possible.  But gearing up takes large scale, long term commitment--the kind that government is best suited to provide, and which in some cases it is the only entity that can handle it.  But we can't even really talk about this--we're engaged in some hopelessly primitive debate in which one side's philosophy has been a catastrophic failure, and they are doubling down on it.  And we're not debating what it is essential to debate.  However, if this election is lost to Romney and the Republicans, it's pretty much game over.  So we have no alternative but to engage in it.

Earth Day began in the U.S.  We're arguing now over what "American" means.  When you look at the U.S. in comparison with the rest of the world, it seems a self-contradiction.  But I don't think that all the strange reversals are inconsistent.  The U.S. now has comparatively bad public education, lower literacy, higher poverty, higher infant mortality. Our rich are richer and everybody else is poorer, and we're near the bottom in upward economic mobility, into the middle class. The U.S. is virtually alone among democratic nations or even industrial-age nations in having no universal health care, a death penalty, and a very high proportion of its citizenry in prison.  We also lead the planet in guns, and in the circumstances where concealed firearms are legal. 

These are not bizarre coincidences.  This is a pattern.  The United States is a plutocracy with a democratic Constitution.  It has been for a long time, perhaps for its entire existence.  But it started really going bad in the late 19th century, when Mark Twain was making a political analysis in the 1870s that could describe the 1920s and the 21st century so far.  There were some important changes, wrought by leaders we revere, though not all of us for the same reasons.  But those changes have largely been eroded or reversed, and the rest are under sustained attack in 2012.  It's a defensive battle when it needs to be a time of shared vision and positive change.

Now it's no longer just North America that's affected, nor even the West, nor just the global economy.  It's the Earth.  The tension between a ruling plutocracy and the democratic Constitution--of the values and vision of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, JFK and now President Obama--versus the power of the plutocracy and the darkness of ignorance it stirs up, is a battle for the planet.  Although sadly the Earth is not the stated primary issue.  But the Earth as we know it is the ground of any future. 

But we live now, and not for long.  We live in as much harmony with the planet as we can not only for the future but for ourselves, in all our dimensions.  We make the future the work of the present, as we allow ourselves to be what we are, part of the life of this living Earth.                

Nuns Sent to the Office

The current mess in the American Catholic Church has definite parallels to the general American political mess, with its sudden and violent moves to the farthest right and the reaction to the reactionaries.  But by its nature, and by my experience, it suggests dimensions that aren't always clear in the larger political culture.

By its nature it reminds us of moral dimensions and moral stakes involved in politics.  It reminds us of the moral --I think you can call it moral--call of the American founding documents, and of the practical conflicts this sometimes creates for American Catholics when their church leaders conflict with the moral basis of the country.

By experience, I see it with the education of twelve years in Catholic schools and my own involvement then in the Church, as well as reflecting on it all today.  And today, reading about some of the current--very current--controversies involving the Church, I reflected on the halls of high school, and how at a certain point there, imagining the Inquisition was not difficult.

The controversies involve: the Vatican coming down strong on the umbrella organization of U.S. Catholic nuns for insufficient zeal in attacking gay rights, abortion etc. in favor of too much progressive talk, particularly in listening to discussions at their convention that question and run counter to their orthodoxy. 

Believe me, it's a little hard for me to conceptualize nuns as champions of free speech and free thought, in the vanguard of progressive values and advocacy, but it is apparently so. (Apparently one change is that the nuns are more in control of the institutions they used to serve, for free.)  The response however is familiar.  It is also part of a pattern, some believe, in the current Pope being who many thought he was going to be when he became Pope in 2005, this century's Grand Inquistor.  It is happening when a far rightist Holocaust denier and his organization separated from the Church are apparently being welcomed back.   

Part of the trouble the nuns are in may well be their support of universal healthcare (something about healing the sick) and specifically the Affordable Care Act. (Operative graphs of the USA Today story: "(Many bishops were angered when LCWR and Network, along with the Catholic Health Association, endorsed President Obama's health care reform over the bishops' objections. LCWR and Network recently endorsed Obama's compromise with the bishop over a mandate to provide insurance coverage for birth control for employees at religious institutions, even as the bishops continue to fight it.")

  That refers to the U.S. Catholic bishops, and they have been all over the place on this, with some condemning especially the legal inclusion of the same health care provisions for employees of Catholic institutions serving the public as everybody else in the USA.  But the Bishops have also (as a group) condemned the rightist Paul Ryan budget for cutting food stamps and other provisions for the poor as "unjustified and wrong."

Ryan pushed back, saying this wasn't the view of all the Bishops.  He was probably thinking of the Bishop of Peoria, who distinguished himself this week by preaching from the pulpit at halftime of the Mass, likening President Obama to Hitler and Stalin for following an extremist path in oppressing the Church.  He should be--but probably won't be--getting another object lesson in the American Way, because making political statements in favor of or opposed to a candidate is a violation of the statutes granting the Church tax exempt status. 

So, ever since the kerfluffle over the contraception coverage, and viewing the disease of partisan religion imposing itself on the electoral process, I've been sent back in memory to my high school days, when our teachers (nuns and priests) kept repeating that you can't legislate morality.  Our President when my my h.s. sentence started (but not for long) was Kennedy, and the separation of Church and State was a principle it was impolitic to dispute.  It was also the time of Pope John XXIII (also not for long) and the Vatican Council, representing something of a liberalizing trend--bringing the Church into the 20th century--but also reemphasizing the moral need to address world hunger, disease and suffering caused by economic conditions, and the beginning of a moral case for concern over the world's natural environment. 

The current Pope represents movement in the opposite direction, but upon reflection there is one thing the two eras have in common: things are changing, and positive change--because there is a lot of it in the world--roils up the reactionaries, threatens the comfortable, and they in turn strengthen the most dogmatic.  There was strong conflict just in that strange high school building, not only among the nuns and priests and students there, but I'd bet within the nuns and priests themselves.  They contradicted themselves all the time.  Some of it was hypocrisy, some of it was probably confusion.  But that's where I learned the terrible energy and unrelenting force of righteous persecution.

It was happening when they couldn't quite keep the historical facts of the Inquisition hidden anymore.  What was in the textbooks was bad enough, but I was daring enough to read more about it at the public library, though only in the Catholic Encyclopedia, because I didn't want to fall into Error promoted by some agnostic intellectuals or, maybe worse, Protestants.  And what I read there was truly hair-raising.

As those nuns are learning now, the Catholic Church's official doctrine on the final supremacy of individual conscience, and the individual responsibility for his or her own soul, can become secondary, irrelevant or worse when the fervid fury of the Inquisition takes hold.  Then everything dark and treacherous about the uncontrolled unconscious, the nature of institutions and the panic of crowds is unleashed.

The Church has always been in conflict with itself.  There may be more like the Bishop of Peoria, but there was Dorothy Day, and the nuns and priests (more nuns than priests probably) who have sacrificed to make compassion and service their guiding principles.  I'm not a member anymore, but I know whose side I'm on.       

  Photo: Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Day           

Richie Richney's unforced error while supposedly campaigning on the theme of supporting small business in suburban Pittsburgh is already legend--and a video by the PA Dems.  He turned his nose up at cookies baked at a locally famous bakery, the kind of small business he was supposedly promoting.  It brought a day's fame to the baker who was obviously afraid to criticize the Rom., since he's an R himself. 

But it did elicit this classic line from Politico reporter John Heilman about Romney: "He is not comfortable, in many case, around ordinary human beings."

And a final word, about this week's polls.  They varied from CNN which showed President Obama with a 9 point lead, to NBC with 6 point lead, to several with smaller leads, to the NY Times as tied.  The margin of error is large for all of them.  Only the Gallup tracking poll has shown Romney with a lead, and I've seen the explanation from others in the polling business to the effect that Gallup uses a "likely voter" profile that skews heavily away from many groups that actually did vote for President Obama in 2008.  "Likely voter" models are not considered useful until after the political conventions.  I don't know about the Times poll, though.   

Romney's Business Plan

After but a week of the unofficial general election campaign, what do we know about what kind of candidate Mitt Romney is going to be?

Well, clearly he's going to be negative, at least for now and probably forever.  He's going around to speak behind podiums with words on them that are about President Obama and not about him.  That's a sign, literally.  But given that, what kind of negative is he going to be?  In this it seems he is going to be a uniquely disgusting candidate.

He's arrogant and dismissive in a way that no presidential candidate in my lifetime has been.  His message to President Obama to "start packing" gives you the tone.  Some have tied this to his personality, his sense of entitlement, but it's more than that.  Among the many polls that came out this week, two went into depth on characteristics and several polled categories of voters.  In characteristics--likeable, trustworthy, leadership, etc.--President Obama scored very high and Romney low.  But strategists can't put names to characteristics, while they can to categories or groups.  And nearly all the polls show that Romney is losing badly with women voters.  Enthusiasm among African Americans for President Obama is high.  And polls show that President Obama has an enormous lead among Latinos--for example, the Pew study which is more conservative in its outcomes than the CNN and NBC polls this week. 

So what category does that leave Romney?  White males.  So his dismissive tone may well be strategic, as it plays into racism that permeates that category from top to bottom.  It's worth noting that however small a percentage is overtly or generally racist, there is the more widespread tendency to pick a scapegoat from another group when things aren't going well.  Things haven't been going well for a long time for white men who've lost the entitlement they assumed--it is their standard of "fairness." It's our standard, I should say, except I'm aware of its unconscious workings enough to keep it from influencing too many of my political thoughts.  But if the economy does not improve fast enough, the irrational could take over--and that's what Richney's campaign is betting on.

But before I leave this let me assert again: the way he is doing this is not only deeply insulting, it's never been done before to my knowledge by one presidential candidate about another, let alone a sitting President, in a general election campaign since World War II at least.  Candidates might routinely talk about their opponent lacking experience, or being too young. But even though lots of people openly said that GW Bush was a dim bulb, neither Al Gore nor John Kerry ever said it, or even implied it.  They didn't say he was in over his head, although a lot of people thought so (which made the Saturday Night Live caricature so instantly popular even in the 2000 campaign.)  Romney is saying so, using those words.  Is it actually a coincidence that the first instance of this is a ultra-wealthy white man talking about the first black President?        

So what else have we learned about what candidate Richney will say?  We know he lies, frequently, in both large and small ways.  We are used to the kinds of political lies called exaggeration, selective memory and facts, "spin."  But Romney lies about almost everything--so frequently that the media can't keep up correcting those lies.

  Here's my favorite lie this week.  Romney justified not releasing more than one year of tax returns (plus his estimated taxes for this year) by saying that John Kerry only released two years.  He was lying, by a factor of ten.  When he ran for President, Kerry released not 3 or 5 or 10 years of returns, but 20.   Now think about this.  Romney volunteered an untrue factual statement (unnecessarily) and didn't correct it.  When has President Obama done this?  He failed to make a correct context for his remark about a Supreme Court action being "unprecedented" and he repeated a story from old history books about a long-gone President that turned out to be contradicted by new history books.  But an outright factual lie like this?  Yet Romney does this almost every day.

Lawrence O'Donnell has been forthright--and mercifully funny as well-- about Romney's lying but he also alerted me to this column by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

"A marathon of debates and an eon of campaigning have toughened and honed Romney. He commands the heights of great assurance, and he knows, as some of us learn too late in life, that the truth is not always a moral obligation but sometimes merely what works. He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan."

The Space Shuttle Discovery hitchhiking on a NASA airplane made a beauty pass low over

Washington, DC yesterday (where, by the way, the temp has been near 90 this week.)   That's a building at the Smithsonian, which is Discovery's

ultimate destination. (Sort of.  They've moved the Air and Space Musuem out near Dulles airport.) Photo by Jeff Malet. 

Postal Post

It's tax day, for some reason, April 17, but I headed for the Post Office on Monday to send in my extension by certified mail.  I filed an extension just like Rich Richney and for the same reason: I'm trying to lie and hide my way to the White House while my obscenely rich friends buy it for me.  Anyway, I conversed with the clerk--one of our characteristic still-comely women I imagine first got their p.o. gig as hippie chicks back in the day--and she noted that tax day used to be a much bigger deal at the old p.o.  I recall that some post offices stayed open until midnight on April 15, and even had an employee outside being handed returns from cars, like a Santa at Christmastime taking donations and handing out candy. 

Not anymore.  The place was emptier than usual, if anything.  Lots of electronic filing she said.  Me, I'm with Kurt Vonnegut on this.  Vonnegut used to buy his manila envelopes at a local store one at a time, and take his manuscripts or whatever to the local post office branch, just to interact with real people.  (He  had a crush on the post office clerk.)  I do enough stuff on the computer machine and most of the time it's a blessing.  But there are these little local things I like to do as always.

As for the Post Office, the recent Congressional stupidities forcing cutbacks has meant our mail is being sorted in another state now.  Perhaps as a consequence, we've had a run of confusion.  We've been regularly getting mail for an address with the same street number but another street.  One alarming day, it was all the mail we got.  And we've gotten some of ours that obviously went somewhere else first.  Counting on the integrity of the mail is a bedrock for confidence in the national government.  A lot of people have already lost it, which might help explain a lot.  Now it seems all the federal government via Congress does is loot the Postal Service, which for all its flaws is and has been just about the only true equal opportunity more or less meritocracy employer in many small places and probably not a few large ones.

Yesterday we did get a note of apology apparently from our mail carrier promising that the problem is being addressed.  At least that's the gist of it, as the note was not very legible or coherent.  But it seemed sincere.  We didn't have this problem when we had the same carrier on this route.  I chatted with him a few times.  He liked to talk about UFOs.  But he knew the route and never tried to jam stuff into the box that won't fit, but came up to the front porch and left it where he knew we'd find it. It's not always remembered that big government can enable people to make things work, and have a life in their community.
    

A Video for Catloving French Existentialist Film Buffs

Subverting the Future

Govenor Crisp Crispie of New Jersey is making wannabe VP with Richney noises, and this column by Paul Krugman suggests how appropriate that would be, as he is also a conniving liar as well as a thug.  But that's not the purpose of the column, exactly: Krugman uses Crispie to illustrate a point about how GOPers talk so much about the future, and work so hard against it.

"One general rule of modern politics is that the people who talk most about future generations — who go around solemnly declaring that we’re burdening our children with debt — are, in practice, the people most eager to sacrifice our future for short-term political gain," Krugman begins.  He names the Ryan budget as a prime national example, but also: "And you can see it in the actions of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who talks loudly about acting responsibly but may actually be the least responsible governor the state has ever had."

Crispie cancelled work on a tunnel linking NJ to NY, lied about its costs, how it was financed, and whether it's necessary.  He did it so he could raid the funds set aside for it to apply to short-term uses.  Governors in general are good at this, Congress did it for years with Social Security, but the mendacity here is striking.  And its effect is devastating, on the future of the state he's supposed to be working for.  

Krugman's expanded point: "Unfortunately, Mr. Christie’s behavior is all too typical these days.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works."  

Such shortsightedness is going to have even greater consequences as the need to apply imagination and will to big projects to deal with the effects of the Climate Crisis as well as the causes becomes acute.               

Wild Thing

This photo from the White House Easter Egg Hunt, as President Obama reads "Where the Wild Things Are" to the assembled children, is classic enough to feature on its own.  But it suggests a few political notes.  The Obama campaign understands that it has to be aggressive and lively to be successful against the many millions of dollars that will be spent in lying about President Obama over the next too many months, thanks to the Supreme Court's decision that money should be the prevailing power in selecting our leaders.  The Obama campaign right now is countering with on the ground organizing that so far the GOP can't match.  But the air war has been joined as well.  It's clear that the Obama campaign is not taking anything for granted.

This photo highlights something else--President Obama and Michelle Obama are popular figures.  They connect as human beings, as a couple and as parents.  President Obama clearly loves being in the company of children.  And he loves his dog.  So as Americans try to protect their eyes and ears from the barrage of ads and robocalls, such images and realities could become decisive. 

Last Clown Standing

Little Ricky Sanctimonious has called it quits before facing humiliation in Pa fueled by carpet bombing by Richie Richney's vicious attack ads, and Casino Newt is so broke that his check for a $500 filing fee bounced.  So Richney has bought the GOP nom, and there are millions more where that came from, so expect a seven month onslaught of negative derogatory insulting vicious lying ads from Richney and his obscenely wealthy backers aimed at President Obama.   As Richney, the last clown standing, attempts to buy the presidency.

He may need the help of the "conservatives" who are busy trying to install theocratic dictatorships in the states, specifically by preventing the non-rich from voting.  He may even eventually need the Supreme Court.  But in the meantime he is so personally and politically unpopular, and the policies he advocates so extreme, that his only recourse is to preside over the spending of millions in what I have no doubt will be the most thorough and best financed attempted character assassination in American history. 

Emerson For the Day

"It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination."
Thoreau
[click photo to see it all]

This is An Extreme Weather Event?

photo with story: "Western Michigan sets another hot weather record," March 22, 2012. in M Live (Grand Rapids.)

The Climate Crisis reality mandates new kinds of thinking, and much of America is getting a lesson in it now.  The weather is great.  Really, really great.  And that's really, really weird.  And maybe really really bad.

After a mild to nonexistent winter in much of the country, March has been ridiculously warm.  Up to 40 degrees F warmer.  By standard definition, it's an extreme weather event.  It just happens to be temporarily a nice one.

NPR quotes climatologist Heidi Cullen to that effect: When you think of extreme weather, you often think of dramatic events like tornadoes, droughts or hurricanes. It's hard to view a warm, spring day as an extreme weather event, and Cullen says that's one of the challenges of talking about climate.

Cullen notes all the ways that recent climate extremes track with predictions based on Climate Crisis science.  "The science tells us that if we don't do anything about this problem, that by the middle and the end of the century, we're looking at really a radically different climate," she says.

It's not all due to the Climate Crisis--La Nina is having a particular heating effect on North America.  But Climate Crisis models predict that unusual weather trends become more extreme and last longer because of global heating.   NOAA climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi compared the increase in weather extremes to baseball players on steroids: You can't say an individual homer is because of steroids, but they are hit more often and the long-held records for home runs fall.

How hot is it?  Try these stats on for size:

The first quarter of 2012 broke the January-March record by 1.4 degrees. Usually records are broken by just one- or two-tenths of a degree. U.S. temperature records date to 1895.

The atypical heat goes back even further. The U.S. winter of 2010-2011 was slightly cooler than normal and one of the snowiest in recent years, but after that things started heating up. The summer of 2011 was the second warmest summer on record.

The winter that just ended, which in some places was called the year without winter, was the fourth warmest on record. Since last April, it's been the hottest 12-month stretch on record, Crouch said.

But the month where the warmth turned especially weird was March.

Normally, March averages 42.5 degrees across the country. This year, the average was 51.1, which is closer to the average for April. Only one other time — in January 2006 — was the country as a whole that much hotter than normal for an entire month.

In March, at least 7,775 weather stations across the nation broke daily high temperature records and another 7,517 broke records for night-time heat. Combined, that's more high temperature records broken in one month than ever before, Crouch said.

"When you look at what's happened in March this year, it's beyond unbelievable," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver.

What has people feeling weird about this right now is the near term prospects.  Already there's a large increase in insects in some places, and farmers worry that their rapidly growing crops are more vulnerable to a seasonable frost.  Allergies are more active, and that's a sign of other health problems that might arise.

And then there's summer...

Meanwhile 350.org are busy organizing an international Climate Impact Day for May 5 (5/5) to "connect the dots" between extreme weather and the Climate Crisis.  More on that later.