Posts Tagged ‘Michael Steele’
TDS on CRU
Jon Stewart had a so-so bit on the CRU hack last night, but I was annoyed to see him make the same mistake the right-wingers keep making regarding “hide the decline”: this idea that some sort of global cooling is happening but being masked by data manipulation. (This is a purely Limbaughian fantasy, last seen pouring out of the logorrheic mind of Michael Steele.) The opposite is actually the case: the problem is that post-1960 tree-ring data suggest temperatures that are lower than the real temperatures. The “decline,” that is to say, is in the theoretical temperatures as extrapolated from post-1960 tree-ring data, and not in the temperatures that were actually recorded.
Maybe it’s less funny that way, but Jon really shouldn’t feed the trolls if he can help it.
Infinite Politics Thursday
Infinite linkdump Thursday, just politics.
* The Mark Sanford story grows stranger by the day, with 19 South Carolina politicians now on the record calling for his resignation. (TPM reports that Senators DeMint and Graham have gone to Sanford to prevail on him to resign.) Today he backed off a pledge to release his travel records, which suggests more trouble may be brewing for him.
* Who could have imagined that Exxon-Mobil would lie about its continued support for climate-change “skepticism” advocacy groups?
* Highlights from the first day of the Al Franken Century.
* Democrats can now “hijack elections at their whim”: just another responsible, measured, and most of all empirically provable claim from RNC chairman Michael Steele, truly our country’s finest elder statesman.
* But it’s not all craziness: Michele Bachmann is facing criticism from the GOP for her weird lies about the Census.
* What caused the financial crisis? Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via MeFi) points to bubble economies nutured and created by giant investment firms, pointing the finger especially at Goldman Sachs. An Oklahoma lawmaker says it was “abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery.” I report, you decide.
* Malthusianism and world history: a chart from Conor Clarke.
It’s clear these growth trends can continue forever.
* Ezra Klein has a new Washington Post column on the politics of food.
Why Not Her?
Will the 2010s be the Sarah Palin Decade?
According to Pew, the Alaska governor’s popularity among Republicans, as measured by her net approval-minus-disapproval ratings, is +56, with former Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker Newt Gingrich a bit further back, at +39 and +33 respectively, and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele trailing far behind that trio with a +14 and 58 percent of Republicans having no opinion or unable to identify him.
This dynamic has been predicted before.
Late Night Late Night
Late night!
* Still more logic puzzles, via the comments.
* My father directs our attention to a disturbing provision in North Carolina state law.
* I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change, you know. Yglesias uses this inanity to try and make a serious point, but man. That’s the second-stupidest thing ever said about climate change.
We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom! More on today’s No More Apologizing! campaign from Michael Steele, who instructs us to imagine what Ronald Reagan might have to say about all this looking backwards. The Washington Independent notes this is the seventh attempt to reboot the GOP since November.
Good Morning, World
Good morning, world.
* Michael Steele wants you to know that Republicans are done apologizing for the ruinous policies of the last eight years. Love it or lump it, chumps, they’ve turned the page.
* “Calling Utopia a Utopia,” by Ursula K. Le Guin.
To define science fiction as a purely commercial category of fiction, inherently trashy, having nothing to do with literature, is a tall order. It involves both denying that any work of science fiction can have literary merit, and maintaining that any book of literary merit that uses the tropes of science fiction (such as Brave New World, or 1984, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or most of the works of J.G. Ballard) is not science fiction. This definition-by-negation leads to remarkable mental gymnastics. For instance, one must insist that certain works of dubious literary merit that use familiar science-fictional devices such as alternate history, or wellworn science-fiction plots such as Men-Crossing-the-Continent-After-the Holocaust, and are in every way definable as science fiction, are not science fiction — because their authors are known to be literary authors, and literary authors are incapable by definition of committing science fiction.
Now that takes some fancy thinking.
* And Sarah Conner‘s showrunner says goodbye.
Good shows are cancelled every year; smart shows, worthy shows, shows which move their viewers to write blogs and have viewing parties and create action figures and bury executives’ email accounts under thousands of messages. I miss Deadwood and The Wire and Arrested Development but thank God that I still have Rescue Me and The Office and a recently renewed Party Down written by ex-T:SCC writer John Enbom.
Bad shows are cancelled, too. And certainly there are those who did not like what we did and had their own vision for what a Terminator TV show should be. It’s easy to look at low ratings or cancellation as “failure” and for those who believe we’ve gone about this all wrong I’m sure today’s news will only serve to confirm a world view that I would never try to change. We’ve written the show as best we can, executed it to the best of our abilities, and sent it out in the world knowing that we worked out asses off to do something that wouldn’t be a waste of anybody’s forty-three minutes.
More on Specter
The netroots blogs are already talking about a primary challenge to Specter, despite apparent party-boss promises to the contrary. Right now most of the talk centers around the Employee Free Choice Act, which Specter recently decided he opposed back when he was still trying to protect his right flank from Pat Toomey. There’s been speculation that Specter’s reference to EFCA in his statement earlier today referred only to voting against the bill itself, and that he’d vote to invoke cloture—but it’s looking now as if he won’t vote for cloture either. In that case put money on the idea of a “miraculous compromise” on EFCA that modifies the language just enough to give Specter cover to flip-flop back. A Ned-Lamont-style primary challenge backed by Labor and the netroots would otherwise be almost inevitable, Rendell’s promises notwithstanding, and unlike Connecticut Pennsylvania has a “sore loser” law that would prevent a Liebermanesque run as an independent.
P.S.: Don’t miss Steele’s response to all this invoking the ugly specter of Arlen Specter’s mama.
Line of the Day
Line of the day goes to Josh Marshall, writing about the Arlen Specter switch:
Late Update: Needless to say, this is quite a coup for the GOP, likely engineered by Michael Steele as a way to smoke out enemies.