Brad Blog

We have yet another potential mess concerning elections in New York City on the new optical-scan computer tabulation systems which recently replaced the mechanical lever machines used by the city for decades.

This time, the problem relates to the upcoming citywide elections in September which, if no candidate wins more than 40% in any of the primary races, a runoff will be required by state law, just two weeks later.

This is now a huge problem for the city, since there is concern that it could be all but impossible to re-prepare and fully re-test the computer optical-scan systems in the short time after the primary and before the runoff elections. It has left some, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as the NYC Board of Elections, seemingly regretting the move away from lever machines and considering bringing them out of mothballs for this year's runoffs.

"The computers just can't be programmed and readied in time for a runoff," ABC7's Dave Evans notes in his video report on Monday (posted below). "The old machines can be."

Further adding to the problems, says State Board of Elections Commissioner Doug Kellner "If there is a very close primary election, it may not be possible to determine the candidates in the runoff election in the time frame available."

Since New York state was the last in the nation to "upgrade" their voting systems from the old lever systems to new proprietary computer optical-scan systems over the last several years, the move has caused nothing but headaches in New York City and across the state...

New systems cause new problems for New York...

For example, back in 2008, as the new systems began to arrive, just 15% of the new, $11,000/piece electronic Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) for disabled voters actually arrived in working order in Nassau County. All the others were "unusable or...require[d] major repairs," according to the County Attorney at the time.

During the 2009 Special Election to fill the NY-23 U.S. House seat vacated by Kirsten Gillibrand after she was named to fill the U.S. Senate seat of then newly appointed Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, unsubstantiated rumors of a "virus" in the new optical-scan systems, used for the very first time in the district during that race, sullied confidence in the computer-reported results. [We covered the story extensively at the time for the right-leaning Gouverneur Times which is now, unfortunately, out or business.]

In late 2010, the state court ordered that a manual "recount" of paper ballots had to be stopped and that unverified computer tallies were to be used as "official" in a New York state Senate race where just 451 votes, out of some 84,000 ballots cast, separated the two top candidates. The election would result in Republicans gaining the majority in that body that year.

Last year, after a public records request, the New York Daily News discovered that during the 2010 statewide September primary elections, some op-scan systems in the South Bronx experienced a failure rate of 70%. In the November general election that year, the failure rate was found to be 54%. Thousands of valid votes went uncounted entirely.

When the new op-scan systems rolled out in New York City itself in 2010, long lines, "reports of broken and missing scanners," and computer "system errors" resulted in what Mayor Bloomberg at the time described as a "royal mess."

All of those royal messes might have been avoided, had the state simply listened to the Election Integrity advocates at the time who were attempting to persuade the state to stick with their old tried and true mechanical lever voting machines, rather than move to secret vote counts by computer tabulators. The advocates had tried to warn the state to ignore a wholly inaccurate "legal advisory" issued in 2005 by the woefully compromised U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) which had incorrectly advised that mechanical lever voting machines did not meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

Even today, some elections official in New York refuse to certify races tabulated on the new, unreliable electronic systems, insisting on a hand-count before they will sign off on official results.

Back to the future...

Which brings us to the latest royal mess in New York City surrounding their upcoming September elections which has lead Bloomberg to pine for the old lever machines. In fact, using those systems has been presented as one of the possibilities examined by the NYC Board of Elections as a solution to the latest woes, as explained in ABC7's Monday night report below...

"We used to be able to get, within a couple of hours, a count. Now you can't get it within a couple of months," Bloomberg complains in the report above. "This is ridiculous."

The old lever machines, still stored in a Brooklyn warehouse, "could easily be called up for a runoff this fall because they're uncomplicated, easy to use," reports ABC7's Evans. "The new computers aren't."

In response, Dick Dadey, Executive Director of NY good-government group Citizens Union calls the lever machines "unreliable." He goes on to argue that they "haven't been used in three or four years, do not count votes correctly [and] would cause more problems than they would solve."

While there are various problems that can crop up with the old lever machines, they are very rare, and limited in scope only to the single precinct where the problem occurred. Unlike the secret-vote counting computer systems that Dadey seems to be arguing for, the suggestion that they "do not count votes correctly," is simply wrong.

In ABC7's report, Frederic Umane, chief of the NYC Board of Elections, calls for simply "getting rid of the runoff" entirely.

As usual, here we have a case of technological driving the democracy, rather than the other way around.

Other proposed solutions for the problem have included calls for the state legislature to move the September primary up to an earlier date (Republicans would like it in August, Democrats prefer June before folks go out of town for the summer), to allow time to reprogram the systems between the two elections if a runoff becomes necessary.

Still others have called for the horrible and incredibly confusing idea of an Instant Runoff, using a process known as Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) which requires voters to select first and second choices, with the votes of losing first choice candidates being shifted to others until one candidate finally reaches the required percentage to be declared the winner. Schemes like that --- in a country where we have enough trouble adding 1 + 1 + 1 in a way that the citizenry can know votes have been tabulated correctly --- have been tried and failed all over the country. They can also be gamed and lead to candidates "winning" even though they've received less than a majority --- even less than a plurality --- of the vote. (Here is an excellent YouTube video channel with a bunch of great videos explaining the many problems with Instant Runoff Voting and RCV.) Think NYC has problems with their elections now? Try adding RCV to the mix.

All of those "solutions", however, would call for legislative action by the state, which is believed to be unlikely.

So, yesterday, here's how the NYC Board of Elections decided to handle the problem for now, according to WNYC...

The city BOE had narrowed their choice down to four options. One involved using the old lever machines, two of the others relied on all paper ballots and differing types of manual counts. Each of these scenarios required some change to state law. Since the BOE's ideal solution was for state lawmakers to move the primary date entirely, and Albany remained resistant, commissioners raised concerns around any scenario that relied on legislative action.

Ultimately the board opted to forge ahead with optical scanners, through a vote of 8 to 1, because that option only required the State BOE to approve the city's plan for reduced testing between the primary and runoff.

Yes, that's right. The "solution" settled on, for now, by the BOE, is to do less testing of the oft-failed, easily-hacked, computer tabulation systems they are already using, rather than move to a simpler, cheaper, overseeable option like the tried and true lever machines, or, better yet, simply hand-counting results, as per "Democracy's Gold Standard".

And, as if all of that wasn't dumb enough, there was this closing note from WYNC: "A primary generally costs the city around $20 million dollars, according to Board officials. Using the scanner option, the runoff will cost that much, plus an additional $8.5 million."

Brilliant. The September elections in NYC should be fun. What could possibly go wrong?

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

On Monday, we offered a single chart as a reminder of who is really to blame for America's "DEBT CRISIS!!!" (which, as we noted prior to that, isn't really a crisis at all.)

As the Dow hit its all-time record high yesterday (continuing same today) and while corporate profits continue to hit record highs along with it --- underscoring, yet again, that Barack Obama is the worst socialist ever --- there are a couple more charts worth reminding you about today, courtesy of Rachel Maddow's show last night...

And while corporate profits sky-rocket, unemployment slowly (really slowly) improves, and Republicans hold the nation hostage with the "Sequester" by refusing to close any tax loopholes for the rich which might serve to increase revenues by even the tiniest amount, there is this chart to ponder...

So, remember, when you hear Republicans claim they are concerned about "the deficit", they are not. They are flat out lying. They are concerned only about maintaining low taxes and sky-high profits for corporations and the rich people who need those tax-payer funded giveaways the least.

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Another hurdle cleared for the Keystone XL pipeline; Obama names new environmental cabinet nominees; New York Times kills its Green blog; PLUS: Score one for endangered polar bears ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Pesticides are killing our sperm; "I am one of the Fukushima fifty"; L.A. aims to be coal-free by 2025; US scientists report big jump in heat-trapping CO2; Tar sands developers turn to railroads; Atmospheric warming altering ocean salinity, circulation; Drought, snow hit KS wildlife hard; Forest elephants near extinction due to ivory poachers; Offshore windpower vulnerable to wave power; Rising food prices triggered Arab Spring ... PLUS: 'Angry Summer': Australia's climate on steroids in record-breaking summer ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• Keystone XL Moves Closer to Approval:
• VIDEO: Van Jones: Keystone XL would be ‘the Obama Pipeline’ (Grist):
  "What happens if you’ve got the Obama Pipeline — now it’s the Obama Pipeline — and it leaks? His legacy could be the worst oil disaster in American farmland history. ...If after he gave that speech for his inauguration, the first thing he does is approve a pipeline bringing tar sands through America … the first thing that pipeline runs over is the credibility of the president on his climate policy. … The Obama Tar-Sands Pipeline should not the legacy of the president that gave that speech."





• State Dept. on Keystone XL: So not a big deal (Grist)
• Report May Ease Path for New Pipeline (NY Times)
• Keystone XL pipeline would have little impact on climate change, State Department analysis says (Washington Post)
• Keystone XL pipeline clears hurdle as State report downplays climate impact (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• NBC Overstates State Department's Keystone XL Jobs Estimate Tenfold (Media Matters)
• Arguments over climate impacts rage on in wake of State Dept. report (Greenwire)
• Will Canada’s Proposed Tar Sands Oil Pipeline Muck Up Its Pacific Coast?: Large cracks remain in the science assessing Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline Project (Scientific American)
• Everybody Likes New Energy, EPA Cabinet Nominees:
• VIDEO & Transcript: President Obama's Remarks on Personnel Nominations
• Cabinet Picks Could Take On Climate Policy (NY Times):
  President Obama on Monday named two people to his cabinet who will be charged with making good on his threat to use the powers of the executive branch to tackle climate change and energy policy if Congress does not act quickly. Mr. Obama nominated Gina McCarthy, a tough-talking native of Boston and an experienced clean air regulator, to take charge at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ernest J.
  Moniz, a physicist and strong advocate of natural gas and nuclear power as cleaner alternatives to coal, to run the Department of Energy.
• Natural Gas Seen Gaining With Obama's Fracking-Friendly Nominees (Bloomberg)
• Do Obama Cabinet Picks Match His Greener Second-Term Talk? (CS Monitor)
• Ernest Moniz, Considered Fracking Shill By Some Environmentalists, Sparks Concern Amid Energy Department Nomination (Huffington Post)
• Gina McCarthy's Republican History Should Smooth Path to Head of EPA (Reuters):
  After a long career in public service including work for two Republican governors, Gina McCarthy is expected to win confirmation as the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency, thanks to her reputation as a practical, fix-it regulator.
• Enviros Cheer Obama EPA Pick (Mother Jones)
• Meet the New Secretary of Energy Nominee: Ernie Moniz (Scientific American)
• Wyden would press rumored Energy pick Moniz on Hanford cleanup, gas exports (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• Top oil exec praises Obama’s energy pick (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• Sen. Murkowski maintains hold threat for Interior nominee (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• NYT Kills Green Blog:
• NYT cancels Green blog: No explanation from editors following surprise announcement (Columbia Journalism Review):
  When the Times announced in January that it was dismantling its three-year-old environment pod and reassigning its editors and reporters to other desks, managing editor Dean Baquet insisted that the outlet remained as committed as ever to covering the environment. Obviously, that was an outright lie. The Green blog was a crucial platform for stories that didn’t fit into the print edition’s already shrunken news hole—which is a lot on the energy and environment beat—and it was a place where reporters could add valuable to context and information to pieces that did make the paper.
• For Times Environmental Reporting, Intentions May Be Good but the Signs Are Not (NYT Public Editor)
• A Farewell to Green (Dot Earth blog)
• Score One For the Polar Bears:
• Court ruling keeps polar bear as threatened species (The HIll's E2 Wire)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• Australia's climate 'on steroids' after record-breaking summer (Telegraph UK):
  Australia's weather went "on steroids" over a summer that saw an unprecedented heatwave, bushfires and floods, the head of the country's Climate Commission has said, warning that global warming would only make things worse.
• Pesticides are killing our sperm (Grist):
  George Washington University researchers pored over 17 scientific studies that were published between 2007 and 2012 and reported in the journal Toxicology that 15 of them found “significant associations between exposure to pesticides and semen quality indicators.”
• 'I am one of the Fukushima fifty': One of the men who risked their lives to prevent a catastrophe shares his story (UK Independent):
  They displayed a bravery few can comprehend, yet very little is known about the men who stayed behind to save Japan’s stricken nuclear plant. Meet Atsufumi Yoshizawa, who was at work on 11 March 2011 when disaster struck.
• Los Angeles Aims To Be Coal-Free In 12 Years (Climate Progress)
• US scientists report big jump in heat-trapping CO2 (AP)
• Railroads emerge as alternative to Keystone XL pipeline for moving oil sands from Canada (Washington Post):
  Even if foes of the Keystone XL pipeline block it, companies seeking to get Canada’s oil sands to U.S. and world markets could travel the old-fashioned way: by rail. Rail shipments of Canadian crude oil sands are on track to quadruple this year.
• ExxonMobil Former Employee Defends Company In MTBE Water Pollution Case (AP):
  Former Department of Environmental Services Commissioner Robert Varney testified earlier that he was shocked Exxon Mobil did not share Mickelson's findings with the state, but Mickelson said the information was widely available at the time. [But did she tell New Hampshire? - ed.].
• Atmospheric Warming Altering Ocean Salinity And The Water Cycle (Climate Progress):
  A clear change in salinity has been detected in the world’s oceans, signaling shifts and acceleration in the global rainfall and evaporation cycle tied directly to climate change.
• Natural gas leaks come under scrutiny, raise questions on climate impact (Washington Post)
• Drought-Starved Habitat, Snow Hit Kansas Wildlife Hard (Wichita Eagle)
• Wheat Prices Slump as Rains Erode US Drought Fears (AgriMoney.com)
• 2/3 of Forest Elephants Killed by Ivory Poachers in Past Decade: (Guardian UK):
  The threat of extinction is growing for African forest elephants, according to a study released at the Cites summit in Bangkok.
• NC to Reverse Fracking Waste Ban? (Raleigh News & Observer):
  Forty years ago, when North Carolina banned using deep wells to permanently dump industrial waste, some thought the issue had been decided for good. Now state lawmakers who want to turn North Carolina into the nation's next fracking hotspot are reopening the case for injecting brines and toxins deep underground.
• Offshore Wind at Risk From Wave Power: Offshore wind turbines are vulnerable to sudden and catastrophic destruction in moderately stormy seas, according to new research. (Climate News Network)
• Climate Change and Rising Food Prices Heightened Arab Spring: (ClimateWire):
  The effects of climate change on the food supply exacerbated the underlying tensions that have led to ongoing Middle East instability.
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

So what do the Chinese Government and the Rightwing mega-lobbying group calling itself the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have in common? Apparently, they are both interested in hacking into the computer networks of their perceived political opponents and appear to be using very similar techniques and tools to do so, as The Nation's Lee Fang reported on Monday.

A computer security expert cited by Fang notes "lots of overlap" between the recent documented Chinese military cyber hacks and tactics proposed for use by federal contractors working with the U.S. Chamber and their attorneys to discredit their enemies.

Readers of The BRAD BLOG will likely remember the emails hacked by Anonymous in February of 2011 revealing that three U.S. government defense contractors had been working with U.S. Chamber of Commerce attorneys from the Washington D.C. lobbying/law firm of Hunton & Williams to develop a $12 million scheme to target their political opponents --- such as unions and progressive organizations --- by hacking into their computer networks, infiltrating the groups, planting false information in hopes of discrediting them, and using other sophisticated computer tools developed for the "War on Terror" by the three cyber-security firms.

One of the perceived political opponents targeted by the Chamber, we would learn from the hacked emails, was I. Personal details about myself and my family showed up in both the emails and a PowerPoint presentation for the U.S. Chamber prepared by "Team Themis," the name used for the illicit project by the three government contractors, HBGary Federal, Palintir, and Berico.

Lee Fang, who was then a reporter for Think Progress, and Scott Keyes, who still is, originally broke the revelations from the hacked HBGary Federal emails there. A slide in one of the presentations prepared for the U.S. Chamber scheme described the effort to "Discredit, Confuse, Shame, Combat, Infiltrate [and] Fracture" the progressive organizations with online tools, hacking and other dirty tricks in order to "mitigate [the] effect of adversarial groups."

Another slide included a photograph of me, and other personal details meant to target VelvetRevolution.us, a not-for-profit good government group (co-founded by The BRAD BLOG) which has long called for accountability for the Chamber and its mafia-like political tactics.

[Our main story on the creepy scheme was here, along with a number of follow-ups, such as the ones here, here and here.]

The news of the hack and its revelations quickly garnered front-page headlines in the U.S. and around the world as an international scandal, even as the Chamber denied having knowledge of the specific cyber-terror threat clearly being created on their behalf by the three defense contractors, and even as neither they nor their attorneys have yet to face any accountability for the scheme to terrorize public organizations and private individuals, such as myself and my family. An official Dept. of Justice investigation into the matter --- and even a brief attempt to do so by Democrats in Congress --- was no doubt crippled by both the enormous power of the Chamber, and the fact that it was the DoJ itself which had referred Bank of America to the very same defense contractors in a parallel scheme mirroring the Chamber's, as revealed by the same email hack. That scheme was being prepared to target perceived supporters of WikiLeaks at the time, including journalist Glenn Greenwald.

"[W]ho better to develop a corporate information reconnaissance capability than companies that have been market leaders within the DoD and Intelligence Community," read one of the proposals [PDF] created by "Team Themis," as delivered to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's law firm Hunton & Williams.

In Monday's report at The Nation, Fang details how recent cyber attacks against U.S. interests, which appear to be emanating from the Chinese Military, mirror tactics used by the U.S. Chamber's thugs in the eventually aborted 2010/2011 attempt to pull off what Fang describes as "one of the most brazen political espionage efforts in recent memory."

While D.C. and its media hacks continue to play along with the Republican "Debt Crisis!!!" hoax, and pretend that "Obama just needs to lead on the Sequester!!!", it's worth remembering the following chart, described on Saturday by WaPo's Ezra Klein as "The single best chart on the policies driving our deficits", as recently updated for what they say is the final time...

Any questions?

Celeste Greig, the head of the California Republican Assembly, recently demonstrated that ignorance about female biology is not limited to Republican men.

But then, that should not come as a surprise. Ignorance, like intelligence, is not gender specific. Whether we deal with global climate change, so-called "intelligent design" or the mistaken belief that rape-related pregnancies are rare, the modern GOP has demonstrated that they are unwilling to let a little thing like science stand in the way of their political agenda.

For the anti-abortion crowd, the notion that rape pregnancies are rare entails what The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta aptly described as the "canard that will not die." As she notes, the truth, according to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, is that "among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year." Hardly a "rare" occurrence.

The issue, of course, became a central focus of the 2012 U.S. Senate campaign in Missouri when Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) advanced the idiotic notion that women are rarely impregnated during a "legitimate rape" because "the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down." The idiocy was resurrected by Greig, who on Friday, March 1, after admonishing Akin for his insensitivity, said "the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it's an act of violence, because the body is traumatized."

Unfortunately, Akin wasn't the first to forward the anti-choice ruse, and Grieg, undoubtedly, will not be the last among those seeking to outlaw the right to abortion, even if it requires lying to the American public about scientific facts...

The canard began with the March 1988 claim made by Pennsylvania State Representative Stephen Freind (R) that pregnancies from rape were "one in millions and millions" --- a claim which Freind, himself, admitted was "an exaggeration," though he claimed that studies revealed that during the trauma of rape, "a woman secrets a certain secretion, which has the tendency to kill sperm."

There was, of course, no scientific validity to Freind's claim. To the contrary, the 1996 study by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found: "Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence." The study suggested an increased focus on "preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization."

Medical experts like Richard Depp, M.D., Chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Thomas Jefferson University and Luigi Mastroianni, Jr., M.D., the Director of the Division of Human Reproduction at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, were quick to dismiss Freind's rant at the time as "scientifically unfounded" and "nonsense." Mastroianni, who is a past president of the American Fertility Society, quipped: "Boy, if I could find out what that [secretion] was, I'd use it as a contraceptive."

When it comes to rape, Dr. Fay Boozman, (R-AR) proved that the ability to ignore science was not limited to lay Republicans. Boozman was a right-wing Christian, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1998 and an ophthalmologist. He was appointed by Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) to serve on a medical advisory board for a crisis pregnancy center. Boozman claimed that "fear-induced hormonal changes could block a rape victim's ability to conceive."

Although he later acknowledged that the remark was based on his "personal observations" and not on the basis of any scientific study, Boozman, refused to retract it, though he did apologize to "the women and young ladies of Arkansas" for "any hurt" his remark may have caused.

Boozman was handily defeated in the 1998 U.S. Senate race by Democrat Blanche Lincoln (though he would have his revenge over a decade later, in 2010, when he would eventually unseat her during that year's GOP wave election.)

Not to be outdone by Boozman, John C. Wilke, M.D., a general practitioner and the president of National Right to Life, followed up with a 1999 essay, Rape Pregnancies are Rare, in which he advanced the notion that "assault rape" rarely led to pregnancies. He claimed, without citing a single scientific study, that a rape victim's fallopian tube contracts secondary to fear and trauma, making fertilization less likely.

Wilke's claim was described by Michael Greene, M.D., Prof. of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School as "just nuts." David Grimes, M.D., a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina, who was formerly associated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stated that Wilke's fallopian tube contraction theory was "nonsense. Everything is working. The tube is very small anyway and sperm are very tiny --- they're excellent swimmers."

Scientific refutation, of course, did not dissuade Akin's idiotic "legitimate rape" comment, and it failed to dissuade Greig's, even as she was initially attempting to condemn it --- before she went ahead and asserted it for herself. For fanatic "right-to-lifers," rape pregnancies are an inconvenient truth.

* * *Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). Follow him on Twitter: @Cann4ing.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's obnoxious remark Wednesday about the Voting Rights Act as a "perpetuation of racial entitlement" wasn't the half of it.

Scalia is often held up by self-described "conservatives" as a model jurist, setting the standard for the type of "strict constructionism" or "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution that Republicans would like to see more of on the bench.

Jurists like Scalia, the pretend argument goes, are the antidote to those "liberal activist judges" who don't appreciate the limited authority of the judicial branch and who abuse their position in order to usurp the power of the executive and/or legislative branches by --- gasp! --- "legislating from the bench!"

Wednesday's shameful display by Scalia, however, during the Shelby v. Holder hearing at the U.S. Supreme Court, on whether or not Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) ought to be discontinued, should serve to put the bald hypocrisy of that entire Republican myth to bed for good. The Supreme Court Justice beloved by the hard right demonstrated exactly why that hard right loves him --- and it has nothing to do with "conservatism" or "judicial restraint" or "strict constructionism" or any of those other absurd partisan talking points bandied about in regard to Scalia...

The case out of Shelby County, AL was brought before SCOTUS by wealthy Rightwing activists who hope to use it to finally gut the section of the VRA which requires all or parts of 16 states, predominantly in the South, largely due to their long history of racial discrimination, to receive preclearance for all new election-related laws from either a federal court or the U.S. Dept. of Justice before they can be put into practice.

Section 5 is part of a nearly 50-year old bi-partisan bill that almost all observers, Right, Left and otherwise, see as a smashing success to date. Even the bulk of those on today's Supreme Court who now oppose all or parts of the Act, recognize that it has been the cornerstone of civil rights law in this country for half a century and has done a remarkable job of restoring equal justice for many after the long and insidious evils of slavery and the more than a century of racism and disenfranchisement that followed it.

So popular is this law that when it was most recently re-authorized for another 25 years in 2006, it was supported 98 to 0 --- 98 to 0! --- in the U.S. Senate, after a 10 month process of hearings and deliberation in the U.S. House as led by the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

So there was a loud chorus of gasps, literal and otherwise, in the wake of Scalia's offensive and inaccurate remark during Wednesday's hearing when he charged that the Voting Rights Act, presumably Section 5 specifically, but he was speaking of the bill in its entirety at the time, served as little more than a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."

Offensive and inaccurate as that comment on its own might have been, there was much --- much --- more wrong with his commentary, almost all of which serves to absolutely destroy the notion that Scalia represents the type of jurisprudence that either he or his supporters claim.

So a) please bookmark this item for use next time you hear someone on the Right parroting phony talking points about "liberal activist judges" who "legislate from the bench" and b) let's look at Scalia's comments around this point in full below, so we can unpack a few points that underscore just exactly how radical and non-conservative and non-strict constructionist and non-originalist this hard right judicial activist actually is.

In this clip from the full transcript [PDF], Scalia is seen attempting to use his lifetime position on the judiciary to usurp both the legislative and executive branches in his quest to dismantle the VRA by legislating from the bench...

JUSTICE SCALIA: ...The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a - in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was - in the Senate, there - it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term.

Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term. Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don't think that's attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

I don't think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless - unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there's a good reason for it.

That's the - that's the concern that those of us who - who have some questions about this statute have. It's - it's a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose - they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act.

Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?

Okay. So let's unpack just some of that.

Scalia is referring to the four times that the VRA --- originally written to include a five-year sunset provision on some of its provisions --- has been re-authorized by Congress since its original passage in 1965. The Act was re-approved, with various tweaks each time, for five years in 1970, for seven years in 1975, for 25 years in 1982 and again for another 25 years in 2006.

Each re-authorization was signed by a Republican President and each time it's been voted on, it has received fewer and fewer votes against it than the time before. Finally, in 2006, following 10 months of deliberation, 21 hearings and some 15,000 pages of evidence compiled to determine the necessity of re-authorizing the VRA, it passed by an astonishing 98 to 0 margin in the U.S. Senate.

The signing of the 2006 re-authorization by George W. Bush was held outdoors at the White House, with Congressional leadership and many members of both parties attending in what was a loud, proud --- perhaps the only proud --- moment during the entire Bush Administration.

For once, Congress managed to do its job and do it well. As the Republican Chair of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee at the time, James Sensenbrenner (who we may never have agreed with on anything else) recently said about the due diligence of the legislative branch before the 2006 renewal of the VRA, it was "one of the most extensive considerations of any piece of legislation that the United States Congress has dealt with in the twenty-seven and a half years that I have [served]."

And yet, somehow, in Scalia's twisted reasoning, the bill's passage under those circumstances, by a unanimous margin in the U.S. Senate, and a nearly as broad margin in the U.S. House, is evidence that the bill's key provision should be struck down by the judicial branch.

So much for the separation of powers contemplated by the U.S. Constitution and by those like Scalia who pretend to be "conservatives".

Scalia's theory --- if he actually has one here, other than little more than a megalomaniacal quest for personal and judicial overreach --- seems to be that members of Congress are simply too frightened of reprisal to vote against the VRA. Even, apparently, the Senators from the states which are covered by Section 5. Several of those states have since joined Shelby in opposing Section 5, but never mind that. For some reason, they still need Scalia's extra help to extricate themselves from it all.

As UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen observes: "It is one thing to talk about whether a particular group (say gay Americans, to take an example currently also before the court) need extra protection from the courts, necessitating a more searching standard of review. But it is hard to claim that states need extra protection. States can spend massive resources lobbying in Congress, and should have an exceptionally receptive ear from the state's Senators and congressional delegation. If state leaders in covered jurisdictions tried to do this in 2006, I was unaware of it."

Scalia also added in his rant: "And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this."

What does that mean? Virginia is one of the covered jurisdictions --- except for 24 counties and six cities in the state, most of which have managed to avail themselves of Section 5's bailout provision, allowing for jurisdictions without violations of the Act for a number of years to become exempt from required preclearance. Is Scalia suggesting that Senators from the home state of Robert E. Lee are somehow too frightened of being called racists to vote against the VRA? So they need the courts to rescue them from the hellish nightmare of not discriminating in their election laws (versus simply using the bailout procedure to get out)? Who knows?

Next, and perhaps most damningly, Scalia has the temerity --- and "strict constructionism" hypocrisy --- to charge that this matter is "not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress."

Well, that's funny, because the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which the VRA of 1965 was finally passed to enforce 95 years later, specifically calls for exactly that. It expressly reads that this is a matter for Congress to determine --- not the states and not the courts. Here's the 15th, in its entirety [emphasis added for aging, hypocritical Supreme Court judicial activists]:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Is there anything unclear about that? A conservative, strict-constructionist reading of the second section of the 15th Amendment seems pretty easy to understand, even for someone who isn't a Constitutional scholar or, say, a Supreme Court Justice with a lifetime appointment to the bench. Though, perhaps a wildly liberal interpretation of the phrase "The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article" could magically be construed as the exact opposite, to be read as "this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress."

As Elie Mystal of Above the Law noted:

Conservatives are usually the ones who claim to be worried about an “activist” Court, but they don’t say a peep when the Court overreaches rightward. And liberal Court watchers have been used to Scalia’s originalist hypocrisy since at least Bush v. Gore.

But Justice Scalia seems to have abandoned even the pretense of impartiality or judicial restraint. The Roberts Court has been the era of Scalia Unchained, and I think we’re not even halfway through this movie.

We hope Mystal is wrong. We fear she is not. What has yet to be destroyed of our electoral democracy following the work of Scalia and friends in Citizens United is now on the chopping block in Shelby, and it doesn't look promising.

But setting aside whether one agrees or disagrees with Scalia's legal opinions or political policies or partisan preferences on any particular issue, his untethered rant during the hearing on Shelby should once and for all destroy the ridiculous pretense that this man is now anything but a wild-eyed radical. He is certainly anything but an "originalist" or a "strict constructionist" or a "conservative". Scalia is plainly a radical judicial activist, legislating from the bench on one of the most central and vital issues to our entire system of governance in this nation.

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

Wow. You likely won't see this covered on the actual Fox "News" Channel --- at least not in these words --- but somehow it made it onto their website yesterday [emphasis added]...

New technological advances may make it possible in the near future to engineer a coal-powered car so clean that it produces nearly no polluting emissions, including carbon dioxide, experts tell FoxNews.com.

"Hey, they say carbon dioxide is a pollutant in the first paragraph!," snarks the sharp-eyed and occasional BRAD BLOG contributor, D.R. Tucker. "Who let that one go through?!"

Who indeed?! After years of deriding the fact that carbon dioxide is a pollutant --- "Hey, look! I just breathed out! I'm a polluter!" --- Fox just admitted to what actual scientists and people who know stuff have been saying for years, even though the Bush Administration, way back when, spent years purposely not opening an email from their own EPA because they knew it contained the finding that, as FoxNews.com just admitted, carbon dioxide is a pollutant!

As Peter Sinclair has mocked the denialists, while debunking their silly notion that CO2, even too much of it, is merely "plant food": "Plants use CO2. Therefore, more CO2 is good. It’s one of the hardy perennials of climate denialism."

The rest of the Fox article goes on to describe the developing technology for "clean coal-powered cars." We can't speak to the feasibility of the technology, but, if it's accurately described by Fox (how could it not be?!) it sounds quite interesting. Reportedly, it combines pulverized coal with iron-oxide pellets to create an "oxidation" process that produces heat "in a small chamber from which pollutants cannot escape."

"The only waste product would be water and solid coal ash --- no greenhouse gases," the article by Gene J. Koprowski claims, adding that the same technology could possibly be used "as a replacement for old-fashioned coal power plants, which spew greenhouse gases."

Oh, my! They just did it again!

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Climate change already hitting Rocky Mtn ski resorts; House Dems slam Republicans for obstruction of climate action; Shell Oil calls it quits in the Arctic --- for now; Fox 'News' makes a stunning admission; Drought in the West, Flooding in Europe PLUS: Finally, some good news for kids in Detroit ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Sequestration would be bad news for clean energy and a clean environment; You may be eating toxic chemicals, even if you eat organic, avoid plastic; High court throws out $1B fraud verdict in Exxon leak case; US nuclear dump is leaking toxic waste; USDA warns farmers of accelerating climate change; Loss of wild bees serious threat to crop yields; Weather extremes provoked by trapping of giant waves in atmosphere ... PLUS: The New Abolitionists: Global Warming Is The Great Moral Crisis Of Our Time ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• FoxNews.com: 'CO2 Is A Pollutant' (The BRAD BLOG)
• UPDATE: BP on Trial for Gulf Oil Spill:
• BP Spill Trial Main Page: New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOLA.com)
• Former BP executives offer conflicting safety accounts as Gulf oil spill trial continues (NOLA.com)
• BP left out critical details in spill report, attorneys allege (Fuel Fix)
• Coast Guard Responds to Oil Spill Off Louisiana Shore (ABC News)
• Shell Quits the Arctic --- For Now:
• Swift reaction as Shell suspends 2013 Arctic Alaska offshore drilling (Alaska Dispatch) [emphasis added]:
  “Alaska remains an area with high potential for Shell over the long term, and the company is committed to drill there again in the future,” the company said.
  ...
  He added that discussions with the Department of Interior indicated that a review ordered by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of the 2012 drilling season would not be performed with the goal of making some ultimate decision on Arctic development and whether or not to continue drilling.
• Shell drillship may have legal troubles on horizon (Alaska Dispatch)
• Shell Pause in Arctic Drilling Spurs Call for U.S. Review (Bloomberg)
• House Dems' "Safe Climate Caucus" Slams GOP For Obstruction:
• VIDEO: Democratic Members Launch Climate Change Floor Initiative (Office of Rep. Henry Waxman, California):
  Following President Obama’s recent call to action on climate change in his State of the Union address, today nearly two dozen Democratic members of the House of Representatives announced the formation of the Safe Climate Caucus. The Caucus members have made a commitment to talk every day on the House Floor about the urgent need to address climate change.
• VIDEO: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) On Hawaii Drought, Natural Disaster (House Democrats Energy & Commerce Cmte YouTube Channel)





• Climate-caucus redux: New group isn’t the first (Washington Post)
• Northern California: Driest Jan.-Feb. On Record:
• Snow survey confirms driest January, February on record (Santa Rosa Press-Democrat)
• Following driest January and February ever recorded, Sierra snowpack at 66 percent of normal: But the news isn't all bad: Heavier-than-normal rain and snowfall in November and December left many of the state's major reservoirs at or above normal levels now. (San Jose Mercury News)
• GRAPH: California starts year with record dry conditions (Sacramento Bee)
• PBS NewsHour: Shrinking Snow Means Steep Slide for Ski Industry (PBS):
  Winter sports like skiing, snowboarding and snowmobiling all rely on long, snowy winters for a profitable season. But climate change is creating uncertain conditions for winter sports and the industries that surround them.






• Extreme Weather: Britain, Greece, Italy Suffer Torrential Rain:
• VIDEO: Greece Rains Flood Athens' Streets, Inundates Basements (Huffington POst)
• British farming in crisis as crop losses from 'relentless' floods pile up woes: Many farmers are quitting an industry hit by rain, disease and cheap imports – just as food security becomes a worldwide issue (Guardian UK)
• Rain in U.K. Said by Union to Cost Farmers $2.1 Billion in 2012 (Bloomberg News)
• Wettest year on record for England... and still more rain and wind to come: England has suffered its wettest year on record after the winter deluge pushed rainfall figures to historic levels, the Met Office has confirmed. (UK Telegraph)
• Good news for Detroit: Lead poisoning of kids drops 70 percent since 2004 (Environmental Health News):
  Not too long before the CDC adopted a more stringent threshold, the agency severely cut its lead prevention funding, which Detroit and other cities have heavily relied on. In this fiscal year, it was slashed from $30 million to $2 million. Thompson of Wayne State University said the lack of money has “halted lead services in their tracks” in Detroit....Schottenfels said almost all of the money in Detroit to fight lead – about $1 million annually – came from the CDC. “With current funding, the effort to stop this problem is in dire straits," she said.

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• The New Abolitionists: Global Warming Is The Great Moral Crisis Of Our Time (Climate Progress):
  The Guardian has a good piece by Andrew Winston accompanying the gallery,”The campaign to abolish slavery has many parallels with the work of today’s climate change activists: it takes bravery and determination to try and make the world a better place.”
• Sequestration would be bad news for clean energy and a clean environment (Grist)
• You’re Eating Toxic Chemicals, Even If You Eat Organic And Avoid Plastic (Fast Company):
  A new study found remarkable levels of endocrine disruptors in even carefully catered diets.
  ...
  The authors conclude in their study: "It may be that our findings reflect an isolated rare contamination event because of unusual processing or a packaging abnormality. It also could be the case that the food supply is systematically contaminated with high phthalate concentrations, which are difficult to identify."
• High court throws out $1B fraud verdict in Exxon leak case (Baltimore Sun):
  The rulings reverse court victories secured by residents and businesses. The court rejected $1 billion in punitive damages from a $1.5 billion verdict handed down in 2011 after a six-month jury trial. The court also rejected some claims from a 2009 case in which a jury awarded $150 million to a smaller number of plaintiffs and ordered some returned to Baltimore County Circuit Court for trial.
• US nuclear dump is leaking toxic waste (New Scientist)
• USDA: Farmers must both recognize climate change & become a part of the solution (NRDC Switchboard)
• BEES: Loss of wild pollinators serious threat to crop yields, study finds: Wild bees and other insects twice as effective as honeybees in producing seeds and fruit on crops (Guardian UK)
• Los Angeles Will Be Off Coal by 2025, Says Mayor (KCET)
• Weather extremes provoked by trapping of giant waves in atmosphere: study (Phys.org) [emphasis added]:
  "An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions. ..."What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks".
• Dept of Defense Launches Attack On Climate Change (Clean Technica):
  Last week, DoD released the new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap [PDF], its blueprint for addressing the effects of climate change in a national security context. That includes global impacts such as geopolitical consequences, conflict acceleration and competition for food, water and other life-sustaining resources, as well as increasing demands on DoD resources for humanitarian relief.
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

Early word on what happened today during the U.S. Supreme Court's hearing on the crucial Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, AL v. Eric Holder is not encouraging. This could come to be seen as a very dark day for voting rights in this country, as a landmark provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act may be on the verge of being dismantled and, arguably, a half a decade of civil rights advancements along with it.

Late last night we detailed what's at stake and how the activist Supremes are likely to intercede in what is clearly a Congressional duty, as specifically ascribed to them in the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That, despite a stunning 98 to 0 vote in the U.S. Senate to re-authorize the VRA for another 25 years as is, after 21 hearings and some 15,000 pages of documentation on the continuing blight of racial discrimination, as recently as 2006.

While it's always a perilous exercise to try and read the tea leaves from a SCOTUS hearing, The Nation's Ari Berman, who was present in the court room this morning, Tweets, disturbingly today: "In oral argument, Scalia likened Congressional support for Voting Rights Act to a 'perpetuation of racial entitlement'". He went on to indicate his "quick reaction" to the hearing was that, that while the five Republican Justices are "skeptical of Sec 5," there is a "small chance Kennedy can still be persuaded." He notes, that, incredibly, "Voter suppression attempts in [the] last election didn't even come up during SCOTUS arguments about Voting Rights Act".

Because the Supreme Court still operates in the 1800s, there was no live audio or video of today's hearing. The transcript, however, should be made available later today [Update: transcript is now linked at the bottom of this article] and audio will be made available on Friday.

For now, NBC reports today's hearings this way:

Central parts of an election law dating back to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act, appeared to be in jeopardy Wednesday after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a challenge to them.

NBC’s Pete Williams reported after the oral argument, "I think it’s a safe prediction to say that the Voting Rights Act, as it now stands, is not going to survive. The question is: how far will the Supreme Court go in striking parts of it down?"

Williams said what seemed to concern a majority of the justices was "the fact that the law is too backward looking."
...
Williams reported that during the one hour-and-15 minute oral argument, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe "was a good thing at one time, but times change."

New York Times' Adam Liptak described today's hearing in more, if similarly disturbing detail this way...

A central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 may be in peril, judging from tough questioning on Wednesday from the Supreme Court's more conservative members.

Justice Antonin Scalia called the provision, which requires nine states, mostly in the South, to get federal permission before changing voting procedures, a "perpetuation of racial entitlement." Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked a skeptical question about whether people in the South are more racist than those in the North. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked how much longer Alabama must live "under the trusteeship of the United States government."

The court's more liberal members, citing data and history, said Congress remained entitled to make the judgment that the provision was still needed in the covered jurisdictions.
...
The law, a landmark achievement of the civil rights era was challenged by Shelby County, Ala., which said that the requirement had outlived its usefulness and that it imposed an unwarranted badge of shame on the affected jurisdictions.

The county's lawyer, Bert W. Rein, said that the "problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved."
...
Congress renewed the act in 2006 after holding extensive hearings on the persistence of racial discrimination at the polls, again extending the preclearance requirement for 25 years.

We'll update this item as needed throughout the day.

Also, please note that our friend and colleague, investigative reporter Greg Palast, has posted a petition calling for Section 5 of the Voting Rights to be extended, rather than killed, to require preclearance of new election laws in all states, rather than just the 16 covered jurisdictions currently specified in Section 5 of what he calls "Martin Luther King's Dream Act". You can sign that petition here.

* * *

UPDATE 11:32am PT: Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog sees a similar case made to those of the others reporting on the hearing, but finds a sliver of possible light in regard to Kennedy's "swing" role on an otheriwse clearly 4 to 4 divided court...

The argument Wednesday in one of the most important cases of the Court’s current Term --- a hearing that ran 17 minutes longer than the allotted hour --- left no doubt that four of the Justices (and maybe Kennedy with them) are just as troubled as they were four years ago when they last lambasted the selective enforcement approach mandated by history’s most successful civil rights law. Equally, there was no doubt that four Justices --- including the two newest members --- were prepared to let Congress have its way with the 25-year extension of the law.

Naturally, that meant the potential swing vote would be held by Justice Kennedy.

Denniston then goes on to describe how Kennedy seemed to "perk up" during arguments made by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor that, even if the formula used to determine which jurisdictions are covered by Section 5, that Alabama, and thus, Shelby County, would still be among those jurisdictions. If so, the argument that seemed to catch Kennedy's interest went, Shelby was the wrong plaintiff to bring this case, since they can't argue that they are being harmed by the current formula.

"If you would be covered under any formula, why are you injured under this one?," Kennedy asked Shelby's attorney who reportedly refused to agree with the premise of the question.

Denniston continues:

Justice Kennedy’s overall comments went quite far to suggest that he, too, believes that the law, if not modified to capture more states in more equal enforcement, probably could not withstand constitutional scrutiny. But occasionally...the "swing" Justice made other remarks that suggested he might not be prepared --- as he almost certainly was not in 2009 [when Section 5 was last upheld] --- to go all the way to invalidate the law’s Section 5, its core.

He wanted to be assured that the Voting Rights Act might not be enforceable at all, if Section 5 were to be nullified. He commented that the other enforcement provision — Section 2, which applies nationwide — was not an adequate substitute.

So, there's a bit --- a very small bit --- of hope that Kennedy may end up siding with the court's liberal wing on this one.

Tom Goldstein, however, also at SCOTUSblog, saw it this way:

The more liberal members pressed both the narrow argument that an Alabama county was not a proper plaintiff because it inevitably would be covered and the broader argument that there was a sufficient record to justify the current formula. But the more conservative majority was plainly not persuaded by either point. It is unlikely that the Court will write an opinion forbidding a preclearance regime. But it may be difficult politically for Congress to enact a new measure

UPDATE 11:55am PT: LA Times' David G. Savage and David Lauter describe Scalia's controversial remark this way:

Justice Antonin Scalia called the law "a perpetuation of a racial entitlement…. This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress."

As we described in our coverage last night, this is exactly the "kind of question you can leave to Congress." In fact, the 15th Amendment, which bars the denial of the vote "by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," specifically gives Congress the power to enforce that article of the Constitution as they have done (albeit 95 years later) with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Section 2 of the 15th Amendment reads plainly: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

So, which part of that two-sentence Constitutional Amendment does Scalia --- who pretends to be a "strict constructionist" --- seem to have trouble understanding?!

* * *

UPDATE 12:43pm PT: The complete transcript of today's hearing is now posted here [PDF].

• See our earlier coverage of what's at stake in today's hearing right here...

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

The first section of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870 after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, reads simply: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

The second, and final section of the 15th Amendment, is even shorter: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Congress is charged with determining the "appropriate legislation" to assure that voters are not discriminated against on the basis of race. And, though it took almost another 100 years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment to do so, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 was passed to help ensure exactly that.

In 2006, in continuing its duty to uphold the Constitution, after 21 Congressional hearings, including testimony that amounted to some 15,000 pages of evidence, the VRA was re-authorized for another 25 years by an astounding 98 to 0 margin in the U.S. Senate and a nearly-as-impressive 390 to 33 in the U.S. House.

"There was a lot of invidious discrimination shown," says Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who chaired the U.S. House Judiciary Committee at the time. He characterized the hearings, which closely examined the extent to which racial discrimination still affects minority voters, as "one of the most extensive considerations of any piece of legislation that the United States Congress has dealt with in the twenty-seven and a half years that I have [served]."

That year's VRA re-authorization was signed into law by Republican George W. Bush. The law's three other federal re-authorizations (in 1970, 1975 and 1982) were also signed into law by Republican Presidents.

One of the most successful, and universally respected pieces of bi-partisan legislation in our nation's history, however, is now coming under serious attack from Republicans and a group of billionaire funders in the years following its last re-authorization. Since that year, an unprecedented number of challenges against the VRA --- specifically its Section 5, which applies to some 16 different jurisdictions with a long history of racial discrimination --- have been filed in the court system, at the same time that a tidal wave of voter suppression laws have been passed by GOP legislatures across the country, most notably, in many of the jurisdictions covered by Section 5.

A challenge to that section of the VRA, which served to block a number of new restrictions on voting and voter registration during the run-up to the 2012 election, will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, and the outlook for the crucial protections that Section 5 has offered for decades are now potentially in very grave danger of being struck down entirely...

Section 5, which covers all of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, and portions of California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, requires that new election-related laws in those jurisdictions receive preclearance from either the Dept. of Justice or a federal court.

Thanks to Section 5, polling place photo ID restrictions in Texas and in South Carolina were blocked before last year's Presidential election, and restrictions on early voting in Florida as well as a purposefully discriminatory redistricting scheme in Texas were all turned back after Republicans in those states attempted to change the law for political advantage.

The once beloved VRA has come under new fire since 2010, as Republicans have decided that, suddenly, there is no more need for Section 5, that discrimination in those covered jurisdictions with historically high levels of discrimination are no longer any worse than anywhere else in the United States, and that, in any event, the law violates the premise of equal protection for all by forcing only certain jurisdictions to jump through hoops that other jurisdictions in the nation do not have to.

Section 5 has been upheld by the Supreme Court many times over the years, but after another largely unsuccessful challenge to it in 2009, just after the first inauguration of President Barack Obama, Republicans were emboldened by several signals offered by the new Rightwing Justices about the future of the provision.

"The historic accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act are undeniable," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, "but the Act now raises serious constitutional concerns."

At ABC, Ariane DeVogue quotes the Chief Justice, long a foe of the VRA, charging that voter turnout and registration in the South, where a great number of states are covered by Section 5, "now approach parity," that "blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare" and that "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels."

"The evil that Section 5 is meant to address may no longer be concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance," observed Roberts in 2009. "The statute's coverage formula is based on data that is now more than 35 years old, and there is considerable evidence that it fails to account for current political conditions."

Justice Clarence Thomas, in his minority opinion in the same case, wrote that "the lack of current evidence of intentional discrimination with respect to voting renders Section 5 unconstitutional."

Both Roberts and Thomas, apparently, failed to read the extraordinary body of "evidence of intentional discrimination" collected by their Republican colleagues in Congress in 2006. The record since then, particularly since the GOP takeover of many state legislatures at the beginning of 2011, has been even more striking.

"After the 2010 election, GOP officials approved laws in more than a dozen states to restrict the right to vote by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, shutting down voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons and mandating government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot --- all of which disproportionately target communities of color," writes Ari Berman in his recent cover story at The Nation, on both the history of the VRA and its new Supreme Court challenge. "The states covered by Section 5 were significantly more likely to pass such laws than those that are not," he argues.

"Past remains present to a disturbing degree in the South," Berman says. "States and counties with a history of voting discrimination in the 1960s and '70s are still trying to suppress their growing minority vote today. Six of the nine fully covered states have passed new voting restrictions since 2010, including voter ID laws (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), limits on early voting (Georgia) and restrictions on voter registration (Alabama and Texas). But only one-third of noncovered jurisdictions passed similar restrictions during the same period. The worst of the worst actors are still those covered by Section 5."

He also notes that "there have been more lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 over the past two years than during the previous four decades."

"Taken as a group, the covered jurisdictions are not any worse in terms of discrimination," counters Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, one of several who have joined Shelby County, AL v. Eric Holder, the case being heard on Wednesday in the Supreme Court, in order to challenge Section 5. "Congress should either base its extra burdens on states that show current problems with discrimination, or make voting regulations that apply equally to all states," argues Severino.

The lower court in the case had upheld Section 5, finding against Shelby County, and noting that "Congress drew reasonable conclusions from the extensive evidence it gathered" when the act was re-authorized in 2006.

For once, Congress had done its job and fulfilled its specified Constitutional role, as cited by the 15th Amendment. But now, Rightwingers are hoping for judicial activism to intercede and overturn the Constitutionally-delegated efforts of the legislative branch.

The argument against the notion that discrimination is no worse in the South and the other covered jurisdictions, seems to be belied by the Shelby County case itself, which Berman summarizes as follows:

Calera, a once-sleepy town [in Shelby County, AL] from which the lawsuit stems, is fifty-five miles north of Selma. Best known for its Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum, Calera became the fastest-growing city in the state over the past decade, adding new businesses like Walmart and Cracker Barrel off the busy I-65 highway running from Birmingham to Montgomery. Before local elections in 2008, Calera redrew its city boundaries. The black voting-age population had grown from 13 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2008, but the new maps eliminated the City Council's lone majority-black district, represented by Ernest Montgomery since 2004. The city decreased the black voting-age population in Montgomery's district from 71 to 30 percent by adding three overwhelmingly white subdivisions while failing to include a large surrounding black neighborhood. A day before the election, the Justice Department objected to the change. Calera could have preserved the majority-black district, the city's demographer told Washington, but the City Council chose not to. Calera held the election in defiance of Justice Department orders, and Montgomery lost by two votes.

A soft-spoken and civic-minded precision machinist, Montgomery grew up going to segregated schools until junior high, but he didn't think race was as big an issue in Calera as it was in other parts of the state. That changed in 2008, when he knocked on doors in the lily-white subdivisions of his new district-which he knew well from his time on the city planning commission-and was told by residents that they were supporting his opponent, who'd lived in the town for only three years. When asked why, they couldn't give him a good reason. Montgomery could come to only one conclusion: "they voted against me because of the color of my skin."

The Justice Department negated the election results and, after a year of negotiations, Calera moved from single-member districts to an at-large election system for the City Council. Montgomery was easily elected under the new system, winning the largest number of votes of any candidate, while his opponent from 2008 received the second-fewest. After the two elections, "I realized how important Section 5 is," Montgomery said.

It was this case that has become the basis for the challenge to Section 5 to be heard by SCOTUS on Wednesday. Berman says that Shelby County had no intention of challenging the VRA, but for pressure from Ed Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, "a conservative legal-defense fund devoted to fighting raced-based protections in public policy."

The funding for Blum's organization comes exclusively from Donors Trust, a rightwing dark money outfit which, reports Berman, "doled out $22 million to a Who's Who of influential conservative groups in 2010, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafted mock voter ID laws and a raft of controversial state-based legislation; the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers' main public policy arm; as well as Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform Foundation."

Donors Trust was recently highlighted by Suzanne Goldenberg at the UK's Guardian for fronting for "anonymous billionaires [who] donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science." Since Donors Trust is a non-profit 501(c)3, the millionaires and billionaires who donate to the hard right anti-voting, anti-science organization, also receive a tax-payer funded tax deduction for their efforts!

"Blum’s group does not have to disclose which funders of Donors Trust are giving him money, but he has identified two of them: the Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust," Berman reports. "The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation paid for billboards in minority communities in Milwaukee during the 2010 election with the ominous message 'Voter Fraud Is a Felony!', which voting rights groups denounced as voter suppression. Both Bradley and Searle have given six-figure donations to ALEC in recent years, and Bradley funded a think tank in Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute, that hyped discredited claims of voter fraud to justify the state’s voter ID law, currently blocked in state court."

If Section 5 is struck down by SCOTUS, opponents argue, Section 2, which covers all 50 states can be used to stop discriminatory election laws. But Section 5 places the burden of proof onto the specific jurisdictions to demonstrate that their new laws will not have a discriminatory effect before they are put into practice. Section 2, on the other hand, allows for someone who has been discriminated against by such laws to sue. But the burden falls on them to prove that they have been discriminated against and, in most cases, it happens only after the damage has already been done.

The BRAD BLOG's legal analyst Ernest A. Canning has argued that the U.S. Dept. of Justice has an obligation to challenge discriminatory laws under Section 2 in jurisdictions not covered by Section 5. Though the more difficult burden of proof in such cases has meant that there have been far fewer such cases historically. In the waning days of the 2012 Presidential Election, the DoJ signaled to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which is not covered by Section 5, that they were considering a Section 2 challenge to the polling place Photo ID restriction law passed just months before the election by the GOP legislative majority in that state. The worst provisions of that law --- which might have kept tens of thousands of otherwise perfectly legal voters from casting their vote last November --- were temporarily blocked by a state challenge (and recently blocked again from taking effect in their upcoming May primary), so the DoJ's potential Section 2 challenge has yet to move forward.

Still, the loss of Section 5 would be an enormous blow to the cause of voting and civil rights in this country. "Section 5 gives the federal government a more effective tool for combating discrimination in voting than anything else that Congress has ever come up with," Sam Bagenstos, former Deputy Asst. AG for Civil Rights in the Obama Justice Department told Berman.

While the Supreme Court has upheld Section 5 in the past, it may not do so this time around, given the hard right shift of the current court, their activist bent, and their willingness to intercede in duties specifically assigned to Congress by the U.S. Constitution.

"The disappearance of Section 5 would be a devastating setback for voting rights --- akin to the way the Citizens United decision eviscerated campaign finance regulation --- and would greenlight the kind of voter suppression attempts that proved so unpopular in 2012," Berman warns.

The court is expected to issue their ruling on the Constitutionality of Section 5 this Summer.

* * *

UPDATE 2/27/13: While it's always a perilous exercise to try and read the tea leaves from a SCOTUS hearing, Ari Berman, who was present in the court room this morning, Tweets, disturbingly, "In oral argument, Scalia likened Congressional support for Voting Rights Act to a 'perpetuation of racial entitlement'". He went on to indicate his "quick reaction", that while the 5 Republican Justices are "skeptical of Sec 5," there is a "small chance Kennedy can still be persuaded." He notes, that, incredibly, "Voter suppression attempts in last election didn't even come up during SCOTUS arguments about Voting Rights Act".

It seems this could be a very dark day. Because the Supreme Court still operates in the 1800s, there was no live audio or video of today's hearing. The transcript should be posted later today, and audio will be made available on Friday. So, more coming later on today's hearing, we suspect...

UPDATE 2/27/13, 11:19am PT: Our coverage now continues here, with still more disturbing reports out of this morning's SCOTUS hearing...

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Here we go again: another "historic" storm... but it's not enough to end our historic drought; BP finally goes to trial for the oil disaster in the Gulf; China and Estonia move forward on renewable energy innovation; PLUS: CA Gov. Jerry Brown says fighting climate change is a boon, not a bust, for the economy... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Study: how Arctic sea ice loss impacts weather extremes; Horsemeat scandal 'an object lesson in food politics'; Drought closing U.S. feedlots, meatpackers; Dog food recall underscores toxic danger in drought; AEP agrees to close 3 coal plants; Heart-pounding ride on Navy's Great Green Fleet; DoD attacks climate change; Media and myth on doomsday messages on climate change; Cryosat-2 confirms stunning Arctic ice loss; UK farming, flood crisis ... PLUS: Tanks leaking radioactive waste in Washington State ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• BP Goes to Trial for Oil Disaster: "Greed Devastated the Gulf"
• 'Greed devastated the gulf,' prosecution says as BP trial opens (LA Times)
• First BP trial witness says company put cost cuts over safety (Chicago Tribune)
• As Oil Spill Trial Opens, Push For A Deal Continues: (NY Times)
• Greed Caused BP's Gulf Oil Spill, Lawyers Argue (LA Times)
• BP, Contractors Start Trial for Worst U.S. Offshore Spill (Reuters)
• Opening Statements Blame BP and Transocean for Massive Oil Spill (New Orleans Times-Picayune):
  Among the recurring story lines and accusations:
  • BP...was more concerned with profits than safety
  • Transocean...had not properly trained its crew
  • Halliburton...used a type of cement that was known to be risky but did not succeed in sealing the well...
• Another "Historic" Storm Slams the Midwest:
• 'Truly a historic blizzard,' weather service says (CNN)
• Blizzard batters U.S. heartland, spreads snowy mess into the Midwest (CNN)
• Ag Sec: Climate Change Impacts U.S. Agriculture, Forests:
• VIDEO: USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack on Long-Term Impacts of Climate Change: - remarks begin at 11:10. (Natural Resources Committee Session, "Extreme Weather and the Corps of Engineers: Preparing States for the Future", Nat'l Governors Assoc. Annual Mtg):
  Ag Sec. Tom Vilsack: "The world around us is indeed getting warmer, and the result of that will be more intense weather patterns...longer droughts, more flooding, more severe storms, which will have an adverse impact on crop production and livestock, and it will likely lead to increased tree mortality, which in turn increases the risk of wildfires.
  ...
  Over the course of the next 50 years, we're going to see changing crop production patterns. What's grown in Iowa today may or may not be grown in Iowa 50 years from now, unless we begin a process of adapting now.
• Climate Change Set to Batter U.S. Agriculture, Forests (Climate Central):
  Climate change is likely to transform U.S. agriculture by mid-century, reducing yields of many staple crops and the productivity of livestock operations, according to a new government analysis. Rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns will also harm the nation's forests, increasing their vulnerability to fires, insect infestations and disease. Those are some of the dramatic projections outlined in a pair of analyses released Tuesday by the Agriculture Department.
• Study: Effects of Climate Variability and Change on Forest Ecosystems: A Comprehensive Science Synthesis for the U.S. Forest Sector (USDA)
• USDA on Climate Change: Adaptation for Agriculture, Forests (The Energy Collective)
• Dust Bowl Days: Historic U.S. Drought Projected To Persist For Months, Worsened By Thin Western Snowpack (Climate Progress):
  Without repeated, significant bouts of heavy snow and rain in the remaining days of winter, a large part of the country will face serious water supply shortages this spring and summer, when temperatures are hotter and average precipitation is normally low. The drought already ranks as the worst, in terms of severity and geographic extent, since the 1950s.
• CA Governor Jerry Brown: Addressing Climate Change Helps the Economy:
• VIDEO: CA Gov. Jerry Brown: 'Playing Russian Roulette' with climate: (Natural Resources Committee Session, "Extreme Weather and the Corps of Engineers: Preparing States for the Future", Nat'l Governors Assoc. Annual Mtg):
  Brown: Dealing with climate change can be a real stimulus...I believe we have to take action. In California, we've adopted a goal of 33% renewable energy for our electricity... we have the toughest energy efficiency standards, started 30 years ago... we have a cap-and-trade system... but we can't do it alone. We need other states...It's a real stimulus for innovation."

• Jerry Brown warns nation is 'playing Russian Roulette' with climate (San Luis Obispo Tribune)
• California releases first-ever fracking regulations (San Jose Mercury News)
• China: Instituting a Carbon Tax?:
• China to introduce carbon tax: official (Xinhua.net):
  China will proactively introduce a set of new taxation policies designed to preserve the environment, including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions...The government is also looking into the possibility of taxing energy-intensive products such as batteries, as well as luxury goods such as aircraft that are not used for public transportation...To conserve natural resources, the government will push forward resource tax reforms by taxing coal based on prices instead of sales volume, as well as raising coal taxes. A resource tax will also be levied on water.
• What Would China’s Carbon Tax Regime Look Like (Ella Chou):
  "[T]he larger context is missing and the key questions about the implementation are not answered."
• China's New Carbon Tax And The Crumbling Case For Inaction (Media Matters)
• China may soon get a carbon tax. But how effective will it be? (Washington Post)
• China Discusses A Nordhaus Carbon Tax Not A Stern One (Forbes)
• VIDEO: Wait Until China Acts. Wait - What? They Are? (Climate Desk via Slate)





• Estonia: World's 1st Nationwide Fast-Charging Network:
• Estonia goes electric with new car charger network (Reuters):
  Estonia has become the first country in the world to install a nationwide system of fast chargers for electrical vehicles, the manager of the new system said, as part of European efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
• Estonia Launches Nationwide Electric Vehicle Fast-Charging Network (Forbes):
  The network of 165 DC (direct current) quick-charging stations, produced and installed by Swiss engineering giant ABB, are strategically dispersed across the country. Along highways, the stations are no more than 60km (37 miles) apart, installed at gas stations, cafes, shops, and other high-visibility spots.

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• Weather extremes provoked by trapping of giant waves in atmosphere: study (Phys.org) [emphasis added]:
  "An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions. ..."What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks".
• The horsemeat scandal–an object lesson in food politics: The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. (Food Politics)
• Feedlots, Meatpackers Closing With Fewer US Cows (AP):
  Years of drought are reshaping the U.S. beef industry with feedlots and a major meatpacking plant closing because there are too few cattle left in the United States to support them.
• Dog food recall underscores toxic danger in drought-hit U.S. corn (Reuters)
• AEP agrees to close 3 coal plants in emissions settlement (Washington Post):
  One of the the nation's largest utilities agreed Monday to close three of its coal-fired power plants as part of a settlement with government officials and environmental groups, the latest sign of how the nation's electricity supply is shifting away from coal.
• My Heart-Stopping Ride Aboard the Navy's Great Green Fleet:
  With Washington frozen solid on climate, the Navy is breaking the ice. (Mother Jones)
• Dept of Defense Launches Attack On Climate Change (Clean Technica):
  Last week, DoD released the new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap [PDF], its blueprint for addressing the effects of climate change in a national security context. That includes global impacts such as geopolitical consequences, conflict acceleration and competition for food, water and other life-sustaining resources, as well as increasing demands on DoD resources for humanitarian relief.
• Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate (Climate Progress):
  These myths are so deeply ingrained in the mainstream media that such messaging, when it is tried, is routinely attacked and denounced — and the flimsiest studies are interpreted exactly backwards to drive the erroneous message home.
• Cryosat-2 Confirms Stunning Arctic Ice Loss (Open Mind):
  PIOMAS data already indicated that the annual cycle of ice volume has increased its amplitude, but the Cryosat-2 data suggest an even more dramatic change in the size of the annual cycle than that estimated by PIOMAS.
• UK farming in crisis as crop losses from 'relentless' floods pile up woes: Many farmers are quitting an industry hit by rain, disease and cheap imports – just as food security becomes a worldwide issue (Guardian UK)
• Florida legislators hope to fix nuclear advance fee law (Tampa Bay Times):
  Five years ago, Peter Bradford warned that a Florida law allowing utilities to charge customers in advance for nuclear power projects could have "ruinous economic impacts.'' It did.
• Governor: 6 tanks leaking radioactive waste at Washington nuclear site (CNN):
  Six tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington state are leaking radioactive waste, the governor said Friday, calling the news "disturbing" even as he insisted there are "no immediate health risks."
• Understanding extreme weather in an era of climate change: Scientists try to ID climate signals in weather as public draws conclusions. (Ars Technica)
• Coast Guard finds violations on Shell's Arctic drilling rig: (Anchorage Daily News)
• 1.5C rise in temperature enough to start permafrost melt, scientists warn (Guardian UK):
  Team of scientists use radiometric dating techniques on Russian cave formations to measure historic melting rates
• The most terrifying graph you'll see all year (Digby's Hullabaloo):
  Your brain will fight it, even with the numbers on the page staring back at you, because the collapse of civilization is simply beyond human comprehension. To really internalize this information means you would need to accept things like...
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

I'd strongly recommend that you read this piece by Jeff Spross, entitled "The Debt Everyone is Freaking Out About Does Not Exist", in full. It's a very smart and sober primer explaining...well, exactly what the headline says.

Yes, Washington D.C. and the corporate media which cover it, are spending a whole lot of time and resources playing into what amounts to a massive presentation of kabuki theater, and its not one that actually helps us with the addition of new jobs or economic growth in any real way whatsoever. Arguably, as Spross explains, it may well accomplish just the opposite.

It's difficult to select just the key passages from the piece, as mentioned, since it's chock full of smart analysis throughout. But, for those without the patience to read the whole thing, here are a few of the central thoughts that you should educate yourself about...

Some of the debt certainly exists, like the roughly $11.6 trillion owed to foreign and private creditors. But that isn’t the debt anyone’s worried about. If we stopped adding to it tomorrow, the debt as it stands would pose essentially zero threat to the country’s fiscal health, as the ongoing growth of the economy would send our debt-to-GDP ratio dropping like a rock.

So the debt that’s got everyone worried is the part we haven’t yet incurred. And that debt, by definition, does not exist. It’s not a certainty, it’s merely a projection by the Congressional Budget Office. And trying to model how the federal budget, not to mention the entire American economy, will behave years or even decades in the future is a devilishly treacherous business.

For instance: one of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) favorite talking points in 2011 was that the computer simulations CBO uses to model the economy crash when they attempt to account for the debt load in 2037. Imagine trying to model the 2011 economy in 1985. Things you’d never see coming include (among other things) the Internet, fracking, massive advances in computing power, the renewable energy boom, three wars, a massive recession, and Harry Potter. And predictions can be hard even over shorter time frames. In 1995, CBO predicted the deficit in 2000 would be well over $200 billion. We ran a surplus of $236 billion.

In fact, Ryan plastered dramatic graphs of debt going out 75 years onto everything in sight while stumping for his last budget. Forget predicting 2011 in 1985. That’s like predicting 2011 in 1940.

So neither the impending Baby Boomer retirement nor growing health care costs make astronomical debt a certainty, despite the insistence of the conservative and centrist punditariat. With respect to the Boomers, economist Dean Baker ran the numbers and found that if productivity growth in the economy clocks in at one percent until 2035 (a very conservative estimate) the resulting gains will swamp the added retiree burden.

Spross goes on to explain how even the freak out about rising health care costs, and the threat it is said to pose to Medicare and Medicaid should not be taken for granted either, since it's based on curves that change, for different reasons, over time. It has already begun to change, he notes, as health care costs have "unexpectedly slowed to a 50-year low since 2009," about which he adds (and explains why): "We probably have Obamacare to thank for that."

He argues that we are, essentially, "fixating on a problem that may or may not exist," and by doing so, "Policymaking becomes less about solving concrete problems ... and more about made-up numbers on an Excel spreadsheet."

This choice to prioritize a phantom number over real-world evidence has consequences. In a depression, spending cuts suck demand out of the economy, leading to slower growth. Remember: the denominator counts as much as the numerator in the debt-to-GDP ratio. Europe has so far pursued austerity with markedly more enthusiasm than the United States, and its economic performance predictably tanked as a result. Spain and France are anticipated to miss their latest debt-cutting targets, and the Continent as a whole will probably not see renewed economic growth for another year.

Both in Europe and here in America, we have tax codes that by their nature bring in less revenue when the economy goes into a downturn, and a series of safety net programs designed to ramp up when unemployment rises. The vast majority of the deficits we’ve seen since President Obama took office were due to the 2008 collapse. Under depression conditions, deficits are a feature, not a bug.

But these excerpts, even as extended as they are, don't do the full story justice. As I said, do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing.

* * *

By way of just one more piece of added perspective on this issue. Here is the public debt-to-GDP ratio for a whole bunch of developed countries, and for the world as an average. As you can see, in 2010, the U.S. was below most of the other developed nations on this score, and just a touch higher than the average of world countries...

If you followed the news of late out of Washington, however, you'd think we're on the brink of complete debtpocalypse! That's a pretty clear victory for D.C. Republicans, and, as usual, a clear failure of both Democrats and the U.S. corporate media.

My thanks to those of you who answered my recent call for support on the heels of our 9th Anniversary announcement. A little more than 100 of you answered that call which, while seemingly a very small number of the thousands who visit here each day, is amongst the largest responses we've had to any of our attempted fundraisers over the years, in terms of number of people giving.

So my great thanks for that. If you had purchased our premium offer for a signed copy of Marta Steele's new book, Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Rise and Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000 - 2008, it's on its way or already there, or we'll need a few more days to get a few of them out, since we oversold our limited number of available copies and Marta's been kind enough to help us get a few more to cover all of those who purchased. If you didn't get one through our premium offer, you can (and should!) get one via the Columbus Free Press website right here.

All of that said, I'm still facing difficult questions about how to sustainably keep going here as we begin our 10th(!) year of trouble-making, muckraking and journalism regarding many topics that most in the media would prefer to ignore. I hate --- and am not very good at --- constantly haranging you all for contributions, even if it's just a few times a year. So, for the short term, a quick question for those who have time to offer some feedback to me here...

While a good number of you were generously willing to help out with one-time donations during the recent drive, what, if anything, might help to encourage you in the future to become a monthly sustaining contributor? I'm open to any and all ideas. While I don't usually directly request feedback of this sort, I am doing so now, as I search for a more reliable way to try and keep things afloat here as we move forward.

I know there's a lot of "competition" for your eyeballs and web support dollars these days. And so much free content is available out here that I appreciate how difficult it is to contemplate paying anything for stuff on the web.

But is there additional or a different type of coverage you'd like to see here that might help? More quick news items? Fewer items, but more longer investigative reports? More and varied guest blog voices? A "subscriber's only" area of some sort?

I'm just tossing out a few thoughts to give you an idea. I don't want to prejudice the imagination of the jury here, and I may or may not be able to accomplish any particular changes given our limited resources. Also, I want to make sure that we continue to offer original reporting or analysis, rather than simply re-post stuff from elsewhere, as so many sites do these days.

But I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on what, if anything, might help encourage some of you --- beyond those few who have already done so (thank you!) --- to be more inclined to sign up for a monthly sustaining contribution (of any particular amount).

Please let me know in comments. Or, if you feel more comfortable responding via email, I'm happy to hear from you that way as well.

And, again, my thanks to all of you who contributed to help us try to keep going in our most recent fund drive, as well as those who have done so in previous years. The support truly means the world.

* * *

P.S. If you'd like to sign up for one of those monthly sustaining contributions I'm referring to, you can do so anytime, for any amount you like, in the light-blue box about halfway down the right-sidebar on any page here at The BRAD BLOG. Or, you can select from one of the pre-determined monthly amounts in the dropdown link below.

Choose monthly amount... $10: $10.00 USD - monthly
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P.P.S. Of course, a regular old one-time donation is always appreciated as well! (Even by snail mail to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028")

Last Friday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow proudly, and justifiably, crowed about the ratings success of last Monday new NBC News documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, as narrated by her and based on the 2007 book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.

"First I want to say thank you, if you tuned in this past Monday to watch the new MSNBC documentary about how the last administration tricked the U.S. into the Iraq War," she said. The film garnered the highest ratings of any documentary in the history of the channel.

"The success is really exciting. It means there will be more of where that came from in coming months and years," Maddow explained before announcing that the film will re-air on Friday, March 15th at 9pm ET. (You can watch the entire documentary online before that right here, if you like.)

Congratulations are certainly due. While there were several new revelations in the film, much of the story of the string of blatant lies and scams culled together to hoax the country into war had already been known to those of us news geeks who follow this stuff too closely. Nonetheless, it was very helpful, and an excellent reminder, to see the entire case laid out in a single, simple, watchable presentation. We're delighted to hear it was a ratings success.

Revisiting that disaster also helped encourage The BRAD BLOG to examine several still-existing loose ends --- beyond the fact that, shamefully, nobody in the Bush Administration has ever been brought to account in any way for what happened, including what are clearly a series of very serious war crimes. Among the points we've been looking into, in the wake of the Hubris documentary, is the questions of whether or not Colin Powell "knowingly lied" in his presentation of what turned out to be blatantly false evidence for the case against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, when the then-Secretary of State spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003 and helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of an invasion.

Powell's Chief of Staff at the time, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, admits during the film that he and Powell "did participate in a hoax." But, in a statement in response to our request for comment, Wilkerson vigorously denied that either he or his boss knowingly did so. He sent his statement after we'd published anti-war author and activist David Swanson's critique of the Hubris film, on the day after it initially aired. In the critique, Swanson cites his own 2011 essay which offers evidence to argue that Powell "knowingly lied" during his presentation to the U.N. (Both Swanson and 27-year Sr. CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who was cited in Wilkerson's response, each replied to him in turn. You can read all of their responses here.)

While Swanson "applauded" the MSNBC documentary for helping to "prolong Americans' awareness of the lies that destroyed Iraq," he also offered a number of pointed critiques for the cable news channel itself. His observations are on-point in both regards, and help to raise a suggestion for an important and necessary follow-up documentary that, we suspect, would likely garner ratings at least as high as those earned for Hubris.

After all, though Hubris:Selling the Iraq War focused on the lies told by the Bush Administration in the run-up to war, unfortunately, they were not the only ones "selling the Iraq War"...

MSNBC: Selling the Iraq War

"As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help," Swanson alleged in his review last week, highlighting the infamous cancellation of Phil Donahue's show, even though it was said to have had the highest ratings on the nascent cable news channel at the time.

"The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week --- and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world," wrote Swanson.

After his firing, he continued, "MSNBC proceeded to support the war with mild critiques around the edges, and to white-out the idea of impeachment or accountability."

Indeed, Donahue has famously charged (to Sean Hannity of Fox "News", ironically enough, but also to Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and others) that, following 9/11 and during the march to war in Iraq a year and half later, he was forced by the network "to have two conservatives on for every liberal" voice he featured on the show.

An internal memo at the time claimed that Donahue is "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war...he seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

But being "skeptical of the administration's motives" should have earned Donahue a raise, not a pink slip. That was precisely what was lacking in almost every American newsroom at the time. Had there been any such skepticism on our airwaves, it might have helped to avert one of the deadliest and most expensive foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. In short, the corporate media failed what is supposed to be their role.

Of course, NBC and MSNBC were not alone in their lack of skepticism and subsequent failure to accurately report what was known about the fraudulent case for war against Iraq. The administration's persistently false drumbeat was being sold, unskeptically, to the American public with the compliance of nearly the entirety of the U.S. corporate mainstream media.

A March 2003 study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which examined coverage on the evening news broadcasts at ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS one week before and one week after Powell's U.N. presentation, found that "[o]f the U.S. guests" featured on the programs, "a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources --- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) --- expressed skepticism or opposition to the war."

"Of all official sources," the study found, "75 percent (222 of 297) were associated with either the U.S. or with governments that support the Bush administration's position on Iraq; only four out of those 222, or 2 percent, of these sources were skeptics or opponents of war."

This was at the same time as historically large anti-war street protests were taking place in the U.S. and around the world. It was also when, as the report notes, "61 percent of respondents in a CBS poll (2/5-6/03) were saying that they felt the U.S. should 'wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time,' [and] only 16 of the 68 U.S. guests (24 percent) who were not officials represented such views."

"Half of the non-official U.S. skeptics were 'persons in the street'; five of them were not even identified by name. Only one U.S. source, Catherine Thomason of Physicians for Social Responsibility, represented an anti-war organization."

In the three weeks after the war was launched, according to a subsequent FAIR study from May of 2003 --- this one including evening news reports from CNN and Fox as well NBC, ABC, CBS and PBS --- the story was almost identical.

"Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1."

In both reports, NBC's record was roughly as dismal as the other network news outlets. Though, FAIR notes, "the largest percentage of U.S. sources who were anti-war" was seen on NBC Nightly News, "despite the network's ownership by General Electric, a significant military contractor."

What was that percentage of U.S. anti-war sources featured on NBC's main evening news program in the three weeks after the launch of a war based on the knowing lies detailed by MSNBC in Hubris? Just 4 percent, according to FAIR.

They gave him a second term

The inaccurate coverage didn't only affect American's beliefs about the war. The wildly imbalanced coverage across all of the major television news outlets played a key roll in the subsequent Presidential election.

In March of 2004, exactly one year after the war was launched, a study [PDF] by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks, based on a nationwide sampling of 1,311 respondents, found: "A majority continues to believe that Iraq was giving substantial support to al Qaeda, while nearly half continue to believe that evidence of such support has been found. A majority believes that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them."

None of those things were true.

"The majority of those who have such beliefs," the study notes, "approve of the decision to go to war, while the majority of those who do not have such beliefs disapprove of the war."

While there remain justifiable dispute around the accuracy of the results of the 2004 election, there can be little doubt that the corporate media's inaccuracies and related historic failures in their coverage of the war, both before and after it was launched, helped to inflate support for the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign.

But how did a majority of Americans come to believe, a full year after the war began, with no evidence of a WMD program discovered, "that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them"?

Here, NBC played a key role. It was just one of many aspects of NBC and MSNBC's participation in misinforming America which begs examination in a new, follow-up MSNBC documentary, if we are ever to "come to terms with what happened, and how it happened," as Maddow (who was not at MSNBC at the time the Iraq War began) discussed in the week leading up to last week's documentary.

First, just three days after U.S. troops had begun rolling in to southern Iraq, questions began to arise in regard to the whereabouts of those vaunted WMD we had all been warned about by Powell and the rest of the Bush Administration.

"Bush administration officials were peppered yesterday with questions about why allied forces in Iraq have not found any of the chemical or biological weapons that were President Bush's central justification for forcibly disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government," Washington Post reported on March 23, 2003. "Officials said they are certain such weapons of mass destruction will be located."

"Miraculously," Seth Ackerman wrote in July of 2003 in "The Great WMD Hunt", the weapons in Iraq were "found" by that very night! Or, at least, MSNBC reported as much.

"Bob, as you know, there's a lot of talk right now about a chemical cache that has been found at a chemical facility," MSNBC's then anchor, Forrest Sawyer told NBC's White House correspondent Bob Kur. "I underscore, we do not know what the chemicals are, but it sure has gotten spread around fast."

The next day, according to Ackerman, the real facts emerged. "U.S. officials had admitted that morning that the site contained no chemicals at all and had been abandoned long ago." But few heard about the quiet correction.

An even worse, and far more damning incident occurred, once again with the help of NBC, just two months later, as Ackerman explains:

Having suffered a series of public humiliations from the conspicuous absence of unconventional weapons, the administration made it known that it was pinning its hopes on two trailers found in northern Iraq, which they termed mobile biological weapons labs. On May 12, NBC News correspondent Jim Avila, reporting from Baghdad, declared that the labs "may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Joining him was hawkish former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay (now an "NBC News analyst"), who was flown to Iraq to perform an impromptu inspection for the cameras. Armed with a pointer, he rattled off the trailer 's parts: "This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." In his report, Avila didn't explain how and why Kay and the NBC crew obtained access to the trailers while the legally mandated U.N. inspection team, UNMOVIC, had been barred from looking at them.

The trailers quickly became the "centerpiece" (New York Times, 5/21/03) of the administration's argument that Iraq was indeed hiding a biowarfare program, and Bush himself used them to proclaim (5/31/03) that "for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." No actual biological agents were found on the trucks, though; nor were any ingredients for biological weapons. In fact, no direct evidence linked the trailers to biological production at all.

It was eventually determined that the trailers in question had been used "to produce hydrogen for military weather balloons." But, again, that "disappointing" news didn't make quite the splash of the original, incorrect NBC News report.

That, of course, is just a tiny sampling of NBC/MSNBC failures and, as mentioned, they were by no means alone among media outlets in those, and similar, failures. But, Maddow's premise for presenting the Hubris documentary, as she offered in the week before its airing, was based on the importance of understanding exactly what happened to bring our nation into an unnecessary war built on lies, and whether the same thing could happen again today.

The answer to that question, at the moment, is an unequivocal, "yes!"

'Coming to terms with what happened'

"Until we come clean about this, until we get honest about it, until we can draw a line under it and say, 'You know what? That was a bad idea.' Until we are able to do that cleanly, this kind of stuff really is gonna drag around behind everybody who wants to be in public office in the future, who was in public office then, or was in a position to comment on it when it was all happening," Maddow, who was hired by MSNBC in 2008, said in promoting the new documentary on the Friday before its initial Monday airing last week.

"The Government perpetrated a massive deception campaign on us," she intoned, while sharing clips of Republicans such as war-supporter John McCain, then and now, attempting to justify the war, along with Mitt Romney and his 2012 senior campaign foreign policy advisers such as Bush Administration National Security Adviser Condoleezza "Mushroom Cloud" Rice and the administration's chief spokesman in Iraq, Dan Senor. Both played key roles in that known 2003 "deception campaign" which Maddow references, and yet they were both welcomed with open arms by the 2012 Romney campaign.

It's ironic to view Maddow's remarks, however, in light of NBC's own failures as highlighted above. And, of course, those examples are just "tip of the iceberg" stuff.

Maddow continued: "As long as those who were wrong about the Iraq War, as long as those who did it can count on us not being blunt about that, as long as we, as a country, avoid coming to terms with what happened then," it will all likely happen again.

Good point. So, let's be "blunt about that". In fact, it is already happening again. And, once again, along with the rest of the corporate media, NBC News is playing its part.

Just one example, once again courtesy of FAIR, where Peter Hart reported earlier this month on the "familiar script" played out briefly late last year concerning reports of chemical weapons being deployed in civil war-torn Syria.

Hart notes that, as in the run-up to the Iraq War, the New York Times once again "drove the initial storyline." But NBC (along with other news outlets) jumped onto the very same bandwagon:

On the NBC Nightly News (12/5/12), anchor Brian Williams led the newscast: "Chemical weapons in Syria. Suddenly, the world has an urgent situation on its hands. The fear is Syria is preparing to use them against its own people." Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski went on: "U.S. officials tell us that the Syrian military is poised tonight to use chemical weapons against its own people. And all it would take is the final order from Syrian President Assad." He added that "this week, U.S. intelligence detected a flurry of activity at chemical weapons sites.... The alarming developments shook the world."

Miklaszewski reported, "Today, while U.S. officials confirm the precursor chemicals are loaded, they must still be mixed together to create the deadly gas." Of course, it is highly unlikely that U.S. officials can "confirm" any such thing.

Did NBC learn anything from what happened ten years ago? It's difficult to say. Though MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell expressed some skepticism that night during her own discussion with Williams, she still managed to defer to what she described, generically, as "specific intelligence" from U.S. officials about the threat of the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

By the following Sunday, 12/9/12, Hart notes, "When NBC's Meet the Press needed a guest to weigh in on Syria's WMDs, it chose Jeffrey Goldberg-the former New Yorker reporter who authored alarmist reports about Iraq's WMDs."

'Ought to scar everybody associated with it'

Though Maddow had noted during her Friday promo that being wrong about Iraq during the run-up to war "ought to scar everybody in American politics associated with it for the rest of their careers," NBC News was more than happy to invite Goldberg, one of the most wrong journalists from the Iraq War period, back on to their premiere Sunday news show to offer analysis about the latest Middle-East dictator said to possess weapons of mass destruction which could ultimately result in the U.S. joining yet another war in the region.

Of course, that was the same NBC news program where, in their exclusive September 8th, 2002 interview with then Vice-President Dick Cheney, he was allowed to trumpet an array of blatantly false information about a 9/11 hijacker having met "in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the the attack on the World Trade Center"; that "we've seen al-Qaeda members operating physically in Iraq"; that the U.S. had intercepted an Iraqi order of "aluminum tubes" said to be for use in enriching uranium; that Saddam Hussein might have been responsible for the anthrax attacks in the U.S.; and the chilling charge that Iraq was "in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

"We do know, with absolute certainty," Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert and the world, "that [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."

All of those charges, as aired to the world on NBC's Meet the Press, were false.

During her promo for Hubris, Maddow highlighted the fact that "not everybody was wrong about this." There were, as her footage showed, mass street protests against the war in February of 2003, the very month before the war began. Those anti-war rallies were the largest in the history of the planet, in fact. "We didn't all blunder into this together because 'we all believed what that lousy intelligence turned up'," she said.

She is right again. And yet, a week ago Sunday, in hopes of avoiding yet another catastrophe that many of us can see coming, the largest climate rally in the history of our country took place on the streets of Washington D.C. Although 35,000-50,000 people braved bitter cold to protest against the Keystone XL pipeline and other menacing dangers related to climate change, not one of the Sunday network news shows bothered to even mention the rally. That includes NBC's Meet the Press which, like most of the other Sunday shows, actually broadcasts from the nation's capital, where the protests where ongoing that very day.

As with the massive protests before the Iraq catastrophe, which were all but ignored by the mainstream corporate media at the time, it was as if Sunday's climate rally --- following a year of record heat, record drought and record billion-dollar weather disasters, to boot --- never even occurred on NBC News' long-running Sunday broadcast.

The next night, on NBC Nightly News, the largest climate rally in U.S. history garnered just 63 words. On the bright side, that was more than the protest received on CBS Evening News, which devoted only 49 words, or ABC World News, which managed to cobble together just 43.

'Hubris' in the mirror

And yet, NBC deserves great praise, even ten years late, for daring to begin an examination of how we ended up in one of the --- if not the --- greatest foreign policy disasters in our nation's history.

We were led into an unnecessary war and, as MSNBC's own documentary details, it was done knowingly. It should have never happened. The media's job at the time should have been to warn the public about that threat. Instead, they largely played the role of stenographers for the Bush Administration's con-game about Iraq's non-existent threat. The result: almost 3,500 dead U.S. troops, more than 32,000 of them injured, well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians murdered (the low-ball figured offered by Hubris itself), and some $3 trillion robbed from the coffers of the American people for the effort.

Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, as laudable as it is, ought to be just the beginning of examining and reporting the full story of how the war was really sold to the American people.

"You could not criticize this war four months before the invasion," the fired MSNBC host Phil Donahue said during an interview last year on CNN. "It was not good for business. General Electric [the parent company of NBC and MSNBC at the time] had no interest in featuring an old talk show host who was against the President's war."

"This is what you get with corporate media. It's gonna happen again!," he warned.

If Maddow is serious about her own network's willingness to produce more such important documentaries following on the success of last week's --- and if she's serious about what she said during the promotional run-up to that broadcast about the necessity of understanding what really happened in order to prevent it from happening again --- then a helpful and absolutely necessary place to start would be with the difficult, and undoubtedly incredibly uncomfortable, mea culpa examination of her own network's complicity in that historic and massive failure. It won't be easy. But nothing of this much gravity ever is.

Every corporate media outlet in the nation ought to do the same, of course, as an initial step towards the accountability that never came, for anybody, after the deadly scam perpetrated by the Bush Administration and the huge helping hand it received from NBC and every other major news outlet (with a very few, if notable, exceptions). NBC must set the example for all the others, if Maddow's words are to serve anything more than promotion for the next airing of Hubris.

"If the revisionism that we are experiencing right now, ten years later, is able to succeed," Maddow said a week ago Friday, "then we are doomed to repeat this again as a country some day. If we do not come to terms with what happened, and how it happened, if we do not learn the lessons of that disaster as a country, and how we were duped, how it worked, then history says we are doomed to repeat it."

She's absolutely right. And hopefully she'll consider doing her part to hold her own news organization accountable in a follow-up documentary, to help ensure that they "learn the lessons of that disaster," or else, as she correctly echoes Donahue in her own warning, we are absolutely "doomed to repeat it."

• Watch NBC's entire Hubris: Selling the Iraq War documentary now online here.

TPM has been posting some of the winners from this this year's World Press Photo of the Year contest. This remarkable photo, by Paul Hansen, was awarded the top prize from among more than 100,000 submitted by 5,666 photographers...

Hansen's Nov. 20, 2012 photo was taken in Gaza City, Palestinian Territories, and is described this way: "Two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and his older brother Muhammad were killed when their house was destroyed by an Israeli missile strike. Their father, Fouad, was also killed and their mother was put into intensive care. Fouad's brothers carry his children to the mosque for the burial ceremony as his body is carried behind on a stretcher."

Check out TPM's selections of some of the other winners. Some are breathtaking. All represent some tremendous journalism.

We'll have a related-ish story on all of this Monday. But, for the moment --- in the comment thread of our recent story about Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's vehement denial that his old boss "knowingly lied" during his infamous 2/5/03 U.N. Security Council presentation of what turned out to be false evidence of an Saddam Hussein's WMD program, there was a fair bit of vitriol directed at both Powell and Wilkerson.

A number of commenters feel that neither of the two men have yet to come fully clean, and argued as much in pretty harsh terms in their remarks.

Longtime BRAD BLOG commenter David Lasagna offered this observation in the same thread in response to some of those commenters...

I'm uncomfortable with a lot of the Wilkerson bashing in this comment thread.

I would agree that there are gaps in Wilkerson and Powell's narratives. I share the anger and frustration of the continuing themes in this country of no accountability for those in power, whether the issues are war and death, financial collapse and suffering, or the constant lying and gross misrepresentation of history and reality that we're subjected to every day by most politicians and the bulk of the corporate media.

ON THE OTHER HAND, regarding the Iraq War--

Wilkerson, more than any of the other key players, stopped drinking the cool-aid and began copping to the bullshit. Okay, it's not a perfect copping, but it's distressing to see how many commenters here are so focused on what's missing and acknowledge so little the magnitude of what Wilkerson has done by coming forward as he has AND by being available for further discussion as he continues to be.

It sounds to me like his critics here are doing very little imagining of what it was like FOR HIM to be in that treacherous inner circle. The way I see it, it is just this inability to understand, or even bothering TRYING to understand, someone else's experience/worldview that is at the core of so much of what is wrong in this country.

I would offer that the process of vilifying Wilkerson, as demonstrated in comments above, is a process related to the type of vilification of the "enemy" that so tragically confines and distorts the thinking of all our pro-war players whose nightmarish, illegal, immoral decisions resulted in all the death and devastation that we all decry and that fuel the Wilkerson bashing.

I'm saying that we, the critics, need to offer a different way of BEING if we're serious about trying to derail the madness.

I share the pain, distress, and desire for truth of all those critical of Wilkerson and Powell's narratives. It's beyond maddening what continues to be done in our name and the continuing obfuscation and lack of accountability surrounding our continuing unjustified, cruel, murderous policies.

But continuing vilification of Wilkerson, besides being, in my opinion, an unattractive, perhaps less obvious relative of the mindset/process that leads to war in the first place is, I suspect, particularly counterproductive here.

The point is to learn how to get out of the fucking lemming leap of mindless destruction that nations insanely indulge in again and again.

Regarding our current disasters, Wilkerson, more than anyone else, opened the door to the process of how the fuck these things happen. It appears to me that he feels really bad about his part in it all. Wouldn't it be more likely to bear fruit to engage him in creative discussion of how it all happened than demanding more of the truth as WE see it? Why not help him unravel it all as a sympathetic partner in dialogue? Might not a more empathetic method be more likely to further our understanding and reveal more of the unconscious aspects of this dysfunctional process we repeatedly fall into than hammering away at the guy and triggering a natural defensiveness cuz he's being attacked?

I guess it sorta matters what your objectives are. If it's just blowing off steam, go at it. If it's really doing the painful examination of how as individuals and groups we fool ourselves into war again and again; if our purpose is to learn and become more conscious of what these unconscious processes are so that we can stop doing them and start exploring other ways of interacting with the world, I think a more conciliatory attitude might be helpful. To say the least.

Please, do not misinterpret my exhortations here as a cousin to the "coddling terrorists" meme. I'm not excusing or endorsing terrible mistakes. I am very much for a more productive, humane method of examining them.

With another papal election coming up, one might wonder how the papal elections, since 1059 or so, have managed to remain secure and unchallenged?

As security technologist Bruce Schneier details at CNN, the trick is what we have long referred to here as "Democracy's Gold Standard": publicly hand-counted paper ballots.

Here at The BRAD BLOG we've been calling for the same thing for U.S. elections for some time. Granted, it hasn't been 1000 years, it's just beginning to feel like it. We were even recently immortalized for that effort.

Schneier's breakdown of the voting process at papal enclaves is absolutely fascinating, particularly as the process they've developed over centuries mirrors much of what the process would look like if our nation ditched its secret, oft-failed, easily-manipulated, unoverseeable vote-tallying computers and modeled our tabulation process on the open, public, and very rarely challenged process used by the citizens in some 40% of New Hampshire's towns. It's almost identical, in many ways, to the one used to select new popes.

As Schneier notes, when a new pope is elected, "Every step of the election process is observed by everyone."

"The ballot is entirely paper-based," he explains, "and all ballot counting is done by hand. Votes are secret, but everything else is open"

Talk about your "Holy See"?! It's hand-counted PAPAL ballots!...

"Nine election officials are randomly selected from the cardinals: three 'scrutineers,' who count the votes; three 'revisers,' who verify the results of the scrutineers; and three 'infirmarii,' who collect the votes from those too sick to be in the chapel."

If that sounds remarkably familiar, then you may be one of the few who understand how "Democracy's Gold Standard", publicly-overseen precinct-based hand-counting, actually works. While there are different techniques for it, one that is often used includes counting teams of four, with two people both agreeing on which candidate has been selected by the voter on each ballot ("scrutineers", as they are known at the Vatican) and two others who write down the running count, with both agreeing that it has been recorded correctly (the "revisers").

For papal elections, the entire counting process is transparent and happens immediately after all votes are cast, with all of the assembled Cardinals observing and authenticating the tally in the very same place where votes were cast, inside the Sistine Chapel.

In precinct-based hand-counted elections in the U.S., it all happens just after the close of polls at the very same precinct where the votes were cast, with the public, video-cameras and representatives from all political parties observing and authenticating the tally as accurate. The results are publicly posted at the precinct before ballots are moved anywhere. They can also be verified for accuracy again later if there are any questions.

At the Vatican, the ballots are burned right after the vote to make sure they remain secret to the rest of the world for all time. Though not before everyone who took part in the election had been able to oversee its tabulation. In our case, by law, we do not "burn the ballots" until 22 months after federal elections, and often far sooner after non-federal elections. In any case, burning the ballots immediately after they are tabulated is something we are wise to not model after the cardinals.

Their system, however, is far more secure than the one we use in almost every election jurisdiction in our country. As Schneier notes in his assessment of how difficult it would be to hack a papal election: "The system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky."

He says that while it's feasible a "scrutineer" could modify a vote, it would not be easy. "The counting is conducted in public, and there are multiple people checking every step."

And that, of course, is the point, and exactly why a similar process used in the U.S. --- albeit adapted for use in a large, modern election with many precincts --- would be very difficult to game, at least without being detected. Contrast the papal system with the computerized systems we use now in the majority of every state. They are easily gamed by a "conspiracy" as small as one person who can modify the computer-tabulated results in any number of ways, in a matter of seconds, with almost no possibility of detection. Those concerns are precisely what we have been documenting and warning about here at The BRAD BLOG for almost 1000 years.

Remember, as Schneier explains, in papal elections "every step of the election process is observed by everyone." That is the key. And neither touch-screen votes, nor paper ballots tallied secretly by optical-scan computers meet that test.

There are a few places where Schneier sees a possibility for chicanery in the papal system, but it would be difficult. And, if used in the U.S., the same chicanery would have to occur at many different precincts without being detected at any of them before it was likely to have an adverse effect on any particular race or ballot initiative.

But while no system is perfect, publicly hand-counted paper ballots remain "Democracy's Gold Standard". When there is a close election and we really, really, really need to know who won, what do we do? We publicly hand-count the ballots.

We've long argued that in every race, we, the people, deserve to know who really, really, really won. And, in this case, the system worked out by the cardinals seem to have served them pretty well for many centuries.

"When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years," Schneier concludes, "you end up with something surprisingly good."

Imagine that. Please don't make us keep at this for another thousand years. Thanks.

[Mitre-tip to Steve Heller.]

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Secretary of State John Kerry comes out swinging on climate change; BP off the hook again - for $3.4 billion; Genetically modified crops do not produce bigger harvests; PLUS: How secretive rightwing billionaires fund the climate change denial industry --- and get a tax deduction for it! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone; 1.5C rise in temperature enough to start permafrost melt; Poll: strong support for clean energy, carbon pollution standards; Alaska Senate rolls back cruiseship water pollution standards; Honda to offer rooftop solar systems; Arctic sea ice volume has 'collapsed'; The most terrifying graph you'll see all day; Major methane release is almost inevitable; Mexico's dramatic, rapid recovery from traffic gridlock; US natural gas bubble threatens economy ... PLUS: Unlocking the conspiracy mind-set ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• BP Off the Hook Again for Gulf Oil Spill Disaster:
• BP challenges 'excessive' spill claims (The Hill's E2 Wire):
  BP announced Tuesday that it would defend itself in court against "excessive" claims for civilian penalties and federal gross negligence charges regarding its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
• Justice Dept. Deal Reduces BP's Deepwater Horizon Fine by $3.4B (Guardian UK):
  Court reduces company's maximum fine a week before trial over blowout that dumped millions of gallons of oil into Gulf of Mexico.
• Battle Lines Drawn for BP's Day in Court (NY Times):
  Unless the Justice Department and BP reach a last-minute settlement, the British oil company will return to court on Monday to face tens of billions of dollars in civil claims from the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that could cripple the company for years to come.
• BP Faces Civil Trial Over Gulf Oil Spill (LA Times)
• NASA Probes Show 'Alarming' Water Loss in Middle East (Climate Central):
  Parts of the Middle East are losing groundwater reserves at "an alarming rate," according to a new analysis of NASA satellite data.From the beginning to 2003 to the end of 2009, portions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria that lie within the Tigris and Euphrates river basins shed 117 million acre-feet of water. That's roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.
• Japan Suspends Annual Whale Hunt After Clashes with Activists:
• Japan Halts Whale Hunt After Sea Shepherd Clashes: (Australian Broadcasting Co.):
  Sea Shepherd is claiming victory after Japan temporarily suspended its annual whale hunt in the Southern Ocean.
• Japanese Whaler Rams Sea Shepherd Ships In Australian Waters: (Environment News Service):
  The Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru has collided with two whale conservation vessels and its own refueling tanker in Australia's Antarctic waters, damaging the other ships. No injuries are reported.
• GMO Seeds: Less Yield, Higher Cost, More Chemicals:
• Do GMO Crops Really Have Higher Yields? (Mother Jones):
  Washington State University researcher Charles Benbrook has demonstrated that the net effect of GMOs in the United States has been an increase in use of toxic chemical inputs.
  ...
  And in a new paper (PDF) funded by the US Department of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin researchers have essentially negated the "more food" argument as well.
• GMOs: Nearly Half of All US Farms Now Have Superweeds (Mother Jones):
  Last year's drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.
• SCOTUS: Justices Hostile to Farmer's Argument Against Monsanto: (Reuters):
  Supreme Court justices signaled on Tuesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto Co was in a strong position to claim that an Indiana farmer violated its patent for a type of soybean.
• How Rightwing Billionaires Secretly Fund Climate Change Denial Industry
• Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks (Guardian UK):
  Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science [And it's all tax-deductible! --- ed.]
• Digging For Dark Money (Columbia Journalism Review) [emphasis added]:
  Exposes by the Guardian and Center for Public Integrity have unravelled parts of a dark network which launders the millions flowing from fossil-fuel interests like the Koch brothers to climate change denial and disinformation outlets. It was documents obtained by scientist Peter Gleick, whose undercover tactics brought criticism from some journalists, that helped bring the story to light.
• Donor's Trust: ATM for Climate Denial (Democracy Now!, via Climate Crock of the Week):






• Sec. of State John Kerry Calls for Action on Climate Change:
• In 1st Big Speech, Kerry Sounds Like A Climate Hawk With The Courage To Reject Keystone XL Pipeline (Climate Progress) [emphasis added]:
  We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.

  And let's face it - we are all in this one together. No nation can stand alone. We share nothing so completely as our planet.

  When we work with others - large and small - to develop and deploy the clean technologies that will power a new world, we're also helping create new markets and new opportunities for America's second-to-none innovators and entrepreneurs to succeed in the next great revolution.

• Kerry comes out swinging on climate change (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• World Bank: 'A 4°C [7°F] World Can, And Must, Be Avoided' To Avert 'Devastating' Impacts (Climate Progress)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone (David Roberts, Grist):
  The argument of Keystone protestors is not that there's One True Way, but that eventually there has to be some way. Somebody's got to start taking these dire warnings seriously and do something, something specific and concrete. You can't support Doing Something but oppose Doing This Particular Thing forever. Sooner or later, people have to draw lines and take sides. Progress does not happen without struggle.
• Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set (NYT Green):
  The strongest finding in the survey was that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone's willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research. No great surprise there. It was the secondary findings that set off a brouhaha.
• 1.5C rise in temperature enough to start permafrost melt, scientists warn (Guardian UK):
  Team of scientists use radiometric dating techniques on Russian cave formations to measure historic melting rates
• Polling Finds Strong Support For Clean Energy And Stricter Carbon Pollution Standards (Climate Progress):
  Yesterday, Pew Research released new poll research that re-confirms the trend. When asked to choose between developing "alternative sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen" and expanding "exploration and production of oil, coal and natural" gas as their preferred priority for addressing America's energy needs, 54 percent of Americans went with alternative energy. Only 34 percent chose continued prioritization of fossil fuels. That's a drop from the 63 percent high in 2011, but an uptick over the 52 percent response last year.
• Rollback of Cruiseship Wastewater Rules Approved by Alaska Senate: (Anchorage Daily News):
  The Alaska Senate on Tuesday approved a Parnell administration measure to roll back cruise ship wastewater standards that were approved by voters in 2006. The vote was 14-6.
• Home Solar Systems to Be an Option for Honda Customers (NY Times)
• Arctic Death Spiral Bombshell: CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed (Climate Progress)
• The most terrifying graph you'll see all year (Digby's Hullabaloo):
  See that 5 degrees Celsius we're projected to hit by 2050? That's 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
  ...
  Your brain will fight it, even with the numbers on the page staring back at you, because the collapse of civilization is simply beyond human comprehension. To really internalize this information means you would need to accept things like...
• Major methane release is almost inevitable (New Scientist):
  For the first time, we have an indication of when this could start happening. Anton Vaks of the University of Oxford in the UK and colleagues have reconstructed the history of the Siberian permafrost going back 500,000 years. We already know how global temperatures have risen and fallen as ice sheets have advanced and retreated, so Vaks's team's record of changing permafrost gives an indication of how sensitive it is to changing temperatures.
• Mexico City Makes Dramatic Recovery From Gridlock: (ClimateWire):
  Little more than a year after making it to the top of IBM's list of worst commuter cities, Mexico City has returned to the urban transit spotlight --- this time at the receiving end of international praise.
• When Natural Gas Bubble Explodes, Economy Could Implode All Over Again (Crooks & Liars) [emphasis in original]:
  It is highly unlikely that market-savvy bankers did not recognize that by overproducing natural gas a glut would occur with a concomitant severe price decline. This price decline, however, opened the door for significant transactional deals worth billions of dollars and thereby secured further large fees for the investment banks involved. In fact, shales became one of the largest profit centers within these banks in their energy M&A portfolios since 2010. The recent natural gas market glut was largely effected through overproduction of natural gas in order to meet financial analyst’s production targets and to provide cash flow to support operators’ imprudent leverage positions.
• Emails: Officials Worried About Water Temps at CT Nuke Plant (AP):
  Emails among federal regulators show that officials running Connecticut's nuclear plant want to use water that's even warmer than the temperature that forced it to shut a unit in August. The emails have been obtained by The Associated Press through an open records request. They show regulators were cool to at least two other suggestions by Millstone Power Station in Waterford to operate with warmer water.
• Fracking: EPA Officials Ignored Engineer's Theory in Range Resources Contamination Case (EnergyWire):
  A former Texas state oil and gas regulator outlined in 2011 how two Range Resources Corp. wells outside Fort Worth could have leaked natural gas into the water supply of nearby homes.
• UK Climate Change Secretary Slams Deniers As 'Dogmatic And Blinkered' (Climate Progress):
  "It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable."
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

[Now UPDATED with a response from 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern at bottom of article.]

In a response to a charge cited by The BRAD BLOG on Tuesday that then Sec. of State Colin Powell "knowingly lied" during his infamous February 5, 2003 presentation of false intelligence to the U.N. Security Council about the need to attack Iraq, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's Chief of Staff at the time, characterizes the allegation as unfair.

He says points made in support of that claim are "misleading and even spurious" and "not supported in the surrounding narrative."

"I have admitted what a hoax we perpetrated," says Wilkerson in his reply today, sent in response to our request for comment. "But it actually spoils or desecrates a fair condemnation of what is already a bad enough set of misstatements, very poor intelligence analysis, and --- I am increasingly convinced, outright lies --- to take the matter to absurdity with one man, in this case Powell."

David Swanson, who authored the charges in question, as cited earlier this week by The BRAD BLOG, disputes Wilkerson's response. The full remarks by both men are posted in full at the end of this article.

On Tuesday, we ran Swanson's critique of Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, a new NBC News documentary based on the book of a similar name by journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff. (You can watch the entire film online here.)

While Swanson lauded the project for helping to "prolong Americans' awareness of the lies that destroyed Iraq," he offered a number of worthy criticisms as well, including the fact that MSNBC, which aired the documentary, failed to acknowledge its own participation in propagating many of those same lies to the American people.

Featured in the film are several new pieces of information and commentary that have come to light since the original publication of Corn and Isikoff's 2007 book.

Some of those revelations come by way of Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and, more to the point, Powell's Chief of Staff at the time of his February 5, 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the supposed chemical, biological and nuclear threats posed by Saddam Hussein. That presentation by, perhaps, the most well-respected official in the Bush Administration at the time, is widely credited with turning the tide of public opinion in favor of the invasion of Iraq which would commence just weeks later, ten years ago next month.

Unfortunately, virtually every piece of evidence presented by Powell at the U.N., said to have been culled from various intelligence agencies, turned out to be completely false. Some years later, Powell would describe the speech as a "painful" "blot" on his career. As Hubris details, Powell's evidence was not only wrong, but known to be wrong by many in the intelligence community by the time that it was presented to the public as fact by the well-respected Secretary of State.

"Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied," says Wilkerson in the film, "we did participate in a hoax."

Swanson's critique, however, takes that point further, charging that "The Hubris version of Colin Powell's lies at the United Nations is misleadingly undertold."

"Powell was not a victim. He 'knowingly lied.'," wrote Swanson, including a link to his own 2011 op-ed at Consortium News headlined "Colin Powell's Disgraceful Lies".

Given the serious nature of the charges cited by Swanson, as detailed in his 2011 piece --- all well-documented with direct quotes from the State Department's own January 31, 2003 Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) assessment repeatedly describing most of the claims Powell would offer the following week at the U.N. as "WEAK" at best, and "implausible" in many cases --- it seemed appropriate to given Wilkerson the opportunity to respond to the direct allegation that Powell was outright lying during his U.N. presentation.

In his response, Wilkerson draws a line in the sand, if you will, against the contention that his former boss "knowingly lied"...

He says he believes that Swanson's "use of INR's assessment of 'weak' repeatedly, is weak itself."

"INR was at the time one of 15 intelligence entities in the US intelligence architecture at the federal level. (Add Israel France, the UK, Jordan, Germany, et al, and of course you get even more)," writes Wilkerson. "INR's assessments were often viewed --- indeed still are --- as maverick within that group (and were particularly so viewed by [the CIA's Director of Intelligence] George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Indeed, INR's insistence on putting a footnote in the October 2002 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] with regard to its doubts about Saddam's having an active nuclear weapons program was only grudgingly acknowledged and allowed by Tenet.)"

"In truth," Wilkerson continues, "INR itself concurred in the overall NIE's finding that chems and bios existed (and the NIE was the root document of Powell's 5 Feb presentation)."

Swanson contests Wilkerson's response. He says in reply that "Powell's own staff, the INR...told him the claims were weak and questionable and even implausible."

He notes that Hubris highlights the fact that even claims that had been rejected by Powell and Wilkerson as "bullshit" about flimsy claims of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda "were put back in" to the speech, after insistence from the CIA.

"That is a moment to resign in protest," Swanson notes in his reply, "not to move forward and dismiss the INR, the State Department's own experts, as 'maverick.'"

"When the Pentagon and the White House build a transparently fraudulent case for war, rejected by countless experts, many nations, and much of the public, the State Department's job is to support fact-based analysis regardless of whether it is 'maverick,'" Swanson contends.

In their dueling replies, the two also exchange thoughts on the use of intelligence that came from "Curveball", the code-name given to Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al-Janabi, who later admitted to blatantly lying to Germany's intelligence agency about the existence of mobile bioweapons labs used by Saddam.

Wilkerson says Powell was never warned about the dubious nature of "Curveball" and, "in fact quite the opposite." He says that while the now-discredited anti-Saddam operative was Tenet's "strongest weapon," in pushing the case for war internally, "the title 'Curveball' was never heard until well after the 5 Feb presentation."

Finally, for all his admissions, Wilkerson still seems to allow room for both himself and Powell off the biggest hook. "One must realize that whether Powell had given his presentation or not, the President would have gone to war with Iraq. That doesn't relieve Powell or me or any of us who participated in preparing Powell of responsibility; it simply places the bulk of that responsibility squarely where it should rest."

"I don't believe blame works that way," replies Swanson. "Blaming Bush more doesn't blame Powell or you less. It just blames Bush more."

In his last thought in reply to Swanson, Wilkerson is generous, even while acknowledging that he, Swanson and other anti-war voices like former CIA analyst Ray McGovern "will never reach accord on this I'm certain."

"But I must say that just as I may have biases from my long association with Powell, I believe both of you [Swanson and McGovern] should examine your biases with regard to the man. Just as it was very difficult for me to face the fact I had participated in a hoax, it probably is just as difficult that you two admit you may be too aggressively critical of Powell. Both our conditions are recognizably human and yours more forgiveable than mine to be sure."

* * *

The full responses from both Wilkerson and Swanson follow below. We sought a response from McGovern as well, since he is invoked by Wilkerson, but we have yet to hear back. UPDATE: McGovern's response is now also included below...

Wilkerson's complete Wednesday, 2/20/13 response:

David,

Several misleading and even spurious bullets and headlines that make strong claims that are not supported in the surrounding narrative. For example, no one ever DID warn Powell about Curveball, in fact quite the opposite. This particular source --- billed as an Iraqi engineer who had defected --- was George Tenet's --- the DCI's --- strongest weapon. And incidentally, the title "Curveball" was never heard until well after the 5 Feb presentation.

Your use of INR's assessment of "weak" repeatedly, is weak itself. INR was at the time one of 15 intelligence entities in the US intelligence architecture at the federal level. (Add Israel France, the UK, Jordan, Germany, et al, and of course you get even more). INR's assessments were often viewed --- indeed still are --- as maverick within that group (and were particularly so viewed by George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Indeed, INR's insistence on putting a footnote in the October 2002 NIE with regard to its doubts about Saddam's having an active nuclear weapons program was only grudgingly acknowledged and allowed by Tenet. And in truth, INR itself concurred in the overall NIE's finding that chems and bios existed (and the NIE was the root document of Powell's 5 Feb presentation).

I have admitted what a hoax we perpetrated. But it actually spoils or desecrates a fair condemnation of what is already a bad enough set of misstatements, very poor intelligence analysis, and --- I am increasingly convinced, outright lies --- to take the matter to absurdity with one man, in this case Powell.

To see my point dramatically, one must realize that whether Powell had given his presentation or not, the President would have gone to war with Iraq. That doesn't relieve Powell or me or any of us who participated in preparing Powell of responsibility; it simply places the bulk of that responsibility squarely where it should rest.

You, Ray McGovern, and I will never reach accord on this I'm certain; but I must say that just as I may have biases from my long association with Powell, I believe both of you should examine your biases with regard to the man. Just as it was very difficult for me to face the fact I had participated in a hoax, it probably is just as difficult that you two admit you may be too aggressively critical of Powell. Both our conditions are recognizably human and yours more forgiveable than mine to be sure. lw

Swanson's complete, same-day reply in turn:

Larry,

Thanks for this response. I'm CCing Brad Blog which posted my commentary and might want to post your reply. Here's my reply to your reply (also available to publish)

Whether or not anyone told Powell of Curveball's reputation, Powell's own staff, the INR, told him the claims were weak, the claims that came from Curveball and from numerous other sources. The INR told him the claims were weak and questionable and even implausible.

Powell used fabricated dialogue. He used evidence from a source who had admitted all the weapons had been destroyed years ago, but failed to mention that bit. Again, here is the catalog of bogus claims: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/021811a.html

You yourself in Hubris state that claims you'd rejected were put back in. That is a moment to resign in protest, not to move forward and dismiss the INR, the State Department's own experts, as "maverick."

When the Pentagon and the White House build a transparently fraudulent case for war, rejected by countless experts, many nations, and much of the public, the State Department's job is to support fact-based analysis regardless of whether it is "maverick."

You recently accused Norman Solomon on DemocracyNow! and all other truth tellers of that time of having failed to warn you --- as if we weren't shouting into every available microphone. If word had slipped through to you, it seems you would have rejected it as "maverick."

This is highly discouraging. If analysis within our government consciously engages in groupthink, where will we find the whistleblowers necessary to prevent the next war?

Please do not imagine that any of us suppose the President wasn't intent on going to war at all costs. It was the transparency of that intention that created the largest public protest in world history. But to suggest that Powell and you did no harm by supporting a war that might have gone ahead even if you'd resisted is a complete breakdown in morality.

I don't believe blame works that way. Blaming Bush more doesn't blame Powell or you less. It just blames Bush more. Blame is not a finite quantity born of a drive for vengeance and distributable to a limited number of people. Blame is what we each deserve when we fail to take the best actions available, as explained here.

* * *

UPDATE 8:58pm PT: Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA analyst turned staunch anti-war activist following his years personally delivering the CIA's Presidential Daily Briefings to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, replies to our request for comment in response to Wilkerson's response with the following tonight:

thanks brad ---

There are very few people still around with the kind of integrity that leads me to give them virtually implicit trust (allowing for the fact that all of us are nonetheless human). One such person is Larry Wilkerson.

It seems to me that a lot hinges on whether Powell and Wilkerson could bring themselves to believe that Tenet and McLaughlin would lie to their faces about Curveball. Tenet is the mother of all con men, and one can argue that Powell and Wilkerson should have been quite aware of that.

Still, I can readily believe that Powell and Wilkerson found it difficult to conclude that Tenet was making stuff up on such a critical issue --- that, assured of backing by Cheney, Tenet and McLaughlin would feel free to let Powell dangle softly in the wind....for the greater cause, of course.

Sizing up Powell, Tenet and McLaughlin might well have concluded that, as long as Cheney was around to protect them (and that he would badmouth Powell to the President if Powell stepped out of line), Powell would not dare accuse them of outright lying. If that was part of their calculation, they appear to have been right.

What incredible fear Cheney inspires --- still! Let's see what Powell says if Cheney ever dies!

I looked into all this at some length earlier this month. For what it's worth, this is how I came out: "Colin Powell: Conned or Con-Man?"

feel free to share my comments, if you wish.

Best regards,

ray
raymcgovern.com

• Watch the entire NBC News documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War now online here.