More Irony, Oh Delicious Irony

Fans of irony, gather ‘round. For years Mitch McConnell railed at Harry Reid for his use of a parliamentary gimmick that allows the leader of the Senate to control which amendments get attached to which bills. Reid was, from the outset, in a constant battle with conservative Republicans to keep destructive tackons from undermining legitimate legislation and became a master of this move.

Those of us who are poker players know just how effective (and damaging) these inappropriate amendments can be. The infamous UIGEA that effectively shut down online poker in the US was the result of just one of these that snuck by. It got “glued” to the Safe Port bill that absolutely had to be passed — and at the very last moment before the Senate adjourned. Retrospective analysis discovered that only three (or perhaps four) senators even realized the rider was attached or understood that it would have the impact on online poker that it did. Their focus was on passing a bill designed to strength surveillance and defense of vulnerable ports and, of course, getting out of town. Online poker never even crossed anyone’s mind, except the DRB’s who slipped it in.

From the moment Reid took over, he was constantly on the watch for similar sneaky moves, and they showed up all the time, most frequently in the form of amendments to bills on education or transportation that would repeal Obamacare or weaken Social Security or strip away oversight of the EPA or the FDA. In fact, until he was replaced by McConnell after the 2014 elections he had used his power to snip off unwelcome amendments some 85 times, a record. McConnell never let him forget it and publicly assailed him every time he did it.

So what’s happened since McConnell took over as Majority Leader? Glad you asked. He’s actually been using the same legislative gambit at a rate higher than Reid and (and here’s the really amusing part) doing so because the same obstreperous right-wing nutballs that drove Reid to distraction are doing it to McConnell. The fact that he’s “their boy” has had no impact. In fact, recently the smartest crazy person in the Senate, Ted Cruz, publicly called McConnell “a liar” because he had presumably told Cruz that he wouldn’t let a particular bill come up for a vote without one of Cruz’s bizarro amendments attached and then did so.

The reason why the Senate doesn’t function is becoming ever clearer. It’s not a simple partisan issue with Republicans in a pitched battle with Democrats, which had been the common wisdom. It’s that the wackadoodle wing of the GOP is against everyone else and that includes their own party’s leadership.

I guess we need a new meaning for the acronym RINO.

Trump Dooms the GOP

The Donald has managed, in his inimitable way, to create the perfect storm for the GOP. The Republican establishment is freaking out over his antics like swiftboating McCain’s Vietnam experiences and issuing, seemingly daily, unfiltered statements on immigration, Mexicans, the treaty with Iran and religion.

They are doing what they’ve always done with someone who breaks rank: attack. Lindsey Graham called him a “jackass,” McCain accused him of “firing up the crazies” and Rick Perry issued a rare coherent statement condemning Trump as “a barking carnival act … a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.” Similar missiles were fired by Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio and many of the big-money folks who actually run the party.

They’re all wigging out because they see that he’s undermining their (mostly feeble) attempts to appear to be at least sane. But the truth is that Trump is saying loudly and often precisely what they all believe but won’t/can’t acknowledge for the simple reason that they know these attitudes do not go over well with the electorate.

Fascinatingly, it isn’t workin’. The more outrageous Trump’s statements become, the higher he goes in the polls. The more the GOP establishment tries to reign him in, the more the base embraces him.

Now I, you, we, all of us, know he’s not going to win the nomination. But he’s now in a really interesting spot, one we have not seen before.

(a) He’s popular enough that he is a force to be reckoned with.

(b) His adopted party (he used to support Democrats) hates him.

(c) He’s pissed to beat the band over the fact that the GOP insiders dismiss him and insult him.

(d) He’s threatened to bolt and run as a third party candidate if they don’t change their tune.

The intersection of these factors has become, for now at least, a nightmare for the Republican Party.

If the party insiders begin to moderate their stance on his candidacy and give him the kind of support they typically give front-runners, they run the risk of appearing to be embracing his positions or, worse, they could actually end up with him as the nominee.

But, of course, they cannot do this. Normally, legit candidates get money, advice, support and counsel from their national organization. If the RNC were to suddenly begin treating Trump as a serious potential nominee, they will draw the ire of the establishment candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, folks who actually have a legit shot at taking on Hillary. The firestorm within the party will be something to behold.

If they don’t, if they continue to attack him and try to marginalize him, Trump will do what he always does when folks won’t give him the backing he believes is his due. He will pick up his football and leave to play in a stadium he built down the street. He’ll run as a third party candidate.

Now, I, you, we, all of us, know he’s not going to win the presidency as a third party candidate. But he won’t care. His great joy will come from knowing he “fired” his own party, tossed Reince Preibus in the dumpster behind some building with “TRUMP” emblazoned on it. He will bask in the glow of the Hillary Clinton landslide that will result and know, with the certainty of a true believer, that he took down the Grand Old Party just because they snubbed him.

If you think this won’t happen here are the results of a recent poll:

Among likely voters asked to choose between Hillary and Jeb, she’s ahead 50% to 46% — a signficant but breachable gap.

With The Donald in there the numbers shift dramatically. Now, Clinton is backed by 46%; Jeb’s support drops to 30% and Trump garners 20%. Hillary jumps from being a 4 point favorite over Bush to holding an astonishing 16 point edge. Similar patterns would likely be seen with any of the other viable Republican candidates in there instead of Jeb.

If these folks end up voting for state and local candidates at anything like this ratio the Dems will probably take back both houses of Congress and win more than a few state houses.

The irony here is that, by insulting and denigrating Trump, the RNC has lost its negotiating position with him. The more they attack the more supporters he gains and the more they piss him off.  Right now Trump is acting like someone who’d be just pleased as punch to push the whole damn GOP over the cliff because they failed to stroke his ego.

Hillary’s got to be enjoying this little drama — while wondering whether Bernie really might make things difficult for her.

That Treaty with Iran: A Different Vision

Thinking about the Iran deal…. First thought is that, perhaps, just perhaps, everyone’s got it wrong. The folks who cut the deal are touting it as a near-ideal treaty that will keep communication channels open and prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons. The critics are slamming it as a terrible treaty that will just hand Iran a couple hundred billions zucchinis to funnel to terrorists and give them cover to build a bomb and nuke Tel Aviv or maybe Boston.

I have some heretical thoughts.

a. Iran doesn’t really want to have any nuclear capability. They never did.

b. Iran has no intentions of trying to build a bomb. They never did, it was all a charade.

c. Iran wants to be accepted into the circle of industrialized, modern countries.

d. Iran wants respect.

e. Iran wants to have those crushing economic sanctions lifted.

It would be utterly nonsensical for Iran to develop nuclear capability. What would Iran do with a bomb? Drop it on Israel? Ridiculous. Israel (and the US) would turn Iran into a radioactive wasteland in about two hours and, worse, we’d all end up in WW III.

The Iranians are not stupid and they are a proud people. They were once the cradle of civilization. The Persian Empire arched its wonder across all of the Middle East for centuries.

But one thing is clear. Every nation that has nuclear capability gets respect — whether they deserve it or not.

Iran has been using the threat of a nuclear weapon as a weapon. But not one that they can or will or would ever drop on anyone. It’s been a diplomatic weapon, to be used at the bargaining table. They’ve always been willing to give it up in a New York minute because its real role has been to function as a chit to be given up — in exchange for:

a. Respect

b. Lifting the sanctions.

So we have ourselves a wonderful moment, a magical moment: A Win-Win-Win situation.

Iran gets the sanctions lifted, shuts down a weapons program that they never really cared about (and was draining their treasury). The US and its allies get to crow about how they neutralized Iran’s dangerous march toward becoming a nuclear power. Netanyahu gets to throw another temper tantrum (they are getting boring — someone needs to tell him). Obama gets to take credit for cutting a deal that had more than a few others smoothing the way. The GOP gets to howl at the moon about how that secret Muslim in the White House is a wuss who is undermining the country.

And the sensible folks like you and me? I’m pleased as punch to see how a deal can be cut between a surprisingly large number of countries who have, in just the past century, flickered back and forth between best buds and mortal enemies.

I suspect that the key negotiators at the tables, late at night when others have wandered off to bed (or, more likely, a Gasthaus for this was, after all, Vienna), knew this, knew it all along. It was a charade. It wasn’t about some unusable bomb or nationalistic posturing or ideology or theology. It’s about respect and economic recovery.

Iran is/was Persia. It once stretched its vision across the world. It was the font of civilization. It would be pleased, thank you, if the rest of the western, industrialized world, were to acknowledge that past greatness, understand its current frustrations and see (it only takes a bit of empathy) that this treaty is the best damn thing that could happen to all of the countries involved.

And, oh yeah, Iran is Shite. The Islamic State is Sunni. Iran is actually our most important and effective ally in the Middle East right now. Keep that one in mind ….

APA and Torture - An Ugly Alliance: A Follow-up

In May I posted a critique of the American Psychological Association’s involvement with the Department of Defense and the CIA in suborning torture and engaging in various actions to cover up their collaboration. At the time the APA had finally, after being publicly criticized by many both within and outside the organization, called for an investigation and retained an independent firm to carry it out.

The report was released today. It finds that the APA did engage in virtually every horrific and unethical act that early investigations suggested they had. It can be found here.

I, and many of my colleagues, await the APA’s response. So far they’ve merely whitewashed things with an official apology. A more thorough assessment of their involvement is needed and, yes, heads should roll. Will that happen? Who knows….

Terminology in Science and Politics, a Case Study -- Climate Change

I just got back from a ten day sojourn in Las Vegas, my annual pilgrimage to the WSOP (as in World Series of Poker). The games were not good to me. But that’s okay. Poker is a game with significant variance and you just learn to live with the fluctuations.

But the focus today isn’t poker, it’s terminology, the words that are used in science and in political discourse. The stimulus was the Vegas, daily high temperature. It went over 110° F every day of my visit and managed to hit a stunning 115° one afternoon.

I don’t want to hear any nonsense about “dry heat” — 115° is brutal no matter how low the humidity. In fact, the low humidity did horrible things to my nasal passages which were in a desperate state to keep themselves from drying out and cracking.

During my stay there was more news about the ongoing drought in California which is now spreading to Oregon and Washington State, wildfires up and down the coast and ridiculously high temperatures in Vancouver, northern British Columbia and Alaska.

How should we describe these meteorological events? What words should be used? Are they evidence of “global warming” or “climate change?” Is it “anthropogenic” or “normal variation?” Are those who question the causes for these effects or even whether they are occurring at all “skeptics” or “deniers?”

The science is unambiguous. The climate is changing, and rapidly. The earth is warming and the impact of this can be seen in a wide variety of effects from shifting migration patterns of birds, northward drifting of species distribution, increases in CO₂ levels of the planet’s oceans which is having dramatic impact on fish, mollusks, coral and other marine species.

Severe weather events are increasingly common and variation of temperature and precipitation is rising dramatically across the planet. Icepacks are melting, glaciers receding and the long sought for “northern passage” over the pole is now there during the summer. These changes are also seen in subtle but potentially devastating effects like the pine bark beetle infestations that are destroying whole forests across Canada and the northern parts of the United States. The winters have become so warm that the beetle pupae survive in far greater numbers than in the past.

One of the reasons why these effects are not getting the attention they deserve in the press and in the halls of Congress is the unfortunate tendency for members of the media to use the term “global warming” which produces empty and mostly irrelevant arguments about whether temperatures today are higher than last year’s or “hockey stick” graphs, idiotic rants from brain dead morons like Rush Limbaugh whenever it snows in New York or empty claims that “gee, didn’t we think that things were cooling off just a decade or two ago?”

Local and global temperatures, when plotted over years and decades, always show variation. By focusing on these numbers the picture gets distorted — and this is an issue we cannot afford to let be distorted.

The problems are compounded by another unhappy lexicographic choice, to call those who question changing climate “skeptics.” They aren’t. They are “deniers.” Within the scientific community a skeptic is an honored soul. Skeptics might question the legitimacy of the experimental methods used in a study. They will inquire about interpretations of data and wonder about the explanatory reach of theoretical models. Skeptics ask hard questions about claims. A skeptic might question findings about IQ and race or want to probe deeply into claims made about novel drugs or the iffy arguments made by promoters of homeopathy. It’s all part of the scientific game. Skeptics keep things honest and above board.

Within the world of the earth scientists, within meteorology and geology there are virtually no skeptics for there is little to be skeptical about. The data showing rapid and worrisome climate change are overwhelming. Go here for a good overview of the scientific skeptics perspective.

There are a few deniers but they are a very small minority. Most deniers are simply ignorant (or Fox News watchers). The dangerous ones are those in Congress where, led by Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok) who has assured us that climate change cannot be real because God is protecting us and that the evidence for this can be found in the Bible (Genesis 8:22 is his favorite line — look it up if you feel you need to though it won’t help much in unpacking Inhofe’s peculiar form of logic). Inhofe apparently also thinks that an empty stunt like bringing a snowball into the Senate somehow negates all the data. Inhofe is not a “skeptic.” He is a “denier” and a look at who contributes to his campaigns and what state he represents will tell you why.

The take-home message is pretty straightforward. The climate is changing. A warming trend is part of it. FWIW, global mean temperature in 2014 was the hottest since record-keeping began. It beat out the previous high which was 2013 and the temperatures in 2015 look like they will be another record.

But warming is just part of the problem. Virtually every aspect of life will change in the coming years including distribution of species (many of who will die off), shifts in agriculture as weather patterns change and droughts occur where water was once plentiful and floods become common where they once were nonexistent. Weather variability goes up as global temperatures rise. Hurricanes, tornados, extreme snow falls, crushing heat waves all will occur with greater frequency than before.

Denying this reality is, literally, a crime against humanity and we better start using the right terminology to talk about this stuff because the problems will not go away just because some bozo from Oklahoma brings a snowball into the Senate.