Why Oh Why?

Senator James Inhofe was on the Rachel Maddow Show last night on MSNBC. Senator Inhofe lied with a smug smile as his State suffers from climate warming-induced drought and horrific tornadoes. How is it possible that people in Oklahoma vote for this dangerous charlatan?I can only surmise that these people do not care if their children and grandchildren will suffer through the worst catastrophe humans will ever face.The dangers of climate change, which is ultimately caused by overpopulation, will dwarf any immediate problems we see today since it will almost certainly lead to mass famines caused by the loss of arable land causing world wide migrations on an unprecedented scale,which will in turn lead to wars and probably the use of nuclear weapons, flooding of almost all coastal cities and destruction of infrastructure such as roads, railways and airports,leading to financial collapse of industrialized countries, and eventually almost certainly to the collapse of modern civilization. Neither I nor Imhofe will live to see the worst of this but his 20 grandchildren and their children will.

 And everyone who survives will be asking "Why oh why did they let this happen?".

Climate Change Denial a la Mode

Senator Jim Inhofe is a super religious climate denier who actually has the political power to disrupt our society from making the necessary changes in our way of life to prevent the coming catastrophe. He has just published a book "The Greatest Hoax" with all his dangerous and crazy ideas.

I copy below a review from ThinkProgress.org:

Inhofe: God Says Global Warming Is A Hoax

By Brad Johnson on Mar 9, 2012 at 11:24 am

In a radio interview with Voice of Christian Youth America , Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued that his belief that global warming is a hoax is biblically inspired . Promoting his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe told interviewer Vic Eliason on Wednesday that only God can change the climate, and the idea that manmade pollution could affect the seasons is “arrogance “:

Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Listen here:

Inhofe went on to attack evangelical leader Rich Cizik , the former Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals, who has made thereligious case for fighting climate change pollution . Inhofe said Cizik has been “exposed as a liberal” and that he is like idolatrous Romans described in the Bible as those who “give up the truth about God for a lie.”

In the interview, Inhofe did not mention he has received $1,352,523 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $90,950 from Koch Industries.

VCY America also argues that Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud , Muslim extremists have infiltrated the federal government, and that the United Nations has engineered the Agenda 21 program to transform human society through population control and energy use.

Gag Me with a Spoon

I just read an article from a whistleblower on "pink slime". My god! (and I'm not even religious!).
I copy below a gut-renching selection from this article:

“Pink slime” is largely made up of connective tissue that used to be reserved only for dog foods. It was not classified as “meat” because it was largely seen as unfit for human consumption. It also contains ammonia, which is used to kill off bacteria so people who eat it do not get sick. ...The meat industry now refers to it as “lean finely textured beef,” but in a government memo USDA scientist Gerald Zirnstein coined the term “pink slime,” which now appears to have stuck.

This week I had two major blows to my psyche: One involved a FedEx package which was held up for a week until the dry ice evaporated and the other one this pink slime revelation. Really, if you can't trust FedEx or your friendly hamburger place, what is left?

The article link is  http://tinyurl.com/7a2ycnr 
 

Climate Change Denial from Republican Presidential Candidate Santorum

As I have said before, the Republican Right has a policy of denying human-caused climate warming and even calling it a "hoax". The latest example is the Presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, who thank God has no chance of becoming the president. He is worse than an idiot, since if  he knows better and still says this, he is malicious and even evil. And if he really believes that 95% of all climate scientists are wrong, then he is a true idiot and utterly dangerous since he represents the views of a lot of people in the United States.

I copy below a recent article from the Huffington Post blog:

Rick Santorum: I've Never Believed In The 'Hoax Of Global Warming'

First Posted: 02/ 7/2012 1:39 pm Updated: 02/ 7/2012 1:45 pm

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum targeted primary rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich on Tuesday for allegedly buying into the "bogus" science of man-made climate change, while proudly declaring that he himself had never believed in the "hoax of global warming."

At a campaign event in Colorado Springs, Colo., Santorum first took aim at Romney for his support of a regional cap and trade energy pact as Massachusetts governor, a line of attack he previewed over the weekend on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"Governor Romney proudly announced that they were the first state, Massachusetts, to put a cap on CO2 emissions in the state of Massachusetts," Santorum said in Colorado, according to Politico , before turning on Gingrich.

"Speaker Gingrich has supported cap and trade for more than a dozen years. Now, he wants business incentives to go along with cap and trade, but he supported cap and trade, and sat on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and said that global warming had to be addressed by Congress," Santorum continued. "Who is he or who's Governor Romney to be able to go after President Obama? I've never supported even the hoax of global warming."

Gingrich has been battered on the now-notorious spot repeatedly over the course of the campaign. He's gone as far as to call it the "dumbest thing " he's done in the "last four years."

As Think Progress points out , Santorum also gave a more thorough explanation of his views on climate change on Monday.

"If you leave it to Nature, then Nature will do what Nature does, which is boom and bust," Santorum said at an energy summit in Colorado. "We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth's benefit."

He then appeared to give credence to the importance of "science and discovery," but only to prevent the "vagaries of nature" that could damage humans' ability to benefit from the planet.

"We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create," Santorum said.

Read this and weep. I can only surmise that these people want their children and grandchildren to suffer through the worst catastrophe humans will ever face. Maybe with people like this, the human race deserves to be destroyed, but the other life on Earth did not cause  this and does not deserve this fate. 

A True Revolution of the Mind

I have been following from a distance the political battle over intellectual property and freedom of the internet, but yesterday something happened that made me sit up and think. There are two bills with the acronyms, SOPA and PIPA, which are being fiercely  fought for by the Hollywood Film Studios and their literally thousands of lobbyists loaded with money to grease their  passage. And ex Senator Chris Dodd became the head of  the Motion Picture Association of America,  a lobbying group for the five biggest American film studios. I had had the feeling that the old Senate bull, Dodd, was going over to the dark side during  his last days in the Senate, but then Iearned that  some of my favorite Democratic Senators and Congress persons, including Barbra Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Franken, Pat Leahy and  Harry Reid, among others from both parties, were sponsors of these bills, and my head began to spin. 

These bills would allow the US Government to protect copyright infringement by blocking entire websites by manipulating the Domain Name Service or DNS system. A letter to Congress from over 100 law professors stated:  
"The Act would allow the government to break the Internet addressing system. The Internet's Domain Name System ("DNS") is a foundational building block upon which the Internet has been built and on which its continued functioning critically depends. The Act will have potentially catastrophic consequences for the stability and security of the DNS." 


It would essentially give our government the same power as used and abused by the Chinese government to counter political discontents. 


I can appreciate the problems with the online piracy of  intellectual property but I also believe that the internet is something special in the intellectual evolution of mankind and exemplifies freedom of speech and freedom of thought  as it is rapidly binding the entire world into a single sentient being. Paper news  media and other forms of non-digital information must learn to adapt to new ways or vanish in the dustbin of history. And media such as movies, books and music, which can be easily digitized must also somehow find new ways to coexist with the chaotic and all-expansive freedom of the internet. 


The power of the internet can be seen in the random appearance of "flash mobs" suddenly coming together in Railroad Stations, city streets and monuments to either make a political point or even to sing song, dance  or read poetry. And most famously, the internet was mainly responsible for the "Arab Spring" revolutions  which deposed and are still deposing long standing dictatorships. China in fact is so worried about the freedom of the internet that it tries to maintain the type of iron grip now being proposed to be given to the US Government, and is overjoyed that the US is considering these bills. 


But suddenly on Wednesday of this week, more than 400 web sites routinely used by millions of people world-wide decided to protest against these bills and simply shut down their sites, while providing users with the phone numbers and emails of all their Federal representatives and Senators. The effect was instant and enormous. The phone systems of almost all the congress people almost collapsed from the irate calls and their email systems overflowed with complaints. And suddenly many congress people turned 180 degrees and decided that these bills were in fact bad and should not be pushed. So in spite of all the financial political contributions from the lobbyists and the power of large corporations and powerful friends, our government representatives saw the power of the people and made up excuses not to vote for these bills. This to me was astounding and opened my eyes to a new way to produce political change in our country. 


I would argue that this may provide the way to maintain democracy and achieve goals in the political process. I finally can see a way forward to achieve progress on fighting, for example, the most serious problem of our civilization, climate warming. The overwhelming power of the truly millions of people using the  internet can clearly do anything. It is true democracy unblemished by Republican filibusters or Tea Party control of the House. For once I am almost an optimist. We can finally stop racism, religious fanaticism,  wars and the invasion of our privacy by the State. Our leaders will be beholden to the people if they want to keep their job, and the people will undergo a learning experience beyond belief. 


This is a true revolution of the mind. 

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The recently passed Defense Authorization Bill contained language that will continue allowing our country to grab anyone they want from anywhere in the world and keep them in prison without charges for as long as they want. It also will allow indefinite detention of US citizens. Everyone is concerned with the detention of US citizens, but I feel that the indefinite detention of anyone in the world is much more serious. It attacks the  very principles our country was founded on. Although President Obama made a "Signing Statement" that the US detention part would not be enforced during his administration, it  said nothing about non-US citizens, and nothing will prevent future Presidents from following this law as written, especially if the Republican right wing extremists gain power.
    I copy below a slightly revised article from "Nation of Change" that expresses my sentiments well:

The irony of it all is way more telling than the State of the Union ad­dress that we will hear in a few weeks. A con­sti­tu­tional lawyer who was freely elected pres­i­dent signs into law an act that be­trays the very prin­ci­ples that the na­tion he rep­re­sents was founded on. While the more cau­tious of us might shy away from the word fas­cism to de­scribe a na­tion’s mil­i­tary hav­ing the right to de­tain cit­i­zens with­out trial, it is cer­tainly not hy­per­bole. There has al­ready been an on­slaught of crit­i­cism re­gard­ing the con­tro­ver­sial Na­tional De­fense Au­tho­riza­tion Act that Con­gress leg­is­lated and Pres­i­dent Obama signed into law.
   His­tor­i­cally, the NDAA was a spend­ing bill that set the an­nual bud­get for the US mil­i­tary. Re­cently, the guar­an­teed pas­sage of the NDAA has been used by leg­is­la­tors—in spite of ve­he­ment rhetor­i­cal op­po­si­tion by pro­gres­sive and GOP leg­is­la­tors, the bill still passed, un­sur­pris­ingly, with over­whelm­ing sup­port (86-13 with one ab­stain­ing in the Sen­ate; 322-96 with eleven ab­stain­ing in the House)—to craft the poli­cies and pol­i­tics of the war on ter­ror.
   The same day Pres­i­dent Obama signed the NDAA, ac­tivists with Wit­ness Against Tor­ture (WAT) began prepar­ing for a Jan­u­ary 3, 2012 trial to de­fend them­selves against charges stem­ming from a June 2011 protest when they in­ter­rupted House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive de­lib­er­a­tions on a De­fense Ap­pro­pri­a­tions Bill—a pre­cur­sor to the final NDAA. The rea­son for WAT’s protest was not the pro­vi­sion that al­lows the pres­i­dent to in­def­i­nitely de­tain any­one, any­where, which was not in­cluded in the early drafts of the 2012 mil­i­tary spend­ing bill. Rather WAT was protest­ing the pro­vi­sions in the bill—which did make it into the NDAA—that es­tab­lish the prison in Guan­tanamo Bay as a per­ma­nent fix­ture in U.S. for­eign pol­icy and se­ri­ously ques­tion Amer­ica’s com­mit­ment to human and civil rights. Jour­nal­ist Andy Wor­thing­ton de­scribes the pro­vi­sions that make it near im­pos­si­ble to trans­fer de­tainees for trial in civil­ian courts or re­lease them to for­eign countries.
   The Guardian wrote that, re­gard­ing the NDAA’s po­ten­tial treat­ment of U.S. cit­i­zens as “enemy com­bat­ants,” with­out rights to coun­sel or trial, in the war on ter­ror is sim­ply the re­al­iza­tion of a mis­guided, im­moral, and in­ef­fec­tive do­mes­tic and for­eign re­sponse to ter­ror­ism. The chick­ens are com­ing home to roost. The Amer­i­can legacy of the 2000s is one of tor­ture, il­le­gal do­mes­tic spy­ing, the flout­ing of in­ter­na­tional law, and un­con­scionable de­ten­tion prac­tices. Mean­while, non­vi­o­lent al­ter­na­tives for ef­fec­tively deal­ing with ter­ror­ists—such as a long-stalled po­ten­tial re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion cen­ter for Guan­tanamo de­tainees or peer-group cen­ters that chal­lenge and shift the nar­ra­tives of Is­lamist ter­ror­ism (such as Abdul Haqq Baker and the STREET cen­ter that WNV fa­vorite Tina Rosen­ re­ported —are not given much of­fi­cial con­sid­er­a­tion.
   In­stead, the net of re­pres­sion con­tin­ues to grow as it ex­tends across the planet and all its peo­ples. The U.S. and its peo­ple have not been trou­bled much by the men, women, and even chil­dren who lan­guish in its mil­i­tary pris­ons—se­cret or oth­er­wise—in Cuba and count­less other global lo­ca­tions. As Wit­ness Against Tor­ture ac­tivists, whom I am join­ing, begin an 11-day Fast for Jus­tice on be­half of all those in­def­i­nitely de­tained, will or­di­nary Amer­i­cans rec­og­nize the global as­sault on free­dom that the Bush and Obama ad­min­is­tra­tions have waged for over a decade?
As Gitmo proves, the pol­icy and prac­tice of in­def­i­nite de­ten­tion is not new.It’s only the lat­est in a long, ugly suc­ces­sion of un­just de­ten­tions rang­ing from Japan­ese in­tern­ment camps to slave plan­ta­tions and Abu Ghraib. Even if Amer­i­cans are aghast at the NDAA’s con­tents that quite clearly con­tra­dict the con­sti­tu­tional right of habeas cor­pus we hold so dear, it is fool­ish to think this is just a naïve lapse of judg­ment by the keep­ers of our best in­ter­ests. The cat was let out of the bag a long time ago. Re­call the fa­mous words of Mar­tin Niemöller , the anti-Nazi pas­tor and paci­fist:


First they came for the com­mu­nists,and I didn’t speak out be­cause I wasn’t a com­mu­nist. Then they came for the trade union­ists,and I didn’t speak out be­cause I wasn’t a trade union­ist.
Then they came for the Jews,and I didn’t speak out be­cause I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.


We have failed to speak out for pris­on­ers de­tained the world over. Pres­i­dent Obama en­ters the final year of his first term, and his land­mark ex­ec­u­tive order to close Guan­tanamo has been re­duced to lit­tle more than a prank played on hope­ful sup­port­ers. 171 men re­main im­pris­oned — more than 60 of whom were cleared for re­lease years ago by Pres­i­dent Bush. It is not too late to speak out for them—or our­selves, for that mat­ter—but the sun is set­ting and the dark night of in­def­i­nite de­ten­tion threat­ens to rise on friend and foe alike. 

A sobering essay from Robert Reich

I copy below a recent essay by Robert Reich entitled "Why the Republican Crackup is Bad for America." He articulated many of my own thoughts.

                                                 Goya  - Republicans eating their own:

Two weeks be­fore the Iowa cau­cuses, the Re­pub­li­can crackup threat­ens the fu­ture of the Grand Old Party more pro­foundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for Amer­ica. 

The crackup isn’t just Rom­ney the smooth ver­sus Gin­grich the bomb-thrower. 

Not just House Re­pub­li­cans who just scotched the deal to con­tinue pay­roll tax re­lief and ex­tended un­em­ploy­ment in­sur­ance ben­e­fits be­yond the end of the year, ver­sus Sen­ate Re­pub­li­cans who voted over­whelm­ingly for it. 

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps mak­ing agree­ments he can’t keep, ver­sus Ma­jor­ity Leader Eric Can­tor, who keeps mak­ing trou­ble he can’t con­trol. And not just ven­er­a­ble Re­pub­li­can sen­a­tors like In­di­ana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of for­eign pol­icy for more than three decades, ver­sus pri­mary chal­lenger state trea­surer Richard Mour­dock, who ap­par­ently mis­placed and then re­dis­cov­ered $320 mil­lion in state tax rev­enues.

Some de­scribe the un­der­ly­ing con­flict as Tea Partiers ver­sus the Re­pub­li­can es­tab­lish­ment. But this just begs the ques­tion of who the Tea Partiers re­ally are and where they came from.

The un­der­ly­ing con­flict lies deep into the na­ture and struc­ture of the Re­pub­li­can Party. And its roots are very old.

As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ide­o­log­i­cal move­ment than the lat­est in­car­na­tion of an angry white mi­nor­ity – pre­dom­i­nantly South­ern, and mainly rural – that has re­peat­edly at­tacked Amer­i­can democ­racy in order to get its way.

It’s no mere co­in­ci­dence that the states re­spon­si­ble for putting the most Tea Party rep­re­sen­ta­tives in the House are all for­mer mem­bers of the Con­fed­er­acy. Of the Tea Party cau­cus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Geor­gia, and three each from South Car­olina, Ten­nessee, and bor­der-state Mis­souri.

Oth­ers are from bor­der states with sig­nif­i­cant South­ern pop­u­la­tions and South­ern ties. The four Cal­i­for­ni­ans in the cau­cus are from the in­land part of the state or Or­ange County, whose po­lit­i­cal cul­ture has was shaped by Ok­la­homans and South­ern­ers who mi­grated there dur­ing the Great De­pres­sion.

This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, South­ern or rural Re­pub­li­cans – only that these char­ac­ter­is­tics de­fine the epi­cen­ter of Tea Party Land.

And the views sep­a­rat­ing these Re­pub­li­cans from Re­pub­li­cans else­where mir­ror the split be­tween self-de­scribed Tea Partiers and other Re­pub­li­cans.

In a poll of Re­pub­li­cans con­ducted for CNN last Sep­tem­ber, nearly six in ten who iden­ti­fied them­selves with the Tea Party say global warm­ing isn’t a proven fact; most other Re­pub­li­cans say it is.

Six in ten Tea Partiers say evo­lu­tion is wrong; other Re­pub­li­cans are split on the issue. Tea Party Re­pub­li­cans are twice as likely as other Re­pub­li­cans to say abor­tion should be il­le­gal in all cir­cum­stances, and half as likely to sup­port gay mar­riage.

Tea Partiers are more ve­he­ment ad­vo­cates of states’ rights than other Re­pub­li­cans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abol­ish the De­part­ment of Ed­u­ca­tion; only one in five other Re­pub­li­cans do. And Tea Party Re­pub­li­cans worry more about the fed­eral deficit than jobs, while other Re­pub­li­cans say re­duc­ing un­em­ploy­ment is more im­por­tant than re­duc­ing the deficit.

In other words, the rad­i­cal right wing of today’s GOP isn’t that much dif­fer­ent from the so­cial con­ser­v­a­tives who began as­sert­ing them­selves in the Party dur­ing the 1990s, and, be­fore them, the “Willie Hor­ton” con­ser­v­a­tives of the 1980s, and, be­fore them, Richard Nixon’s “silent ma­jor­ity.”

Through most of these years, though, the GOP man­aged to con­tain these white, mainly rural and mostly South­ern, rad­i­cals. After all, many of them were still De­moc­rats. The con­ser­v­a­tive man­tle of the GOP re­mained in the West and Mid­west – with the lib­er­tar­ian lega­cies of Ohio Sen­a­tor Robert A. Taft and Barry Gold­wa­ter, nei­ther of whom was a barn-burner – while the epi­cen­ter of the Party re­mained in New York and the East.

But after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the South began its long shift to­ward the Re­pub­li­can Party and New York and the East be­came ever more solidly De­mo­c­ra­tic, it was only a mat­ter of time. The GOP’s dom­i­nant coali­tion of big busi­ness, Wall Street, and Mid­west and West­ern lib­er­tar­i­ans was los­ing its grip.

The wa­ter­shed event was Newt Gin­grich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Sud­denly, it seemed, the GOP had a per­son­al­ity trans­plant. The gen­tle­manly con­ser­vatism of House Mi­nor­ity Leader Bob Michel was re­placed by the bomb-throw­ing an­tics of Gin­grich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.

Al­most overnight Wash­ing­ton was trans­formed from a place where leg­is­la­tors tried to find com­mon ground to a war zone. Com­pro­mise was re­placed by brinkman­ship, bar­gain­ing by ob­struc­tion­ism, nor­mal leg­isla­tive ma­neu­ver­ing by threats to close down gov­ern­ment – which oc­curred at the end of 1995.

Be­fore then, when I’d tes­ti­fied on the Hill as Sec­re­tary of Labor, I had come in for tough ques­tion­ing from Re­pub­li­can sen­a­tors and rep­re­sen­ta­tives – which was their job. After Jan­u­ary 1995, I was ver­bally as­saulted. “Mr. Sec­re­tary, are you a so­cial­ist?” I re­call one of them ask­ing.

But the first con­crete sign that white, South­ern rad­i­cals might take over the Re­pub­li­can Party came in the vote to im­peach Bill Clin­ton, when two-thirds of sen­a­tors from the South voted for im­peach­ment. (A ma­jor­ity of the Sen­ate, you may re­call, voted to ac­quit.)

Amer­ica has had a long his­tory of white South­ern rad­i­cals who will stop at noth­ing to get their way – se­ced­ing from the Union in 1861, re­fus­ing to obey Civil Rights leg­is­la­tion in the 1960s, shut­ting the gov­ern­ment in 1995, and risk­ing the full faith and credit of the United States in 2010.

Newt Gin­grich’s re­cent as­ser­tion that pub­lic of­fi­cials aren’t bound to fol­low the de­ci­sions of fed­eral courts de­rives from the same tra­di­tion.

This stop-at-noth­ing rad­i­cal­ism is dan­ger­ous for the GOP be­cause most Amer­i­cans re­coil from it. Gin­grich him­self be­came an ob­ject of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Re­pub­li­cans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suf­fer large losses.

It’s also dan­ger­ous for Amer­ica. We need two po­lit­i­cal par­ties solidly grounded in the re­al­i­ties of gov­ern­ing. Our democ­racy can’t work any other way.

Why the Republican Crackup is Bad ForAmerica

Two weeks be­fore the Iowa cau­cuses, the Re­pub­li­can crackup threat­ens the fu­ture of the Grand Old Party more pro­foundly than at any time since the GOP’s eclipse in 1932. That’s bad for Amer­ica.

The crackup isn’t just Rom­ney the smooth ver­sus Gin­grich the bomb-thrower.

Not just House Re­pub­li­cans who just scotched the deal to con­tinue pay­roll tax re­lief and ex­tended un­em­ploy­ment in­sur­ance ben­e­fits be­yond the end of the year, ver­sus Sen­ate Re­pub­li­cans who voted over­whelm­ingly for it.

Not just Speaker John Boehner, who keeps mak­ing agree­ments he can’t keep, ver­sus Ma­jor­ity Leader Eric Can­tor, who keeps mak­ing trou­ble he can’t con­trol.

And not just ven­er­a­ble Re­pub­li­can sen­a­tors like In­di­ana’s Richard Lugar, a giant of for­eign pol­icy for more than three decades, ver­sus pri­mary chal­lenger state trea­surer Richard Mour­dock, who ap­par­ently mis­placed and then re­dis­cov­ered $320 mil­lion in state tax rev­enues.

Some de­scribe the un­der­ly­ing con­flict as Tea Partiers ver­sus the Re­pub­li­can es­tab­lish­ment. But this just begs the ques­tion of who the Tea Partiers re­ally are and where they came from.

The un­der­ly­ing con­flict lies deep into the na­ture and struc­ture of the Re­pub­li­can Party. And its roots are very old.

As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ide­o­log­i­cal move­ment than the lat­est in­car­na­tion of an angry white mi­nor­ity – pre­dom­i­nantly South­ern, and mainly rural – that has re­peat­edly at­tacked Amer­i­can democ­racy in order to get its way.

It’s no mere co­in­ci­dence that the states re­spon­si­ble for putting the most Tea Party rep­re­sen­ta­tives in the House are all for­mer mem­bers of the Con­fed­er­acy. Of the Tea Party cau­cus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Geor­gia, and three each from South Car­olina, Ten­nessee, and bor­der-state Mis­souri.

Oth­ers are from bor­der states with sig­nif­i­cant South­ern pop­u­la­tions and South­ern ties. The four Cal­i­for­ni­ans in the cau­cus are from the in­land part of the state or Or­ange County, whose po­lit­i­cal cul­ture has was shaped by Ok­la­homans and South­ern­ers who mi­grated there dur­ing the Great De­pres­sion.

This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, South­ern or rural Re­pub­li­cans – only that these char­ac­ter­is­tics de­fine the epi­cen­ter of Tea Party Land.

And the views sep­a­rat­ing these Re­pub­li­cans from Re­pub­li­cans else­where mir­ror the split be­tween self-de­scribed Tea Partiers and other Re­pub­li­cans.

In a poll of Re­pub­li­cans con­ducted for CNN last Sep­tem­ber, nearly six in ten who iden­ti­fied them­selves with the Tea Party say global warm­ing isn’t a proven fact; most other Re­pub­li­cans say it is.

Six in ten Tea Partiers say evo­lu­tion is wrong; other Re­pub­li­cans are split on the issue. Tea Party Re­pub­li­cans are twice as likely as other Re­pub­li­cans to say abor­tion should be il­le­gal in all cir­cum­stances, and half as likely to sup­port gay mar­riage.

Tea Partiers are more ve­he­ment ad­vo­cates of states’ rights than other Re­pub­li­cans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abol­ish the De­part­ment of Ed­u­ca­tion; only one in five other Re­pub­li­cans do. And Tea Party Re­pub­li­cans worry more about the fed­eral deficit than jobs, while other Re­pub­li­cans say re­duc­ing un­em­ploy­ment is more im­por­tant than re­duc­ing the deficit.

In other words, the rad­i­cal right wing of today’s GOP isn’t that much dif­fer­ent from the so­cial con­ser­v­a­tives who began as­sert­ing them­selves in the Party dur­ing the 1990s, and, be­fore them, the “Willie Hor­ton” con­ser­v­a­tives of the 1980s, and, be­fore them, Richard Nixon’s “silent ma­jor­ity.”

Through most of these years, though, the GOP man­aged to con­tain these white, mainly rural and mostly South­ern, rad­i­cals. After all, many of them were still De­moc­rats. The con­ser­v­a­tive man­tle of the GOP re­mained in the West and Mid­west – with the lib­er­tar­ian lega­cies of Ohio Sen­a­tor Robert A. Taft and Barry Gold­wa­ter, nei­ther of whom was a barn-burner – while the epi­cen­ter of the Party re­mained in New York and the East.

But after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the South began its long shift to­ward the Re­pub­li­can Party and New York and the East be­came ever more solidly De­mo­c­ra­tic, it was only a mat­ter of time. The GOP’s dom­i­nant coali­tion of big busi­ness, Wall Street, and Mid­west and West­ern lib­er­tar­i­ans was los­ing its grip.

The wa­ter­shed event was Newt Gin­grich’s takeover of the House, in 1995. Sud­denly, it seemed, the GOP had a per­son­al­ity trans­plant. The gen­tle­manly con­ser­vatism of House Mi­nor­ity Leader Bob Michel was re­placed by the bomb-throw­ing an­tics of Gin­grich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.

Al­most overnight Wash­ing­ton was trans­formed from a place where leg­is­la­tors tried to find com­mon ground to a war zone. Com­pro­mise was re­placed by brinkman­ship, bar­gain­ing by ob­struc­tion­ism, nor­mal leg­isla­tive ma­neu­ver­ing by threats to close down gov­ern­ment – which oc­curred at the end of 1995.

Be­fore then, when I’d tes­ti­fied on the Hill as Sec­re­tary of Labor, I had come in for tough ques­tion­ing from Re­pub­li­can sen­a­tors and rep­re­sen­ta­tives – which was their job. After Jan­u­ary 1995, I was ver­bally as­saulted. “Mr. Sec­re­tary, are you a so­cial­ist?” I re­call one of them ask­ing.

But the first con­crete sign that white, South­ern rad­i­cals might take over the Re­pub­li­can Party came in the vote to im­peach Bill Clin­ton, when two-thirds of sen­a­tors from the South voted for im­peach­ment. (A ma­jor­ity of the Sen­ate, you may re­call, voted to ac­quit.)

Amer­ica has had a long his­tory of white South­ern rad­i­cals who will stop at noth­ing to get their way – se­ced­ing from the Union in 1861, re­fus­ing to obey Civil Rights leg­is­la­tion in the 1960s, shut­ting the gov­ern­ment in 1995, and risk­ing the full faith and credit of the United States in 2010.

Newt Gin­grich’s re­cent as­ser­tion that pub­lic of­fi­cials aren’t bound to fol­low the de­ci­sions of fed­eral courts de­rives from the same tra­di­tion.

This stop-at-noth­ing rad­i­cal­ism is dan­ger­ous for the GOP be­cause most Amer­i­cans re­coil from it. Gin­grich him­self be­came an ob­ject of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Re­pub­li­cans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suf­fer large losses.

It’s also dan­ger­ous for Amer­ica. We need two po­lit­i­cal par­ties solidly grounded in the re­al­i­ties of gov­ern­ing. Our democ­racy can’t work any other way.

This ar­ti­cle was orig­i­nally posted on Robert Reich's blog .

Truly incredible

Alan Grayson is one  of my political heroes. I sincerely hope he gets elected again.
Following is an email sent from his campaign. Read it - It is truly incredible!

I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage.

Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history.

Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number.

Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank.

Pages 133 & 137 – Some of these “broad-based emergency program” loans were long-term, and some were short-term. But the “term-adjusted borrowing” was equivalent to a total of $1,139,000,000,000 more than one year. That’s more than $1 trillion out the door. Lending for these programs in fact peaked at more than $1 trillion.

Pages 135 & 196 – Sixty percent of the $738 billion “Commercial Paper Funding Facility” went to the subsidiaries of foreign banks. 36% of the $71 billion Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility also went to subsidiaries of foreign banks.

Page 205 – Separate and apart from these “broad-based emergency program” loans were another $10,057,000,000,000 in “currency swaps.” In the “currency swaps,” the Fed handed dollars to foreign central banks, no strings attached, to fund bailouts in other countries. The Fed’s only “collateral” was a corresponding amount of foreign currency, which never left the Fed’s books (even to be deposited to earn interest), plus a promise to repay. But the Fed agreed to give back the foreign currency at the original exchange rate, even if the foreign currency appreciated in value during the period of the swap. These currency swaps and the “broad-based emergency program” loans, together, totaled more than $26 trillion. That’s almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That’s an amount equal to more than seven years of federal spending -- on the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and everything else. And around twice American’s total GNP.

Page 201 – Here again, these “swaps” were of varying length, but on Dec. 4, 2008, there were $588,000,000,000 outstanding. That’s almost $2,000 for every American. All sent to foreign countries. That’s more than twenty times as much as our foreign aid budget.

Page 129 – In October 2008, the Fed gave $60,000,000,000 to the Swiss National Bank with the specific understanding that the money would be used to bail out UBS, a Swiss bank. Not an American bank. A Swiss bank.

Pages 3 & 4 – In addition to the “broad-based programs,” and in addition to the “currency swaps,” there have been hundreds of billions of dollars in Fed loans called “assistance to individual institutions.” This has included Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and “some primary dealers.” The Fed decided unilaterally who received this “assistance,” and who didn’t.

Pages 101 & 173 – You may have heard somewhere that these were riskless transactions, where the Fed always had enough collateral to avoid losses. Not true. The “Maiden Lane I” bailout fund was in the hole for almost two years.

Page 4 – You also may have heard somewhere that all this money was paid back. Not true. The GAO lists five Fed bailout programs that still have amounts outstanding, including $909,000,000,000 (just under a trillion dollars) for the Fed’s Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program alone. That’s almost $3,000 for every American.

Page 126 – In contemporaneous documents, the Fed apparently did not even take a stab at explaining why it helped some banks (like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) and not others. After the fact, the Fed referred vaguely to “strains in the financial markets,” “transitional credit,” and the Fed’s all-time favorite rationale for everything it does, “increasing liquidity.”

81 different places in the GAO report – The Fed applied nothing even resembling a consistent policy toward valuing the assets that it acquired. Sometimes it asked its counterparty to take a “haircut” (discount), sometimes it didn’t. Having read the whole report, I see no rhyme or reason to those decisions, with billions upon billions of dollars at stake.

Page 2 – As massive as these enumerated Fed bailouts were, there were yet more. The GAO did not even endeavor to analyze the Fed’s discount window lending, or its single-tranche term repurchase agreements.

Pages 13 & 14 – And the Fed wasn’t the only one bailing out Wall Street, of course. On top of what the Fed did, there was the $700,000,000,000 TARP program authorized by Congress (which I voted against). The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) also provided a federal guarantee for $600,000,000,000 in bonds issued by Wall Street.

There is one thing that I’d like to add to this, which isn’t in the GAO’s report. All this is something new, very new. For the first 96 years of the Fed’s existence, the Fed’s primary market activities were to buy or sell U.S. Treasury bonds (to change the money supply), and to lend at the “discount window.” Neither of these activities permitted the Fed to play favorites. But the programs that the GAO audited are fundamentally different. They allowed the Fed to choose winners and losers.

So what does all this mean? Here are some short observations:

(1) In the case of TARP, at least The People’s representatives got a vote. In the case of the Fed’s bailouts, which were roughly 20 times as substantial, there was never any vote. Unelected functionaries, with all sorts of ties to Wall Street, handed out trillions of dollars to Wall Street. That’s now how a democracy should function, or even can function.

(2) The notion that this was all without risk, just because the Fed can keep printing money, is both laughable and cryable (if that were a word). Leaving aside the example of Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, we have the more recent examples of Iceland (75% of GNP gone when the central bank took over three failed banks) and Ireland (100% of GNP gone when the central bank tried to rescue property firms).

(3) In the same way that American troops cannot act as police officers for the world, our central bank cannot act as piggy bank for the world. If the European Central Bank wants to bail out UBS, fine. But there is no reason why our money should be involved in that.

(4) For the Fed to pick and choose among aid recipients, and then pick and choose who takes a “haircut” and who doesn’t, is both corporate welfare and socialism. The Fed is a central bank, not a barber shop.

(5) The main, if not the sole, qualification for getting help from the Fed was to have lost huge amounts of money. The Fed bailouts rewarded failure, and penalized success. (If you don’t believe me, ask Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan.) The Fed helped the losers to squander and destroy even more capital.

(6) During all the time that the Fed was stuffing money into the pockets of failed banks, many Americans couldn’t borrow a dime for a home, a car, or anything else. If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there be 24 million Americans today who can’t find a full-time job?

And here’s what bothers me most about all this: it can happen again. I’ve called the GAO report a bailout autopsy. But it’s an autopsy of the undead.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

A Social Misfit

I must admit that I have always been a true social misfit. After a one night binge many years ago as a Freshman at Princeton, I decided even in the case of peer pressure not to ever drink anything that I use  in the lab to kill cells.But I guess I should explain the "binge" comment: Well, one night I decided to see what being drunk was like so I bought a fifth of scotch and several six packs, and my roomates mixed the scotch with beer and I gulped it down and ran up and down the stairs in my dorm to  get it into my system quicker. I don't remember much but my roomate told me that I tried to jump out a window at one point saying that I could fly. I woke up the next morning  in the shower where my roomies had put me since I was vomiting so  much. By the evening I was capable of crawling to the campus Infirmary and telling them I was dying. Not fun at all.

In any case that was my last drink of alcohol. Full disclosure: I have sipped sweet Begium beers and Manichevitz wine once or twice.

Not drinking is a hard thing to do and my friends and colleagues must think I am a nut case when I sip Root Beer at wine-tasting parties. But I long ago stopped worrying what people thought of me. And it has led me to become an expert on the many vintages of Cream Soda and Root Beer. Dick Siegel, a colleague and close friend at UCLA, once held a Cola tasting party. I was not aware that there were so many different varieties of Cola. Dick was careful to decant each and read off the vintage year and bottling location (i.e. Philadelphia, 1998) before having people do the tasting. He offered Cheetos to clean the palate between tastings. This party was incidentally held the same night that another colleague was having a gourmet wine-tasting party.

A digression: I really think that the love affair people have with "good" wines and beers is due to mass hysteria induced by television and books since I cannot believe that anyone sincerely likes the taste of alcohol in a drink. To me, wine-tasting is a cultural affectation, but I figure that as long as it is not harmful to others let them do it.

Another digression: My wife claims that "Root Beer" is also an acquired taste that is uniquely American. She says it smells to her like Ben Gay. It is indeed true that none of my foreign postdocs over the years could stand even the smell of Root Beer. Be that as it may, my favorite always been A & W Root Beer in a frosty mug, but the closely related Birch Beer and IBI Root Beer come close. I will always remember the cross country trip I took coming from Philadelphia to my first job at UCLA, stopping at every A &W along the way. And of course the ultimate drink is Sasparilla, which is a sort of Root Beer but very hard to find. I recently looked up the difference between Sasparilla and Root Beer and here it is if you are interested: Root beer is also flavored with sarsaparilla root but has additional flavorings from "sassafras, anise, burdock, cinnamon, dandelion, ginger, juniper, vanilla and wintergreen". Wow!

OK. I finally got all this off my chest and I will retire in two years with a clear conscience.

The curious mind wants to know...

Why do people talking on a cell phone make all the hand and arm gesticulations and even the facial expressions normally used when talking to someone in person? Do they think that the person can see them as well as hear them? Or is this the only way they can talk?  It is so crazy and yet it has become a socially acceptable behavior. They don't even stop when they are in a crowded elevator forcing everyone to listen to their problems and to watch their grimaces and arm waving. 

It almost rivals the other socially acceptable behavior of having little white wires extending from their ears to their Ipods and walking around with a zombie like expression. And some people (usually University students) wear huge earphones connected to the little white wires, and walk with the same zombie like expression. Perhaps the continuous loud music zombifies them and that is why they seldom talk to others as they walk from class to class.

Consider this Blog a silent cry for help in understanding and coming to terms with these behaviors before my head explodes.

Meanwhile the Earth gets Hotter and Hotter - and the Band Plays On!

I copy below an article from Joe Rom's Climate Change blog about a recent speech by Jim Hanson, the leading climatologist in the US and perhaps, the world. If this does not scare you, nothing will.

NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable.”

By Joe Romm on Sep 29, 2011 at 5:17 pm

Climatologist Slams Media for “Silent Summer”:  Poor Coverage of Link Between Extreme Weather and Human-Caused Climate Change

The nation’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has a new paper out — and he has been speaking out.  At 350.org’s Moving Planet event in New York on Saturday, he said:

“Climate change — human-made global warming — is happening.  It is already having noticeable impacts…. If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

Hard to argue with that.
The combination of extreme heat, constant Dust-Bowl conditions in the Southwest and South central, the whipsawing from drought to deluge in the Southeast, and decade after decade of sea level rise will create nearly intolerable conditions by century’s end (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impact”).  Conditions might look a lot like this:

Oops, that’s the US Drought Monitor for Texas this week!  Dark red is “exceptional drought” (covering 86% of the state) — virtually no rain for a year.  Red is “extreme drought” (covering 97% of the state) — a Palmer Drought Severity Index of -4 or worse.
Imagine what it will be like when much of the South is like this most of the time (other than the occasional record-smashing deluge) — and temperatures are some 9°F to 11°F warmer on average.  It will be the great repopulation of the North.
Hansen also has a new paper out on climate change in which he says:

It is time for all of us to get Tea-Party-angry about what our political system has become and about the intergenerational injustice being perpetrated on young people.

Again, no argument here.
The most interesting part of the paper is his critique of the media coverage (“Silent Summer”), his discussion of the intimidation of climate scientists, and a tantalizing introduction to a forthcoming analysis on extreme weather and attribution to human emissions.  Also, he doesn’t like the phrase “global weirding.”  Here are the highlights:

Silent Summer

There is ample evidence of growing climate disruption. But despite record or near-record heat and drought in the United States this past summer with simultaneous extreme flooding, and despite comparable extremes in China and elsewhere, there has been little public discussion of the connection of these climate extremes with human-made climate forcing.
The media are partly responsible for the silent summer, as they have mainly chosen not to examine connections between climate anomalies and human-made causes. A cynic may ask whether their silent summer is related to increasing right-wing control of media and large advertising revenues from fossil fuel companies. Regardless of reasons for media silence, should scientists be making more effort to draw public attention to the human role in climate anomalies?
Scientists face one long-standing obstacle to public communication and one new factor. The old difficulty arises from limits on our ability to detect expected change in a chaotic climate system, especially concerning the significance of specific regional events. The new factor is the likelihood of being pilloried for reporting evidence of a human role in climate change.

In a later section, he elaborates on that last sentence:

Character Assassination

There was criticism of my congressional testimony about global warming in the 1980s, but it was mainly normal healthy scientific skepticism (Kerr, 1989). A different sort of criticism, including an element of character assassination, has developed since then and has been leveled most heavily against scientists Ben Santer, Michael Mann and Phil Jones. The approach has included acquiring and digging into personal correspondences of scientists in search of any inappropriate or questionable statements, as well as fine-toothed scrutiny of their scientific analyses in search of any element, however minor, that could be criticized.
The ultimate target of the critics in Santer’s case was a specific sentence that Santer was responsible for as a lead author in the 1995 IPCC report: “Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate.” The target in Mann’s case was the temperature record of the past millennium, which Mann had shown to resemble a “hockey stick”, bending upward into rapid warming in the past century. The target in Jones’ case was his analysis of observations showing the rapid warming of the past century.
The important point I wish to note is that each of these three targets, the scientific conclusions that provoked the critics and which they aimed to destroy or discredit, have been shown in subsequent analyses to have been correct, indeed, dead-on-the-mark.
However, the scientific community is well aware of the toll that these attacks took on the scientists, despite the fact that their work was eventually vindicated and corroborated.
Thus, it would not be surprising if these experiences have an effect on the willingness of other scientists to make statements that draw attention to the likely role of human-made forcings as a contributor to the climate extremes of the past summer.
In any case, there is abundant evidence that the attacks on the science and the scientists have contributed to a pullback in public support for national and international efforts to find a path forward that would lead to the large reductions in emissions that are needed to stabilize climate and provide young people with a promising future.
This is important, because the actions that are required can only be achieved through the political process. That will not happen until the public understands and supports what is needed.

Finally, Hansen has an interesting discussion of extreme weather and attribution to human emissions:

Limits on Detection

Global warming is expected to intensify climate extremes: (1) Warmer air holds more water vapor, and precipitation occurs in more extreme events. ’100-year floods’ and even ’500- year floods’ will become more likely. Storms fueled by water vapor (latent heat), including thunderstorms, tornadoes and tropical storms, will have the potential to be stronger. Storm damage will increase because of increased flooding and stronger winds. (2) Where weather patterns create dry conditions, global warming will intensify the drought, because of increased evaporation and evapotranspiration. Thus fires will be more frequent and burn hotter.
Observations confirm that heat waves and regional drought have become more frequent and intense over the past 50 years. Rainfall in the heaviest downpours has increased about 20 percent. The destructive energy in hurricanes has increased (USGCRP, 2009).
Is the Texas drought related to human-made global warming? There is strong reason to believe that it is. Basic theory and models (Held and Soden, 2006) and empirical evidence (Seidal and Randel, 2006) indicate that the global overturning circulation, air rising in the tropics and subsiding in the subtropics, expands in latitude with global warming. Such expansion tends to make droughts more frequent and severe in the southern United States and the Mediterranean region, for example. Climate simulations, shown in Figure 3 for one of the best climate models, support that expectation.

[JR:  I suspect this study underestimates likely drought in the West due to early snow melt and other factors.  I'll have to take a look.]

So the occurrence of unusual Texas heat and drought is consistent with expectations for increasing CO2. But is this year’s event just climate ‘noise’? Scientists need to help the public distinguish climate change caused by global warming from natural climate variability.
I used ‘climate dice’ in conjunction with testimony to Congress in 1988 to try to help the public understand that the human-made climate ‘signal’ must be extracted from the large ‘noise’ of natural climate variability. I believe the public can grasp the concept of natural climate variability and its effect on perceptions of climate change.
In an upcoming post (Climate Variability and Climate Change, Hansen, Sato and Ruedy) we try to clarify this matter via simple maps and graphs that show how the odds have changed, allowing comparison of expectations and reality. We believe this is a truer approach than the frequently suggested alternative of dropping the long-standing ‘global warming’ terminology in favor of anything (‘climate disruption’, ‘global weirding’, etc.) that avoids the need to explain the occurrence of unusually cold conditions.
We show that a ‘signal’ due to global warming is already rising out of the climate ‘noise’, even on regional scales. Figure 4 is an example, showing surface air temperature anomalies in the last four Northern Hemisphere summers relative to the climate of 1951-1980, the time when the ‘baby-boomers grew up – it was a time of relatively stable climate, just prior to the rapid global warming of the past three decades.

During 1951-1980 the world had equal areas of blue (cool), white (near average), and red (warm) temperature anomalies. The division 0.43σ, where σ is the local standard deviation about the local 1951-1980 mean, was chosen to yield equal area categories for a normal (‘bell curve’) distribution of temperature anomalies. The other divisions in the figure, 2σ and 3σ, allow us to see the areas that have extreme anomalies relative to climatology. The frequency of an anomaly greater than +2σ is only 2-3 percent in the period of climatology for a normal distribution. The frequency of a +3σ event is normally less than one-half of one percent of the time. The numbers on the upper right corner of each map are the percentages of the global area covered by each of the seven categories of the color bar.
Figure 4 reveals that the area with temperature anomaly greater than +2σ covers 20-40 percent of the planet in these recent years, and the area greater than +3σ is almost 10-20 percent. The United States has been relatively ‘lucky’, with the only +2-3σ areas being the Texas region in 2011 and a smaller area in the Southeast in 2010. However, these events are sufficiently fresh in people’s memories that they provide a useful measure of the practical impact of a 3σ anomaly.
There is no good reason to believe that the United States, or any other region, will continue to be so ‘lucky’. On the contrary, as shown in our upcoming post, there is a clear positive trend to increasing areas of +2-3σ anomalies, consistent with expectations for the climate response to increasing greenhouse gases. If BAU emissions continue, the area with anomalies of +2-3σ and larger will continue to increase.
The chaotic element in climate variability makes it impossible to say exactly where large anomalies will occur in a given year. However, we can say with assurance that the area and magnitude of the anomalies and their practical impact will continue to increase. Clear presentations of the data should help the public appreciate the situation as global warming continues to rise further above the level of natural variability.
However, as Mother Nature makes the dominance of human-made climate change more obvious, proponents of business-as-usual have engaged in another method to stifle communication by scientists about global warming.

Hard to argue with that!