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.

To Kill A Mockingbird: Two Birthdays

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film of To Kill A Mockingbird, President Obama had a screening at the White House.  Attending were Mary Badham, who as a child played Scout in the film, and Gregory Peck's widow. The film will be shown on the USA cable network on Saturday, with an introduction by President Obama.

Today would have been Gregory Peck's 96th birthday.  He was a thoroughly admirable man playing an thoroughly admirable man, which was part of the excitement of seeing this movie when it came out.  He was the adult actor I most admired in my adolescence.  It's not coincidence that he became the link for many of the people connected with this film.  He had a lifelong friendship with Mary Badham and the novel's author Harper Lee. 

I've written in detail on all versions of To Kill A Mockingbird, both on this site and on Stage Matters.  Judging from the hits on both these sites, this story remains alive.  That's a truly wonderful thing about books, plays and films.  No matter how old, they can always become present to new readers and audiences, to new generations, like the school children who also attended the White House screening this afternoon.  

The Daily Tweets

With nonsense that need not be repeated here making all the noise, the real issues with the Supreme Court get an airing from Linda Greenhouse, who I've trusted for years for her reporting and divining of the cases before the Supremes.  The piece is provocatively titled "Embarass the Future."

In Circus News, Little Ricky Sanctimonious is taking a long time coming out of the locker room.  The NY Times reports a confab of conservatives with his campaign, but no outcome (like Ricky or Casino Newt dropping out), but there was an earlier report of several long conversations between the two.

Little Ricky is counting on PA and Texas in May, but Richney has gone ahead of him for the first time in one PA poll, and the politically astute Ed Rendell predicts he'll drop out before the PA primary if he seems likely to lose, because if he wants any future political viability he can't afford to lose his home state, again.

Meanwhile, Joe Klein has a piece on Richie Richney and the "Wounds of Victory."  There are two schools on Richney.  The first says he can still move to the center and remake his image enough to contend in the general, the second says he's stuck with what he's become.  Klein is of the second school: "He seems a figure from the Great Depression, a combination of Daddy Warbucks and Old Man Potter. He celebrates creative destruction at a time when the destruction has been a bit too creative."

Morning Joe is on the record saying that off the record, he hasn't talked to a GOPer pol who believes Richney will win.  The gender gap keeps getting wider, and it may be out of control thanks to GOPers in the states.  Certainly any poll that has President Obama at 50% or above is daunting in itself.  Here's an intriguing analysis, though I don't know how credible it is: even if President Obama's approval rating remains under but near 50%, he's very likely to be reelected.  If it remains where it is now, at 47%, it's an 85% chance.  At 50% it's 99%. 

Personally I'm of the it's still a long time until the election school.  But the enthusiasm of Dems and especially 2008 Obama supporters is firming and growing, while the GOP seems in an angry violent death spiral.  Apart from unforeseen events and strange reactions, that violence is the most dangerous.

Clouds Behind the Moon

So it's very early Thursday morning, still dark here.  Wednesday was rainy, with some sun breaks, then rainy again.  But in the past several hours it's cleared enough to see a few stars among the clouds, and especially a super-bright not quite full Moon.

It was so bright that I went outside to check it out.  Moonlight on the cala lillies.  Towards the western horizon, the very bright disc looking especially three-dimensional as the clouds passed behind it.

Wait a minute--behind it?  Yes.  The pretty substantial looking clouds were moving horizontally behind the moon.  Although it's freezing out there, I took a real good look.  And then came back in to google it.

Turns out it is not an unknown sight.  There are youtube vids and photos, like this one.  Googling was less interesting than ogling, though.  In answer to the question, how can clouds be moving behind the moon, most of the answers were brief and elementary, with the tone of an adult explaining something to an idiot child: the clouds can't be behind the moon because the clouds are only a few miles up and the moon is like a million miles away.  The clouds are on Earth, the Moon is the Moon, see? 

Welll you know I figured that out myself.  What I wondered is what accounts for the optical illusion?  I'll bet that might be interesting.  It was a remarkable sight anyway.
   

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

“I am an invisible man. 
No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: 
Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. 
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids
- and I might even be said to possess a mind. 
I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Ralph Ellison

This quote, from Ellison's famous novel The Invisible Man which turns 60 years old this month, I saw quoted twice on Tuesday, and in fact after not reading it at all for decades, I read that final sentence of the quote twice within a couple of minutes.  It was noted by a reader on Andrew Sullivan's blog in response to his description of how the Rabid Right project their fears etc. onto President Obama,  the other is a very interesting piece in the New Yorker about the controversy over how some readers/viewers are reacting to black characters in The Hunger Games.  Some are surprised (and then dismayed) that a couple of characters are black.  It seems race, the present and the apocalypse are very much tied together.  Anyway, it seems the meanginful coincidence itself selected this as the Dreaming Up Daily Quote for today.

The painting is The Solidity of Fog by the Italian Futurist painter Russolo.

Circus News: The Halftime Show

On Tuesday Richie Richney won all the primaries but Little Rickey Sanctimonious declares that as far as the GOPer circus is concerned, it's only "halftime."  There's May and June and summer and the convention.  So he's going to the locker room and work on a game plan to come from behind.  Right.  Far, far right.

If you think Sanctimonious must be living on Mars you're partly right.  He made this analogy from a campaign stop in Mars, PA.

Even with the media ready to move on, and the GOPer establishment desperate to get the campaign attention off the real and present GOPer war on women in the states that is helping to turn women voters away from GOPer candidates in droves, Richney can't really claim the nom, and still seems likely to come up at least a few delegates short by the end of the primaries.

Richney is stuck with the right wingers who brung him so far, and can't yet Etch-a-Sketch his way to a different campaign.  So before he becomes the Etch-a-Sketch candidate he'll probably keep on trying out new lies, and otherwise clowning around.  President Obama isn't waiting however, and his speech Tuesday detailed the real consequences of the latest GOPer budget, and he insisted that while there are problems for the economy, they can be addressed with what used to be the common sense balance of revenues, cuts and prioritizing.  The undercurrent of this speech and his answers to reporters questions afterwards (it was an address to the AP), it seemed to me, was that when it comes to actually addressing the country's problems, in the GOPers he is not dealing with serious people.  Richney is not a serious person. 

What is he is--according to David Javerbaum--is the first quantum politician.   It turns out that quantum physics can do what no political analysis can: it explains the Richney candidacy.  The principles of complementarity( "In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation.."), probability (Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms of likelihood, not certainty.) and the principle of Entanglement: "It doesn’t matter whether it’s a proton, neutron or Mormon: the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker."

Well that's the circus news for today, and I'm decohere.

The Big Finish

Congratulations to Brittney Griner and the Baylor Lady Bears for winning the NCAA womens championship and becoming the first collegiate team in history to go 40-0.  Notre Dame played well for much of the game but couldn't hang in against this great team.  What can you say about a team with players named Destiny Williams and Odyssey Sims?  It could even be like a myth.

Closer

The Darkness--specifically a new Dark Ages--got just a little closer Monday, and gee whiz if it wasn't the U.S. Supreme Court that did it.  As reported in detail by Rachel Maddow, a bureaucratic mistake that the state of New Jersey failed to correct led to police pulling over a man, his pregnant wife and child in his BMW, and arresting him.  The police jailed him for six days, and subjected him to two strip searches, even though what he was arrested for was failure to pay a traffic fine (which he had in fact paid, and had a certificate to prove it.)  He is a black man.  Albert Florence (pictured) sued the state over those strip searches, and today in the Supreme Court, he lost.

  As the New York Times put it, in a 5-4 decision the Court ruled "that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband."  This ruling appears to nullify laws in several states banning this practice, as well as international law.

(Update: comment on the decision from Andrew Sullivan.)

So now police and prison guards are given more of a free hand to abuse prisoners whose skin color--or eye color, or anything--they don't like.  What's a citizen to do?  Well, arm yourself.  Carry a couple of guns everywhere and if somebody looks at you funny--and you're in the right state, at least before the Supreme Court spreads the Shoot First laws to everywhere else--you shoot the black/brown/hippie/federal-looking weirdo, but shoot to kill, cause you don't want a witness arguing against your "I felt threatened" defense.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, the rise of a police state and the rise of armed anarchy really do go together, and that's what we're seeing.  A police state that can spy, jail without trial, harrass and torture with the help of the Supreme Court.  A police state that prevents people from voting, or takes away the power of the people they vote for.  A police state that insists on committing acts of coercion and violence against women, their families, their doctors.  At the same time as suspicious citizens are armed to the teeth, and let loose by the police--as long as they are on the same racial and social side.

This is one reading of what's going on: that this rush towards the Dark Ages is in response to massive fears, mostly by a minority of mostly older whites, and that those fears may partly be of various twisted signs of an apocalyptic future, but most directly right now, in reaction to our black President, and all that he symbolizes to them. 

There are ways to parse each of these separate phenomena as a response to this or that--for example by taking Court opinions at face value.  But by coincidence or by something more sweeping, they are adding up to this.

It's going way beyond partisan politics, although the news media is slow to admit it--they've got jobs to protect, and all that fat income from superpacs and campaigns.  After noting how extremist such a step would be, on Monday President Obama talked about the human cost of the Supreme Court possibily overturning the Affordable Care Act:

“[T]his is not an abstract argument,” Obama added. "People’s lives are affected by the lack of availability of health care, the inaffordability of health care, their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions. The law that is already in place gives 5 million young people health care that wouldn’t otherwise have it.

There are tens of thousands of adults with pre-existing conditions who have health care right now because of this law. Parents don’t have to worry about their children not being able to get health care because they can’t be prevented from getting health care as a consequence of a pre-existing condition.
That’s part of this law.

Millions of seniors are paying less for prescription drugs because of this law. Americans all across the country have greater rights and protections with respect to their insurance companies and they’re getting preventive care because of this law. That’s just the part that has already been implemented.

That doesn’t speak to the 30 million people who stand to gain coverage once it is fully implemented in 2014. And I think it is important, and I think the American people understand, and I think the justices should understand that in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to insure that people with pre-existing conditions can actually get health care. So there is not only an economic element to this but there is a human element to this."

Emerson for the Day

"We must act with so rapid and resistless a purpose in one direction, that our vices will necessarily trail behind.  The nucleus of a comet is almost a star."

Thoreau

In the Direction of Darkness

Until now I've resisted joining the media panic regarding oral arguments before the Supreme Court which seemed to suggest 5 of the Justices were set to overturn the Affordable Care Act.  Since the decision is not expected until June, I thought there would be plenty of time for cooler constitutional heads to prevail, and the evident political energy displayed this week would give way to judicial scholarship, which has overwhelmingly supported the constitutionality of the Act and specifically the so-called individual mandate, under the Commerce clause, in the same way that Social Security and Medicare were found constitutional. 

They would also have time to learn more about health care, health insurance and what they mean in the American economy--knowledge which some who studied the questions they asked doubt that they now have.  They would have time to discuss all this, and share what they've learned, what their reasoning is.

But then I saw this piece, which says that they may well make their decision without talking to each other at all, and that the decision will probably be made almost immediately.  Maybe today.   We just won't find out about it until June, in the thick of the pre-conventions presidential campaign. 

So in the heat of this moment, I am obliged to take seriously the prospect that this politicized court will ignore virtually every constitutional scholar's view that the Act easily falls within established law, and essentially roll back 80 years of progress, such as it is.  On the basis of a radically reactionary reinterpretation of the Constitution, this Court could substitute itself for the other two branches of government in a matter that has vast economic and social repercussions. 

The prospect has shocked many commentators, but I will let one speak for all, since E.J. Dionne's column drips with the contempt that this process so far deserves.  He uses the words "judicial dictatorship," and that's the prospect we're facing.  Having overturned the outcome of the 2000 election, and having institutionalized the single greatest threat to electoral democracy in our history with its Citizens United decision, this Supreme Court threatens to take over the government outright.

To do so in a presidential election year would be to make that even more obvious, and would turn the 75% of American who believe that the Court makes its decisions based on politics into 99%.

But the most specific impact will be on the U.S. health care system and the economy.  Gone will be restrictions on denying coverage for preexisting conditions.  Gone will be coverage extended to young adults on their parents policies.  And most of all, gone for a very long time will be the hope that the rank injustices and utter cruelties of health insurance in America will be stopped.

Ezra Klein offers the long-term hope that defeat of this admittedly complex law will lead to a single-payer system, but he doesn't expect that process to even begin for 10 years.  So another generation will have to endure rising costs, declining insurance coverage.  More Americans will go bankrupt paying for overpriced health care.  More American will die because they cannot afford medical care, or even basic insurance.  As Klein writes, "in the decades between here and there, there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering and deaths among the uninsured. That’s the real cost of losing this opportunity to insure 30 million people. And it’s a cost that too often gets swept under the rug in Washington’s handicapping of the political fallout."

And that's before the forces behind this Court and the Paul Ryan budget destroy medical care coverage for the most vulnerable population, older Americans, as they set about hollowing out Medicare until nothing remains of it but a phony name.

Given the challenges this country will face in the near future--those associated with the Climate Crisis in particular--this could be crippling, in what it does and what it portends.  The coming election is really about whether we're propelling ourselves into a new Dark Age, or reaffirming the movement away begun in 2008.  But this Court itself could--with a decision made on this very day--take that into its own hands, and carry this country a giant step in the direction of darkness.

Doing Something About It

Despite the political dangers in an election year, as the LA Times reported:

"The Obama administration announced long-awaited rules that would sharply limit the output of carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, the gases that the vast majority of scientists say are the primary contributor to global climate change."

The new regulations mean that, for one thing, the era of King Dirty Coal plants is over. The move elicited the predictable political cacophony about gubment regulations throttling the freedom of corporations destroying life on the planet in sole service of their cancerous greed, as well as relative silence by the news media,  but may also surprise environmentalists depressed by the lack of rhetoric from the White House.  The words would be welcome, but doing something about it anyway is pretty damn good.  The Times story continues:

   "Yet by proposing the power plant rules and pressing forward with new car and truck fuel economy standards, the Obama administration has moved to cut pollution from the two largest domestic sources of greenhouse gases. Power plants themselves are the single greatest stationary source, accounting for 40% of the country’s output of carbon dioxide.

“I think the administration releasing a proposed regulation for greenhouse gases for new plants is as strong a signal that anyone can ask for about how seriously they are addressing the threat of climate change,” said Megan Ceronsky, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund."

Climate Crisis Update: Arctic Heating and Weather Disasters

In my most recent Climate Crisis update, I focused on some consequences of the fast melting Arctic ice.  In the update before that one, I reviewed some of the latest on this year's weird weather, which has been freakishly warm in much of North America, especially east of the Mississippi, but there have been unusual extremes of hot and cold in other parts of the world--as in Europe, where a killer cold spell was followed by a hot spell.  In this update, those two subjects come together: as scientists suspect this weird weather is causally related to Arctic melting.

In a New York Times story on this subject: “The question really is not whether the loss of the sea ice can be affecting the atmospheric circulation on a large scale,” said Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher. “The question is, how can it not be, and what are the mechanisms?”

The story continues: "A report released on Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that issues periodic updates on climate science, confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding."

A summary of evidence based on recent weather:    "United States government scientists recently reported, for instance, that February was the 324th consecutive month in which global temperatures exceeded their long-term average for a given month; the last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. In the United States, many more record highs are being set at weather stations than record lows, a bellwether indicator of a warming climate."

And March may turn out to be more extreme than February.

The mechanism that may be at work involving the Arctic has to do with the effect of longer iceless periods on the water changes the pattern of heating and cooling from the ocean, and may then change the Jet Stream.  That's the contention of one scientist quoted in the Times story, and although it is not yet a consensus view (according to the Times,) the story does make this general statement:

 "Yet mainstream scientists are determined to figure out which climate extremes are being influenced by human activity, and their attention is increasingly drawn to the Arctic sea ice."

Other stories concerning the IPCC Report emphasize the basic finding that the frequency and extent of at least some kinds of extreme weather are linked to the Climate Crisis, and the future threat, especially to vulnerable places in the world.   For example, from the Independent:

    "Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists says in a report issued on Wednesday.

The greatest danger from extreme weather is in highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe - from Mumbai to Miami - is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts."    

The Montreal Gazette led with this conclusion:

A future on Earth of more extreme weather and rising seas will require better planning for natural disasters to save lives and limit deepening economic losses, the United Nations said on Wednesday in a major report on the effects of climate change.

Another study making news Wednesday:

"By 2050, global average temperature could be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than it was just a couple of decades ago, according to a new study that seeks to address the largest sources of uncertainty in current climate models. That's substantially higher than estimates produced by other climate analyses, suggesting that Earth's climate could warm much more quickly than previously thought."

Best Thing in the World Today

Rachel Maddow has a "Best New Thing in the World Today" segment, but I'm not bound to new.  Today's Best Thing(s) are perennials, but given new bestness by Science.  However dubious two new studies are, I'll take them.

One says that popcorn is not only low in calories, it's high in antioxidants, and so may be better for you than fruit.  And they laughed when I said popcorn is my favorite vegetable.

And speaking of antioxidants, chocolate has been known as another good source, but besides that, chocolate eaters weigh less than non-chocs.  So it's like a weight loss aid, see?  No, I don't really buy it either, but it's a cheery rationalization anyway.

Bankrupt

The federal gov may be running an unsustainable deficit but it is the Republican party that is morally and intellectually bankrupt.  The morality of lying has long since become entrenched doctrine with these pious hypocrites.  Combine that with the bankruptcy of ideas and you come up with the latest Paul Ryan budget.  It's worse than the last one.  It still ends Medicare as we know it, and it still doesn't balance the federal budget.  It just gives more money to the ultra rich plutocracy.  But why listen to me--here's E.J. Dionne:

"Paul Ryan made absolutely clear that he is not now and never was interested in deficit reduction. After a couple of years of being lauded by deficit hawks as the man prepared to make hard choices, he proposed a budget that would not end deficits until 2040 but would cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over a decade while also extending all of the Bush tax cuts, adding an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit. Ryan would increase military expenditures and then eviscerate the rest of the federal government.

Oh yes, Ryan claims he’d make up for the losses from his new tax cuts with “tax reform” but offered not a single detail. A “plan” with a hole this big is not a plan at all. Ryan’s main interest is in cutting the top income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 35 percent. His message: Solving the deficit problem isn’t nearly as important as (1) continuing and expanding benefits for the wealthy and (2) disabling the federal government."

Among the functions of that federal government, by the way, is the effort to secure loose nuclear material throughout the world that could easily be used in bombs by terrorists or just a Stand Your Ground neighborhood watch captain.  It requires expertise, intelligence, determination and attention, and its success can be measured in what has not happened.  But a party and a faction that is morally and intellectually bankrupt is not interested in that.  They're upset because President Obama is trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, including ours.  It would not surprise me if the Rabid Right soon started talking about the Second Amendment guaranteeing them the right to have their own nukes.

Morale Boost

Obama supporters feeling nervous today because of all the noise surrounding Obamacare and the threat the Supremes are going to deep six it, may be in the mood for some good news.

The good news is Romney.  A Suffolk University shows President Obama with a 10 point lead over Romney nationally, and that's the closest GOPer to him.  Even better, the numbers are 47% to 37%.  When the leader flirts with 50% and the opponent is below 40%, it has the potential to hold.

Then there is this from John Cassidy in the New Yorker, who writes that he's "tried his best" to put a positive spin on the Romney campaign to encourage a competitive race, but:

"After the last week, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to rescue Romney’s Presidential bid may be a hopeless task. Really, what prospect is there for a campaign that, on the day it should have been celebrating a big win in Illinois, suggests that its man’s political positions have all the permanence of a child’s drawing on an Etch A Sketch? A campaign which now, after getting its derriere handed to it in Louisiana, has the temerity to issue a statement calling its opponent, Rick Santorum, “pathetic”? There isn’t much hope: that’s my answer. The Romney campaign consists of a weak candidate and a back-room staff that would have difficulty contesting a city-council election."

The rest of the post is also entertaining.

Full Court Press

The Supreme Court began hearing arguments today on the constitutionality of provisions of the Affordable Care Act.  Fully three-quarters of Americans in one poll expect the decision to be based on politics.  Only 17% believe it will be based on law, and one of those cynical pundits suggested that this 17% was delusional.

However, virtually all constitutional experts and the most experienced and knowledgeable journalists agree that Obamacare is constitutional, and that according to the law it isn't even close.  While this court has been overtly political in other key cases, the notorious Citizens United being the most obvious, I saw where one seasoned observer doesn't expect it to be a close vote.  He figures it will be upheld by a vote of 6-3 or even 7-2. 

On political grounds, there is the absurd wrinkle that the individual mandate was a Republican idea at a time when some of these Justices were appointed and approved by Republicans.  (Rachel hammered at the hypocrisy tonight.)

But for all the babble and the demos this week, this ain't the court where the NCAA March Madness plays.  The final score by the Supreme Court  won't be known until the end of June.   

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"I'm Yertle the Turtle!
Oh, marvelous me!
For I am the ruler
of all that I see!

"I am the ruler," said Yertle
"of all that I see.  But I don't see enough.
That's the trouble with me."

Dr. Seuss

Climate Crisis Update: Planetary Emergency

One of the major focal points of concern regarding the Climate Crisis is the Arctic. Professor Stephen Salter, described by the BBC as an "eminent engineer," made recent headlines in the UK by telling members of Parliament that imminent release of methane in the Arctic constitutes a "planetary emergency."

As scientists observe Arctic melting proceeding faster than their worst predictions, there is fear that it will all be gone in summer in a few years.  If that happens, there could soon follow a catastrophic release of methane into the atmosphere, which would accelerate global heating and change the world's climate dramatically.  Though scientists warning of the Climate Crisis get called alarmists by their oil-fed opponents, thus conveniently mollifying the fearful, ironically those scientists have been slow to talk about the methane problem.  But it is certainly contributing to the marked increase in pessimism among them.

Salter is himself promoting a kind of technological fix: a series of towers that would send ordinary seawater in very small droplets into the atmosphere to whiten clouds and slow down the melting.  Being an engineer he's worked out the plans so the project is doable, and the actual technology appears to be almost ready.

But while the world government on Star Trek could declare a planetary emergency, no such body exists on planet Earth at the moment.  That doesn't preclude action but it makes it more complicated.  Further, there is a lot of suspicion of technological fixes, especially since one of the most prominently proposed--and backed by such towering intellects as the authors of Freakanomics--is proving on second look to not only be useless but counterproductive--contributing to increasing Arctic temperatures and hastening the heating.  Still, it would help if Salter were taken seriously enough to have his approach discussed and tested.  Or we could wait until Rick Santorum gets around to taking care of it.

One effect of Arctic melting and other Climate Crisis phenomena--the rising of sea levels along densely populated coasts--got another round of estimates last week, and they are not good.  A new analysis of the U.S. coasts where nearly 4 million people live suggests coastal flooding may soon become much more frequent.  (There's an interactive map about this at Climate Central.)

Too much water in some places is a big problem, calling for infrastructure investments now.  But potentially a greater problem is too little water--especially fresh water--elsewhere.  The concerns about the effects of droughts and pollution, of environmental degradation and the Climate Crisis as they erase water supplies for huge areas and populations is being taken with increasing seriousness and urgency.  Last week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the latest to warn--to officially warn--of the growing possibilities of massive water shortages, and of wars over them that would threaten to involve a great many nations, including ours.  Global and U.S. issues related to water resources was the topic of a recent roundtable discussion here.  All of these are urgent issues, and not even in the future.  But so far they are not being urgently addressed, except incrementally.  What is an evolving planetary emergency is lost in the fog.

Dead Circus

How does a circus die?  That's easy: when the customers don't come to it anymore.

Little Ricky Sanctimonious won the Louisana primary on Saturday.  Big news right?  Another rejection of the frontrunner, Richie Richney.  Even Casino Newt got 15%.  Keeping the circus going, right?  Well, then where were the special reports on TV, with the animated logo and grand music and your fave anchors and pundits?

Sorry, but the circus is no longer in town.  And it's not exactly because all the votes have been counted, or anybody has won anything.  It's because TV viewers are tuning out, ratings are down.  The circus has been like cancelled.

So now they all say, Richney is the one, why bother?  And so the media declares, and so the self-fulfilling prophesy may be, with some political justification--especially because only Richney can afford to keep spending millions to bury his opponents in negative slog-- but really, the reason is that nobody wants to come to this circus anymore.   

Sporting News

As sports becomes more about obscene amounts of money, my interest wanes.  It's hard to not feel like just another enabling dupe.  But let's say in terms of residual interest...

The biggest ongoing contests are March Madness, the NCAA collegiate tournaments, both men and women.  I've got no favorites (except I like watching the Baylor women with the phenomenal Brittany Griner) but I note with interest that the GOPer attempt to paint President Obama as an out of touch weirdo intellectual alien non-American runs up against his sports acumen.  It's become traditional for fans to "fill out their brackets"--the series of games, the winner of which goes on to the next level in a series of elimination brackets until the last two standing.  The art and/or science of it has lately been called "bracketology."  But since one of the enthusiasts doing so is President Obama, the sports world checks them regularly, for updates on "Barack-etology."  And before today's "Elite Eight" games he was in the top 1% on getting the brackets right.

Meanwhile, NFL football is going through a lot of drama, with New Orleans bounty hunters and a series of moves and trades that includes Tim Tebow becoming the second quarterback for the New York Jets.  Anything to do with New York is endlessly discussed, analyzed, screamed about.  But as this was all going on, Pittsburgh Steeler's wide receiver Hines Ward--who had earlier been cut from the team's roster--decided to retire a Steeler.  This story is about the reception for that decision in Pittsburgh, where he was and will now always remain a hero.  It tells you a little more about the particularities of the unique relationship between Pittsburgh and the Steelers, which in the end has nothing to do with the larger mediasports world.

Lastly, my least favorite team in the NBA is the Miami Heat, and my least favorite player is LeBron James.  But this week, the Heat earned my respect for something they did off the court--getting themselves photographed in hoodies to show their support for the murdered Florida teenager Trayvon Martin--and where they stand in the current controversy.

Climate Crisis Update: If That Was Winter, What Will Summer Be?

Just as spring was about to officially begin, we finally got a bit of winter here on the North Coast, the kind of storms and rain (light and steady with periods of downpour) that we normally get in late December and January.  Elsewhere it has been crazier--snow in Southern California, temperatures in the 80s in Chicago and across the Midwest and into the Mid-Atlantic states, near 90 in the South.  The centennial cherry blossom festival in Washington was supposed to climax with the blooms in a couple of weeks, but the blossoms were already out when the festival started.

Warmer--or hotter--spring weather has already added energy to storms and tornadoes (both the images in this post are from storms earlier in March), and more dangerous and powerful examples of each are likely in the coming months.  And lurking in everybody's mind is the anxiety that if this is winter and spring, what is summer going to be like? 

Climate is the context, the setpoint conditions and processes.  Weather is a manifestation of climate, as well as the result of such phenomena as El Nino and La Nina.  A hotter climate manifests at first in some conditions that are intuitively obvious: it gets hotter.  But it also may manifest in counter-intuitive ways: more snow in the winter, or disturbed patterns of precipitation that makes some places rainier and others dryer, and sometimes even some places are colder, because the physics of a hotter climate favors extremes.

So while people believe less in global heating when it snows and more when it's a warm winter, they are not wrong to see evidence of the Climate Crisis in weather patterns.  Bill McKibben, through his 350.org and climate.org is organizing an action day for May 5 to "connect the dots" to show the emerging pattern of the Climate Crisis through these extreme manifestations.   That work is already underway with the evidence for you to see at  Climate Change Central.

Liar in Waiting

Politicians stretch the truth.  They omit inconvenient truths.  They imply something they know is not true in the hopes that people will believe it while they can deny they actually said it.  They inflate the importance of something (knowing it is not that important) or minimize the importance of something they know is really serious.

None of this is admirable.  All of it interferes with the public's ability to justly judge the meaning of positions, decisions and actions.  Some of it is more forgiven when done in an election campaign, rather than by an officeholder in the performance of duties.  But out and out lying is still a little scandalous--so scandalous that mainstream media is very trepidatious about calling a lie a lie.  It was this tendency that allowed the "swiftboating" of John Kerry to proceed, when it was all based on vicious lies. 

Now Rachel Maddow has exposed Mitt Romney as a serial and unapologetic liar.  She did one segment on Wednesday, illustrating the proposition "that a man who may well take the oath of office in 10 months is choosing to get to that podium on a foundation of utterly unashamed, unprecedented deceit."

This segment started with the Etch-A-Sketch scandal (responding to a question of whether Romney could move towards the center in the general election campaign after taking such hard right positions in the primary, a Romney strategist said sure, moving from primaries to the general is like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch, you just start over) but moved quickly beyond flip-flopping and pandering to a pattern of outright lying. This ignited something of a media kerfluffle, but she made more of a case of Romney the liar on Thursday.  (Both video segments are here.) 

I've been calling Romney a liar for awhile, so I can add only this further observation to what Rachel and her staff have documented.  Beginning perhaps with the de facto lies promulgated by Lee Atwater for Bush I, but in any case for most of a generation now, using lies has been a growing part of the GOPer political playbook.  As one kind of de facto lying gets by and then becomes standard, a more baldfaced sort of lying becomes possible, and then used, and then accepted.  This has been going on for so long that a generation of GOPers--as old now as their 30s and maybe even 40s--has grown up with lying as a standard political technique. 

They may have to make some false equivalences with what Democrats do to help them justify it, but basically they see it as standard.  The Romney brand of lying is a direct product of the Karl Rove school of politics.  It also happens to have become standard during the rise of the Christian right in the Republican party.  I can't pretend to explain or understand how systematic lying comports with fundamentalist Christianity.  There's some ends versus the means going on that contradicts the Christianity I was indoctrinated with in my youth.  But I do see the effectiveness of putting the two things together, so that people can lie while sounding righteous.  (That's one of Romney's problems--he lies so blandly.)   

We aren't talking about different interpretations.  We're talking about lies, about statements of facts which Romney knows are not true.  About telling lies to audiences and reporters, which Romney routinely does.  We're talking about editing the statements of political opponents in ads or in statements by Romney's campaign or supporters that make President Obama or President Clinton say pretty much the opposite of what they in fact said.  These kinds of lies strike at the foundation of democratic government.  They make authentic dialogue about important issues impossible.  And that's probably the point.  They create a culture of ignorance, and feed it with lies.        

Getting Away With Murder

The ongoing firestorm over the killing of a black teenager in Florida has once again brightly if briefly (if the past is any indication) illuminated how much this country has regressed as a civilized society.  Begin with the omnipresence of guns--and the legal omnipresence of guns.  The political fact that gun control can no longer even be whispered about, that it seems a settled matter that "Second Amendment rights" state unequivocally that anybody not legally certified as insane can carry as many guns as he or she can physically carry, out of an arsenal that can be built up by buying hundreds of guns a year, with few limitations on how lethal those guns are.  Nearly every state in the union now permits concealed guns to virtually any resident, at minimum (in this map, all the states in shades of blue.)  There is only one state in the union that does not permit concealed weapons.

There are laws proposed and enacted that allow people to carry their guns into malls, office buildings and bars.  We've seen rifles carried to political events.  There are serious proposals to allow people to carry concealed guns on college campuses and into high schools.  Guns are legally allowed in places and circumstances that have no precedent in my lifetime.  I would guess that guns are legally more a part of ordinary so-called civilized life than at any time since the 19th century or very early 20th.  But the guns of today are far more lethal.  Their ability to kill people is greater.  They can kill more people quicker, and kill and maim people farther from the point of origin--so far that you can be killed by a bullet fired a block away.

Then you add to this ease of acquiring and carrying lethal weapons, easy to fire and to fire repeatedly, to the declining legal jeopardy that might restrain their use.  For a cooler head to prevail, or even for a momentary hesitation that leads to a second thought before entering upon a violent nightmare of consequences, there needs to be the thought of a penalty because killing somebody in a bar fight (and possibly any number of other people, near and far) or a political dispute, or at a parking space, or a sporting event (at a school perhaps) will likely lead to arrest for a felony and many years in prison,  and all that this implies.

But the expectation of such penalties are disappearing, especially in (but not limited to) the states that have enacted some form of "stand-your-ground" law, which basically says that anyone who feels themselves threatened can justifiably shoot the person they believe is threatening them, dead.  They have no "duty to retreat" before using deadly force.  In fact, it is much better for the shooter if the person shot dies, because if there are no witnesses, the stand-your-ground defense could well mean they aren't even arrested, let alone charged.  This is the case in Florida (where it is also legal to shoot somebody who you think may be trying to rob you), where justifiable homicide rates have tripled.  (This map of stand-your-ground states is from Lawrence O'Donnell at MSNBC.  I've seen another such map with a few different states.)

Add to these two elements the very potent source of ongoing rage called racism, whether it is in the form of direct racial hatred or racial profiling--either official or just the expectation that a black person is threatening.  A subjective racist judgment becomes an objective new crime: living while black.  That's at the center of the controversy over the deadly shooting of  17 year old Trayvon Martin, walking home from a convenience store and apparently pursued by a suspicious self-appointed neighborhood watchman, with a gun.  It involves not just the murder itself, since murder it most likely was, but the response of the police in refusing to arrest the shooter.

This is where we are in the 21st century.  Official racism has never gone away--the prisons are full of that evidence.  Racism as a clear byproduct of Washington policymaking, of congressional calls for more tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy over providing just opportunity for people trapped in what we decorously no longer call ghettos,  let alone official and semi-official racial profiling, and in some places the license to kill that some elements of police are happy to let citizens take care of--they are all out in the open again. Overt and violent racism that is bound to accelerate as this presidential election draws nearer, inflamed by the Rabid Right, including the GOPer presidential candidates who deride President Obama in terms that no Democratic candidate ever has, and quite probably, no white candidate has used against another white candidate in living memory.

And we have an entire political culture that bows to the power of the National Rifle Association, so that there is no longer any effective political limit on the spread of ever greater numbers of ever more deadly guns throughout this society, not so far away from shredding its hard-won civilization, and falling apart in violence, ruled by the gun, one way or another.  And if and when that happens, people will lie to themselves and say it happened suddenly.   

Update 3/23: Rachel Maddow fleshes out some of the horrifying changes in gun laws of the past few years in this video segment.
      

Circus Update: Move Along

Today all indications are that Richie Richney will win the Illinois primary, but it changes very little.  Richney has outspent Little Ricky Sanctimonious by 7-1 in the state, and in the huge Chicago media market, by 21-1.  He's buying the state, like he hopes to buy the country.

Late news update: Richney declared winner of the popular vote in Illinois, which is apparently only partially related to the delegate count.  Next up is Louisiana, where Sanctimonious currently has a double digit lead in a poll.

Richney is still is unlikely to win enough delegates to win the nomination by the end of the primaries in June. And despite 80 degree temps in Chicago, June is several months away. So the circus will move on, with several Sanctimonious states to come.

If you're interested in little tremors however, there is a really tawdry feeling about this circus.  Once ebullient in its ridiculousness, its best clowns are gone.  All that are left are two angry clowns, and the awkward one.  And the midget clown Ron St. Paul.  Sanctimonious seems to have lost his mojo, Richney is an increasingly grim robot, who panders and lies with that creepy grin and a voice that sounds like a desperate used car salesman.

And it turns out, his lying may be his greatest advantage, at least in Illinois, and perhaps in the general election.  Not all of his specific lies, but the fact that he is a liar.  This is a theory I heard someone advance on TV Monday.  Illinois for example is split: the city and suburbs of Chicago, locating rich GOPers in the suburbs, which extend for many miles.  They are more numerous than the still substantial numbers of downstate GOPers who are more Sanctimoniously Rabid Right.  But in northern Ill, GOPers are more moderate.  And they are apt to vote for Richney not only because they are horrified by Sanctimonious, but because (this theory goes) Richney is a pandering flipflopper who mouths conservative positions but doesn't really believe them, as they contradict his previous record and statements.  And this is why they like him--or at least,they are likely to vote for him.  Because they can't believe he's as Rabid Right as he says he is.  Because, in other words, he's a liar.  And this is what moderates will believe in the general: that he isn't what he says he is.

Right now he is an increasingly desperate and primitive liar.  Lately he's out-Newting Newt by claiming that President Obama wants gas prices to be high, that he designed them to be high. But  GOPers can't help topping each other in extremism, and so now there's a Rabider claiming that President Obama actually controls gas prices.  In details, the news media does a really lousy job explaining the factors.  A little explanation of what's going on in the Sudan, where 11% of China's oil has been stopped, might alone suggest some reality.  And there's this--that U.S. gas price fluctuations directly parallel gas price fluctuations in Europe and elsewhere--pretty far outside the control of the U.S. President.

As for the actual political effect of gas prices, Binyamin Applebaum in the NY Times writes: "Gas prices influence voters indirectly, because rising prices can slow the pace of growth. But the influence is modest, because spending on oil and its derivatives makes up only a small part of the nation’s economic activity. Gas purchases account for less than 4 percent of household spending."

Meanwhile, Richney has refined his dog whistle mantra that President Obama is too dumb for the job by calling his an "economic lightweight."  "And I'm an economic heavyweight," he claims.  Though he doesn't bother saying a coherent sentence on economic matters.

Richney is very likely to end up the GOPer nominee--as Chuck Todd persuasively argues, unless GOPers suspend their own rules, the only candidates eligible are those who have won five or more state nominating contests, and that's most likely to be Richney and Sanctimonious. (On the other hand, Jeff Greenfield notes that the way these convention fights happen is by changing the rules.)

For now, every time Little Rickey seems like he's moving up, he veers off the road and has to scramble back on. Richney is pouring on money that we could all retire on.   Still, this is also likely to not be resolved for months.  So if you are enjoying this circus of the increasingly exhausted, there's going to be plenty more.  

Two more matters from this past week that bear on the show.  The first is the continuing life of the shameful story of Richney's dog--Seamus, the dog he strapped in a sealed kennel to the top of his car for 2,000 miles, hosed him down in the kennel when the dog got the runs, and left him up there. Not  surprisingly, the dog soon after ran away.  It happened some 20 years ago but it says so much about who Richney really is that even if anybody actually believes his desperate lies, it's still going to be hard to vote for him. 

The second is the bubbling up of racism from whispers to open public notice.  It's there in the Justice Department preventing states from limiting voting participation that discriminates racially, it's front and center in the just announced federal investigation into the race-based killing of a teenager in Florida, and the Florida law that helps racial killers get away with it.  And it's showing up in increasingly obvious ways in the presidential campaign.

So if you're not enjoying this circus maybe it's best to treat it like a crime scene where the police tell you to move along, nothing to see here.

Emerson for the Day

"What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner.  You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey."

Thoreau