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.

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."