The Conservative Tax Borg Has Finally Absorbed Donald Trump
By Kevin Drum
The New York Times reports that Republican leaders are alarmed at one particular aspect of Donald Trump's popularity:
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on American companies that put their factories in other countries. He has threatened to increase taxes on the compensation of hedge fund managers. And he has vowed to change laws that allow American companies to benefit from cheaper tax rates by using mergers to base their operations outside the United States.
Alarmed that those ideas might catch on with some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals — as his immigration policies have — the Club for Growth, an anti-tax think tank, is pulling together a team of economists to scrutinize his proposals and calculate the economic impact if he is elected.
First things first: Trump and the Club for Growth have been feuding ever since Trump entered the race. The Club says it's because Trump had previously supported universal health care and a one-time tax on individuals worth more than $10 million. Trump says it's because the Club tried to shake him down for a $1 million donation and he refused to give it to them. The truth is—oh, who cares what the truth is? It's just another Trump feud.
Anyway, Trump repudiated his wealth tax idea a long time ago, but he has supported (a) a progressive income tax, (b) closing loopholes for hedge fund managers, (c) tariffs on companies that move factories to Mexico, and (d) corporate inversions. But wait! In his interview with Sarah Palin, Trump inched closer to Republican orthodoxy on taxes:
We have to simplify our tax code. You have hedge fund guys that are paying virtually no tax and they're making a fortune....Now you can go to a fair tax or a flat tax, but the easiest way and the quickest way, at least on a temporary basis, is simplification of the code: get rid of deductions, reduce taxes.
OK. So Trump definitely wants to eliminate the carried interest loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay very little in federal income tax. But he's no longer opposed to a flat tax. It's just that on a "temporary" basis he wants to broaden the base and reduce rates. This is as orthodox as it gets.
As for the tariffs on companies that move to Mexico, that's just bluster not to be taken seriously. And reining in corporate inversions is a pretty bipartisan goal. It would presumably be part of a corporate tax overhaul that would end up being revenue neutral.
On taxes, then, Trump has all but caved in. The only serious part of his schtick that's no longer garden variety Republican dogma is his desire to close the carried interest loophole. And even this is small potatoes: it would raise one or two billion dollars per year, which could easily be offset by a tiny tax cut somewhere else. There's really nothing left for even Grover Norquist to dislike.
So no worries! Trump is becoming fully absorbed by the Republican borg on taxes. Aside from the Mexico stuff, which is just campaign trail bombast, there's nothing left that would raise net taxes or offend conservative sensibilities in any way. Whew.
August 31, 2015
Next launch
An international crew of three is getting ready for a two-day ride to the International Space Station. The Soyuz rocket that will lift them to space rolled out to its launch pad today at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.Veteran cosmonaut Sergei Volkov will command the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft that will launch Sept. 2 at 12:37 a.m. EDT. Joining him for the trip to the station will be first time flyers Andreas Mogensen from the European Space Agency and Aidyn Aimbetov from Kazcosmos, the National Space Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan. NASA Television will broadcast the launch and docking activities live.
Onboard the orbital laboratory the One-Year crew members Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko took part in a variety of human research experiments. They studied how microgravity affects vision and explored how spacecraft design influences crew performance.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui unpacked the Multipurpose Small Payload Rack-2 (MSPR-2) from the new HTV-5 resupply ship today. The MSPR-2, which houses small science payloads, was installed in the Japanese Kibo laboratory module.
Busboy
The busboy who cradled a dying RFK has finally stepped out of the past
Steve Lopez
In June, Juan Romero did something he hadn't done in decades. He celebrated his birthday, going out to dinner with his family in San Jose.
"I always dreaded when June was coming up," said Romero, 65, who has struggled for most of his adult life to let go of his crippling memory of an American tragedy.
It happened just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Robert F. Kennedy had won the California presidential primary and made his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Romero was a 17-year-old busboy.
A Roosevelt High School student who had moved north from Mexico at the age of 10, Romero recalled the photos of President John F. Kennedy that hung alongside those of Pope John XXIII in the homes of Mexican families.
He worked at the hotel after school and had delivered room service to Kennedy earlier in the week. He knew he'd never forget the way Kennedy treated him and the pride he felt, and now he wanted to congratulate him as the candidate made his way through a kitchen service area. Romero reached out, took Kennedy's hand, and watched him slump to the floor as gun blasts echoed.
The black-and-white photos of that moment, by Boris Yaro of the Los Angeles Times and Bill Eppridge of Life magazine, are as haunting now as they were 47 years ago.
RFK, who for many people represented hope for social justice, racial tolerance and an end to the war in Vietnam, lies on his back, limbs splayed. Romero squats at his side in white service jacket, a young witness to horror, his hand cradling Kennedy's head.
"I wanted to protect his head from the cold concrete," says Romero, who went to school the next day with Kennedy's blood crusted under his fingernails, refusing to wash it away.
In the photos, disbelief and despair gathered in Juan Romero's dark eyes, and he would carry the weight of that moment through the decades. I knew this when I first met him on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, and his pain was just as raw 12 years later in 2010, when I went with him to RFK's gravesite in Arlington, Va., where Romero knelt, paid his respects and wept once more.
He spoke to me each time about his regrets, his sense of duty to the Kennedy legacy, and a lingering feeling of guilt. I told him there was no rational reason to feel guilty.
But the shooting had wounded his psyche. On far too many nights he lay awake wondering if Kennedy would still be alive if he hadn't paused to shake a busboy's hand.
It was a different Juan Romero, however, who reached out to me earlier this month to say he was much improved "spiritually and emotionally," and it was all because of an unlikely friendship with a woman from Germany who saw my column about the Arlington visit, tracked Romero down and helped him finally step out of the past.
Claudia Zwiener, 45, was a teenager when she first read about the Bobby Kennedy assassination. She became insatiably interested in his life.
As an adult, she read books about Kennedy, traveled to the U.S. with her husband, visited the gravesite, and met people who had known him, including former L.A. Times national editor and Bobby Kennedy press secretary Ed Guthman.
Two years ago, Zwiener came upon my column about Romero's visit to Arlington. She wrote to me saying she was touched by his humanity, and didn't believe he needed to ask Kennedy's forgiveness, as he had that day in Arlington. Not long after that, Zwiener sent Romero a message.
Many have reached out to Romero over the years, and he appreciated their concern but wondered as to their motives. He didn't want pats on the back he didn't feel he deserved, or comments that stoked his own second-guessing of his actions that night. He hoped Zwiener wasn't yet another "somebody who wants to feel sorry for me."
But Zwiener came across differently.
"She really wanted to see how I was doing, and to find out if she could do anything to make it easier on my conscience," Romero said.
He answered back. She responded. They became pen pals, then began talking by phone.
Zwiener is not a trained therapist, but she works with special-needs children in Germany, and Romero felt that he could talk to her in ways he had never been able to with other friends or his own family. In time, they began talking about his struggle.
"I don't think she intended to fix me initially," says Romero, "but as we came to know each other, she knew something was broken in me."
One day, while visiting his mother in Tulare, his guilt surfaced again while he spoke to Zwiener by phone. He said she comforted him by saying that in some of the photos, taken just moments after the shooting, the shoes of bystanders can be seen at a safe distance from Kennedy. But there's Juan, who didn't take cover, trying to help a man in need.
Romero traveled to Germany to meet Zwiener, her husband and their children, and the Zwieners came to California. Last August, Romero returned to the site of the assassination with Zwiener.
The hotel is long gone, and in its place is a school and RFK memorial bearing Kennedy's words, which read in part: "Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, it sends out a tiny ripple of hope ..."
Zwiener worried about Romero's ability to handle the visit. As they approached, she trembled, but was relieved to see that even though Romero wept quietly, he was OK.
On another day Zwiener carried a book that had those iconic photos of Romero at the Ambassador — the photos he had glanced at once or twice in nearly half a century, but never studied. She turned to the photos and described what she saw.
"Juan slowly, slowly dared to take a look," she said.
When I asked Romero what he saw, he said:
"I saw a person in need and another person trying to help him."
Romero moved to Wyoming shortly after the assassination. He needed for his own sanity to leave the Ambassador, where guests insisted on being photographed with him.
He returned to Los Angeles before long but later settled in San Jose, where he continues to work as a concrete and asphalt paver. It's good exercise, he told me when I visited last week, and it keeps him young.
On each anniversary of RFK's death, Romero takes flowers to a memorial in downtown San Jose, where Kennedy delivered a speech during his winning primary run. Romero misses Kennedy, or at least what Kennedy seems to have represented as a statesman and presidential candidate. He misses him all the more in the midst of a current campaign in which the hottest topic is a proposal to build a higher wall between Mexico and the United States.
"He made me feel like a regular citizen," Romero says of the night he delivered room service to Kennedy. "He made me feel like a human being. He didn't look at my color, he didn't look at my position ... and like I tell everybody, he shook my hand. I didn't ask him."
Romero has always believed the best way to honor Kennedy is to live a life of tolerance, to work hard, to take care of family, and to not be a burden.
"I don't know if you can understand this, but [what happened in 1968] has made me more humble," Romero said. "It made me realize that no matter how much hope you have, it can be taken away in a second."
Romero was carrying rosary beads in his pocket the night of the assassination. He stuffed them into Kennedy's hands as the former U.S. senator and attorney general lay mortally wounded, two months after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and less than five years after President Kennedy was gunned down.
Romero says no one else may have heard it in the commotion, but he insists that Kennedy spoke after being shot, as one eye blinked and his leg twitched.
"First he asked, 'Is everybody OK?' and I told him, 'Yes, everybody's OK.' And then he turned away from me and said, 'Everything's going to be OK.'"
It has taken Romero 47 years to believe that. He and Zwiener haven't discussed June 5, 1968, for three or four months, he said. They talk about other things — the things friends talk about.
Romero will travel to Germany later this year to vacation with her family, and he has bought himself a new wardrobe because he feels as if he's begun a new phase.
He still thinks about Kennedy, he said, but he no longer drowns in sorrow or regret.
"I don't carry the cross anymore," he said.
Steve Lopez
In June, Juan Romero did something he hadn't done in decades. He celebrated his birthday, going out to dinner with his family in San Jose.
"I always dreaded when June was coming up," said Romero, 65, who has struggled for most of his adult life to let go of his crippling memory of an American tragedy.
It happened just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Robert F. Kennedy had won the California presidential primary and made his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Romero was a 17-year-old busboy.
A Roosevelt High School student who had moved north from Mexico at the age of 10, Romero recalled the photos of President John F. Kennedy that hung alongside those of Pope John XXIII in the homes of Mexican families.
He worked at the hotel after school and had delivered room service to Kennedy earlier in the week. He knew he'd never forget the way Kennedy treated him and the pride he felt, and now he wanted to congratulate him as the candidate made his way through a kitchen service area. Romero reached out, took Kennedy's hand, and watched him slump to the floor as gun blasts echoed.
The black-and-white photos of that moment, by Boris Yaro of the Los Angeles Times and Bill Eppridge of Life magazine, are as haunting now as they were 47 years ago.
RFK, who for many people represented hope for social justice, racial tolerance and an end to the war in Vietnam, lies on his back, limbs splayed. Romero squats at his side in white service jacket, a young witness to horror, his hand cradling Kennedy's head.
"I wanted to protect his head from the cold concrete," says Romero, who went to school the next day with Kennedy's blood crusted under his fingernails, refusing to wash it away.
In the photos, disbelief and despair gathered in Juan Romero's dark eyes, and he would carry the weight of that moment through the decades. I knew this when I first met him on the 30th anniversary of the assassination, and his pain was just as raw 12 years later in 2010, when I went with him to RFK's gravesite in Arlington, Va., where Romero knelt, paid his respects and wept once more.
He spoke to me each time about his regrets, his sense of duty to the Kennedy legacy, and a lingering feeling of guilt. I told him there was no rational reason to feel guilty.
But the shooting had wounded his psyche. On far too many nights he lay awake wondering if Kennedy would still be alive if he hadn't paused to shake a busboy's hand.
It was a different Juan Romero, however, who reached out to me earlier this month to say he was much improved "spiritually and emotionally," and it was all because of an unlikely friendship with a woman from Germany who saw my column about the Arlington visit, tracked Romero down and helped him finally step out of the past.
Claudia Zwiener, 45, was a teenager when she first read about the Bobby Kennedy assassination. She became insatiably interested in his life.
As an adult, she read books about Kennedy, traveled to the U.S. with her husband, visited the gravesite, and met people who had known him, including former L.A. Times national editor and Bobby Kennedy press secretary Ed Guthman.
Two years ago, Zwiener came upon my column about Romero's visit to Arlington. She wrote to me saying she was touched by his humanity, and didn't believe he needed to ask Kennedy's forgiveness, as he had that day in Arlington. Not long after that, Zwiener sent Romero a message.
Many have reached out to Romero over the years, and he appreciated their concern but wondered as to their motives. He didn't want pats on the back he didn't feel he deserved, or comments that stoked his own second-guessing of his actions that night. He hoped Zwiener wasn't yet another "somebody who wants to feel sorry for me."
But Zwiener came across differently.
"She really wanted to see how I was doing, and to find out if she could do anything to make it easier on my conscience," Romero said.
He answered back. She responded. They became pen pals, then began talking by phone.
Zwiener is not a trained therapist, but she works with special-needs children in Germany, and Romero felt that he could talk to her in ways he had never been able to with other friends or his own family. In time, they began talking about his struggle.
"I don't think she intended to fix me initially," says Romero, "but as we came to know each other, she knew something was broken in me."
One day, while visiting his mother in Tulare, his guilt surfaced again while he spoke to Zwiener by phone. He said she comforted him by saying that in some of the photos, taken just moments after the shooting, the shoes of bystanders can be seen at a safe distance from Kennedy. But there's Juan, who didn't take cover, trying to help a man in need.
Romero traveled to Germany to meet Zwiener, her husband and their children, and the Zwieners came to California. Last August, Romero returned to the site of the assassination with Zwiener.
The hotel is long gone, and in its place is a school and RFK memorial bearing Kennedy's words, which read in part: "Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, it sends out a tiny ripple of hope ..."
Zwiener worried about Romero's ability to handle the visit. As they approached, she trembled, but was relieved to see that even though Romero wept quietly, he was OK.
On another day Zwiener carried a book that had those iconic photos of Romero at the Ambassador — the photos he had glanced at once or twice in nearly half a century, but never studied. She turned to the photos and described what she saw.
"Juan slowly, slowly dared to take a look," she said.
When I asked Romero what he saw, he said:
"I saw a person in need and another person trying to help him."
Romero moved to Wyoming shortly after the assassination. He needed for his own sanity to leave the Ambassador, where guests insisted on being photographed with him.
He returned to Los Angeles before long but later settled in San Jose, where he continues to work as a concrete and asphalt paver. It's good exercise, he told me when I visited last week, and it keeps him young.
On each anniversary of RFK's death, Romero takes flowers to a memorial in downtown San Jose, where Kennedy delivered a speech during his winning primary run. Romero misses Kennedy, or at least what Kennedy seems to have represented as a statesman and presidential candidate. He misses him all the more in the midst of a current campaign in which the hottest topic is a proposal to build a higher wall between Mexico and the United States.
"He made me feel like a regular citizen," Romero says of the night he delivered room service to Kennedy. "He made me feel like a human being. He didn't look at my color, he didn't look at my position ... and like I tell everybody, he shook my hand. I didn't ask him."
Romero has always believed the best way to honor Kennedy is to live a life of tolerance, to work hard, to take care of family, and to not be a burden.
"I don't know if you can understand this, but [what happened in 1968] has made me more humble," Romero said. "It made me realize that no matter how much hope you have, it can be taken away in a second."
Romero was carrying rosary beads in his pocket the night of the assassination. He stuffed them into Kennedy's hands as the former U.S. senator and attorney general lay mortally wounded, two months after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and less than five years after President Kennedy was gunned down.
Romero says no one else may have heard it in the commotion, but he insists that Kennedy spoke after being shot, as one eye blinked and his leg twitched.
"First he asked, 'Is everybody OK?' and I told him, 'Yes, everybody's OK.' And then he turned away from me and said, 'Everything's going to be OK.'"
It has taken Romero 47 years to believe that. He and Zwiener haven't discussed June 5, 1968, for three or four months, he said. They talk about other things — the things friends talk about.
Romero will travel to Germany later this year to vacation with her family, and he has bought himself a new wardrobe because he feels as if he's begun a new phase.
He still thinks about Kennedy, he said, but he no longer drowns in sorrow or regret.
"I don't carry the cross anymore," he said.
Christie Packages
Eager To Trump Trump, Christie Says We Should Treat Immigrants Like FedEx Packages
by Judd Legum
Chris Christie, speaking at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Saturday, compared legal immigrants to FedEx packages, arguing they should be tracked continuously by the government. Christie even promised to bring in FedEx founder Fred Smith to set up the system.
“At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It’s on the truck. It’s at the station. It’s on the airplane. Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them,” Christie said.
FedEx tracks its packages so efficiently by affixing a bar code to every package and scanning them at regular intervals.
Martin O’Malley’s campaign criticized the remarks as “dehumanizing.”
Donald Trump has taken a commanding lead in the Republican presidential primary with an extremely hard line on immigration. The other candidates have scrambled to follow his lead — embracing the slur “anchor babies,” rejecting birthright citizenship and supporting Trump’s proposal for a wall across the entire southern border.
Christie previously supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When he started running for President, he reversed his position. His remarks today appear to be an effort to further toughen up his rhetoric on the issue.
by Judd Legum
Chris Christie, speaking at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Saturday, compared legal immigrants to FedEx packages, arguing they should be tracked continuously by the government. Christie even promised to bring in FedEx founder Fred Smith to set up the system.
“At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It’s on the truck. It’s at the station. It’s on the airplane. Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them,” Christie said.
FedEx tracks its packages so efficiently by affixing a bar code to every package and scanning them at regular intervals.
Martin O’Malley’s campaign criticized the remarks as “dehumanizing.”
Donald Trump has taken a commanding lead in the Republican presidential primary with an extremely hard line on immigration. The other candidates have scrambled to follow his lead — embracing the slur “anchor babies,” rejecting birthright citizenship and supporting Trump’s proposal for a wall across the entire southern border.
Christie previously supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When he started running for President, he reversed his position. His remarks today appear to be an effort to further toughen up his rhetoric on the issue.
Walker's fence
Fence On The Canadian Border Is A ‘Legitimate Issue’ Says Scott Walker
by Katie Valentine
Republican Presidential candidate Scott Walker said Sunday that he thought building a wall along the U.S.-Canada border was a “legitimate” issue for the United States to consider.
Walker was asked about border control by Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd, who asked the Wisconsin Governor why he — and other presidential candidates — focuses so heavily on the U.S.’s southern border.
“Why are we always talking about the southern border, and building a fence there — we don’t talk about the northern border,” Todd said. “Do we want to build a wall north of the border?”
Walker said that law enforcement in New Hampshire have raised “legitimate concerns” about that issue to him.
“That is a legitimate issue for us to look at,” he said. Overall, Walker said, national security “starts with securing the homeland.”
“It wasn’t just about building a wall and securing our borders,” he said. “It was also about making sure our intelligence community has the ability for counterterrorism and the ability to go after the infrastructure they need to protect us.”
Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers have focused heavily on securing the country’s southern border, but it’s true that few have talked about the border with Canada. But, as Westminster College political science professor Tobias T. Gibson noted in the Hill in 2014, “no successful terrorist attack on the United States has occurred from someone crossing the border from Canada.” There have been attempted plots, he said, but they occurred before September 11, which means before tougher security measures were implemented along the U.S.-Canada border.
Walker also reiterated his concerns with the southern border Sunday.
“I think we need to secure borders in general,” he said. We spend all this money on TSA. But I think right now one of the most rampant spots is on our southern-based border…if part of what we’re trying to do is protect ourself — set aside immigration from it — but protect ourselves from risk out there, I think we need to make sure we have a secure border.”
Walker, who’s trailing behind Trump and other Republicans in the polls, has developed an anti-immigration position during his run for president. He said Sunday that he wants to “secure the border, enforce the laws,” and grant “no amnesty.” He said in April that “if someone wants to be a citizen, they have to go back to their country of origin and get in line behind everybody else who’s waiting.” He’s also made comments about limiting legal immigration to protect “American workers and American wages.
But Walker isn’t the only Republican presidential candidate to talk about securing the border or limiting immigration. Donald Trump has said he’d deport the country’s undocumented immigrants and build a wall along the United States’ southern border.
“It’s gonna be a great wall,” Trump said earlier this month. “This will be a wall with a big, very beautiful door because we want the legals to come back into the country.”
And multiple Republican candidates have called for an end to birthright citizenship, which would mean that children born in the U.S. to parents from other countries wouldn’t automatically become citizens.
by Katie Valentine
Republican Presidential candidate Scott Walker said Sunday that he thought building a wall along the U.S.-Canada border was a “legitimate” issue for the United States to consider.
Walker was asked about border control by Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd, who asked the Wisconsin Governor why he — and other presidential candidates — focuses so heavily on the U.S.’s southern border.
“Why are we always talking about the southern border, and building a fence there — we don’t talk about the northern border,” Todd said. “Do we want to build a wall north of the border?”
Walker said that law enforcement in New Hampshire have raised “legitimate concerns” about that issue to him.
“That is a legitimate issue for us to look at,” he said. Overall, Walker said, national security “starts with securing the homeland.”
“It wasn’t just about building a wall and securing our borders,” he said. “It was also about making sure our intelligence community has the ability for counterterrorism and the ability to go after the infrastructure they need to protect us.”
Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers have focused heavily on securing the country’s southern border, but it’s true that few have talked about the border with Canada. But, as Westminster College political science professor Tobias T. Gibson noted in the Hill in 2014, “no successful terrorist attack on the United States has occurred from someone crossing the border from Canada.” There have been attempted plots, he said, but they occurred before September 11, which means before tougher security measures were implemented along the U.S.-Canada border.
Walker also reiterated his concerns with the southern border Sunday.
“I think we need to secure borders in general,” he said. We spend all this money on TSA. But I think right now one of the most rampant spots is on our southern-based border…if part of what we’re trying to do is protect ourself — set aside immigration from it — but protect ourselves from risk out there, I think we need to make sure we have a secure border.”
Walker, who’s trailing behind Trump and other Republicans in the polls, has developed an anti-immigration position during his run for president. He said Sunday that he wants to “secure the border, enforce the laws,” and grant “no amnesty.” He said in April that “if someone wants to be a citizen, they have to go back to their country of origin and get in line behind everybody else who’s waiting.” He’s also made comments about limiting legal immigration to protect “American workers and American wages.
But Walker isn’t the only Republican presidential candidate to talk about securing the border or limiting immigration. Donald Trump has said he’d deport the country’s undocumented immigrants and build a wall along the United States’ southern border.
“It’s gonna be a great wall,” Trump said earlier this month. “This will be a wall with a big, very beautiful door because we want the legals to come back into the country.”
And multiple Republican candidates have called for an end to birthright citizenship, which would mean that children born in the U.S. to parents from other countries wouldn’t automatically become citizens.
Global Migration
Call It What It Is: A Global Migration Shift From Climate, Not a Migrant or Refugee Crisis
by Jeff Biggers
Hundreds more died off the coast of Libya today, on the heels of 71 deaths of migrants trapped in the back of a truck near Vienna, Austria. At the same time, NASA officials just warned that rising global sea levels from climate change could affect coastal regions, including 150 million residents in Asia who lived "within a meter from the sea."
While news organizations and policymakers around the world wrestle with calling displaced persons "refugees" or "migrants"or "asylum-seekers," a far more dangerous precedence of denial over a looming global shift of populations largely from climate change is taking place.
There is not a migrant or refugee crisis. We're in the midst of a global migration shift. While its unrelenting realities of forced displacement, whether from war, persecution or economic despair originate from disparate causes, they all share a singular fact: The nascent stages of this historical migration shift require long-term planning, not short-term designation.
Standing on the shores of Sicily two summers ago, the jagged remains of a shattered boat at our feet, I listened to an Italian villager describe the voyage of "migranti" across the Mediterranean. The survivors of the boat crash, which had been launched from Libya, included Somalis, Nigerians, Eritreans, and Syrians, among others.
Framing the issue as part of a cycle of migration, on an island whose ruins and current ways betray millennia of migration realities, the Sicilian fisherman understood better than anyone of what the United Nations refugee agency recently termed a "paradigm change" in unprecedented levels of forced displacement.
Nearly 60 million people fled their homes in 2014, according to a recent UN report. Within a generation, according to estimates by numerous climate scientists and the international organizations dealing with migration, 150-200 million people could be displaced by the fallout of severe drought, flooding and extreme climate.
As the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted in a recent study, "the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought," which has triggered some of the largest displacements of refugees across the Mediterranean, are a significant part of the roots of the Syrian civil war itself.
"This is just the beginning," the Sicilian told me, who has watched the shifting populations over the years. In fact, nearly 200,000 travelers have been rescued attempting to cross "mare nostrum" in 2015.
The real crisis is denial: Of inaction by Europeans on the seas to meet the immediate urgency of rescue; and on land, to recognize a historical cycle of transition and migration that requires integration, regeneration of communities and climate action.
The old saying--a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster--has never been truer than in the Mediterranean and other migration corridors in Asia and the Americas. An estimated 2,000 nameless human beings have lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean in the last nine months.
As a writer, I agree with Al Jazeera editor Barry Malone that words matter, especially in how we define human realities. However, the term "refugee" is no less dehumanizing than "migrant," when we are dealing with deadly border crossings and subsequent marginalization. In both instances, we deracinate people from their homelands, their countries of origin, their ethnicity, and their very names--and a future.
A recent "10-Point Plan to Solve Europe's Refugee Crisis" proposed by German officials fails into the same well-meaning but illusory trap: It calls on European nations to "help genuine refugees," as if migration from environmentally ravaged and climate destabilized economies, including parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, is somehow less "genuine."
This is not only wrong; it is delusive. We need to recognize we now live in an age of mass climate migration. Banter over building walls or policing seas or drawing classifications matters little.
While the United Nations Population Division designates "migrant" as someone has resided for a year or longer in a country other than their own, perhaps it's time we come up with a new term for climate refugees--or migrants. Or, rather, perhaps it's time, as Italian parliament member Luigi Manconi recently wrote, to transform our view of migration from a "crisis" management situation to a long-term opportunity for economic and cultural gain. Or, in the case of Goslar, Germany, recognize the possibilities of migration in regenerating a depressed local economy.
Earlier this summer in Bologna, Italy, I met Frederick, an eastern Nigerian immigrant and university student, who I had interviewed last year. His journey across the north African deserts, and through the labyrinths of war-torn Libya, had been harrowing. He fled his country for myriad reasons. In the year since our first meeting, he had learned basic Italian, gained proper residency documents, and found a seasonal job in construction.
"I won't be returning to Nigeria any time soon," he told me, and discussed educational and entrepreneurial ideas.
Indeed, Frederick isn't a crisis for Italy or Europe. The unfolding hardship of climate change along his path, alas, remains one.
by Jeff Biggers
Hundreds more died off the coast of Libya today, on the heels of 71 deaths of migrants trapped in the back of a truck near Vienna, Austria. At the same time, NASA officials just warned that rising global sea levels from climate change could affect coastal regions, including 150 million residents in Asia who lived "within a meter from the sea."
While news organizations and policymakers around the world wrestle with calling displaced persons "refugees" or "migrants"or "asylum-seekers," a far more dangerous precedence of denial over a looming global shift of populations largely from climate change is taking place.
There is not a migrant or refugee crisis. We're in the midst of a global migration shift. While its unrelenting realities of forced displacement, whether from war, persecution or economic despair originate from disparate causes, they all share a singular fact: The nascent stages of this historical migration shift require long-term planning, not short-term designation.
Standing on the shores of Sicily two summers ago, the jagged remains of a shattered boat at our feet, I listened to an Italian villager describe the voyage of "migranti" across the Mediterranean. The survivors of the boat crash, which had been launched from Libya, included Somalis, Nigerians, Eritreans, and Syrians, among others.
Framing the issue as part of a cycle of migration, on an island whose ruins and current ways betray millennia of migration realities, the Sicilian fisherman understood better than anyone of what the United Nations refugee agency recently termed a "paradigm change" in unprecedented levels of forced displacement.
Nearly 60 million people fled their homes in 2014, according to a recent UN report. Within a generation, according to estimates by numerous climate scientists and the international organizations dealing with migration, 150-200 million people could be displaced by the fallout of severe drought, flooding and extreme climate.
As the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted in a recent study, "the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought," which has triggered some of the largest displacements of refugees across the Mediterranean, are a significant part of the roots of the Syrian civil war itself.
"This is just the beginning," the Sicilian told me, who has watched the shifting populations over the years. In fact, nearly 200,000 travelers have been rescued attempting to cross "mare nostrum" in 2015.
The real crisis is denial: Of inaction by Europeans on the seas to meet the immediate urgency of rescue; and on land, to recognize a historical cycle of transition and migration that requires integration, regeneration of communities and climate action.
The old saying--a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster--has never been truer than in the Mediterranean and other migration corridors in Asia and the Americas. An estimated 2,000 nameless human beings have lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean in the last nine months.
As a writer, I agree with Al Jazeera editor Barry Malone that words matter, especially in how we define human realities. However, the term "refugee" is no less dehumanizing than "migrant," when we are dealing with deadly border crossings and subsequent marginalization. In both instances, we deracinate people from their homelands, their countries of origin, their ethnicity, and their very names--and a future.
A recent "10-Point Plan to Solve Europe's Refugee Crisis" proposed by German officials fails into the same well-meaning but illusory trap: It calls on European nations to "help genuine refugees," as if migration from environmentally ravaged and climate destabilized economies, including parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, is somehow less "genuine."
This is not only wrong; it is delusive. We need to recognize we now live in an age of mass climate migration. Banter over building walls or policing seas or drawing classifications matters little.
While the United Nations Population Division designates "migrant" as someone has resided for a year or longer in a country other than their own, perhaps it's time we come up with a new term for climate refugees--or migrants. Or, rather, perhaps it's time, as Italian parliament member Luigi Manconi recently wrote, to transform our view of migration from a "crisis" management situation to a long-term opportunity for economic and cultural gain. Or, in the case of Goslar, Germany, recognize the possibilities of migration in regenerating a depressed local economy.
Earlier this summer in Bologna, Italy, I met Frederick, an eastern Nigerian immigrant and university student, who I had interviewed last year. His journey across the north African deserts, and through the labyrinths of war-torn Libya, had been harrowing. He fled his country for myriad reasons. In the year since our first meeting, he had learned basic Italian, gained proper residency documents, and found a seasonal job in construction.
"I won't be returning to Nigeria any time soon," he told me, and discussed educational and entrepreneurial ideas.
Indeed, Frederick isn't a crisis for Italy or Europe. The unfolding hardship of climate change along his path, alas, remains one.
Arctic drilling decision
Obama defends Arctic drilling decision on eve of Alaska climate change trip
By Suzanne Goldenberg
Barack Obama has been forced to defend his decision to allow the hunt for oil in the last great wilderness of the Arctic, on the eve of an historic visit to Alaska intended to spur the fight against climate change.
The three-day tour – which will include a hike across a shrinking glacier and visits to coastal communities buffeted by sea-level rise and erosion – was intended to showcase the real-time effects of climate change.
But a defensive White House was forced to push back against campaigners who accuse Obama of undermining his environmental agenda by giving the go-ahead to Shell to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea, only weeks after rolling out his signature climate change plan.
Obama, in his weekly address on Saturday, insisted there was no clash between his climate change agenda and Arctic drilling.
America was beginning to get off fossil fuels, he said. But Obama went on: “Our economy still has to rely on oil and gas. As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports.”
The challenges of protecting the Arctic from climate change as well as the risks of offshore drilling were both on full display on the eve of Obama’s visit.
Disappearing sea ice cover forced an estimated 6,000 walruses, mainly females and their young, to come to shore on a remote barrier island off the Chukchi Sea, US government officials said on Friday.
Meanwhile, Shell was forced to pause its drilling in the Chukchi and evacuate workers “because of extreme weather conditions”, a company spokesman said in an email.
Obama defended the drilling operation, saying: “We don’t rubber-stamp permits.”
The president had hoped to use his visit to showcase the changes unfolding in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, the White House said.
“This is an issue that is very here and now,” Brian Deese, a senior White House advisor told a conference call with reporters on Friday. “Near and above the Arctic circle the impacts of climate change are particular pronounced and Americans are living with those impacts in real time.”
He said Obama would use the visit to draw public attention to those consequences: the retreat of sea ice, land loss due to melting permafrost and coastal erosion, increasingly severe storms and growing risk of wildfires.
The president will also highlight the risks to Alaska’s tiny coastal communities, some of which could be forced to relocate because of climate change. A number have already chosen to move but have no funds to do so.
But campaign groups said Obama was sabotaging his own mission by giving the go-ahead to Shell to hunt for oil.
“There is a very obvious contradiction between meaningful action to address climate change and continued exploration for remote and difficult hydrocarbon resources,” said Michael LeVine, Arctic campaigner for Oceana.
“Moving forward with exploiting Arctic oil and gas is inconsistent with the Administration’s stated goal and meaningful action on climate change.”
Credo, another campaign group, accused Obama of “self-defeating hypocrisy”.
Obama’s first stop on Monday will be a foreign ministers’ conference in Anchorage. The US will take over leadership of the eight-nation Arctic Council later this year.
After a visit to melting glaciers in the Kenai Fjords National park, Obama will visit the rural community of Dillingham, close to Bristol Bay, site of the world’s biggest natural salmon run. The president will also visit the town of Kotzebue, which is increasingly battered by Arctic storms because of coastal erosion and the retreat of sea ice cover.
The White House hoped the visit would help spur a global deal to fight climate change at an international conference in Paris at the end of the year. Negotiators will meet in Bonn next week to try to advance negotiations.
The president is also expected to promote his plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels, and his expansion of protections to Alaska wilderness areas.
Drawing attention to the changes in the polar regions could help Obama win over public support, said Marilyn Heiman, director of the US Arctic program for Pew Charitable trusts.
“He is shining a light on the Arctic and the impacts of climate change on the Arctic and the impact a warming Arctic has on the rest of planet,” she said. “There is no better way for the world or United States to hear about that then have the president visit.”
But campaigners criticised Obama for opening up the Arctic to oil companies.
The Arctic Circle is the last great untapped reserve of oil and gas – containing up to 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of oil, according to the US Geological Survey. It is also a home for indigenous people and endangered wildlife who have co-existed for thousands of years.
Giving the go-ahead to Shell to drill two exploratory wells in the harsh and unforgiving conditions puts the Arctic at risk of a spill, campaign groups argue.
And tapping into that waiting bonanza of oil and gas would also trigger catastrophic climate change.
Rick Steiner, a marine biologist who was involved in the Exxon Valdez clean-up in the 1980s, said: “On climate change Obama has been good but not good enough.”
By Suzanne Goldenberg
Barack Obama has been forced to defend his decision to allow the hunt for oil in the last great wilderness of the Arctic, on the eve of an historic visit to Alaska intended to spur the fight against climate change.
The three-day tour – which will include a hike across a shrinking glacier and visits to coastal communities buffeted by sea-level rise and erosion – was intended to showcase the real-time effects of climate change.
But a defensive White House was forced to push back against campaigners who accuse Obama of undermining his environmental agenda by giving the go-ahead to Shell to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea, only weeks after rolling out his signature climate change plan.
Obama, in his weekly address on Saturday, insisted there was no clash between his climate change agenda and Arctic drilling.
America was beginning to get off fossil fuels, he said. But Obama went on: “Our economy still has to rely on oil and gas. As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports.”
The challenges of protecting the Arctic from climate change as well as the risks of offshore drilling were both on full display on the eve of Obama’s visit.
Disappearing sea ice cover forced an estimated 6,000 walruses, mainly females and their young, to come to shore on a remote barrier island off the Chukchi Sea, US government officials said on Friday.
Meanwhile, Shell was forced to pause its drilling in the Chukchi and evacuate workers “because of extreme weather conditions”, a company spokesman said in an email.
Obama defended the drilling operation, saying: “We don’t rubber-stamp permits.”
The president had hoped to use his visit to showcase the changes unfolding in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, the White House said.
“This is an issue that is very here and now,” Brian Deese, a senior White House advisor told a conference call with reporters on Friday. “Near and above the Arctic circle the impacts of climate change are particular pronounced and Americans are living with those impacts in real time.”
He said Obama would use the visit to draw public attention to those consequences: the retreat of sea ice, land loss due to melting permafrost and coastal erosion, increasingly severe storms and growing risk of wildfires.
The president will also highlight the risks to Alaska’s tiny coastal communities, some of which could be forced to relocate because of climate change. A number have already chosen to move but have no funds to do so.
But campaign groups said Obama was sabotaging his own mission by giving the go-ahead to Shell to hunt for oil.
“There is a very obvious contradiction between meaningful action to address climate change and continued exploration for remote and difficult hydrocarbon resources,” said Michael LeVine, Arctic campaigner for Oceana.
“Moving forward with exploiting Arctic oil and gas is inconsistent with the Administration’s stated goal and meaningful action on climate change.”
Credo, another campaign group, accused Obama of “self-defeating hypocrisy”.
Obama’s first stop on Monday will be a foreign ministers’ conference in Anchorage. The US will take over leadership of the eight-nation Arctic Council later this year.
After a visit to melting glaciers in the Kenai Fjords National park, Obama will visit the rural community of Dillingham, close to Bristol Bay, site of the world’s biggest natural salmon run. The president will also visit the town of Kotzebue, which is increasingly battered by Arctic storms because of coastal erosion and the retreat of sea ice cover.
The White House hoped the visit would help spur a global deal to fight climate change at an international conference in Paris at the end of the year. Negotiators will meet in Bonn next week to try to advance negotiations.
The president is also expected to promote his plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels, and his expansion of protections to Alaska wilderness areas.
Drawing attention to the changes in the polar regions could help Obama win over public support, said Marilyn Heiman, director of the US Arctic program for Pew Charitable trusts.
“He is shining a light on the Arctic and the impacts of climate change on the Arctic and the impact a warming Arctic has on the rest of planet,” she said. “There is no better way for the world or United States to hear about that then have the president visit.”
But campaigners criticised Obama for opening up the Arctic to oil companies.
The Arctic Circle is the last great untapped reserve of oil and gas – containing up to 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of oil, according to the US Geological Survey. It is also a home for indigenous people and endangered wildlife who have co-existed for thousands of years.
Giving the go-ahead to Shell to drill two exploratory wells in the harsh and unforgiving conditions puts the Arctic at risk of a spill, campaign groups argue.
And tapping into that waiting bonanza of oil and gas would also trigger catastrophic climate change.
Rick Steiner, a marine biologist who was involved in the Exxon Valdez clean-up in the 1980s, said: “On climate change Obama has been good but not good enough.”
Alaska Visit
Obama’s Alaska Visit Puts Climate, Not Energy, in Forefront
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
President Obama will travel to Alaska on Monday to call for urgent and aggressive action to tackle climate change, capitalizing on a poignant tableau of melting glaciers, crumbling permafrost and rising sea levels to illustrate the immediacy of an issue he hopes to make a central element of his legacy.
But during a three-day trip choreographed to lend spectacular visuals and real-world examples to Mr. Obama’s message on global warming, he will pay little heed to the oil and gas drilling offshore that he allowed to go forward just this month, a move that activists say is an unsavory blot on an otherwise ambitious climate record.
While the Arctic is a fitting backdrop for the president’s call to action, it is also a place where the conflicting threads of his environmental policy collide, and where the bracing public debate over how to address the warming of the planet is particularly animated.
“It’s inconsistent on the one hand for President Obama to lead the world toward comprehensive action on climate change, while on the other allowing companies to pursue difficult, expensive oil in dangerous and remote places,” said Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel for Oceana, an environmental group.
While Mr. Obama has taken unprecedented steps to reduce the nation’s demand for the fossil fuels that cause climate change, enacting new rules that cut emissions while pressing for a major global accord, he has done far less to shift investment away from oil and gas development. That has boomed during his presidency, bringing economic benefits in the form of jobs and lower electricity prices.
The challenge is highlighted in Alaska, where many citizens are grappling with the devastating effects of climate change even as they depend on energy development for their livelihoods. In becoming the first sitting American president to visit Arctic Alaska, Mr. Obama is confronting those conflicting pressures.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, the president acknowledged, as he had in the past, that although he was pushing to transition the nation “away from dirty energy sources that threaten our health and our environment,” the economy was still reliant on oil and gas.
“As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports, and we should demand the highest safety standards in the industry — our own,” Mr. Obama said. “I share people’s concerns about offshore drilling. I remember the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico all too well.”
At issue this time is a long-delayed application by Royal Dutch Shell, to which the Obama administration gave final approval two weeks ago, to begin drilling for oil and gas in untouched waters of the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast. The president does not plan to interact with Shell during his trip, White House officials said, but he will travel to the town of Kotzebue above the Arctic Circle, where the company has set up some of its equipment.
Kotzebue and many of its neighbors — Inuit villages that are being overtaken by the sea because of soil erosion, brought on by melting permafrost and stronger storms that come with higher temperatures — are potent real-time examples of what Mr. Obama has called a climate wake-up call.
At a State Department climate conference in Anchorage on Monday, Mr. Obama will call for sweeping collective action on climate change, pushing for commitments designed to propel a global accord in December at a United Nations summit meeting in Paris. Then he plans to hopscotch the state bearing witness to the effects of rising temperatures, hiking Exit Glacier in Seward on Tuesday and meeting Wednesday with salmon fishermen in Dillingham, on pristine Bristol Bay, before journeying to Kotzebue.
“This is an issue that is very here and now,” said Brian Deese, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser on climate policy. “The issue of climate change is not an issue of the future tense in Alaska. It is affecting people in their lives and livelihoods in real ways.”
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and the author of “The Quiet World,” which documents conservation efforts in Alaska, said Mr. Obama had spoken privately of how difficult it was to get the climate change story across to the news media, particularly given that Americans “don’t want to feel that they’re doing something wrong driving the S.U.V. to pick up their kids at school.”
“Going up to glacier country is the most visceral way to do that, and it’s really a culmination of President Obama going from being the climate change educator of America to trying to be seen now as a climate activist,” Mr. Brinkley said.
Still, in traveling to the Arctic — a region that has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the world over the past six decades, with its northernmost reaches losing more than a football field a day of land because of coastal erosion and rising seas — Mr. Obama will also be implicitly making the case against the drilling he has authorized.
“The glaring, inconvenient truth is that when you step onto ground zero and visit communities where they’re falling into the sea because of rapidly melting ice, you are witnessing the dramatic impacts of continuing down this path of fossil fuel development,” said Franz A. Matzner, director of the Beyond Oil Initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Environmental groups and progressive activists have been quick to point out the incongruity in Mr. Obama’s Arctic trip. On Thursday, the social-change group Credo began a campaign attacking the president for what it called his “self-defeating hypocrisy” on the climate, calling for Americans to flood the White House with phone calls and petition signatures demanding an end to Arctic drilling.
Conservationists, native leaders and climate activists are holding a rally against Arctic drilling in Anchorage on Monday to coincide with Mr. Obama’s arrival.
At the same time, some Alaskans are asking for just the opposite. Last week, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which represents the business interests of the Arctic Slope Inupiat tribe, released a television advertisement calling on Mr. Obama to “stand with Alaskans and continue to support Arctic energy development.”
The timing of the Shell decision was particularly awkward for the White House, coming so soon before Mr. Obama embarks on his Arctic sojourn. Advisers have argued that the president had no legal option but to process the permit based on leases sold to Shell for $2.1 billion by President George W. Bush’s administration. More broadly, the administration argues that drilling off the Alaska coast is simply a matter of bowing to the reality that the country remains dependent on fossil fuels, and working to ensure that the work is done domestically and under stringent safety rules.
“We might wish for an instantaneous transformation that was drastically less reliant on oil and gas and coal, or at least that used technologies for oil and gas and coal that reduced greatly the emissions associated with that, but we don’t live in a magical world,” said John P. Holdren, senior adviser to Mr. Obama on science and technology. “If you’re going to be using oil and gas, it’s better to produce it here than somewhere else. We have by far the strongest environmental and safety oversight of any country.”
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
President Obama will travel to Alaska on Monday to call for urgent and aggressive action to tackle climate change, capitalizing on a poignant tableau of melting glaciers, crumbling permafrost and rising sea levels to illustrate the immediacy of an issue he hopes to make a central element of his legacy.
But during a three-day trip choreographed to lend spectacular visuals and real-world examples to Mr. Obama’s message on global warming, he will pay little heed to the oil and gas drilling offshore that he allowed to go forward just this month, a move that activists say is an unsavory blot on an otherwise ambitious climate record.
While the Arctic is a fitting backdrop for the president’s call to action, it is also a place where the conflicting threads of his environmental policy collide, and where the bracing public debate over how to address the warming of the planet is particularly animated.
“It’s inconsistent on the one hand for President Obama to lead the world toward comprehensive action on climate change, while on the other allowing companies to pursue difficult, expensive oil in dangerous and remote places,” said Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel for Oceana, an environmental group.
While Mr. Obama has taken unprecedented steps to reduce the nation’s demand for the fossil fuels that cause climate change, enacting new rules that cut emissions while pressing for a major global accord, he has done far less to shift investment away from oil and gas development. That has boomed during his presidency, bringing economic benefits in the form of jobs and lower electricity prices.
The challenge is highlighted in Alaska, where many citizens are grappling with the devastating effects of climate change even as they depend on energy development for their livelihoods. In becoming the first sitting American president to visit Arctic Alaska, Mr. Obama is confronting those conflicting pressures.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, the president acknowledged, as he had in the past, that although he was pushing to transition the nation “away from dirty energy sources that threaten our health and our environment,” the economy was still reliant on oil and gas.
“As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports, and we should demand the highest safety standards in the industry — our own,” Mr. Obama said. “I share people’s concerns about offshore drilling. I remember the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico all too well.”
At issue this time is a long-delayed application by Royal Dutch Shell, to which the Obama administration gave final approval two weeks ago, to begin drilling for oil and gas in untouched waters of the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast. The president does not plan to interact with Shell during his trip, White House officials said, but he will travel to the town of Kotzebue above the Arctic Circle, where the company has set up some of its equipment.
Kotzebue and many of its neighbors — Inuit villages that are being overtaken by the sea because of soil erosion, brought on by melting permafrost and stronger storms that come with higher temperatures — are potent real-time examples of what Mr. Obama has called a climate wake-up call.
At a State Department climate conference in Anchorage on Monday, Mr. Obama will call for sweeping collective action on climate change, pushing for commitments designed to propel a global accord in December at a United Nations summit meeting in Paris. Then he plans to hopscotch the state bearing witness to the effects of rising temperatures, hiking Exit Glacier in Seward on Tuesday and meeting Wednesday with salmon fishermen in Dillingham, on pristine Bristol Bay, before journeying to Kotzebue.
“This is an issue that is very here and now,” said Brian Deese, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser on climate policy. “The issue of climate change is not an issue of the future tense in Alaska. It is affecting people in their lives and livelihoods in real ways.”
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and the author of “The Quiet World,” which documents conservation efforts in Alaska, said Mr. Obama had spoken privately of how difficult it was to get the climate change story across to the news media, particularly given that Americans “don’t want to feel that they’re doing something wrong driving the S.U.V. to pick up their kids at school.”
“Going up to glacier country is the most visceral way to do that, and it’s really a culmination of President Obama going from being the climate change educator of America to trying to be seen now as a climate activist,” Mr. Brinkley said.
Still, in traveling to the Arctic — a region that has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the world over the past six decades, with its northernmost reaches losing more than a football field a day of land because of coastal erosion and rising seas — Mr. Obama will also be implicitly making the case against the drilling he has authorized.
“The glaring, inconvenient truth is that when you step onto ground zero and visit communities where they’re falling into the sea because of rapidly melting ice, you are witnessing the dramatic impacts of continuing down this path of fossil fuel development,” said Franz A. Matzner, director of the Beyond Oil Initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Environmental groups and progressive activists have been quick to point out the incongruity in Mr. Obama’s Arctic trip. On Thursday, the social-change group Credo began a campaign attacking the president for what it called his “self-defeating hypocrisy” on the climate, calling for Americans to flood the White House with phone calls and petition signatures demanding an end to Arctic drilling.
Conservationists, native leaders and climate activists are holding a rally against Arctic drilling in Anchorage on Monday to coincide with Mr. Obama’s arrival.
At the same time, some Alaskans are asking for just the opposite. Last week, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which represents the business interests of the Arctic Slope Inupiat tribe, released a television advertisement calling on Mr. Obama to “stand with Alaskans and continue to support Arctic energy development.”
The timing of the Shell decision was particularly awkward for the White House, coming so soon before Mr. Obama embarks on his Arctic sojourn. Advisers have argued that the president had no legal option but to process the permit based on leases sold to Shell for $2.1 billion by President George W. Bush’s administration. More broadly, the administration argues that drilling off the Alaska coast is simply a matter of bowing to the reality that the country remains dependent on fossil fuels, and working to ensure that the work is done domestically and under stringent safety rules.
“We might wish for an instantaneous transformation that was drastically less reliant on oil and gas and coal, or at least that used technologies for oil and gas and coal that reduced greatly the emissions associated with that, but we don’t live in a magical world,” said John P. Holdren, senior adviser to Mr. Obama on science and technology. “If you’re going to be using oil and gas, it’s better to produce it here than somewhere else. We have by far the strongest environmental and safety oversight of any country.”
Denali
Ohio Republicans Are Freaking Out About the Denali Name Change
Thanks, Barack.
By Tim Murphy
On Sunday, President Barack Obama announced that the highest peak in North America, Alaska's Mount McKinley, would formally be changed to its Athabascan name: Denali. This makes a lot of sense. The mountain was known as Denali long before a gold prospector dubbed it McKinley after reading a newspaper headline in 1896, and it's been officially known as "Denali" in Alaska, according to the state's board for geographic names, for about a century. The state, and its Republican legislature, has been asking Washington to call the mountain Denali for decades. And for decades, the major obstacle to getting this done has been Ohio, McKinley's home state.
We need not spend much time discussing Ohio in this space, but suffice it to say that Ohioans are a very proud, if sometimes misinformed, people, and the birthplace of mediocre presidents won't just take the marginalization of those mediocre presidents lying down. It will fight! To wit, the state's congressional delegation has decided to show off that old Ohio fighting spirit by condemning the decision in sternly worded press releases and tweets. Here's GOP Sen. Rob Portman:
No it wasn't! McKinley was assassinated in 1901. It was named McKinley in 1896, by some random gold prospector who had just returned from the Alaskan Range to find that the governor of Ohio had won the Republican presidential nomination. This is like naming the highest point in the continent after Mitt Romney. Is Portman suggesting that the fix was in as early as 1896? Did Czolgosz really act alone? Was Teddy Roosevelt in on it? My God! Congress did pass a law in 1917 formally recognizing McKinley as the mountain's name, but that was really just paperwork.
Let's see what else they've got:
Boehner stmt: naming continent's highest mt 4 McKinley was "testament 2 his great legacy" including Ohio govship, victory in Spanish-Am War
The Spanish-American War hadn't happened yet in 1896—William Randolph Hearst wouldn't start that for another two years! OK. Here's GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs, all but engraving his sternly-worded response on obsidian.
Job-killing name change!
I haven't seen this much loathing directed at Denali since the last time I went on Yelp.
Thanks, Barack.
By Tim Murphy
On Sunday, President Barack Obama announced that the highest peak in North America, Alaska's Mount McKinley, would formally be changed to its Athabascan name: Denali. This makes a lot of sense. The mountain was known as Denali long before a gold prospector dubbed it McKinley after reading a newspaper headline in 1896, and it's been officially known as "Denali" in Alaska, according to the state's board for geographic names, for about a century. The state, and its Republican legislature, has been asking Washington to call the mountain Denali for decades. And for decades, the major obstacle to getting this done has been Ohio, McKinley's home state.
We need not spend much time discussing Ohio in this space, but suffice it to say that Ohioans are a very proud, if sometimes misinformed, people, and the birthplace of mediocre presidents won't just take the marginalization of those mediocre presidents lying down. It will fight! To wit, the state's congressional delegation has decided to show off that old Ohio fighting spirit by condemning the decision in sternly worded press releases and tweets. Here's GOP Sen. Rob Portman:
- This decision by the Administration is yet another example of the President going around Congress.
- Pres McKinley was a proud Ohioan, and the mountain was named after him, as a way to remember his rich legacy after his assassination.
No it wasn't! McKinley was assassinated in 1901. It was named McKinley in 1896, by some random gold prospector who had just returned from the Alaskan Range to find that the governor of Ohio had won the Republican presidential nomination. This is like naming the highest point in the continent after Mitt Romney. Is Portman suggesting that the fix was in as early as 1896? Did Czolgosz really act alone? Was Teddy Roosevelt in on it? My God! Congress did pass a law in 1917 formally recognizing McKinley as the mountain's name, but that was really just paperwork.
Let's see what else they've got:
Boehner stmt: naming continent's highest mt 4 McKinley was "testament 2 his great legacy" including Ohio govship, victory in Spanish-Am War
The Spanish-American War hadn't happened yet in 1896—William Randolph Hearst wouldn't start that for another two years! OK. Here's GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs, all but engraving his sternly-worded response on obsidian.
Job-killing name change!
I haven't seen this much loathing directed at Denali since the last time I went on Yelp.
Awkward Position
Ohio Abortion Bill Puts Kasich in an Awkward Position
A ban on Down syndrome abortions is expected to reach the governor's desk this fall.
By Allie Gross
Ohio, a state often considered ground zero for anti-abortion legislation, finds itself at the center of the latest reproductive rights controversy—one that could force its governor, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, to take an uncomfortably public stance.
A bill approved in June by a health committee in the Ohio House of Representatives, on a bipartisan 9-3 vote, would ban physicians from performing abortions on women who want to terminate their pregnancy because of a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. The legislation shifts the reproductive rights conversation from its typical preoccupation with time frame and viability to the more nebulous question of a woman's motivation for ending a pregnancy.
"This is a new type of attack on access to abortion care," says Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, an abortion rights advocacy group. "It's restricting access to abortion based on the reason that a woman makes a decision."
The bill, which was written with the help of Ohio Right to Life, is expected to pass the Ohio state legislature—more than two-thirds of whose members have been endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee—before heading to Kasich for a signature.
Since entering office in 2011 Kasich has signed every anti-abortion measure that has landed on his desk, enacting a total of 16 restrictions that limit abortion access and family planning opportunities, and resulting in the closure of half the state's abortion clinics. There is little reason to think this bill will be different.
"I am very confident that he will sign the bill," says Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life. Gonidakis adds, "There is no candidate running for president who has done more for the pro-life movement than John Kasich."
While Kasich is quick to share his pro-life beliefs, his actual abortion record has not been so widely broadcast, because the restrictions he has enacted have been slipped into big, complex budget bills. This legislation, however, forces Kasich, who has largely been labeled a moderate in a GOP race filled with candidates further to the right, to take a broadly publicized stance on a relatively new type of abortion legislation. Only North Dakota has enacted similar legislation, when in 2013 it banned abortions based off diagnoses of Down syndrome, the sex of the baby, or the potential for a genetic abnormality.
Kasich has not yet commented on the bill. "The governor is pro-life and believes strongly in the sanctity of human life, but we don't take a public position on every bill introduced into the Ohio General Assembly," his spokesman Rob Nichols tells Mother Jones in an email.
For decades, Ohio has been considered a testing ground for new abortion measures. It was the first state to consider the controversial heartbeat bill, which would have banned abortions at six weeks, when the fetal heartbeat can be heard. The bill did not pass, but it sparked copycat legislation. "It's very strategic. If you can get something established in Ohio, all the other Midwestern states are going to start doing the same thing," explains Gonidakis, who was appointed by Kasich to the state medical board in 2012. Gonidakis believes Ohio's diversity of people and mix of urban and rural environments make the state a great choice for anti-abortion legislators who want to experiment with new bills. "We do not have a monopoly on good ideas, but we're a good testing ground," he says.
Abortion rights advocates like Copeland find themselves in a more difficult position. With little precedent for legislation like this, they lack a barometer to assess its likely impact.
Under the bill, a doctor found guilty of knowingly performing an abortion on a woman who made her decision because of a Down syndrome diagnosis could face up to 18 months in prison. That could prove nearly impossible to enforce, given the multitude of factors that go into an abortion decision. But abortion rights advocates still fear the repercussions the bill could have for the medical profession and abortions at large.
"It's clearly bad medicine. It's designed to have a chilling effect on physicians," says Copeland, who views the legislation as a way to discourage doctors from providing abortion care for patients. She worries the bill will also affect the amount of information women share with their doctors. "This is not the doctor-patient relationship that we should have in this state."
Supporters of the bill, like Gonidakis, insist it's about discrimination as much as abortion. "We spend so much money helping people with developmental disabilities, or physical disabilities and special needs," he says. "Why don't the same rules apply while they are developing in the womb?"
Critics contend that those pushing for the measure have done little to help people with Down syndrome. A 2013 report from Policy Matters found that there were 30,000 people with disabilities in Ohio on a waiting list for services. "Down syndrome is being exploited for the political purpose of continuing to eliminate abortion care," says Copeland.
According to a 2012 report from researchers at the University of South Carolina, between 60 percent and 90 percent of women nationally who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome have an abortion. David Perry, an Illinois-based journalist and father of an eight-year old son with Down syndrome, has been a public opponent of the bill, arguing that it's the wrong approach to ensuring equity and dignity for individuals with the condition.
"If you really want to reduce the rate of abortions based on prenatal diagnosis, then what you do is make Down syndrome less scary," says Perry. "You don't say, 'You're going to go to jail if you do this.'"
Abortion rights lawyers view the legislation as an encroachment on Roe v. Wade, which allows women to have an abortion until the point of viability. They see the bill as part of an incrementalist approach that chips away slowly at abortion rights, a strategy Gonidakis endorses and praises Kasich for adopting.
"There are some candidates out there who give a great speech on the pro-life issue, but there are very few candidates like John Kasich who can say, 'Here's my body of work,'" says Gonidakis, who expects the bill to land on Kasich's desk by the Thanksgiving break. "Actions do speak louder than words. The proof is in the pudding, and you can just look at the results here in Ohio."
A ban on Down syndrome abortions is expected to reach the governor's desk this fall.
By Allie Gross
Ohio, a state often considered ground zero for anti-abortion legislation, finds itself at the center of the latest reproductive rights controversy—one that could force its governor, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, to take an uncomfortably public stance.
A bill approved in June by a health committee in the Ohio House of Representatives, on a bipartisan 9-3 vote, would ban physicians from performing abortions on women who want to terminate their pregnancy because of a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. The legislation shifts the reproductive rights conversation from its typical preoccupation with time frame and viability to the more nebulous question of a woman's motivation for ending a pregnancy.
"This is a new type of attack on access to abortion care," says Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, an abortion rights advocacy group. "It's restricting access to abortion based on the reason that a woman makes a decision."
The bill, which was written with the help of Ohio Right to Life, is expected to pass the Ohio state legislature—more than two-thirds of whose members have been endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee—before heading to Kasich for a signature.
Since entering office in 2011 Kasich has signed every anti-abortion measure that has landed on his desk, enacting a total of 16 restrictions that limit abortion access and family planning opportunities, and resulting in the closure of half the state's abortion clinics. There is little reason to think this bill will be different.
"I am very confident that he will sign the bill," says Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life. Gonidakis adds, "There is no candidate running for president who has done more for the pro-life movement than John Kasich."
While Kasich is quick to share his pro-life beliefs, his actual abortion record has not been so widely broadcast, because the restrictions he has enacted have been slipped into big, complex budget bills. This legislation, however, forces Kasich, who has largely been labeled a moderate in a GOP race filled with candidates further to the right, to take a broadly publicized stance on a relatively new type of abortion legislation. Only North Dakota has enacted similar legislation, when in 2013 it banned abortions based off diagnoses of Down syndrome, the sex of the baby, or the potential for a genetic abnormality.
Kasich has not yet commented on the bill. "The governor is pro-life and believes strongly in the sanctity of human life, but we don't take a public position on every bill introduced into the Ohio General Assembly," his spokesman Rob Nichols tells Mother Jones in an email.
For decades, Ohio has been considered a testing ground for new abortion measures. It was the first state to consider the controversial heartbeat bill, which would have banned abortions at six weeks, when the fetal heartbeat can be heard. The bill did not pass, but it sparked copycat legislation. "It's very strategic. If you can get something established in Ohio, all the other Midwestern states are going to start doing the same thing," explains Gonidakis, who was appointed by Kasich to the state medical board in 2012. Gonidakis believes Ohio's diversity of people and mix of urban and rural environments make the state a great choice for anti-abortion legislators who want to experiment with new bills. "We do not have a monopoly on good ideas, but we're a good testing ground," he says.
Abortion rights advocates like Copeland find themselves in a more difficult position. With little precedent for legislation like this, they lack a barometer to assess its likely impact.
Under the bill, a doctor found guilty of knowingly performing an abortion on a woman who made her decision because of a Down syndrome diagnosis could face up to 18 months in prison. That could prove nearly impossible to enforce, given the multitude of factors that go into an abortion decision. But abortion rights advocates still fear the repercussions the bill could have for the medical profession and abortions at large.
"It's clearly bad medicine. It's designed to have a chilling effect on physicians," says Copeland, who views the legislation as a way to discourage doctors from providing abortion care for patients. She worries the bill will also affect the amount of information women share with their doctors. "This is not the doctor-patient relationship that we should have in this state."
Supporters of the bill, like Gonidakis, insist it's about discrimination as much as abortion. "We spend so much money helping people with developmental disabilities, or physical disabilities and special needs," he says. "Why don't the same rules apply while they are developing in the womb?"
Critics contend that those pushing for the measure have done little to help people with Down syndrome. A 2013 report from Policy Matters found that there were 30,000 people with disabilities in Ohio on a waiting list for services. "Down syndrome is being exploited for the political purpose of continuing to eliminate abortion care," says Copeland.
According to a 2012 report from researchers at the University of South Carolina, between 60 percent and 90 percent of women nationally who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome have an abortion. David Perry, an Illinois-based journalist and father of an eight-year old son with Down syndrome, has been a public opponent of the bill, arguing that it's the wrong approach to ensuring equity and dignity for individuals with the condition.
"If you really want to reduce the rate of abortions based on prenatal diagnosis, then what you do is make Down syndrome less scary," says Perry. "You don't say, 'You're going to go to jail if you do this.'"
Abortion rights lawyers view the legislation as an encroachment on Roe v. Wade, which allows women to have an abortion until the point of viability. They see the bill as part of an incrementalist approach that chips away slowly at abortion rights, a strategy Gonidakis endorses and praises Kasich for adopting.
"There are some candidates out there who give a great speech on the pro-life issue, but there are very few candidates like John Kasich who can say, 'Here's my body of work,'" says Gonidakis, who expects the bill to land on Kasich's desk by the Thanksgiving break. "Actions do speak louder than words. The proof is in the pudding, and you can just look at the results here in Ohio."
When Galaxies collide..
Pluto is colorful
Pluto is more colorful than we can see. Color data and images of our Solar System's most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in July, have been digitally combined to give an enhanced view of this ancient world sporting an unexpectedly young surface. The featured enhanced color image is not only esthetically pretty but scientifically useful, making surface regions of differing chemical composition visually distinct. For example, the light-colored heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio on the lower right is clearly shown here to be divisible into two regions that are geologically different, with the leftmost lobe Sputnik Planum also appearing unusually smooth. New Horizons now continues on beyond Pluto, will continue to beam back more images and data, and will soon be directed to change course so that it can fly past asteroid 2014 MU69 in 2019 January.
Dione
Saturn's moon Dione crosses the face of the giant planet in this view, a phenomenon astronomers call a transit. Transits play an important role in astronomy and can be used to study the orbits of planets and their atmospheres, both in our solar system and in others.By carefully timing and observing transits in the Saturn system, like that of Dione (698 miles or 1123 kilometers across), scientists can more precisely determine the orbital parameters of Saturn’s moons.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 0.3 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 21, 2015.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 119 degrees. Image scale is 9 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel.
New Target
NASA’s New Horizons Team Selects Potential Kuiper Belt Flyby Target
NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.
This remote KBO was one of two identified as potential destinations and the one recommended to NASA by the New Horizons team. Although NASA has selected 2014 MU69 as the target, as part of its normal review process the agency will conduct a detailed assessment before officially approving the mission extension to conduct additional science.
“Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “While discussions whether to approve this extended mission will take place in the larger context of the planetary science portfolio, we expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science.”
Like all NASA missions that have finished their main objective but seek to do more exploration, the New Horizons team must write a proposal to the agency to fund a KBO mission. That proposal – due in 2016 – will be evaluated by an independent team of experts before NASA can decide about the go-ahead.
Early target selection was important; the team needs to direct New Horizons toward the object this year in order to perform any extended mission with healthy fuel margins. New Horizons will perform a series of four maneuvers in late October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69 – nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) – which it expects to reach on January 1, 2019. Any delays from those dates would cost precious fuel and add mission risk.
“2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”
New Horizons was originally designed to fly beyond the Pluto system and explore additional Kuiper Belt objects. The spacecraft carries extra hydrazine fuel for a KBO flyby; its communications system is designed to work from far beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.”
The 2003 National Academy of Sciences’ Planetary Decadal Survey (“New Frontiers in the Solar System”) strongly recommended that the first mission to the Kuiper Belt include flybys of Pluto and small KBOs, in order to sample the diversity of objects in that previously unexplored region of the solar system. The identification of PT1, which is in a completely different class of KBO than Pluto, potentially allows New Horizons to satisfy those goals.
But finding a suitable KBO flyby target was no easy task. Starting a search in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth, the New Horizons team found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the spacecraft.
The powerful Hubble Space Telescope came to the rescue in summer 2014, discovering five objects, since narrowed to two, within New Horizons’ flight path. Scientists estimate that PT1 is just under 30 miles (about 45 kilometers) across; that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, like the one the Rosetta mission is now orbiting, but only about 0.5 to 1 percent of the size (and about 1/10,000th the mass) of Pluto. As such, PT1 is thought to be like the building blocks of Kuiper Belt planets such as Pluto.
Unlike asteroids, KBOs have been heated only slightly by the Sun, and are thought to represent a well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago.
“There’s so much that we can learn from close-up spacecraft observations that we’ll never learn from Earth, as the Pluto flyby demonstrated so spectacularly,” said New Horizons science team member John Spencer, also of SwRI. “The detailed images and other data that New Horizons could obtain from a KBO flyby will revolutionize our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and KBOs.”
The New Horizons spacecraft – currently 3 billion miles [4.9 billion kilometers] from Earth – is just starting to transmit the bulk of the images and other data, stored on its digital recorders, from its historic July encounter with the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and operating normally.
NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.
This remote KBO was one of two identified as potential destinations and the one recommended to NASA by the New Horizons team. Although NASA has selected 2014 MU69 as the target, as part of its normal review process the agency will conduct a detailed assessment before officially approving the mission extension to conduct additional science.
“Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “While discussions whether to approve this extended mission will take place in the larger context of the planetary science portfolio, we expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science.”
Like all NASA missions that have finished their main objective but seek to do more exploration, the New Horizons team must write a proposal to the agency to fund a KBO mission. That proposal – due in 2016 – will be evaluated by an independent team of experts before NASA can decide about the go-ahead.
Early target selection was important; the team needs to direct New Horizons toward the object this year in order to perform any extended mission with healthy fuel margins. New Horizons will perform a series of four maneuvers in late October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69 – nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) – which it expects to reach on January 1, 2019. Any delays from those dates would cost precious fuel and add mission risk.
“2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”
New Horizons was originally designed to fly beyond the Pluto system and explore additional Kuiper Belt objects. The spacecraft carries extra hydrazine fuel for a KBO flyby; its communications system is designed to work from far beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.”
The 2003 National Academy of Sciences’ Planetary Decadal Survey (“New Frontiers in the Solar System”) strongly recommended that the first mission to the Kuiper Belt include flybys of Pluto and small KBOs, in order to sample the diversity of objects in that previously unexplored region of the solar system. The identification of PT1, which is in a completely different class of KBO than Pluto, potentially allows New Horizons to satisfy those goals.
But finding a suitable KBO flyby target was no easy task. Starting a search in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth, the New Horizons team found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the spacecraft.
The powerful Hubble Space Telescope came to the rescue in summer 2014, discovering five objects, since narrowed to two, within New Horizons’ flight path. Scientists estimate that PT1 is just under 30 miles (about 45 kilometers) across; that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, like the one the Rosetta mission is now orbiting, but only about 0.5 to 1 percent of the size (and about 1/10,000th the mass) of Pluto. As such, PT1 is thought to be like the building blocks of Kuiper Belt planets such as Pluto.
Unlike asteroids, KBOs have been heated only slightly by the Sun, and are thought to represent a well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago.
“There’s so much that we can learn from close-up spacecraft observations that we’ll never learn from Earth, as the Pluto flyby demonstrated so spectacularly,” said New Horizons science team member John Spencer, also of SwRI. “The detailed images and other data that New Horizons could obtain from a KBO flyby will revolutionize our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and KBOs.”
The New Horizons spacecraft – currently 3 billion miles [4.9 billion kilometers] from Earth – is just starting to transmit the bulk of the images and other data, stored on its digital recorders, from its historic July encounter with the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and operating normally.
August 28, 2015
Psychology of supporters
Man Is the Irrational Animal
By Kevin Drum
Mark Kleiman points out that most of us need to hold more-or-less rational beliefs about our professional lives. "Even people whose stock-in-trade is deception — con artists, stockbrokers, lobbyists — have to observe the rules of arithmetic when it comes to totting up the take." But that's only half the story:
Most of the time, though, people aren’t at work, and much of what they think and talk about has little if any relevance to practical decisions in their own non-working lives. Freed of the need to think rationally, most people seem to prefer the alternative.
Yep. This is why, say, it costs nothing to claim that evolution is nonsense and shouldn't be taught in schools. For the 99.9 percent of us who don't work in fields that require it, evolution doesn't affect our daily lives in any way at all. Believing or not believing is affinity politics and nothing more. This explains how Donald Trump gets away with being a buffoon:
The deepest mistake is to regard someone who acts as if he doesn’t give a damn whether anything he says is true, or consistent with what he said yesterday, as stupid....As far as I can tell, Donald Trump simply isn’t bothered by holding and expressing utterly inconsistent beliefs about immigration, or for that matter denying obvious facts in the face of the crowd that witnessed them. And it doesn’t much bother most of his voters, either....And if we deal with it by imagining that Trump, or Trump voters, are “stupid,” we’re going to make some very bad predictions.
We forgive a lot in people we like. Liberals forgive Hillary Clinton for her lawyerly and incompetent defense of her email practices. Trump fans forgive the fact that he makes no sense. But forgiveness is a virtue, right? I guess that makes Trump's supporters the most virtuous folks on the planet.
By Kevin Drum
Mark Kleiman points out that most of us need to hold more-or-less rational beliefs about our professional lives. "Even people whose stock-in-trade is deception — con artists, stockbrokers, lobbyists — have to observe the rules of arithmetic when it comes to totting up the take." But that's only half the story:
Most of the time, though, people aren’t at work, and much of what they think and talk about has little if any relevance to practical decisions in their own non-working lives. Freed of the need to think rationally, most people seem to prefer the alternative.
Yep. This is why, say, it costs nothing to claim that evolution is nonsense and shouldn't be taught in schools. For the 99.9 percent of us who don't work in fields that require it, evolution doesn't affect our daily lives in any way at all. Believing or not believing is affinity politics and nothing more. This explains how Donald Trump gets away with being a buffoon:
The deepest mistake is to regard someone who acts as if he doesn’t give a damn whether anything he says is true, or consistent with what he said yesterday, as stupid....As far as I can tell, Donald Trump simply isn’t bothered by holding and expressing utterly inconsistent beliefs about immigration, or for that matter denying obvious facts in the face of the crowd that witnessed them. And it doesn’t much bother most of his voters, either....And if we deal with it by imagining that Trump, or Trump voters, are “stupid,” we’re going to make some very bad predictions.
We forgive a lot in people we like. Liberals forgive Hillary Clinton for her lawyerly and incompetent defense of her email practices. Trump fans forgive the fact that he makes no sense. But forgiveness is a virtue, right? I guess that makes Trump's supporters the most virtuous folks on the planet.
Chinese turmoil
China: The new Spanish Empire?
The Chinese crisis has important echoes of the Soviet Union and 16th-century Europe. And history tells us the outlook isn't pretty.
By Jacob Soll
The Chinese turmoil roiling markets right now presents a fresh and profound challenge to the world economy: For the first time, a giant, non-European superpower threatens world financial stability and the powers that be seem at a loss. If the IMF and World Bank have stumbled with Greece, how are they going to get a hold on the stock market travails of Communist China? What tools do we even have to affect how it plays out?
But if the particulars are novel, in the bigger sense this is a movie we’ve seen before. Though China has been the global economic star of the last low-growth decade, it remains a totalitarian dictatorship, with its economy shrouded in state secrecy. What we’re encountering in this crisis is the spectacle of a closed society colliding with the forces of complex, free-market capitalism. If we look beyond China, we can find a long history of these collisions, dating back hundreds of years, as both closed societies and capitalism evolved and became more complex. And the history has a clear but unsettling lesson to offer: When such a collision happens, it’s a moment to genuinely worry.
Since the dawn of capitalism, closed societies with repressive governments have—much like China—been capable of remarkable growth and innovation. Sixteenth-century Spain was a great imperial power, with a massive navy and extensive industry such as shipbuilding and mining. One could say the same thing about Louis XIV’s France during the 17th century, which also had vast wealth, burgeoning industry and a sprawling empire.
But both countries were also secretive, absolute monarchies, and they found themselves thrust into competition with the freer countries Holland and Great Britain. Holland, in particular, with a government that didn’t try to control information, became the information center of Europe—the place traders went to find out vital information which they then used as the basis of their projects and investments. The large empires, on the other hand, had economies so centrally planned that the monarch himself would often make detailed economic decisions. As these secretive monarchies tried to prop up their economies, they ended up in unsustainable positions that invariably led to bankruptcy, collapse and conflict.
In Spain, the result was a slow collapse, which has left it and its former empire suffering from perpetual economic crisis and political instability. In France, an open society would eventually be born through monarchial bankruptcy that pulled down banks around Europe, and ended in violent revolution and the vastly destructive Napoleonic wars.
More recently, Germany long struggled with the mix of modern industry, capitalism and authoritarianism. Throughout the 19th century, and into the 20th, Germany experienced massive economic growth under the hand of Bismarck’s central political authority; the result was a period of great strength, followed by crisis, war, political upheaval and the geopolitical and moral catastrophe of WWII.
And though we tend to forget this now, the Soviet Union experienced massive economic expansion for half a century. America feared it not only for its m military, but for the industrial might, expanding GDP and technological achievements that added heft to its ideological challenge around the world. Only after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did we fully understand what was really going on behind the curtain. In financial terms, Soviet secrecy was very effectively shrouding the massive liabilities of the state. It had admirable steady growth, industrial production rates, and GDP rose—so much so that even until the early 1980s, the CIA saw the Soviet economy as a credible, competitive force. But in order to sustain economic growth, we can’t just look at output; we also need to see the long-term cost of the output, and the Soviet system allowed its leaders to shroud the unsustainable costs in inefficiency, lives, and environmental destruction that eventually brought down the empire.
China is a new case, for it has mixed capitalism and totalitarianism in a unique way. Unlike the USSR, there are privately owned companies and public investment. And yet behind banks, companies and the stock market still lies the heavy hand of the state. The Chinese government forces investment in the stock market and bolsters banks, companies and state entities with secretive cash infusions; it and hides toxic assets in its enormous and completely secretive sovereign wealth funds. The government may not be able to control the stock market, but it does successfully keep a veil over state finances. This is what closed, authoritarian governments have done since the 16th century.
China is now playing in world financial markets, but those markets are dynamic and resilient in part because they are relatively open—they can fail, but it’s reasonably clear why, and, in the best cases, the paths to reform are debated in public forums. In China, there are the mechanics of capitalism without the essential spirit of the system. As in imperial Spain, or Cold War Russia, there is neither transparency nor trust. There is no question that China has massive growth potential until its population curve starts to turn, but what we are seeing in this current financial crisis is likely to be only the beginning of the political and societal crisis brought about by a dictatorship’s efforts to simulate the performance of a capitalist economy—but one that only grows. The stock market is not real; government financial statistics are fake and obscured.
There is no historical example of a closed imperial economy facing large capital-driven, open states and sustainably competing over the long term. That is not to say that China isn’t an economic powerhouse and a remarkable site of energy and potential. It is certainly both. But we also know Chinese debt—as secret as the state likes to keep it—is enormous, and that its financial system is like any other bubble. It is predicated on inflated earnings reports and expectations. The great “Beijing Consensus,” China’s absolute commitment to showing 8% growth every year, is unsustainable, at least through legitimate means. And without it, China is beginning to look like an enormous totalitarian ponzi scheme—a phenomenon common enough in world history, but extremely dangerous be near in the long run.
It’s tempting to look for quick policy solutions, or—for some political candidates—to wave around threats as a way to gain leverage. But almost by definition, a society like China is immune to our efforts: if we don’t actually what’s going on, it’s difficult to exert even our limited influence in an intelligent way. In the short term, the best goal to push for is more transparency, in the hope that sunlight helps mitigate whatever shock is still coming. And until then, a healthy skepticism might be the best protection we can offer ourselves.
The Chinese crisis has important echoes of the Soviet Union and 16th-century Europe. And history tells us the outlook isn't pretty.
By Jacob Soll
The Chinese turmoil roiling markets right now presents a fresh and profound challenge to the world economy: For the first time, a giant, non-European superpower threatens world financial stability and the powers that be seem at a loss. If the IMF and World Bank have stumbled with Greece, how are they going to get a hold on the stock market travails of Communist China? What tools do we even have to affect how it plays out?
But if the particulars are novel, in the bigger sense this is a movie we’ve seen before. Though China has been the global economic star of the last low-growth decade, it remains a totalitarian dictatorship, with its economy shrouded in state secrecy. What we’re encountering in this crisis is the spectacle of a closed society colliding with the forces of complex, free-market capitalism. If we look beyond China, we can find a long history of these collisions, dating back hundreds of years, as both closed societies and capitalism evolved and became more complex. And the history has a clear but unsettling lesson to offer: When such a collision happens, it’s a moment to genuinely worry.
Since the dawn of capitalism, closed societies with repressive governments have—much like China—been capable of remarkable growth and innovation. Sixteenth-century Spain was a great imperial power, with a massive navy and extensive industry such as shipbuilding and mining. One could say the same thing about Louis XIV’s France during the 17th century, which also had vast wealth, burgeoning industry and a sprawling empire.
But both countries were also secretive, absolute monarchies, and they found themselves thrust into competition with the freer countries Holland and Great Britain. Holland, in particular, with a government that didn’t try to control information, became the information center of Europe—the place traders went to find out vital information which they then used as the basis of their projects and investments. The large empires, on the other hand, had economies so centrally planned that the monarch himself would often make detailed economic decisions. As these secretive monarchies tried to prop up their economies, they ended up in unsustainable positions that invariably led to bankruptcy, collapse and conflict.
In Spain, the result was a slow collapse, which has left it and its former empire suffering from perpetual economic crisis and political instability. In France, an open society would eventually be born through monarchial bankruptcy that pulled down banks around Europe, and ended in violent revolution and the vastly destructive Napoleonic wars.
More recently, Germany long struggled with the mix of modern industry, capitalism and authoritarianism. Throughout the 19th century, and into the 20th, Germany experienced massive economic growth under the hand of Bismarck’s central political authority; the result was a period of great strength, followed by crisis, war, political upheaval and the geopolitical and moral catastrophe of WWII.
And though we tend to forget this now, the Soviet Union experienced massive economic expansion for half a century. America feared it not only for its m military, but for the industrial might, expanding GDP and technological achievements that added heft to its ideological challenge around the world. Only after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did we fully understand what was really going on behind the curtain. In financial terms, Soviet secrecy was very effectively shrouding the massive liabilities of the state. It had admirable steady growth, industrial production rates, and GDP rose—so much so that even until the early 1980s, the CIA saw the Soviet economy as a credible, competitive force. But in order to sustain economic growth, we can’t just look at output; we also need to see the long-term cost of the output, and the Soviet system allowed its leaders to shroud the unsustainable costs in inefficiency, lives, and environmental destruction that eventually brought down the empire.
China is a new case, for it has mixed capitalism and totalitarianism in a unique way. Unlike the USSR, there are privately owned companies and public investment. And yet behind banks, companies and the stock market still lies the heavy hand of the state. The Chinese government forces investment in the stock market and bolsters banks, companies and state entities with secretive cash infusions; it and hides toxic assets in its enormous and completely secretive sovereign wealth funds. The government may not be able to control the stock market, but it does successfully keep a veil over state finances. This is what closed, authoritarian governments have done since the 16th century.
China is now playing in world financial markets, but those markets are dynamic and resilient in part because they are relatively open—they can fail, but it’s reasonably clear why, and, in the best cases, the paths to reform are debated in public forums. In China, there are the mechanics of capitalism without the essential spirit of the system. As in imperial Spain, or Cold War Russia, there is neither transparency nor trust. There is no question that China has massive growth potential until its population curve starts to turn, but what we are seeing in this current financial crisis is likely to be only the beginning of the political and societal crisis brought about by a dictatorship’s efforts to simulate the performance of a capitalist economy—but one that only grows. The stock market is not real; government financial statistics are fake and obscured.
There is no historical example of a closed imperial economy facing large capital-driven, open states and sustainably competing over the long term. That is not to say that China isn’t an economic powerhouse and a remarkable site of energy and potential. It is certainly both. But we also know Chinese debt—as secret as the state likes to keep it—is enormous, and that its financial system is like any other bubble. It is predicated on inflated earnings reports and expectations. The great “Beijing Consensus,” China’s absolute commitment to showing 8% growth every year, is unsustainable, at least through legitimate means. And without it, China is beginning to look like an enormous totalitarian ponzi scheme—a phenomenon common enough in world history, but extremely dangerous be near in the long run.
It’s tempting to look for quick policy solutions, or—for some political candidates—to wave around threats as a way to gain leverage. But almost by definition, a society like China is immune to our efforts: if we don’t actually what’s going on, it’s difficult to exert even our limited influence in an intelligent way. In the short term, the best goal to push for is more transparency, in the hope that sunlight helps mitigate whatever shock is still coming. And until then, a healthy skepticism might be the best protection we can offer ourselves.
Bash the Reds....
The Republicans' Red Scare
GOP hopefuls are bashing China ahead of next month’s state visit.
By Nahal Toosi
GOP presidential candidates have a new country to bash: the People’s Republic of China.
This week’s Chinese stock market crash — and the resulting turmoil in U.S. markets — prompted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to demand the White House cancel next month’s state visit by China’s president. Donald Trump said he’d treat the Chinese president to McDonald’s instead of a fancy dinner.
There’s likely more China-bashing in the works: On Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio and Walker will deliver dueling foreign policy speeches in South Carolina that in Rubio’s case will focus primarily on the communist-led state.
But while scapegoating Beijing and its questionable economic policies may seem like an appealing campaign tactic, China specialists — including many in the GOP — warn that Republicans run the risk of looking ignorant about U.S.-Chinese ties.
“Welcome to the most complex and challenging relationship of the 21st century,” said Jon Huntsman, a former GOP White House contender and ex-ambassador to China who was once mocked for speaking Chinese during a debate. “It’s foolhardy to think that you can just wave off the work of the China-U.S. relationship for political purposes, but it’s also no surprise that in primary season people make such statements. You want to be seen as a tough guy on the world stage.”
To be fair, China gives White House hopefuls lots of material for a tough-guy routine.
Beijing’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea, its suspected role in cyberattacks on the U.S. and its dismal human rights record are just a few areas already seized upon by Republicans (and some Democrats) for criticism. China’s currency policies have long frustrated the United States in particular, and its increased military spending has led to wariness around the world.
Still, bullying the world’s most populous country isn’t a workable policy prescription, former U.S. officials and other China experts say. Neither is isolating it.
Take, for example, Walker’s call for President Barack Obama to call off Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit, an affair likely to be lavish and, as is tradition, include an elegant dinner, visits to cultural landmarks, a 21-gun salute and an exchange of gifts.
Walker said Obama should show “backbone” and get down to “serious work” with China instead of “pomp and circumstance.” Analysts said those comments foolishly dismiss the high value Beijing places on diplomatic protocol.
“Scott Walker is not ready for prime time,” said Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “The one thing that China really cares about is prestige. The fact that this is a state visit is very important to them.”
Huntsman described the China-U.S. relationship as being “like physics” — “for every action by the United States, there’s a commensurate reaction by China.”
Not only would such a tactic prompt the Chinese to cancel any number of ongoing political, military and economic negotiations, thus scuttling progress on the very issues Walker is worried about, it might lead Chinese leaders to cozy up to another world power instead, like Russia (another favorite GOP boogeyman), the former ambassador said.
Within GOP campaign circles, Walker’s comments didn’t go down well, either. “When you call for something that has absolutely 0.0 percent chance of happening … it looks a little amateurish,” one Republican political adviser said.
A State Department official said it could find “no records of a state visit being canceled by the U.S. in the modern era.”
Walker’s campaign pointed out that the governor, who has little foreign policy experience and once compared labor union activists to Islamic State extremists, has aired concerns for months about China on a range of subjects. Walker, who Democrats noted led a trade mission to China in 2013, has characterized China as neither friend nor foe, but rather a “strategic competitor.”
“Rather than high honors and an unnecessary ceremony for President Xi, President Obama should be focused on real engagement,” Walker spokeswoman AshLee Strong said, adding, “Holding China accountable for its egregious actions doesn’t negate the importance of trade.”
Several other Republican candidates piled on China in the wake of Monday’s stock market plunge.
Trump, who already has bashed Mexico over illegal immigration this campaign, warned that the U.S. and Chinese economies are too intertwined and Xi deserves no more than a Big Mac (which also probably wouldn’t go over well protocol-wise). New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie blamed Obama for letting the U.S. become too in debt to China. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee tweeted: “It’s time to build America’s economy, not China’s or Mexico’s, & quit importing cheap labor & exporting jobs overseas.”
But by midweek, the stock market had rallied, showing how catchy soundbites on the presidential primary trail do little to capture the scope and complexity of China’s economic influence.
In theory, Republicans could use the topic of China to their advantage because “Obama has been seen to have been weak in this area,” said John Lee of the conservative Hudson Institute.
“The problem for the Republicans is that [Democratic] front-runner Hillary Clinton is seen as an effective hawk on China by many of the voters during her time as secretary of state,” Lee added. “Indeed, Obama suffers by comparison with Clinton on this issue. Hence, the Republicans have to show that they know how to be tough on China but will be a steady and firm hand at the same time — rather than volatile and reckless on the issue.”
As of now, the Obama administration has no intention of canceling Xi’s visit. Officials say the best way to make inroads with the Chinese is to keep talking to them, and they have noted that Xi’s visit will offer a chance for both countries to tackle vexing disputes, including cyberattacks.
When asked about Walker’s comments on Tuesday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said: “The value and importance of engagement has been recognized not just by this administration, but by administrations of both parties, and I actually think by governors of both parties in a range of states who have similar engagements with their counterparts in China.”
Both Rubio and Walker will be speaking in Charleston, South Carolina, at around the same time Friday.
Rubio, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has styled himself as a hawk on international affairs, and he’s frequently targeted China, including its human rights record. Earlier this summer, the Florida senator argued that the U.S. should consider sanctions to stop China’s alleged cyberattacks. His speech is supposed to be China-specific.
Walker’s speech focuses heavily on terrorism and the Middle East — in excerpts released by his campaign, he says "radical Islamic terrorists are agents of pure evil" and promises to defeat them — but after his remarks earlier this week, Chinese officials will no doubt pay attention to what he says.
Still, they’re probably not taking any of the 2016ers seriously just yet.
“Top U.S.-watchers in Beijing are pretty savvy,” said Melanie Hart, director for China policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “When election season comes around, they expect to hear a wave of extreme comments from presidential candidates trying to prove they are tough on China. Beijing fully understands that election rhetoric does not reflect how a candidate would approach China once in office.”
GOP hopefuls are bashing China ahead of next month’s state visit.
By Nahal Toosi
GOP presidential candidates have a new country to bash: the People’s Republic of China.
This week’s Chinese stock market crash — and the resulting turmoil in U.S. markets — prompted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to demand the White House cancel next month’s state visit by China’s president. Donald Trump said he’d treat the Chinese president to McDonald’s instead of a fancy dinner.
There’s likely more China-bashing in the works: On Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio and Walker will deliver dueling foreign policy speeches in South Carolina that in Rubio’s case will focus primarily on the communist-led state.
But while scapegoating Beijing and its questionable economic policies may seem like an appealing campaign tactic, China specialists — including many in the GOP — warn that Republicans run the risk of looking ignorant about U.S.-Chinese ties.
“Welcome to the most complex and challenging relationship of the 21st century,” said Jon Huntsman, a former GOP White House contender and ex-ambassador to China who was once mocked for speaking Chinese during a debate. “It’s foolhardy to think that you can just wave off the work of the China-U.S. relationship for political purposes, but it’s also no surprise that in primary season people make such statements. You want to be seen as a tough guy on the world stage.”
To be fair, China gives White House hopefuls lots of material for a tough-guy routine.
Beijing’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea, its suspected role in cyberattacks on the U.S. and its dismal human rights record are just a few areas already seized upon by Republicans (and some Democrats) for criticism. China’s currency policies have long frustrated the United States in particular, and its increased military spending has led to wariness around the world.
Still, bullying the world’s most populous country isn’t a workable policy prescription, former U.S. officials and other China experts say. Neither is isolating it.
Take, for example, Walker’s call for President Barack Obama to call off Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit, an affair likely to be lavish and, as is tradition, include an elegant dinner, visits to cultural landmarks, a 21-gun salute and an exchange of gifts.
Walker said Obama should show “backbone” and get down to “serious work” with China instead of “pomp and circumstance.” Analysts said those comments foolishly dismiss the high value Beijing places on diplomatic protocol.
“Scott Walker is not ready for prime time,” said Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “The one thing that China really cares about is prestige. The fact that this is a state visit is very important to them.”
Huntsman described the China-U.S. relationship as being “like physics” — “for every action by the United States, there’s a commensurate reaction by China.”
Not only would such a tactic prompt the Chinese to cancel any number of ongoing political, military and economic negotiations, thus scuttling progress on the very issues Walker is worried about, it might lead Chinese leaders to cozy up to another world power instead, like Russia (another favorite GOP boogeyman), the former ambassador said.
Within GOP campaign circles, Walker’s comments didn’t go down well, either. “When you call for something that has absolutely 0.0 percent chance of happening … it looks a little amateurish,” one Republican political adviser said.
A State Department official said it could find “no records of a state visit being canceled by the U.S. in the modern era.”
Walker’s campaign pointed out that the governor, who has little foreign policy experience and once compared labor union activists to Islamic State extremists, has aired concerns for months about China on a range of subjects. Walker, who Democrats noted led a trade mission to China in 2013, has characterized China as neither friend nor foe, but rather a “strategic competitor.”
“Rather than high honors and an unnecessary ceremony for President Xi, President Obama should be focused on real engagement,” Walker spokeswoman AshLee Strong said, adding, “Holding China accountable for its egregious actions doesn’t negate the importance of trade.”
Several other Republican candidates piled on China in the wake of Monday’s stock market plunge.
Trump, who already has bashed Mexico over illegal immigration this campaign, warned that the U.S. and Chinese economies are too intertwined and Xi deserves no more than a Big Mac (which also probably wouldn’t go over well protocol-wise). New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie blamed Obama for letting the U.S. become too in debt to China. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee tweeted: “It’s time to build America’s economy, not China’s or Mexico’s, & quit importing cheap labor & exporting jobs overseas.”
But by midweek, the stock market had rallied, showing how catchy soundbites on the presidential primary trail do little to capture the scope and complexity of China’s economic influence.
In theory, Republicans could use the topic of China to their advantage because “Obama has been seen to have been weak in this area,” said John Lee of the conservative Hudson Institute.
“The problem for the Republicans is that [Democratic] front-runner Hillary Clinton is seen as an effective hawk on China by many of the voters during her time as secretary of state,” Lee added. “Indeed, Obama suffers by comparison with Clinton on this issue. Hence, the Republicans have to show that they know how to be tough on China but will be a steady and firm hand at the same time — rather than volatile and reckless on the issue.”
As of now, the Obama administration has no intention of canceling Xi’s visit. Officials say the best way to make inroads with the Chinese is to keep talking to them, and they have noted that Xi’s visit will offer a chance for both countries to tackle vexing disputes, including cyberattacks.
When asked about Walker’s comments on Tuesday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said: “The value and importance of engagement has been recognized not just by this administration, but by administrations of both parties, and I actually think by governors of both parties in a range of states who have similar engagements with their counterparts in China.”
Both Rubio and Walker will be speaking in Charleston, South Carolina, at around the same time Friday.
Rubio, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has styled himself as a hawk on international affairs, and he’s frequently targeted China, including its human rights record. Earlier this summer, the Florida senator argued that the U.S. should consider sanctions to stop China’s alleged cyberattacks. His speech is supposed to be China-specific.
Walker’s speech focuses heavily on terrorism and the Middle East — in excerpts released by his campaign, he says "radical Islamic terrorists are agents of pure evil" and promises to defeat them — but after his remarks earlier this week, Chinese officials will no doubt pay attention to what he says.
Still, they’re probably not taking any of the 2016ers seriously just yet.
“Top U.S.-watchers in Beijing are pretty savvy,” said Melanie Hart, director for China policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “When election season comes around, they expect to hear a wave of extreme comments from presidential candidates trying to prove they are tough on China. Beijing fully understands that election rhetoric does not reflect how a candidate would approach China once in office.”
Hope may die last, but Greed Dies Hard...
Greed Dies Hard in a Poisoned Land
by William Rivers Pitt
When Arizona Sen. John McCain met with the Navajo Nation’s tribal government earlier this month at their capital in Window Rock, Arizona, after arriving in a big black SUV, he believed he would be spending the day observing the commemoration of Code Talkers Day. This was not the case. A group of Navajo activists, incensed at the damage done to the Animas River by a toxic chemical spill from an abandoned mine, confronted the senator. Rather than address their concerns, McCain scuttled out a side door, dove into his SUV and sped down the road with the activists sprinting after him shouting, “Get off our land!”
Activists from the Navajo Nation are furious over the Animas River spill, and for good damn reason. The EPA, while attempting to evaluate the toxicity of the long-abandoned Gold King mine, inadvertently released three million gallons of hideously polluted water into the river, turning it a sickly orange color. The lead level of the released water was at least 12,000 times higher than normal, and also contained extremely high levels of beryllium, mercury, cadmium, iron, copper, zinc and arsenic. The people of the Navajo Nation rely on the river for drinking water, farming, livestock and medicine. It is a lifeline, and now it is dangerous to the touch.
The impact of the spill is not just being felt by the people of the Navajo Nation. That three million gallon orange slick of poison wended its way down the Animas River for some 300 miles until it arrived at and entered Lake Powell, a large reservoir that feeds into the Colorado River, and is a source of drinking water for many cities in the Southwest, including Las Vegas. The EPA and other government agencies are desperately deploying a “Be calm, all is well” argument, but a “team” has been formed to monitor the ongoing damage. Cold comfort indeed.
Also this month, a chemical spill on the south side of Terre Haute, Indiana, had residents fleeing with the taste of acid in their mouths and a harsh burning sensation in their throats and lungs. The Hydrite Chemical Company managed to spill an unknown quantity of sulphur dioxide. However much it was, it was enough to cause an evacuation, and residents near the spill were not allowed to return to their homes for several days.
Spectators at a local racetrack ran away with clothes over their faces to try and staunch the burning once it started to settle in. Some 20 people were reportedly hospitalized, and first responders on the scene were scrubbing down the affected on large blue mats. Sulphur dioxide is the base chemical in the making of sulfuric acid, and is also used in the processing of metal. It is profoundly toxic in every respect, a fact Terre Haute has learned the very, very hard way.
Back east in North Carolina, researchers and engineers at UNC-Charlotte are scrambling to figure out a way to properly deal with 264 billion pounds — that’s 264,000,000,000 pounds, for clarity — of highly toxic coal ash which has accumulated in the state, all of which belongs to Duke Energy. The ash is currently being stored in 32 large holes in the ground, but these holes were constructed without liners, which means the poisons from this terribly bounty — chromium and arsenic top the list — are finding their way into the water table.
Maybe they can move it to safer, lined storage basins. Maybe they can utilize other chemicals to stop the threat of the current chemicals. The situation has become a political and industry football in North Carolina, and while the lawmakers butt heads with the business magnates, while the researchers and engineers labor to find a fix, the water around those 264 billion pounds of awful gets dirtier, and dirtier, and dirtier.
Despite all this, some 15 states are currently petitioning in Federal court to thwart President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to cut carbon emissions from power plants within the next 15 years. These states include West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Some of these states, such as West Virginia, are heavily reliant on the coal industry. Others simply don’t like the federal government.
The leadership in those states dismiss the hard reality of climate change, and likely won’t believe in it until the rain turns to ashes and the seas swallow the coasts … and perhaps, not even then. Greed dies hard, even when the rivers have turned to soot and the tap water catches fire.
All this, along with all the other spills and explosions, the ravages of fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline with its gruesome tar sands oil augurs toward an irrefutable truth: We are killing ourselves with coal, with chemicals, with carelessness and with greed. The people behind all this don’t care, and won’t care until they are made to. Navajo Nation activists literally chased a sitting US senator down the road and off their lands in an attempt to force the issue.
What will you do?
by William Rivers Pitt
When Arizona Sen. John McCain met with the Navajo Nation’s tribal government earlier this month at their capital in Window Rock, Arizona, after arriving in a big black SUV, he believed he would be spending the day observing the commemoration of Code Talkers Day. This was not the case. A group of Navajo activists, incensed at the damage done to the Animas River by a toxic chemical spill from an abandoned mine, confronted the senator. Rather than address their concerns, McCain scuttled out a side door, dove into his SUV and sped down the road with the activists sprinting after him shouting, “Get off our land!”
Activists from the Navajo Nation are furious over the Animas River spill, and for good damn reason. The EPA, while attempting to evaluate the toxicity of the long-abandoned Gold King mine, inadvertently released three million gallons of hideously polluted water into the river, turning it a sickly orange color. The lead level of the released water was at least 12,000 times higher than normal, and also contained extremely high levels of beryllium, mercury, cadmium, iron, copper, zinc and arsenic. The people of the Navajo Nation rely on the river for drinking water, farming, livestock and medicine. It is a lifeline, and now it is dangerous to the touch.
The impact of the spill is not just being felt by the people of the Navajo Nation. That three million gallon orange slick of poison wended its way down the Animas River for some 300 miles until it arrived at and entered Lake Powell, a large reservoir that feeds into the Colorado River, and is a source of drinking water for many cities in the Southwest, including Las Vegas. The EPA and other government agencies are desperately deploying a “Be calm, all is well” argument, but a “team” has been formed to monitor the ongoing damage. Cold comfort indeed.
Also this month, a chemical spill on the south side of Terre Haute, Indiana, had residents fleeing with the taste of acid in their mouths and a harsh burning sensation in their throats and lungs. The Hydrite Chemical Company managed to spill an unknown quantity of sulphur dioxide. However much it was, it was enough to cause an evacuation, and residents near the spill were not allowed to return to their homes for several days.
Spectators at a local racetrack ran away with clothes over their faces to try and staunch the burning once it started to settle in. Some 20 people were reportedly hospitalized, and first responders on the scene were scrubbing down the affected on large blue mats. Sulphur dioxide is the base chemical in the making of sulfuric acid, and is also used in the processing of metal. It is profoundly toxic in every respect, a fact Terre Haute has learned the very, very hard way.
Back east in North Carolina, researchers and engineers at UNC-Charlotte are scrambling to figure out a way to properly deal with 264 billion pounds — that’s 264,000,000,000 pounds, for clarity — of highly toxic coal ash which has accumulated in the state, all of which belongs to Duke Energy. The ash is currently being stored in 32 large holes in the ground, but these holes were constructed without liners, which means the poisons from this terribly bounty — chromium and arsenic top the list — are finding their way into the water table.
Maybe they can move it to safer, lined storage basins. Maybe they can utilize other chemicals to stop the threat of the current chemicals. The situation has become a political and industry football in North Carolina, and while the lawmakers butt heads with the business magnates, while the researchers and engineers labor to find a fix, the water around those 264 billion pounds of awful gets dirtier, and dirtier, and dirtier.
Despite all this, some 15 states are currently petitioning in Federal court to thwart President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to cut carbon emissions from power plants within the next 15 years. These states include West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Some of these states, such as West Virginia, are heavily reliant on the coal industry. Others simply don’t like the federal government.
The leadership in those states dismiss the hard reality of climate change, and likely won’t believe in it until the rain turns to ashes and the seas swallow the coasts … and perhaps, not even then. Greed dies hard, even when the rivers have turned to soot and the tap water catches fire.
All this, along with all the other spills and explosions, the ravages of fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline with its gruesome tar sands oil augurs toward an irrefutable truth: We are killing ourselves with coal, with chemicals, with carelessness and with greed. The people behind all this don’t care, and won’t care until they are made to. Navajo Nation activists literally chased a sitting US senator down the road and off their lands in an attempt to force the issue.
What will you do?
Women’s issues
Clinton: Republicans are like ‘terrorist groups’ on women’s issues
By Anne Gearan
Hillary Rodham Clinton likened Republican presidential candidates to fundamentalist terrorists with brutal or repressive views about women on Thursday, a significant escalation of her rhetoric about GOP positions on abortion that her campaign sees as a major vulnerability in the general election.
"Extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world," Clinton said. "But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States."
Clinton did not say which terrorist or militant groups she meant as a comparison. Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria have held women as sex slaves and chattel, while the Taliban in Afghanistan refused to allow girls to attend school.
"They espouse out of date and out of touch policies," Clinton said of the current Republican field. "They are dead wrong for 21st Century America. We’re going forward. We’re not going back."
Allison Moore, national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, slammed Clinton for her comparison.
"For Hillary Clinton to equate her political opponents to terrorists is a new low for her flailing campaign," Moore said. "She should apologize immediately for her inflammatory rhetoric."
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is seeking the GOP nomination, slammed the statement in a tweet.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) -- another presidential hopeful -- also criticized Clinton for launching "misleading" and "negative" attacks as her poll numbers have softened in the state.
Clinton has repeatedly criticized GOP presidential candidates and Republicans in Congress for seeking to end government funding for women's health services at Planned Parenthood, which also performs abortions. The Democrat has signaled that policies important to many women, including equal pay and abortion rights, will be central to her campaign.
The remarks on Thursday came as Clinton began expanding her campaign into key swing states where Democrats face high hurdles for 2016.
She held a "commit to vote" rally at Case-Western Reserve University, her Clinton’s first such event outside Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the states where the nation’s first presidential selection contests will take place early next year.
The Democratic front-runner has focused most heavily on Iowa since announcing her candidacy in April, largely in recognition of the damage done by her disappointing third-place finish there in 2008. She has spent nearly as much time in New Hampshire, going to one state or the other nearly every week since entering the race in April.
Clinton won delegate-rich Ohio that year but went on to lose the nomination to then-Sen. Barack Obama.
"I will never forget what Ohio did for me in 2008," Clinton said to cheers. "You lifted me up when I was down and out."
Clinton was the choice of 47 percent of Ohio Democratic voters in a Quinnipiac University poll of swing states released last week. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had 17 percent and Vice President Biden, who has not entered the race, had 14 percent.
The Quinnipiac survey in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, taken Aug. 7-18, shows Clinton looking somewhat weak. She is ahead of the pack for the Democratic nomination, but she pulls in less than a majority of Democratic voters.
"Other candidates may be out fighting for a particular ideology, but I’m fighting for you," Clinton told the crowd of about 1,800 who stood on a campus lawn.
Although she spent much of her speech criticizing Republicans, that remark also appeared to apply to Sanders. It is as close as Clinton has come to addressing the fervent progressive backing for Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, and his anti-Wall Street message.
The event was one of Clinton’s larger events. She drew more than 5,000 for her first big rally, in New York, in June, but has otherwise mostly held smaller gatherings with a town hall feel.
Attendees Thursday were given a card asking them to pledge to vote for Clinton. Copies of those cards will be mailed back to voters just before the March 15th Ohio primary. Clinton is hoping to secure the Democratic nomination that month, regardless of the challenge from Sanders and the potential for Biden to make a late entry into the race. Biden is expected to decide on a candidacy next month.
Former Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, who is running for Senate, addressed the crowd before Clinton arrived, and said Ohio will be pivotal in 2016. Republicans know that, and are eyeing super PAC spending in the state, he said.
Perhaps more troubling for Clinton than her showing against other n Democrats, the Quinnipiac survey showed she trails or runs closely with various GOP candidates in the general election ballot test in the swing states tested.
In Ohio, she runs narrowly in match-ups with Bush (41-39), Rubio (40-42) and Trump (43-38). Biden doesn’t fare much better against Bush (42-39) or Rubio (42-41) but is stronger against Trump (48-38).
In Ohio, majorities see Clinton unfavorably, say she is not honest and do not see her as empathetic. Her 36 percent favorability rating in the state roughly matches that of Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 39 percent rating.
By Anne Gearan
Hillary Rodham Clinton likened Republican presidential candidates to fundamentalist terrorists with brutal or repressive views about women on Thursday, a significant escalation of her rhetoric about GOP positions on abortion that her campaign sees as a major vulnerability in the general election.
"Extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world," Clinton said. "But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States."
Clinton did not say which terrorist or militant groups she meant as a comparison. Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria have held women as sex slaves and chattel, while the Taliban in Afghanistan refused to allow girls to attend school.
"They espouse out of date and out of touch policies," Clinton said of the current Republican field. "They are dead wrong for 21st Century America. We’re going forward. We’re not going back."
Allison Moore, national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, slammed Clinton for her comparison.
"For Hillary Clinton to equate her political opponents to terrorists is a new low for her flailing campaign," Moore said. "She should apologize immediately for her inflammatory rhetoric."
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is seeking the GOP nomination, slammed the statement in a tweet.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) -- another presidential hopeful -- also criticized Clinton for launching "misleading" and "negative" attacks as her poll numbers have softened in the state.
Clinton has repeatedly criticized GOP presidential candidates and Republicans in Congress for seeking to end government funding for women's health services at Planned Parenthood, which also performs abortions. The Democrat has signaled that policies important to many women, including equal pay and abortion rights, will be central to her campaign.
The remarks on Thursday came as Clinton began expanding her campaign into key swing states where Democrats face high hurdles for 2016.
She held a "commit to vote" rally at Case-Western Reserve University, her Clinton’s first such event outside Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the states where the nation’s first presidential selection contests will take place early next year.
The Democratic front-runner has focused most heavily on Iowa since announcing her candidacy in April, largely in recognition of the damage done by her disappointing third-place finish there in 2008. She has spent nearly as much time in New Hampshire, going to one state or the other nearly every week since entering the race in April.
Clinton won delegate-rich Ohio that year but went on to lose the nomination to then-Sen. Barack Obama.
"I will never forget what Ohio did for me in 2008," Clinton said to cheers. "You lifted me up when I was down and out."
Clinton was the choice of 47 percent of Ohio Democratic voters in a Quinnipiac University poll of swing states released last week. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had 17 percent and Vice President Biden, who has not entered the race, had 14 percent.
The Quinnipiac survey in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, taken Aug. 7-18, shows Clinton looking somewhat weak. She is ahead of the pack for the Democratic nomination, but she pulls in less than a majority of Democratic voters.
"Other candidates may be out fighting for a particular ideology, but I’m fighting for you," Clinton told the crowd of about 1,800 who stood on a campus lawn.
Although she spent much of her speech criticizing Republicans, that remark also appeared to apply to Sanders. It is as close as Clinton has come to addressing the fervent progressive backing for Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, and his anti-Wall Street message.
The event was one of Clinton’s larger events. She drew more than 5,000 for her first big rally, in New York, in June, but has otherwise mostly held smaller gatherings with a town hall feel.
Attendees Thursday were given a card asking them to pledge to vote for Clinton. Copies of those cards will be mailed back to voters just before the March 15th Ohio primary. Clinton is hoping to secure the Democratic nomination that month, regardless of the challenge from Sanders and the potential for Biden to make a late entry into the race. Biden is expected to decide on a candidacy next month.
Former Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, who is running for Senate, addressed the crowd before Clinton arrived, and said Ohio will be pivotal in 2016. Republicans know that, and are eyeing super PAC spending in the state, he said.
Perhaps more troubling for Clinton than her showing against other n Democrats, the Quinnipiac survey showed she trails or runs closely with various GOP candidates in the general election ballot test in the swing states tested.
In Ohio, she runs narrowly in match-ups with Bush (41-39), Rubio (40-42) and Trump (43-38). Biden doesn’t fare much better against Bush (42-39) or Rubio (42-41) but is stronger against Trump (48-38).
In Ohio, majorities see Clinton unfavorably, say she is not honest and do not see her as empathetic. Her 36 percent favorability rating in the state roughly matches that of Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 39 percent rating.
Fight For Gun Control
Father Of Murdered Journalist Blasts NRA, Promises Tireless Fight For Gun Control
by Jack Jenkins
The father of slain journalist Alison Parker, who was killed in a tragic shooting on live television Wednesday, is calling on politicians to stop being “cowards in the pockets of the NRA” and pass meaningful gun violence legislation.
Speaking Thursday morning on CNN, Parker reiterated a message he voiced last night on Fox news, when he said the murder of his daughter and cameraman Adam Ward should inspire action on gun control. But in addition to declaring plans to be a “crusader” against gun violence, he also blasted the influence of the National Rifle Association.
“Look, I’m for the Second Amendment,” he said. “But there has to be a way to force politicians, who are cowards in the pockets of the NRA, to come to grips and have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns. It can’t be that hard. And yet politicians from the local level, to the state level, to the national level — they sidestep the issue, they kick the can down the road. This can’t happen anymore.”
Parker went on to deconstruct an argument often voiced by NRA leadership: That arming more people will somehow prevent mass shootings.
“And I know the NRA, I know what their position is going to be,” he said. “I can hear it now. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, gee, well, if they were carrying, this never would’ve happened.’ Well I got news for you: If Alison or Adam had been carrying an AK-47 strapped around their waist, it wouldn’t have made any difference. They couldn’t have seen this thing coming. I don’t want to hear that argument from the NRA and you know that’s going to happen.”
“How many Newtowns are going to happen? How many Sandy Hooks? How many Alison’s is this going to happen to before we stop it?” he added, listing other recent mass shootings.
Parker also called on journalists to keep reporting on the issue of gun violence, telling the CNN reporter, “Alison was one of you guys.”
“I’m challenging you, the media, because, again — this is one of your own,” he said. “This has got to hit home for journalists. And if journalists are targets — and we’re not talking about someone going to Syria and being in the crosshairs of ISIL. We’re talking about two kids, two young people who were doing a benign story about a marina opening … and a crazy person with a gun shoots them.”
As the interview drew to a close, Parker was asked to reflect on his daughter’s life. Fighting back tears as he recounted how “everybody loved her,” he was quickly overcome with emotion.
“I just wish I could touch her soul right now,” he said. He then broke down into sobs, unable to continue.
by Jack Jenkins
The father of slain journalist Alison Parker, who was killed in a tragic shooting on live television Wednesday, is calling on politicians to stop being “cowards in the pockets of the NRA” and pass meaningful gun violence legislation.
Speaking Thursday morning on CNN, Parker reiterated a message he voiced last night on Fox news, when he said the murder of his daughter and cameraman Adam Ward should inspire action on gun control. But in addition to declaring plans to be a “crusader” against gun violence, he also blasted the influence of the National Rifle Association.
“Look, I’m for the Second Amendment,” he said. “But there has to be a way to force politicians, who are cowards in the pockets of the NRA, to come to grips and have sensible laws so that crazy people can’t get guns. It can’t be that hard. And yet politicians from the local level, to the state level, to the national level — they sidestep the issue, they kick the can down the road. This can’t happen anymore.”
Parker went on to deconstruct an argument often voiced by NRA leadership: That arming more people will somehow prevent mass shootings.
“And I know the NRA, I know what their position is going to be,” he said. “I can hear it now. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, gee, well, if they were carrying, this never would’ve happened.’ Well I got news for you: If Alison or Adam had been carrying an AK-47 strapped around their waist, it wouldn’t have made any difference. They couldn’t have seen this thing coming. I don’t want to hear that argument from the NRA and you know that’s going to happen.”
“How many Newtowns are going to happen? How many Sandy Hooks? How many Alison’s is this going to happen to before we stop it?” he added, listing other recent mass shootings.
Parker also called on journalists to keep reporting on the issue of gun violence, telling the CNN reporter, “Alison was one of you guys.”
“I’m challenging you, the media, because, again — this is one of your own,” he said. “This has got to hit home for journalists. And if journalists are targets — and we’re not talking about someone going to Syria and being in the crosshairs of ISIL. We’re talking about two kids, two young people who were doing a benign story about a marina opening … and a crazy person with a gun shoots them.”
As the interview drew to a close, Parker was asked to reflect on his daughter’s life. Fighting back tears as he recounted how “everybody loved her,” he was quickly overcome with emotion.
“I just wish I could touch her soul right now,” he said. He then broke down into sobs, unable to continue.
Climate action
Celebrating New Orleans, Obama urges climate action
By Gregory Korte
President Obama travels to New Orleans Thursday to celebrate the progress made in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina, but also to urge action on climate change to prevent and mitigate future weather events from devastating coastal communities.
Calling the 2005 hurricane "one of the seminal catastrophes of our lifetime," Obama told New Orleans television station WWL that the anniversary should focus national attention on the extreme weather events happening with increasing frequency as global temperatures rise.
"We all remember the searing images of the dome, and people trying to rescue others off rooftops. not only was it a terrible natural disaster, but it was a fundamental failure on the part of government to respond rapidly," Obama said.
Obama's visit to the New Orleans will highlight the city, state and federal efforts to bounce back after the hurricane. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the day trip was mainly "an opportunity to celebrate the remarkable revival of an American city."
Excerpts of Obama's speech released in advance by the White House show themes of resilience, rebuilding and renewal. "You are an example of what’s possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future," Obama will say. "That, more than any other reason, is why I’ve come back here today."
But there's also another reason for Obama's ninth visit to Louisiana as president. "One thing that the president will certainly talk about in New Orleans tomorrow is the need for the federal government, and in communities all across the country, to make the kinds of investments in resilience so that our communities can better withstand stronger tornadoes, more violent hurricanes, more widespread wildfires, those kinds of things," Earnest said.
Obama is in the midst of a climate tour that includes stops in Nevada, Louisiana and Alaska. He'll address an Arctic nations conference in Anchorage next week, and then visit remote native Alaskan villages. Obama said the back-to-back visits to the Gulf Coast and Alaska are connected: Melting polar ice is resulting in higher sea levels — with impacts felt in coastal areas like New Orleans.
"We can build great levees. We can restore wetlands. But ultimately, what we also have to do is make sure that we don't continue to see ocean levels rise, oceans getting warmer, storms getting stronger," Obama told WWL anchor Sally-Ann Roberts.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal urged Obama not to "stray into climate change politics" or "the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism."
"A lecture on climate change would do nothing to improve upon what we are already doing," Jindal, a Republican candidate for president, said in an open letter to Obama. "Quite the opposite; it would distract from the losses we have suffered, diminish the restoration efforts we have made, and overshadow the miracle that has been the Louisiana comeback."
By Gregory Korte
President Obama travels to New Orleans Thursday to celebrate the progress made in the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina, but also to urge action on climate change to prevent and mitigate future weather events from devastating coastal communities.
Calling the 2005 hurricane "one of the seminal catastrophes of our lifetime," Obama told New Orleans television station WWL that the anniversary should focus national attention on the extreme weather events happening with increasing frequency as global temperatures rise.
"We all remember the searing images of the dome, and people trying to rescue others off rooftops. not only was it a terrible natural disaster, but it was a fundamental failure on the part of government to respond rapidly," Obama said.
Obama's visit to the New Orleans will highlight the city, state and federal efforts to bounce back after the hurricane. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the day trip was mainly "an opportunity to celebrate the remarkable revival of an American city."
Excerpts of Obama's speech released in advance by the White House show themes of resilience, rebuilding and renewal. "You are an example of what’s possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future," Obama will say. "That, more than any other reason, is why I’ve come back here today."
But there's also another reason for Obama's ninth visit to Louisiana as president. "One thing that the president will certainly talk about in New Orleans tomorrow is the need for the federal government, and in communities all across the country, to make the kinds of investments in resilience so that our communities can better withstand stronger tornadoes, more violent hurricanes, more widespread wildfires, those kinds of things," Earnest said.
Obama is in the midst of a climate tour that includes stops in Nevada, Louisiana and Alaska. He'll address an Arctic nations conference in Anchorage next week, and then visit remote native Alaskan villages. Obama said the back-to-back visits to the Gulf Coast and Alaska are connected: Melting polar ice is resulting in higher sea levels — with impacts felt in coastal areas like New Orleans.
"We can build great levees. We can restore wetlands. But ultimately, what we also have to do is make sure that we don't continue to see ocean levels rise, oceans getting warmer, storms getting stronger," Obama told WWL anchor Sally-Ann Roberts.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal urged Obama not to "stray into climate change politics" or "the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism."
"A lecture on climate change would do nothing to improve upon what we are already doing," Jindal, a Republican candidate for president, said in an open letter to Obama. "Quite the opposite; it would distract from the losses we have suffered, diminish the restoration efforts we have made, and overshadow the miracle that has been the Louisiana comeback."
14th Amendment
The Anti-Birthright Citizenship Brigade
Meet the lawyers with an alternative history of the 14th Amendment.
By Pema Levy
For the past several years, the issue of birthright citizenship has slowly worked its way into the Republican agenda. Bills to end birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants have routinely cropped up in Congress. So-called "anchor babies" have become a political target on the right. But now, thanks to GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump's call to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, the issue is front and center, forcing the other 16 Republican candidates to make an uncomfortable choice: support rolling back the 14th Amendment, which granted equal rights to former slaves after the Civil War, or look weak on unauthorized immigration.
Enter John Eastman and Lino Graglia, two conservative constitutional scholars offering the Republican candidates a third option: an alternative history of the 14th Amendment. In their telling, the amendment was never intended to grant citizenship to the children of undocumented people. In other words, Trump and those who agree with him are not calling to repeal the 14th Amendment. They are calling to restore it.
"I don't think they have American citizenship," Trump said last week, referring to the children of undocumented immigrants. "And if you speak to some very, very good lawyers…you're going to find they do not have American citizenship."
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has cozied up to Trump as the real estate mogul has risen in the polls, is also touting this view. Back in 2011, Cruz said arguments like those put forward by Eastman and Graglia "are not very good.” But this week he walked that back, telling Fox News host Megyn Kelly that there are "serious legal scholars" on both sides of the issue, and that he wants to end birthright citizenship by any means possible.
Eastman says interest in the issue has recently taken off. "Every time I hang up the phone, another one rings," he says. "It's reporters, it's public policy shops." Trump, he says, has not called.
"I'm grateful to him for raising [birthright citizenship] and making it popular," Graglia says of Trump.
A central tenet of Eastman and Graglia's case hinges on the language of the 14th Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." The common understanding of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was that it was a narrow carve-out for the children of diplomats, enemy combatants on US soil, and American Indian tribes. But according to Eastman, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that in addition to being born in the United States, a child must have at least one parent who owes allegiance to the US government by being a permanent legal resident.
To back up this claim, Eastman and Graglia point to the congressional record in the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment was debated, particularly the discussion of whether members of Indian tribes were included. (Congress gave American Indians birthright citizenship by statute in 1924.) But that ignores what many legal scholars believe is a clear record indicating the opposite. For instance, when one senator asked during the writing of the Citizenship Clause whether "it will not have the effect of naturalizing the children of the Chinese and Gypsies born in this country," the response from a supporter of the clause was, "Undoubtedly."
Conservative media outlets have publicized the ideas of Eastman, Graglia, and a handful of other legal scholars. Talk radio host Mark Levin expounded on it on his show. National Review's Andrew McCarthy recently wrote that Graglia "was clearly right that the Fourteenth Amendment, far from compelling the grant of birthright citizenship, is better understood as denying it." The conservative magazine has made it a subject of debate, first publishing an article by conservative lawyer John Yoo supporting birthright citizenship, then one by Eastman defending his position. The Daily Caller ran an article on Graglia's argument titled, "University Chair Makes Pretty Convincing Argument Against Constitutionality of Birthright Citizenship."
In April, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security held its first hearing in 10 years on birthright citizenship, where Eastman and Graglia explained their interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va), declared that the question of whether the crafters of the amendment intended to include the children of unauthorized immigrants is "far from settled," and that "in any event, we must still determine if it is the right policy for America today."
Though the other GOP presidential candidates have not embraced Graglia and Eastman's specific ideas, the list of those who support birthright citizenship (Jeb Bush, George Pataki, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and Mike Huckabee) is shorter than the list of those open to amending it (Trump, Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Lindsay Graham, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, and Chris Christie). In 2011, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), co-sponsored a bill to change the Citizenship Clause, saying in a statement that it was incorrect to assume the "the 14th Amendment confers birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, either by its language or intent." Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wobbled on the issue for a week before announcing, "I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other." Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry shrugged off the issue as "inconsequential" compared with the task of securing the border.
Eastman and Graglia, however, may not be the best proponents of their theory. Both have a history of controversial comments and opinions that make them easy prey for Democrats. Eastman, a professor at Chapman University School of Law in California, is the chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that fought bitterly against same-sex marriage, and he once equated homosexuality with "barbarism." Graglia, of the University of Texas at Austin's law school, is a longtime opponent of affirmative action and busing programs. His comment in 1997 that black and Hispanic students "are not academically competitive with whites" earned him the moniker "the most controversial law professor in America." At April's hearing, instead of inquiring about Graglia's views on the Citizenship Clause, Democrats on the committee instead grilled him on these past statements and entered old articles about them into the record. For a Republican Party that hopes to appeal to Hispanic voters in particular, Graglia may not be the best ambassador on the citizenship debate, which many already find offensive.
In recent years, the first people to introduce the idea that birthright citizenship is more limited than is commonly understood were two professors, Peter Schuck of Yale Law School and Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, who argued in a 1985 book that Congress could exclude the children of undocumented immigrants from automatic citizenship. While they hold to that belief today, they don't seem particularly pleased with the Pandora's Box they opened.
"This is just NOT an issue that should be occupying the country's attention at this moment, if ever," Smith said in an email. "We have far, far more important problems to deal with that we are not addressing, including mounting economic inequalities, persisting racial inequalities, environmental degradation, crumbling infrastructure, a crippled labor movement. That's why I rarely talk about the issue these days. I believe very strongly that our focus should be elsewhere."
Meet the lawyers with an alternative history of the 14th Amendment.
By Pema Levy
For the past several years, the issue of birthright citizenship has slowly worked its way into the Republican agenda. Bills to end birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants have routinely cropped up in Congress. So-called "anchor babies" have become a political target on the right. But now, thanks to GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump's call to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, the issue is front and center, forcing the other 16 Republican candidates to make an uncomfortable choice: support rolling back the 14th Amendment, which granted equal rights to former slaves after the Civil War, or look weak on unauthorized immigration.
Enter John Eastman and Lino Graglia, two conservative constitutional scholars offering the Republican candidates a third option: an alternative history of the 14th Amendment. In their telling, the amendment was never intended to grant citizenship to the children of undocumented people. In other words, Trump and those who agree with him are not calling to repeal the 14th Amendment. They are calling to restore it.
"I don't think they have American citizenship," Trump said last week, referring to the children of undocumented immigrants. "And if you speak to some very, very good lawyers…you're going to find they do not have American citizenship."
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has cozied up to Trump as the real estate mogul has risen in the polls, is also touting this view. Back in 2011, Cruz said arguments like those put forward by Eastman and Graglia "are not very good.” But this week he walked that back, telling Fox News host Megyn Kelly that there are "serious legal scholars" on both sides of the issue, and that he wants to end birthright citizenship by any means possible.
Eastman says interest in the issue has recently taken off. "Every time I hang up the phone, another one rings," he says. "It's reporters, it's public policy shops." Trump, he says, has not called.
"I'm grateful to him for raising [birthright citizenship] and making it popular," Graglia says of Trump.
A central tenet of Eastman and Graglia's case hinges on the language of the 14th Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." The common understanding of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was that it was a narrow carve-out for the children of diplomats, enemy combatants on US soil, and American Indian tribes. But according to Eastman, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that in addition to being born in the United States, a child must have at least one parent who owes allegiance to the US government by being a permanent legal resident.
To back up this claim, Eastman and Graglia point to the congressional record in the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment was debated, particularly the discussion of whether members of Indian tribes were included. (Congress gave American Indians birthright citizenship by statute in 1924.) But that ignores what many legal scholars believe is a clear record indicating the opposite. For instance, when one senator asked during the writing of the Citizenship Clause whether "it will not have the effect of naturalizing the children of the Chinese and Gypsies born in this country," the response from a supporter of the clause was, "Undoubtedly."
Conservative media outlets have publicized the ideas of Eastman, Graglia, and a handful of other legal scholars. Talk radio host Mark Levin expounded on it on his show. National Review's Andrew McCarthy recently wrote that Graglia "was clearly right that the Fourteenth Amendment, far from compelling the grant of birthright citizenship, is better understood as denying it." The conservative magazine has made it a subject of debate, first publishing an article by conservative lawyer John Yoo supporting birthright citizenship, then one by Eastman defending his position. The Daily Caller ran an article on Graglia's argument titled, "University Chair Makes Pretty Convincing Argument Against Constitutionality of Birthright Citizenship."
In April, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security held its first hearing in 10 years on birthright citizenship, where Eastman and Graglia explained their interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va), declared that the question of whether the crafters of the amendment intended to include the children of unauthorized immigrants is "far from settled," and that "in any event, we must still determine if it is the right policy for America today."
Though the other GOP presidential candidates have not embraced Graglia and Eastman's specific ideas, the list of those who support birthright citizenship (Jeb Bush, George Pataki, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and Mike Huckabee) is shorter than the list of those open to amending it (Trump, Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Lindsay Graham, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, and Chris Christie). In 2011, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), co-sponsored a bill to change the Citizenship Clause, saying in a statement that it was incorrect to assume the "the 14th Amendment confers birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, either by its language or intent." Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wobbled on the issue for a week before announcing, "I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other." Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry shrugged off the issue as "inconsequential" compared with the task of securing the border.
Eastman and Graglia, however, may not be the best proponents of their theory. Both have a history of controversial comments and opinions that make them easy prey for Democrats. Eastman, a professor at Chapman University School of Law in California, is the chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that fought bitterly against same-sex marriage, and he once equated homosexuality with "barbarism." Graglia, of the University of Texas at Austin's law school, is a longtime opponent of affirmative action and busing programs. His comment in 1997 that black and Hispanic students "are not academically competitive with whites" earned him the moniker "the most controversial law professor in America." At April's hearing, instead of inquiring about Graglia's views on the Citizenship Clause, Democrats on the committee instead grilled him on these past statements and entered old articles about them into the record. For a Republican Party that hopes to appeal to Hispanic voters in particular, Graglia may not be the best ambassador on the citizenship debate, which many already find offensive.
In recent years, the first people to introduce the idea that birthright citizenship is more limited than is commonly understood were two professors, Peter Schuck of Yale Law School and Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, who argued in a 1985 book that Congress could exclude the children of undocumented immigrants from automatic citizenship. While they hold to that belief today, they don't seem particularly pleased with the Pandora's Box they opened.
"This is just NOT an issue that should be occupying the country's attention at this moment, if ever," Smith said in an email. "We have far, far more important problems to deal with that we are not addressing, including mounting economic inequalities, persisting racial inequalities, environmental degradation, crumbling infrastructure, a crippled labor movement. That's why I rarely talk about the issue these days. I believe very strongly that our focus should be elsewhere."
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