Illinois Congressman not Florida Congressman

One abiding theme here at the Gypsy Chief Blog is the press always gets it wrong. I was thinking that the other day when I heard Richard Lui of MSNBC say that Joe Walsh [R-IL] shouted “You Lie” at last year’s SOTU speech. Unfortunately the you lie comment was made by Joe Wilson [R-SC] not Joe Walsh. Walsh, in a tough re-election fight against Tammy Duckworth is the child support guy and Tea-Party favorite.

Decided there wasn’t enough to blog about but then today the Coloradoan came up with a doozy of a Tweet. The Coloradoan says in a Tweet Florida Congressman is thrown off House Floor for wearing hoodie [I am paraphrasing]. Sorry Coloadoan, Bobby Rush is from the Chicagoland area of Illinois, not Florida.

Accuracy in journalism is key

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Mainstream media outlets throughout the country are now reporting on record-breaking gas prices, the highest ever for this time of the year. Also making the rounds is the commonly cited prediction by former Shell CEO John Hofmeister that there is a better than 50 percent chance that gas prices will reach $5 a gallon by this summer in the U.S. This is in spite of the fact that U.S. oil production is up and oil consumption down, since 2008. What the media isn’t reporting on is the rest of what Hofmeister said in a recent peak oil themed debate he had with Tad Patzek on Feb. 14.

In the debate, Hofmeister said that we’re heading for $7 to $8 gas and rationing by 2015, and rolling blackouts and brownouts. He also made clear that oil is the lubricant of the world’s economy, and there is no alternative. He further stated that China, which used 8 million barrels of oil a day last year, uses 9 million now, and is projected to use 15 million by 2015. India will go from 4 to 7 in the same time frame. And, that there’s “not enough oil out there to meet that demand.”

On CNBC, Hofmeister stated that he expects WTI oil, now at $106 a barrel, to be $120 to $130 over the next six months, and even higher for Brent, which is now at $121. He further stated that OPEC has no spare capacity, and is maxed out. This is what the early stages of peak oil looks like.

Part of the explanation is the possibility of war with Iran, which could escalate to supply disruptions along the straight of Hormuz. If this happens, prices could quickly skyrocket to new highs above $150, and send the global economy into even deeper depression/recession. Donald Trump has now correctly recognized the oil shock of `08 as the cause of the depression we are still in.

As Patzek explains in the debate, world oil production simply has not grown for six years, and is on the cusp of entering terminal decline. There is still a huge amount of energy out there, but it is increasingly difficult and expensive to extract, both in terms of money and energy. What we crave is not energy, but power, or energy per unit of time. The rate we can extract all fossil fuels is peaking, and more nations are vying for their share of a shrinking pie, and chasing after low flow rate and EROEI projects like bitumen and shale. So, we must work to use less energy, which is currently consumed at the rate of over 100 times what our own bodies run on in the U.S.—we have 100 slaves.

The national average cost of gas is now $3.57, up from $3.51 last week, $3.38 last month, and $3.17 this day last year. In Eugene, gas prices average $3.69. Prices could surpass the $4.11 record set in July 2008 very soon. When we reach those levels, only another deep recession can lower prices. Post Carbon Institute has produced an excellent half-hour documentary explaining the situation. We need Obama or Chu to give a speech like President Carter gave on April 18, 1977, and to take a leadership role on helping us make the transition to something more sustainable. Ending all forms of “growth” would be a good start.
~~

Note to the reader: The source of this is Zachary Moitoza .

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Courtesy: Moveon.org

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Insensitivity, gaffes dog Romney

Narrative from Irish Times

AMERICA: MITT ROMNEY, who is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee, is hounded by the memory of Seamus the Irish setter.

My friend Orla reminded me of the story when I was in New Hampshire this week. It was history, I thought, underestimating the doggedness of US reporters.

Rachel Maddow devoted a long segment of her Thursday-night show on MSNBC to Seamus. The Dogs Against Romney website, founded in 2007, has been revived and is hawking T-shirts stamped with paw prints and the slogans “Mitt is mean!” and “Never Forget Crate Gate”. The subject is again being addressed by serious newspapers.

The incident occurred in 1983, and was first reported by the Boston Globe in June 2007, when Romney made an earlier bid for the presidency.

As recounted by the Globe , Romney, his wife and five sons set out in their Chevy station wagon on a 12-hour holiday journey to Ontario, Canada. Romney placed the family pet, Seamus, in a dog carrier, which he strapped to the roof of the car.

The eldest son, Tagg, watched out the rear window, “where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ‘Dad!’ he yelled. ‘Gross!’ A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

“As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station,” the Globe report continued. “There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back on to the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.”

Romney’s detractors have created a “Google bomb”, a method of redefining a name and pushing it to the top of Google searches. If you enter “spreading Romney”, the first thing that pops up is: “(rom-ney) v. 1. to defecate in terror”.

In August 2007, Fox News presenter Chris Wallace asked Romney how he could do such a thing. “This is a completely airtight kennel and mounted on the top of our car,” Romney said. “Love my dog. We’ve had a lot of dogs over the years. Love them. Seamus, as his name is, climbed up there all by himself, enjoyed his ride . . . it was a good ride.”

Wallace failed to ask the obvious follow-up question: why Romney put Seamus back on the roof after the dog’s distress became apparent.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins has retold the Seamus story more than 30 times in five years, and the Wall Street Journal recently asked Romney to rebut Collins’s insinuations. “Uh . . . Love my dog,” Romney replied. “That’s all I’ve got for ya.”

Link to Rachel Maddow video

Rusty thanks you

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From Skeptical Science: Climate B. S. of the Year Awards

The 2011 Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards

Posted on 6 January 2012 by Peter Gleick

[*B.S. means “Bad Science.” What did you think it meant?]

The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.

Why the failure to act? In part because climate change is a truly difficult challenge. But in part because of a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians. These are mostly groups focused on protecting narrow financial interests, ideologues fearful of any government regulation, or scientific contrarians who cling to outdated, long-refuted interpretations of science. While much of the opposition to addressing the issue of climate change is political, it often hides behind pseudo-scientific claims, with persistent efforts to intentionally mislead the public and policymakers with bad science about climate change. Much of this effort is based on intentional falsehoods, misrepresentations, inflated uncertainties, or pure and utter B.S. – the same tactics that delayed efforts to tackle tobacco’s health risks long after the science was understood (as documented in Naomi Oreske and Erik Conway’s book, Merchants of Doubt).

Last year, we issued the first ever “Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards.” I am now pleased to present the 2nd Annual (2011) Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards. In preparing the 2011 list of nominees, suggestions were received from around the world and a panel of reviewers — all climate scientists or climate communicators — waded through them. We present here the top nominees and the winner of the 2011 Climate B.S.* of the Year Awards.

The 2011 Winner: (See below)

[snip]

Second Place: Disinformation from Fox News and Murdoch’s News Corporation

In this year’s competition, we award Fox News second place – up from their fifth place finish last year. This year, the award is extended to the entire News Corporation empire of Rupert Murdoch because of its apparent efforts to synchronize anti-climate science reporting among the different Murdoch outlets in the UK, the U.S., and Australia. Among the bad climate science promoted by Fox News is that snowy weather disproves global warming (while ignoring or inaccurately reporting record high temperatures recorded around the world); biased and misleading reporting about the content of emails stolen from climate scientists; incorrect claims that El Niños are responsible for global warming; and inaccurate reporting about fundamental scientific principles

Other Murdoch empire assaults on climate science? The editorial page editors of the Wall Street Journal routinely dismiss or ignore all climate change science. Glenn Beck incorrectly tells viewers that there has been no warming in the past decade – the hottest decade in over a century. Sean Hannity says “global warming doesn’t exist.” Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon officially directed his journalists to cast doubt on climate science. Brian Kilmeade, of Fox & Friends, joked, “Sorry global warming people, we have too many polar bears.” And of course, Bill O’Reilly has stated incorrectly, “For every scientist who says there is [climate change], there’s one that says there isn’t.” [Thanks to MediaMatters for tracking these statements.] As a 2011 story in Rolling Stone noted, “[n]o one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch.”

In an analysis of network news reporting on climate change, Feldman, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and Leiserowitz concluded that Fox News is consistently the most dismissive about climate change and is highly biased toward choosing climate change doubters to interview. Nearly half of their guests dismiss climate change compared to 9 and 15% at CNN and MSNBC. In the scientific community, 97 to 98% of climate scientists accept human-caused climate change. This misinformation has an effect: a study [pdf] from Stanford University shows that Fox viewers are far more likely to be fundamentally misinformed about climate change than others. In short, frequent exposure to Murdoch news reporting can be hazardous to your understanding and knowledge of the real world.

Editor’s Note:
See also a recent study by Fairleigh Dickinson University which concludes that people who watch Fox News are less well informed than people who do not watch any news on television.

First Place: Climate B.S.* from all of the Republican candidates for President of the United States

In short, the choice among the Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, distain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency, any one of which would make the Republican candidates strong contenders for the 2011 Climate B.S. Award. Combined? They win hands down.

Because Fox has put off the best Republican candidates, Barack Obama will be much less vulnerable at the election

Whoever wrote the political rulebook needs to start rewriting it. It used to be an iron maxim that voters’ most vital organ was neither their head nor their heart, but their wallet. If they were suffering economically, they’d throw the incumbents out. Yet in Britain a coalition presiding over barely-there growth, rising unemployment and forecasts of gloom stretching to the horizon is holding steady in the opinion polls, while in the US Barack Obama is mired in horrible numbers – except for the ones showing him beating all-comers in the election now less than 11 months away. Even though the US economy is slumped in the doldrums, some of the country’s shrewdest commentators make a serious case that Obama could be heading for a landslide victory in 2012.

How to explain such a turnaround? In the United States, at least, there is one compellingly simple, two-word answer: Fox News.

By any normal standards, Obama should be extremely vulnerable. Not only is the economy in bad shape, he has proved to be a much more hesitant, less commanding White House presence than his supporters longed for. And yet, most surveys put him comfortably ahead of his would-be rivals. That’s not a positive judgment on the president – whose approval rating stands at a meagre 44% – but an indictment of the dire quality of a Republican field almost comically packed with the scandal-plagued, gaffe-prone and downright flaky. And the finger of blame for this state of affairs points squarely at the studios of Fox News.

It’s not just usual-suspect lefties and professional Murdoch-haters who say it, mischievously exaggerating the cable TV network’s influence. Dick Morris, veteran political operative and Fox regular, noted the phenomenon himself the other day while sitting on the Fox sofa. “This is a phenomenon of this year’s election,” he said. “You don’t win Iowa in Iowa. You win it on this couch. You win it on Fox News.” In other words, it is Fox – with the largest cable news audience, representing a huge chunk of the Republican base – that is, in effect, picking the party’s nominee to face Obama next November.

This doesn’t work crudely – not that crudely, anyway. Roger Ailes, the Fox boss, does not deliver a newspaper-style endorsement of a single, anointed candidate. Rather, some are put in the sunlight, and others left to moulder in the shade. The Media Matters organisation keeps tabs on what it calls the Fox Primary, measuring by the minute who gets the most airtime. It has charted a striking correlation, with an increase in a candidate’s Fox appearances regularly followed by a surge in the opinion polls. Herman Cain and Rick Perry both benefited from that Fox effect, with Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, the latest: in the days before he broke from the pack, Gingrich topped the Fox airtime chart. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney cannot seem to break through a 20-to-25% ceiling in the polls – hardly surprising considering, as the league table shows, he has never been a Fox favourite.

But it works in a subtler way than the mere degree of exposure. Fox, serving up constant outrage and fury, favours bluster over policy coherence. Its ideal contributor is a motormouth not a wonk, someone who makes good TV rather than good policy.

Read the balance of this Guardian UK article here.

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Post on Yahoo! News this morning says Top Marine: Fears of ending gay ban prove founded

The problem? Headline is exactly backwards. The story says that top Marine Corp general Doug Amos now admits fears of ending gay ban were proven unfounded.

Moral: The Press Always Gets it Wrong

Update

It is now several hours later and Yahoo! News still has not corrected their misleading headline

Turns out that Yahoo! News is not the source of the error. Thanks site visitor for pointing this out. The Associated Press wrote the headline. Yahoo! News has never corrected this.

Related: Does Yahoo! Hate Lesbians?

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Published November 25, 2011 in Just a Holiday Reminder by Charles Hugh Smith.

You’d never know it from the media coverage, but Black Friday sales are essentially meaningless noise in the U.S. economy.

You know the economy and stock market are in deep trouble when the Mainstream Media elevates one essentially meaningless metric to “The One Meaningful Statistic” and then trumpets it slavishly. One such meaningless metric is Black Friday.

The Media has glommed onto Black Friday for a number of flawed reasons, number one being the MSM’s ceaseless drive to reduce all complex problems down to something that can be expressed in a sound-bite voiceover and a video clip of a crowded mall.

Balance of article here

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Professional Right-Winger Character Assassin

America’s right-wingers have orchestrated an aggressive assault on those they consider to be their enemies. Well, we don’t have to lay down and take it.

March 20, 2011 |
Politics is a dirty business. Its history contains some of the most unsavory and slanderous conduct imaginable. In recent years there seems to have been an escalation by conservative activists who were never able to accept the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. From Inauguration Day, when Fox News immediately began speculating that Obama was illegitimate because Supreme Court Justice John Roberts flubbed the oath of office, to the present where we see the president still shirking off allegations of treasonous sympathies for Muslim terrorists, America’s right-wingers have orchestrated an aggressive assault on those they consider to be their enemies. Well, we don’t have to lay down and take it. Here are some of the ways we can fight back:

1. Trust, No. Verify, Yes:
   

   The easiest way to smack down a conservative is to do some cursory research. In all likelihood whatever they are using against you is filled with errors or is entirely made up. It shouldn’t be too difficult to expose their attacks as vacant smear tactics. Mike Huckabee’s recent assertion that President Obama holds views that are different than the average American due to his “upbringing in Kenya” is a perfect example of right-wing disinformation. It was quickly debunked, which led Huckabee to offer even more ludicrous falsehoods to cover his original deceit. We are fortunate to be blessed with opponents who are, more often than not, idiots. Let’s exploit that good fortune.

2. Mock Treatment:
   

   When you’re dealing with the sort of people who vote for former witches for the senate there is sometimes little you can do other than laugh. And while the antics of right-wingers are often indistinguishable from satire, it is still an effective response to their attacks. The latest inanity from Sarah Palin can be addressed at length in a point-by-point rebuttal or a brief skit by Tiny Fey. Which do you think has a more enduring impact?

3. Talk Back:
   

   The purpose of most attacks from the right is to influence public opinion, and eventually, social behavior and legislation. They must not be left alone on that field of battle. A concerted effort should be made to inform the media that the attacks are baseless. That means letters to the editor, op-eds, call-ins to radio shows, and speaking out at public forums. The PR response is critical. The latest, loudest assertion is often the one most remembered. Don’t let it be a Tea Partier.

4. Consider the Source:
   

   Attacks from the right often emanate from notoriously disreputable characters whose grousing is better ignored. Their hypocrisy is legendary. Why should we care when the corpulent Rush Limbaugh calls Michael Moore fat? And the next time Ann Coulter proposes that the way to deal with violent extremism (or in her view, with anyone of the Muslim faith) is to “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity,” we ought not to pay attention to the violent extremism she espouses. This isn’t giving up. It’s tactical disregard, but it should only be employed against irrelevant figures whose opinions are widely ignored anyway. I know, that’s a pretty big chunk of the rightosphere.

5. Hit the Streets:
   

   Nothing has been more illustrative of the power ordinary people have to effect change than the determined and courageous example set by the people of Wisconsin. They have been relentless in asserting their rights to speak, assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Sadly, their governor and his GOP minions have resisted the will of the people — so far. But this battle is far from over. And the example set by Wisconsin Democrats, unions and citizens, has inspired a national movement in support of working families and the notion that tough economic times require sacrifices from everyone, including wealthy individuals and corporations. This movement has flourished despite scant attention from the conventional media. That’s the power of numbers and a public presence.

6. Sue the Bastards:
   

   This action can only be undertaken by actual victims of right-wing attacks, but it is effective and underutilized. Recently lawsuits have been been filed by Shirley Sherrod (against Andrew Breitbart) and Juan Carlos Vera (against James O’Keefe). These suits can serve as notice that people will not tolerate being slandered or otherwise harmed by spurious attacks. They can also preoccupy conservative evildoers who will have to spend both time and money on their defense. The publicity from these suits can help to advance progressive activism, particularly if they are successful. But just keeping their dastardly exploits in the news has a beneficial effect all its own. It would be great to see more of this from aggrieved parties like Van Jones and George Soros.

7. Get Up, Stand Up!
   

   Last, but not least, it is imperative that we coalesce into a culture of pride and conviction for the ideals we cherish. We must cease to buckle under pressure from rightist factions who will oppose us even after we make every concession they demand. Has the criticism of the White House declined since the departure of Van Jones? Did the opposition relent after we removed language from the health care bill that was falsely lambasted as “death panels?” Has there been any let-up on charges of over-taxation and socialism from Tea Partiers despite the extension of Bush-era tax relief for the rich? Of course not. So why on earth would we continue to try to appease an opponent who is insatiable and resistant to compromise?

   Our side has to stop firing people just because they were subjects of criticism from the right. That just empowers the other side and highlights our weaknesses. It’s long past time for us to stand up for ourselves and our own. And when we get hit, as we will, we need to hit back. We have a moral obligation to stand up for the principles that we share with the majority of the American people. And now we must augment that with the will to advance those principles even in the face of dishonest, dirty dealing by our opponents.

One more thing: have fun! There is no reason we can’t pursue our goals with a positive demeanor that reflects our hopes and aspirations for a country that cares about its people and the people of the world.

Related link: News Corpse
Photo Source: AlterNet
Related: Right-Wing Media Attack Renewable Energy

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