Awkward... Ryan says we should take away Romney's tax shelters

Look at Romney's face while Ryan is saying this.

RYAN: What we're saying is, take away the tax shelters that are uniquely enjoyed by people in the top tax brackets so they can't shelter as much money from taxation, should lower tax rates for everybody to make America more competitive.

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Video: Who are the climate criminals?

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
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The people at Ring of Fire Radio have made a nice YouTube video of my recent conversation with host Mike Papantonio about the climate criminals — who they are, why they act like they do.

There's an excellent set of graphics in this interview. Do click if you're inclined.



For those who've followed this climate discussion, thanks to you all. We're winding to a smashing finish.

Just two things to keep in mind:

 1. It's over for staying below 1½°C (3°F) by 2100. We should be planning (and funding) for that outcome right now. It will be bad, and it's going to cost big. A responsible government has a response team working it right now.

 2. Nothing past that point is baked in yet.

As I've said many times, there's only one way to win. In football terms:

Block to the whistle. Tackle to the ground. Play to the end of the game.

We ask this of others, like our friendly Dem allies. (Did I say allies? I meant protectors.)

It's only fair to ask it of ourselves as well.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius Read the rest of this post...

Mars in 360 panorama, and HD - go check this out now

Just run. Read the rest of this post...

This just in... Shootings at Texas A&M;

Because it wouldn't be America without some mindless gun violence at a place frequented by young people.

Three people were killed Monday after a gunman exchanged fire with police near Texas A&M University's College Station campus. The dead included: the shooter, a police constable and a civilian.

Local police said that a handful of others had been taken to the hospital for treatment, including at least one other law enforcement official.

Time for another Romney fundraiser with NRA chief Wayne LaPierre. Read the rest of this post...

Is Paul Ryan palling around with (former) terrorists?

He will be in just one month when he attends the hate-group founded Value Voters Summit.  See, here's Ryan right next to the (former) terrorist Kamal Saleem (the asterisk means their attendance is confirmed):

Mitt Romney is in the same row as the (former) terrorist, but Paul Ryan is smack dab right next to him.

Now, you might ask yourself why a "former" terrorist isn't spending some time in Gitmo instead of heading to a religious right hate summit.  (Because he might be a fraud - but hey Paul Ryan agreed to speak at the conference of a known hate group, so he gets to explain, not us). But that's not really important. What's important is that Paul Ryan is on a Web site next to a guy who allegedly came to the US to kill us all.

So, first we find out that Paul Ryan's biggest inspiration in life isn't God, but instead a woman who devoted her life to killing God.  Now he's apparently palling around with (former) terrorists.  This guy might turn out to be more fun than Sarah Palin!


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Paul Ryan as sassy man-child

Title is my own, but I think it accurately reflects Matt Taibbi's great observation about Paul Ryan, GOP clone writ large.

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.

Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

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Ryan confirms he turned over "several" years of tax returns to Romney

Paul Ryan confirms on 60 Minutes that Mitt Romney made him turn over more years of tax returns, to vet him as a possible VP, than Romney will turn over to the American people, so we can vet him as a possible president. Romney turned over 1.5 years worth of returns. Ryan was asked to turn over "several" years, which usually means 3 or more.

It's brazen and arrogant, and tone deaf, of Romney.  What's particularly galling is that Romney is more worried about Ryan's gaffe-factor than he is about his own qualifications for the presidency.  The gaffe-factor must be avoided at all costs, thus the several years of returns - but Romney's qualifications, not so important, just a year's complete returns is fine.

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New satellite data: Arctic ocean losing 50% more summer ice than predicted

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
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We've written here about the shrinking Arctic ice. Now satellite data confirms that the ice is thinning as well, hastening the day when the Arctic summer will be ice-free.

First the news, then a note about the phrase "in the pipeline":

■ From Raw Story and the Observer (h/t MiroCollas via Twitter; my paragraphing and emphasis throughout):

Using instruments on earlier satellites, scientists could see that the area covered by summer sea ice in the Arctic has been dwindling rapidly. But the new measurements [made by the new CryoSat-2 satellite] indicate that this ice has been thinning dramatically at the same time.

For example, in regions north of Canada and Greenland, where ice thickness regularly stayed at around five to six meters in summer a decade ago, levels have dropped to one to three meters.

“Preliminary analysis of our data indicates that the rate of loss of sea ice volume in summer in the Arctic may be far larger than we had previously suspected,” said Dr Seymour Laxon, of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), where CryoSat-2 data is being analyzed.

“Very soon we may experience the iconic moment when, one day in the summer, we look at satellite images and see no sea ice coverage in the Arctic, just open water.”

Being able to measure the area covered by Arctic ice gives us one metric. But being able to measure the thickness (as this new satellite does) gives us quite another.

Note those numbers above — from 5–6 meters just a decade ago, to 1–3 meters now. That's a loss in volume from thinning of more than 50%, even if the area covered stayed the same — which it hasn't.

From an article I covered recently:

“Since the 1970s, there’s been a 40% decrease in the summer sea ice extent,” said Jonny Day, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, who led the latest study.

A 40% decrease in area (over 40 years) times a greater-than-50% decrease in thickness (in a decade) is a shockingly small number, even if the thickness changes aren't uniform. The Raw Story article states:

[R]eductions in the volume of summer sea ice [have been] around 70% over the past 30 years.

Read it through carefully — there are some ifs and maybes in it regarding rate of change, including a semi-offsetting trend in winter ice.

But still, the summer data is real, the summer losses are real. I think we'll certainly see ice-free Arctic summers in this decade.

We've been off on every estimate of global warming consequences I've seen; each has been too conservative compared to later measurements. I expect this be the same, to surprise us with its speed.

■ Another section of the same article illustrates a point I've made repeatedly about our current situation, namely:

• Even if we stop right now, we still get 1.5°C (3°F) global warming by 2100. Half has occurred; half is in the pipeline, unavoidable.

This is what "half is in the pipeline" means, just so you know:

The consequences of losing the Arctic’s ice coverage, even for only part of the year, could be profound.

Without the cap’s white brilliance to reflect sunlight back into space, the region will heat up even more than at present. As a result, ocean temperatures will rise and methane deposits on the ocean floor could melt, evaporate and bubble into the atmosphere.

Scientists have recently reported evidence that methane plumes are now appearing in many areas. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas and rising levels of it in the atmosphere are only likely to accelerate global warming.

And with the disappearance of sea ice around the shores of Greenland, its glaciers could melt faster and raise sea levels even more rapidly than at present.

Professor Chris Rapley of UCL said: “With the temperature gradient between the Arctic and equator dropping, as is happening now, it is also possible that the jet stream in the upper atmosphere could become more unstable. That could mean increasing volatility in weather in lower latitudes, similar to that experienced this year.”

Permanent loss of summer Arctic ice is just one of the changes that's unavoidably "in the pipeline." But it illustrates the concept; we will get to 1.5°C (3°F) no matter what we do.

I've heard, by the way, that methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2. If so, this is one reason beef consumption is being discouraged by climatologists. The number of cows raised to feed a planetful of beef-eaters can produce a whole lot of methane.

World population is 7 billion humans. How many cows do you think are alive right now, producing atmospheric methane?

Combine the story above — that getting to 1½°C warmer is inevitable — with this story (do click; Obama gets a name mention), and I hope you can see where I'm headed with my own recommendation.

There really is only one choice; the others are almost not worth pursuing, since they all lead to the "do nothing" outcome.

Said differently, as I look at this problem, the answer is increasingly obvious. The only trick is getting there.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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He didn't build it: How socialism helped Paul Ryan go to college

It's not really "socialism," but then again, considering the wide definition that Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney use for "socialism" - anything a Democrat embraces - the word is apt.

More specifically, what Ryan and Romney actually mean by "socialism" is any government program that helps someone. This is why Ryan is so determined to dismantle Social Security (which he wants to privatize) and Medicare (which he wants to replace with a voucher system, meaning, you get to fend for yourself against private insurance companies that will charge you a few thousand dollars a month for really bad insurance).

What's interesting, therefore, is the news that Social Security helped Paul Ryan go to college and make him the man he is today (which is perhaps a justification for getting rid of it). Via Raw Story:

From the age of 16, when his 55-year-old father died of a heart attack, until he was 18, Ryan received Social Security payments, which, according to a lengthy profile in WI Magazine, he put away for college. The eventual budget czar attended Miami University in Ohio to earn a B.A. in economics and political science, and landed a congressional internship as a junior.

So Paul Ryan benefitted from the largesse of big liberal government. Government that he now wants to take away from the rest of us. Read the rest of this post...