Month: May 2015

The Washington Post Editorial Board.

The Obama administration has been unable to induce the Abadi government to deliver desperately needed arms deliveries to the Sunni tribes and Kurdish forces. Yet it simultaneously refuses to deliver materiel directly to those fighters, on the grounds this might undermine the Abadi government. Meanwhile, U.S. officials watch as Iran continues to provide massive direct support to Shiite militias, including forces the United States has designated as terrorist organizations.

Rather than blame Iraqi troops, Mr. Obama should bolster them with more U.S. advisers, including forward air controllers, and more air support. He should insist that Mr. Abadi open a weapons pipeline to Sunni and Kurdish units. Perhaps most important, Mr. Obama should make his priority eliminating the Islamic State — as opposed to limiting U.S. engagement in Iraq.

Because greater US military engagement in a Middle East meat grinder is always the bestest idea, evah. It’s always worked out so well in the past.

PS. Read the comments. They (most of them anyway) at least make some sense.

Leave it to the Daily Mail to track down Paula Jones and get the former Penthouse cover girl’s opinion on sexual morality and Hillary Clinton’s fitness for the presidency. This makes me want to vote for and against Hillary simultaneously. For her, because “Shut up, Paula Jones!” Against her, because “I need this shit like a recurring nightmare.”

I’ll be honest here. Ever since I became politically conscious at the ridiculously young age of seven, I’ve never liked Republicans. I didn’t like Jerry Ford or Poppy Bush or Bob Dole or Ronald Reagan. I didn’t like relatively liberal Republicans like Nancy Kassebaum, William Roth, Jim Jeffords, and John Chafee. I really didn’t like Arlen Specter or Christie Todd Whitman or Rudy Giuliani, who were all major figures in my area during my teenage years or young adulthood. Later on, I didn’t like local governors Tom Ridge and George Pataki, either, despite them both being pro-choice. So, I’m not the person to ask about “good” Republicans because I have no use for any of them.

Still, even the Harlem Globetrotters need the Washington Generals, and I recognize that there must be another team and someone must play for them. The list I compiled above represents a good sampling of the kind of Republicans who I could do business with. With the exception of Rudy Giuli9/11 who has been acting crazy of late, that list includes people who are at least familiar with reality.

It would be nice if someone like George Pataki had some influence on the Republican Party, so I could get excited about him running for president.

Aw, who am I kidding?

Pataki announced with a slickly produced video in which he almost does a Lou Reed kind of thing, speaking rapidly and a bit rhythmically over unusually obtrusive background music. In the video (which you can see below the fold), we learn a few important things about Pataki. He ties his own shoelaces with great authority, but prefers to be seen reading a newspaper while riding shotgun rather than driving a car. His big applause line at New Hampshire campaign events is “God bless you all, and lunch is on me.” And he plans to run as a man who led New York through the aftermath of 9/11, because that worked so incredibly well for Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

I learned long ago not to get my hopes up with this crowd. Pataki will be gone from this race before most people even realize that he was running.

Here’s a choice quote for you:

“I’m not surprised that conservatives led the death penalty repeal effort in Nebraska. I think this will become more common,” Marc Hyden of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty said in a statement, adding that the death penalty violates what he called “the core conservative principles of fiscal responsibility, limited government, and valuing life.”

What Mr. Hyden is referring to is a decision made today by the Nebraska state legislature to override Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto and repeal the state’s death penalty. Nebraska is unusual in that it has a unicameral legislature and no formal party identification, but the single congressional body is dominated by conservatives. They nonetheless voted resoundingly, 30-19, to put Gov. Ricketts in his place. And Ricketts didn’t like it, saying that the decision called into question “the true meaning of representative government,” and declaring that “my words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families.”

Perhaps this isn’t the final word, however. Proving that it’s very difficult for anyone to have nice things, state Sen. Dave Bloomfield said that the issue would be on the ballot for the next election and predicted that the ban would be short-lived.

I don’t know how the death penalty is polling these days, but I know that it’s getting close to impossible to kill people with a lethal injection because no one will sell the drugs to the states for that purpose. I imagine that conservatives are still the most supportive of executing people and that people are generally for killing murderers as long as the question is posed in the abstract without getting into the practical, fiscal, and moral complications. Ideally, legislators are able to take these additional factors into account, which seems to be what just happened in Lincoln.

I’m pleased to see this unexpected good news, and I hope it means that sanity is still possible on the right.

I often have my doubts about that.

This research looks promising but I imagine that it will be somewhat difficult to explain to some people the logic of giving them herpes in order to treat their skin cancer.

That graphic from Climate Central shows the top fifty cities in the United States with the largest percentage increase in intense rain events (comparing the decade 1950-1959 to the ten year period 2005-2014). Those dramatic increases in heavy rainfall are no accident. They are the direct result of anthropogenic climate change. From Scientific American, dated May 27, 2015, “Heaviest Downpours Rise across the U.S.”

Record-breaking rain across Texas and Oklahoma this week caused widespread flooding, the likes of which the region has rarely, if ever, seen. For seven locations there, May 2015 has seen the most rain of any month ever recorded, with five days to go and the rain still coming. While rainfall in the region is consistent with the emerging El Niño, the unprecedented amounts suggest a possible climate change signal, where a warming atmosphere becomes more saturated with water vapor and capable of previously unimagined downpours.

Several people have been killed and hundreds have been rescued from their homes. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has already declared disaster areas in 37 counties. These torrential downpours follow weeks of unusually rainy weather across the Southern Plains. And they stack up to a broader trend in the region, and across the U.S., toward more heavy precipitation.

Across most of the country, the heaviest downpours are happening more frequently, delivering a deluge in place of what would have been routine heavy rain. Climate Central’s new analysis of 65 years of rainfall records at thousands of stations nationwide found that 40 of the lower 48 states have seen an overall increase in heavy downpours since 1950.

Gosh, makes you wonder who could have predicted such a state of affairs? Oh right, there was ONE group of people who did. From the 2007 Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, FAQ 10.1

Summer dryness indicates a greater risk of drought. Along with the risk of drying, there is an increased chance of intense precipitation and flooding due to the greater water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere. This has already been observed and is projected to continue because in a warmer world, precipitation tends to be concentrated into more intense events, with longer periods of little precipitation in between. Therefore, intense and heavy downpours would be interspersed with longer relatively dry periods. Another aspect of these projected changes is that wet extremes are projected to become more severe in many areas where mean precipitation is expected to increase, and dry extremes are projected to become more severe in areas where mean precipitation is projected to decrease.

Dear Climate Change Denialists (including just about every Republican candidate for the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination, but especially Jeb Bush), please proceed.

Just because something important has been repeated endlessly doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with trying to find new ways to say it. But you should get it right. If you want to identity something like the “Protestant Work Ethic” as the original sin of this country and the great enabler of racism, then you really ought to acknowledge the white Protestant roots of abolitionism, too. Otherwise your piece is going to read like Introductory Philosophy for Dummies.

I have a Protestant background and Mayflower ancestors on both sides of my family, and I’m well aware of their faults. But I am also aware of their contributions.

And I know that there’s an upside to divinely-inspired industriousness. If you need a modern day refresher, go look at Salt Lake City. Mormons are the new Congregationalists.

I don’t like having to point it out, but our white Protestant ancestors gave us the good with the bad. Our Founding Fathers were children of The Enlightenment. They didn’t emerge pure from Jupiter’s head like Minerva. What they did was give us some values and a roadmap. What we do with them is up to us.

Did you know that if a man masturbates he will discover that his hands are pregnant in the afterlife?

Maybe I knew a little more about Libya than Duncan and maybe I didn’t, but we both came to the same conclusion. What did I say over and over?

I said it isn’t humanitarian to kick out Gaddafi if what you leave is Somalia. Libya is getting closer and closer to being Somalia.

In any case, if you scroll past the Benghazi stuff in my archives, you’ll see that I earned the right to say “I told you so.”

In the end, Obama did better than I feared by managing to get Gaddafi out of there without much real effort, and he was smart not to make us responsible for the aftermath because it was a very predictable quicksand trap.

But my point was never that Gaddafi was a good guy that deserved to be in power. My point was that freaking out that he was about to decimate Benghazi only made sense if you could create a better outcome. I don’t see a better outcome.

I never did.

Look, I’ll freely admit that I’m grateful that Mary Landrieu held one Louisiana’s two Senate seats for the Democrats as long as she did. Considering the corruption the Bayou State is so famous for, she had a clean record. I understand that her state’s economy is heavily reliant on the mineral extraction industry, so I’m a little (not too much) forgiving of her odious record on climate change. She was not a bad senator, at least when compared to most of her colleagues.

But I am getting disgusted by how one senator after another gets lucrative lobbying jobs virtually as soon as they leave office. You can sometimes discern that outgoing senators are angling for these jobs by how they vote. There’s a reason that there is a two-year ban on former senators lobbying the Senate, and the intent is to prevent this kind of corrupting influence. I’d like to see a minimum six-year ban (since a single Senate term is six years) if not a lifetime ban. This is bullshit:

Landrieu said she will join Van Ness Feldman as a senior policy advisor, working closely with another recent hire, former Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the former top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Former senators are barred from lobbying their former colleagues for two years after the end of their congressional careers. For Landrieu, that means she can’t lobby colleagues until January, 2017. But she can lobby members of the executive branch, and is free to provide Van Ness Feldman clients with strategic advice.

Now, Norm Dicks spent his time in Congress authorizing the invasion of Iraq and using his senior position on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to keep Boeing fat and grease the Military-Industrial machine.

Here’s an idea, Dicks: go get a job that doesn’t peddle death and violence. Enough already!

I think people should start insisting that people who are running for office pledge that they will never lobby Congress after their elected career in DC is over.