Headlines - Sunday

Arctic ice is now in a "death spiral" that could mean summer ice at the North Pole will be a thing of the past in a decade, according to a leading scientist involved with studies of the region. As recently as 2001, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change had reported that major ice retreat would not occur before 2100. Two years ago, a key researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said summer ice would be gone by 2050. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/6/739369/-Green-Diary-RescueOpen-Thread:-Meltdown-Edition

 

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A story making its way around the right-wingnut-o-sphere tries to discredit the Obama stimulus plan as having already failed because the unemployment rate is apparently higher than Obama's team had forecast in January. Sean Hannity picked up on it on his show last night. Personally, I'd speculate that the Obama team simply underestimated the size of the bag of shit that Bush left on the White House welcome mat when he departed, but that's just me.

It's interesting to note that the wingnuts make no mention of the text that accompanies the Obama team's chart:

"...there is considerable uncertainty in our estimates: both the impact of the package on GDP and the relationship between higher GDP and job creation are hard to estimate precisely."

Why tell the whole story when you can just take something out of context?

In any event, it might be instructive to take a look at some Bush team forecasts (PDF, dated Feb. 11, 2008, see Page 14):

The Administration projects that employment will increase at an average pace of 109,000 jobs per month during the four quarters of 2008, before picking up to 129,000 jobs per month in 2009. [Ed. note: 2008 averaged -256,000, and so far in 2009 we're running -584,000 on average. Neither of their forecasts, by the way, provides enough jobs to keep pace with population growth. Nice call.] In the longer run, the pace of employment growth will slow, reflecting diminishing rates of labor force growth due to the retirement of the baby-boom generation. The Administration also projects that the unemployment rate will edge up from 2007 to 2008 as a whole, before returning to 4.8 percent in 2010, the middle of the range consistent with stable inflation in the long run. [Ed. note: 4.8 percent unemployment in 2010 is exponentially more of a fantasy than Obama's January forecasts.]

So, they only missed on 2008 jobs by 365,000/month, and on 2009 jobs (thus far) by 713,000/month.

The report concludes:

The economy is projected to settle into a steady state in which real GDP grows at about 2.9 percent per year, the unemployment rate stays around the level consistent with stable inflation (about 4.8 percent) and inflation remains moderate and stable (about 2.3 on the CPI). Consumer spending is projected to grow in line with disposable income, and business investment and exports are projected to grow a bit faster than GDP as a whole.

Of course, the forecasts were pure garbage and not remotely reality-based.

The next sentence is:

Economic forecasts are subject to error, and unforeseen positive and negative developments will affect the course of the economy over the next several years.

But in the interest of intellectual dishonesty I probably shouldn't include that here.

ADDING: And this is the type of idiocy that shows up in such posts' comments:

One must wonder what koolaid the Whitehouse people drank in forecasting such a rosy scenario. Orszag, director of OMB must really be stoned by now after that Whitehouse budget he gave using such assumptions. How long before the MSM notices the difference between reality and the utopic visions of Obamamania?

Right. Because clearly the Bush folks did a way better job.

ADDING AGAIN, LASTLY: It should go without saying -- but I'll say it anyway -- that the Bush team's forecasts were published when the economy was already in its third month of recession, making their absurdity all the worse (i.e. many metrics had already rolled over).

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The Privatization of "Obama's War": http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/06-4

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Here in America, we have members of our so-called media promoting the bogus claim that President Obama is a secret Muslim. 

It's to be expected, really. These are the same people who rarely, if ever, questioned the integrity of the previous administration - you know, the one which got so tangled up in its own web of deceit, it reached the point where it couldn't even tell a lie the same way twice - so now they're reduced to making stuff up about the new guy and passing it off as news. Same thing they did with Bush, only now they're on the offensive because... well, I don't know why. I mean, Sally Quinn approves of his wife's bare arms - you'd think if Sally Quinn was satisfied, the rest of the village would be satisfied, too. But no...

 

And then there's al-Qaeda. Not to be outdone by their kindred spirits here, no less a number two than Ayman al-Zawahiri went on record with the equally bogus contention that Obama was really a jew. 

Wow. just... wow. What to make of that?

I'm not on al-Qaeda's mailing list, so I have no idea what al-Zawahiri was trying to accomplish on that tape. But it does seem like their current strategy runs along the lines of, "when all else fails, go after the jews." Can't rail against Obama for being the next great satan if he's trying to reach out to muslims, can they? No problem -- disingenuously link him to the jews instead!

Hell, why not? Germany did the "blame the jews" thing seventy years ago, the crusaders did that a millennium ago*, and even one of two subsets of Jerusalem-based jews did that to the other after Rome sacked the $#!+ out of the place in a.d. 70. (lovely way to set a precedent, no? Thanks a million, first-century christians.)

Funny how al-Qaeda is turning to one of the oldest aspects of western tradition in its never-ending war against the west. It kinda defeats the whole point of their existence...

(* - well, the crusaders intended to go after the muslims, but a lot of times, they never quite made it to the islamic world, so they went after local jews instead - "when all else fails," et cetera. And the ones who did make it to the islamic world usually got their asses handed back to them, so there you go...)

 

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As soon as the 111th Congress was seated the republican minority started whining incessantly that they did so have substantive ideas, but the mean ole Democrats were ignoring and marginalizing them.  Well, they are half-right.  They are being ignored and marginalized, but not because they are so clever and wise.

They are being ignored and marginalized because they are blithering damned idiots. Witness Todd Akin discussing climate change on the House floor last week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObP1K-7nwv4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftheygaveusarepublic%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded

Now, someone, please...make me understand why, in the name of all that is holy, I supposedly owe it to a jackass like that to give any gravity at all to a single word he utters, including 'and,' 'the' and 'of.'  

If the republicans want to be taken seriously they have to stop taking pride in being ignorant.  It isn't rude to refuse to engage with willfully ignorant and pathologically dishonest jackasses who not only intentionally conflate the definitions of climate and weather, but who intentionally mischaracterize the change of seasons as 'climate change' and pretend that weather phenomena can be legislated.  If that were the case, I'm pretty sure that Kansas would have outlawed tornadoes after Udall and just skipped Andover all together.

You can not seriously expect me to engage with untreated mental illness as if it were a credible position.  It is not.  And anyone who insults the intelligence of their constituents with such blithe, glib, voluntary, dishonesty either deserves an ass kicking at the polls in the midterms, cuz there is no way in hell the people I know from St. Louis deserve to be represented by this goon.  

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Obama considers change to military commissions law that would allow some detainees who are charged with complicity in the 9/11 attacks to plead guilty even though they face the death penalty.  It's got something for everyone...the government gets to avoid revealing the details of the tortures that were employed and the terrorists get to achieve martyrdom.  The proposal, in a draft of legislation that would be submitted to Congress, has not been publicly disclosed. It was circulated to officials under restrictions requiring secrecy. People who have read or been briefed on it said it had been presented to Defense Secretary Bob Gates by an administration task force on detention.

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Tennessee lawmakers approve handguns in bars, override veto: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/06/tennessee-lawmakers/

I can't imagine there will be any problems with this.

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Obama planning even more speeches and town-hall-style meetings about health care: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/politics/07policy.html?_r=1&hp

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4,311 soldiers killed in Iraq; 700 in Afghanistan.

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Bay Buchanan: My staffer who karate-chopped a black woman and called her the "n" word was the victim of a "modern day lynching."