Sunday Funnies

News that's not breaking

Between the Supreme Court's decision on McCutcheon and the shootings at Ford Hood, a lot of other important developments got drowned out this week.   If you want to read something about those two things, there's plenty elsewhere; you can click away now.  We'll catch up on some lesser news here today.

-- The new CEO of Mozilla was forced out by public protests over his support of the anti-gay marriage initiative in California.  This is another example of the rapid evolution of tolerance in American society, and the haste with which it has happened.  This, and the same evolution of attitudes about marijuana legalization -- not just decriminalization, mind you -- are among the very few things that give me great hope about progressivism in this country.

-- Nate Silver seems to be hearing the critics of his hire of a climate change skeptic for FiveThirtyEight.  But his response is also tepid; he's going to air "both sides" of the issue.  He's already apologizing for the man, and that apology does not include the flawed data that underlie the opinions the man was employed to write.

Silver has growing problems with his "data-driven" analysis model of news outside of polling data.  This summarizes the dilemma.

It's not that Nate revealed himself to be a climate change denier; he accepts that human-caused climate change is real, and that it represents a challenge and potential threat. But he falls victim to a fallacy that has become all too common among those who view the issue through the prism of economics rather than science. Nate conflates problems of prediction in the realm of human behavior -- where there are no fundamental governing 'laws' and any "predictions" are potentially laden with subjective and untestable assumptions -- with problems such as climate change, which are governed by laws of physics, like the greenhouse effect, that are true whether or not you choose to believe them.

In short... Nate Silver has never been so wrong about so much.  An extremely rare, unforced error on his part.  Stick to the polls, Nate.  Or them and baseball.

-- I wonder what new whine the conservatives will be drinking now that Obamacare has served over seven million?  I mean besides "the numbers are skewed".

(Go back to last Sunday's Funnies for the above to have the greatest meaning.)

If Democrats all across the nation do not run on the success of Obamacare -- and the failure of certain states and their governors not to expand Medicaid -- then the chances to overcome their historical disadvantages in midterm elections will be reduced to nil.

This is the issue all Democrats should proudly own.  This is the issue they can win on.

Yeah, kind of in a bad mood today

Because this.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court struck down aggregate limits on campaign donations, offers a novel twist in the conservative contemplation of what Nazis have to do with the way the rich are viewed in America. In January, Tom Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worried about a progressive Kristallnacht; Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot, said, of economic populism, “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” Roberts, to his credit, avoided claiming the mantle of Hitler’s victims for wealthy campaign donors. He suggests, though, that the rich are, likewise, outcasts: “Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects,” he writes:

If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.

So pick your analogy: when thinking about people who want to donate large sums of money to candidates, should we compare their position to that of the despised and defeated, like the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, in the nineteen-seventies, or of scorned dissidents, like flag-burners, trying to get their voice heard with their lonely donations? 

And this.

The opinion was classic Roberts: professing to make a minor adjustment to the status quo, but carrying the seeds of potential destruction for core legal principles settled for decades. To some, it evoked his decision last year overturning the core of the Voting Rights Act — a ruling that also claimed to toss back to Congress an issue lawmakers have little desire to revisit.

Critics saw the chief justice’s arguments about the leaky nature of current campaign finance rules as cynical and disingenuous, effectively punching yet another gaping hole in the law by citing loopholes his court helped to create or enlarge.

“It’s like the definition of chutzpah: the guy who kills his parents and asks for mercy from the court because he’s an orphan,” said Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice, which favors tighter campaign finance regulation. “Look at what the court has done since 2007 after Roberts came on board, one case after another gradually striking down the laws that are in place and then claiming that, therefore, more has to be done. It’s nonsensical.”

And this.

All of which means, in effect, that the more money flowing through the system the better. Those who, from lack of money, are muted or excluded from the process are simply losers in a fair democratic system.

And also this.

ExxonMobil has 25.2 billion barrels worth of oil and gas in its current reserves, it's going to extract and sell all of it, and isn't expecting any meddling climate regulations to get in the way.

That's the main takeaway of a report the company released this week to its investors, examining the risk that greenhouse gas emissions rules in the US and worldwide might pose to its fossil fuel assets. Exxon made headlines a couple weeks back when it promised to issue the report after facing pressure from shareholders led by Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth management firm.

[...]

Exxon's report suggests that its planners don't believe serious carbon limits will be on the books anytime soon, leaving the company free to burn through its reserves of oil and gas. That's a disconcerting vision to come just on the heels of Sunday's new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which predicted a nightmarish future if greenhouse gas emissions aren't slowed soon.

"The reserves are going to be able to turn into money, because they're assuming there isn't going to be a policy change," said Natural Resources Defense Council Director of Climate Programs David Hawkins. "They're definitely saying that no matter how bad it gets, the world's addiction to fossil fuels will be so overwhelming that the governments of the world will just suck it up and let people suffer."

And last, this.

It's hard out there for the 1 percent.

Okay, that's not true at all. But they think it is. If you talk to people on Wall Street, most of them—even, in my experience, the ones shopping for Lamborghinis—will tell you that they're "middle class." Their lament, the lament of the HENRY (short for "high-earner, not rich yet"), goes something like this. You try living on $350,000 a year when you have to pay taxes, the mortgage on the house in a tony zip code, the nanny who knows how to cook ethnic cuisine, the private school tuition from pre-K on, the appropriately exclusive vacation, and max out your retirement and college savings accounts. There just isn't that much cash left over each month once you've spent it all!