Paul Ryan: Climate Science Denier and Conspiracy Theorist

From Climate Progress

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick, is a virulent denier of climate science, with a voting record to match.

favorite of the Koch brothers, Ryan has accused scientists of engaging in conspiracy to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” He has implied that snow invalidates global warming.

Ryan has voted to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse pollution, to eliminate White House climate advisers, to block the U.S. Department of Agriculture from preparing for climate disasters like the drought devastating his home state, and to eliminate the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E):

“If Paul Ryan Knew What Poverty Was, He Wouldn’t Be Giving This Speech”

The fightin-for-the-poor Catholics signed up and lined up to take issue with the fighting-for-the-rich Catholic, Paul Ryan when he gave a speech at Catholic Georgetown University on Thursday.

“I am afraid that Chairman Ryan’s budget reflects the values of his favorite philosopher Ayn Rand rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Father Thomas Reese, a fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, in a press release Tuesday. “Survival of the fittest may be okay for Social Darwinists but not for followers of the gospel of compassion and love.”

… During the Q&A session that followed, where Ryan fielded questions submitted by students, he insisted that welfare reform had brought down child poverty rates. The claim is false, especially in Ryan’s home state. According to the most recent data, the child poverty rate in Wisconsin jumped 42 percent between 2000 and 2010. The suffering would have been more significant but for the large increases in federal food assistance that Ryan wants to scale back.

… James Salt, the executive director of Catholics United, which organized one of the protests outside the hall where Ryan was speaking, told gathered reporters that his group was there because “the dignity of the poor should be at the forefront of our minds.” Taking a dig at Ryan’s attempts to cast his budget as a boon for poor people, Salt noted, “If Paul Ryan knew what poverty was, he wouldn’t be giving this speech.”

Mother Jones

Bring Out the Pitchforks

James Stewart in the NY Times business pages has this astounding (once again) report:

 …this summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income. This elite ultrarich group earned on average $202 million in 2009, the latest year available. And buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax.

The I.R.S. has never before disclosed that last fact.

…Besides the six who paid no federal income tax, the I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010. (At the other end of the spectrum, 82 paid 30 to 35 percent. None paid more than 35 percent.)

 Actually, the import of Stewart’s article is why Romney won’t release say, 10 years, of income tax returns — especially 2009.

Some rally-trackers with big 1040s censored out, mounted on pitchforks, would be an excellent way to pressure him about this.

Romney ♥ Trade Deficits, Middle East Oil

UNbelievable!  The trade deficit fell to its lowest in 18 months in June largely due to drop in oil imports.  Security analysts, presidents and even Detroit vehicle makers know that less consumption of non US oil is beneficial for US security and the economy, not to mention — if Saudi Oil is not replaced by Canada tar-sand oil– that a decrease in fossil fuel burning is good for the climate, and we who depend on it.

President George W Bush pushed for higher fuel standards, saying that America ‘had an addiction to oil.’  President Obama, with car manufacturing executives behind him, pushed the minimal gas standard to 54.5 mpg, to be achieved by 2025.  What benefits this would bring!

Candidate Mitt Romney, in his latest show of what-me-worry-about-costs attitude, told the Detroit News that he would ‘back off’   Obama’s agreement with car makers to gradually move the bottom line up. [He also ‘refines‘ his position on letting GM and Chrysler fail instead of giving them federal aid.]

As William K Reilly, head of EPA under Bush I, says in an Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post:

Improving fuel efficiency is also an essential part of reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, since about two-thirds of imported oil goes to transportation. The 54.5 mpg standard would save us 2.2 million barrels of oil every day by 2025 — half of what we import from OPEC daily.

Burning less oil also means less pollution, which means a healthier population, lower medical costs and fewer workdays and school days lost.

It is difficult to see what advantage could be gained by abandoning a policy that is broadly supported and that will prove so beneficial.

Americans of all stripes can be proud that, when it comes to gas mileage, the government is working as it should, bringing all sides of an issue together and moving the nation forward”

The SF Chronicle adds its opinion as well:

As the Bay Area emerges from two straight Spare the Air days, drivers should be mindful of emissions. Cars, SUVs, pickups and minivans account for nearly two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions, and the proposed standards would shave this figure way down.

 

Romney Bets the (White) House on Ryan

Nate Silver, the justly celebrated meta-pollster, thinks Romney picked Ryan because to stay the course he has been on was to lose. Ryan is a risky bet. When the details — the lack of which Romney had been hammered with– get known, how popular will the Ryan choice be? When it’s YOUR parent’s social security, YOUR school districts decrease in funding, YOUR communities loss of a safety net — will Mr. Ryan still bring in the needed votes?  As the Times lead editorial says: Voters will now be able to see with painful clarity just what the Republican Party has in store for them. 

A Risky Rationale Behind Romney’s Choice of Ryan

When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama.

Vice-presidential choices are inherently risky to a degree, but the risks are asymmetric, and weighted toward the downside: it’s far easier to name choices who undermined campaigns than those who helped them. The best way to mitigate that downside risk is to select someone who has been tested on a national stage before, ideally by having run for president themselves — or failing that, by having been elected multiple times from a large and diverse state.

Mr. Ryan is a national figure of some repute — before Saturday morning, hisnational name recognition was about 50 percent — but he has never been elected to anything larger than his Congressional district of about 700,000 people. Members of the House of Representatives have only occasionally been selected as running mates. The last one on a winning ticket was John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, in 1932.

Silver is good, so read it all.

The New Yorker is awash with articles on this choice, here, here and here.  My  favorite is by Jane Mayer: Ayn Rand Joins the Ticket  Rand is a declared hero to Ryan; her atheism should be a big hit to Romney supporters….

And, to couple to this, are two articles about the recent polls — as Silver also reports.

Charles Blow:

 …a series of recent polls paints a worrisome picture for Mitt Romney in the run-up to his party’s national convention. Three polls — from CNN/ORC, Fox News and Reuters/Ipsos — were released this week. President Obama’s lead over Romney ranged from 7 points to 9 points.

The Fox News poll showed Obama with his highest level of support this year.

So what gives? Is this real? Is it a fluke?

It’s hard to say, but there are some theories.

Romney spends so much time hiding, dodging and trying to say nothing specific that when he does show up — and speak up — he bungles it.

The Washington Post has it’s own report:

A bumpy overseas trip and a month of pummeling by Democratic ads depicting Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat and possible tax evader appear to have taken a toll.

Three polls released in the last few days show President Obama widening his lead over the former Massachusetts governor to as much as nine points.

Romney in Romney Land

Tom Friedman often gives reason not to read him [here, here, here  or here,] or having done so to press the back-delete key and hold it.  This morning, however, tracking Prince Romney in Israel, he lays an ugly stick on him.

I’ll make this quick. I have one question and one observation about Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel. The question is this: Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return.

David Atkins, at Hullabaloo, adds that it’s not just the money Romney wants, it’s the End-Times Are A Comin’ crowd whose votes he covets.

Maureen Dowd doesn’t like what she see, either.

Poor Mitt Romney had no … magic carpet ride. He insulted the British and infuriated the Palestinians while pandering to the Israelis and American Jewish voters, including donors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson who tagged along.

Egged on by some of the same neocon advisers who brought us the Iraq pre-emptive invasion, Romney offered “Go ahead, make my day” diplomacy, signaling he would support Israeli action to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

 

Netanyahu Plays the Fiddle, Romney Dances

Haaretz reported that “Romney apparently accepts instructions from Netanyahu” (are these the kinds of headlines we want to see about our President?):

Today it has become clear that the two are more than just friends. Romney apparently accepts instructions from Netanyahu who succeeded in getting him to cancel a scheduled and meticulously planned meeting with MK Shelly Yacimovich, the leader of the Labor party…

Herzog (Labor faction head Yitzhak (Buzi) Herzog) was dumbfounded to hear of the cancellation on two hours’ notice. He said that Romney was “intentionally misguided by political elements that were unsettled by the steady strengthening of Yacimovich and her transformation into the only alternative to the prime minister.” Circles close to Yacimovich said it clearly: “This is the crude hand of Netanyahu and his people against the background of the disagreement between him and Yacimovich over the economic measures his government is about to adopt.”

Netanyahu’s camp denies having any part in this, but the negotiations for this meeting were long in the making and were confirmed repeatedly today, up until the time Romney took his meeting with Netanyahu.

Is this American exceptionalism, Romney style? He criticizes Obama for “apologizing for America” – something President Obama has actually never done – implying that Obama is a weak person, and yet Obama as a young senator was able to meet with opposition Netanyahu on his visit to Israel. He didn’t let anyone else dictate his policy, let alone his meetings.

Politicusa.com

Mitt Loves Government Largess, Except When He Doesn’t

Mother Jones reports on Romney’s shameless tax-payer grab for the Salt Lake Olympics, while condemning just such behavior.

As Romney chastises the president for pointing out that successful business ventures benefit from a larger social compact and accuses critics of pining for “free stuff,” Romney is simultaneously touting an Olympic effort that, more than any other in American history, succeeded thanks to public investment—some of it sunk into questionable projects of marginal value to the Salt Lake games. “The $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars that Congress is pouring into Utah is 1.5 times the amount spent by lawmakers to support all seven Olympic Games held in the U.S. since 1904—combined,” Donald Barlett and James Steele reported for Sports Illustrated in 2001. Those numbers were adjusted for inflation.

How the Salt Lake Games came to receive more money than any games in American history isn’t much of a mystery. The organizers, including Romney, asked for it. In his 2004 book, Turnaround, Romney acknowledges the central role of the federal government in making the Olympics possible. “No matter how well we did cutting costs and raising revenue, we couldn’t have Games without the support of the federal government,” he wrote

In 2000, with the opening ceremonies still more than a year away, Arizona Sen. John McCain called the Salt Lake price tag “a disgrace,”  and partnered with Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) to demand a Government Accountability Office investigation into how the games could cost so much. Romney’s response was muted…

Mitt’s British Blunders: How It Played In The UK Press

Update:

Karl Rove became the latest political observer to express amazement that Mitt Romney blew a seemingly un-blowable opportunity.

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Update II

Charles Krauthammer called Romney’s Olympics remarks “unbelievable” and “incomprehensible.”

Joan Walsh wants to know:  whether Romney has some kind of personality disorder, so dissociated does he occasionally seem from the well-worn routines of normal human interaction. Maybe we should be asking to see his medical records and not just his tax returns. I don’t mean to be flippant about that or insensitive to any kind of problem he may struggle with. But his struggles are our struggles; he’s running to be our president. There is something very odd about Mitt Romney.

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Mitt Romney is off to a spectacularly bad start in London, at least according to the British press ridiculing the Republican candidate on his first major foreign trip.

Read at TPM

not to mention his saying the Obama didn’t get the special Anglo-Saxon relationship….

Perhaps what will get recession hammered American attention more than foreign policy gaffes is the sight of the Romney family horse prancing at the Olympics dressage….

Mitt Romney’s Fancy Horse Is Worth More Than Your Entire Family. Seriously.

Rafalca, Mitt Romney’s frou frou Olympics-bound dressage horse, nets the family a $77,000 tax credit per year. Since Normals who produce mere human children only get a $1,000 tax credit per child, it therefore stands to reason that Rafalca Romney is worth 77 human children

Here is a very nice chart about the comparative expenses of the Horse v Family

 

Asset Stripping: In Zimbabwe and at Bain Capital

My traveling wife having just returned from a three week trip to Africa (south) we settled in to watch an eye opening (for most of us) documentary about Zimbabwe, the long struggle of a white African family to hang on to their farm against Mugabe’s madness, rolled in a chaff of racism.

Titled Mugabe and the White African, it is a documentary focused on Michael Campbell and his son-in-law, Ben Freeth and their effort, principally in the courts, to hang on to their farm — where 500 Zimbabweans are employed.  Mugabe, as he does with anyone who presents him opposition, has them beaten.  There are some horrific pictures following the beating of the two men, and Campbell’s wife.  Freeth was close to death from the skull fracture he took. It’s a sad, personal story and one which has been true of many other white farm families under Mugabe’s reign of terror, thought  they have not been the principle targets of his armed-lunacy.  That privilege belongs to black Zimbabweans who have stood up to him repeatedly, in courts, in elections and in the streets.

What caught my attention particularly, however, was a phrase that was used to describe the behavior of the so-called peasant-farmers who are sent to add the whiff of legitimacy to what is going on to this “land redistribution.”  These men, and some women and children, are not farmers, farm-workers or even farm laborers.  They, according to the film and other articles I have read, are the poor and homeless, easy to find in the wretched economy Mugabe has engineered, and aresent in as a rag-tag army of looters.  They don’t know how to drive a tractor but they know the tires might be sold, and the bolts, and cutting tines, and gasoline, and spark plugs and…..  Copper is worth a lot — whether in the form of wire, tubing or brass pots.  A television might get a bit at the local market.

This is called asset stripping.

And who should leap into my mind, watching the shaking, wildly swinging shots from the clandestine camera, of the farm being stripped, but Bain Capital and it’s founder and presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney.

Though Bain doesn’t send in thugs with knives and firebrands, the end effect is much the same. Ruined companies stripped of all their tools, labor and organization.   Under color of the law, Bain and others — dizzy with the ideology that only money matters– take over companies which need help, with the promise of bringing in teams to set things back to stable.  In some cases this happens.  A  knowledgeable team is put together.  Financing is secured.  Marketing experts find willing buyers of the product and a company is turned around.

In most cases, as we have read, this does not happen.  Instead, the company, once with a corporate life of its own, and people who depended on it for a livelihood, is “asset stripped.”  Pieces are sold off, sometimes in the dead of night; mailing lists, patents, methods, hardware, software, down to the desks and computers.  Ask anyone who has ever gone to a  corporate asset auction say, under the steady gavel of Dove, Disposition Services, or Corporate Assets, Inc. For the happy scavenger these are happy days.  I remember boxes of hard-drives being carted out to the back of the station wagon, fine flat screen monitors and printer that might or might not work, but who cared, they were so cheap!

For the fired worker, manager and sometimes even founders, the day is not so happy, as some of the testimonies in the Obama ads have been telling us. It shouldn’t take such ads for us to know the pain, and suspect the deceptive hardball practices of the Bains of the world.  They don’t give a damn about turning an unsteady company into a steady one. They want to know what the parts are worth, and they set about stripping them, to sell them on any market they can find.  Just like the scavengers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, who at least have their own spectacular poverty to exonerate their actions to some degree.   In Romeny’s case the sold-off parts have built him mansions around the world.

Mark them up with nice graffiti:  Asset Stripper Lives Here.

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The movie, qua movie, is not terrific.  The focus on the white farmer, almost exclusively, means that the much larger case against Mugabe isn’t made.  Their story needs to be told.  The beatings and fear they have lived under should happen to know one, but they are a mid-size piece of a much larger, and even more terrible, story — which wasn’t told.  Had it been, and the Campbell farm story been part of it, we would have had a powerful and much needed indictment of Mugabe and his band of thugs.