Let’s balance the budget by raising taxes on working people!
Here’s another story to remind us how far the political/media culture of Georgia has fallen. In Wednesday’s AJC, political columnist Jim Galloway lionizes Republican state Rep. Chuck Sims for bucking his party’s anti-tax fundamentalism.
The most interesting point made by Galloway is how much rural areas rely on government jobs. UGA sociologist Doug Bachtel told him in a fifth of the jobs in Coffee County, where Sims lives, are in the public sector. And the portion is higher in other rural counties. In other words, for all their pull-yourself-by-the-bootstraps, cut-the-pork talk, rural Georgia politicians — and their constituents — feed at the trough more than the typical Atlantan.
So when the going gets tough, Sims — the “conservative” — turns out to be all for big government: He doesn’t want to see all those jobs cut to make up for the state’s $1-billion-plus budget shortfall. What’s his solution? Eliminate the sales tax on groceries! Read more
Newt’s pants are on fire! Not surprised, are you?
Here’s a point that shoots right into the split between left and right: 19 of the last 20 “Pants on Fire” ratings on PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter are held by rumors, errors and lies from the right.
In other words, the idea that “both sides do it” is a bit of a myth. There is no moral equivalence between one side lying 19 times as much as the other.
Right wingers will respond as they typically do: They will attempt to work the ref. They will claim that PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize winning project run by the St. Petersburg Times, is “biased.” But that simply doesn’t wash in this case. If anything, PolitiFact has bent over backwards to throw a harsh spotlight on misrepresentations from the left.
Case in point: The sole “Pants of Fire” rating for the left side out of the most recent 20. Read more
Top 5 tall tales by climate change deniers in 2009
t was a banner year for myth making about climate change. Despite mounting evidence that temperatures are rising, the deniers’ camp spun bigger, better and more believable tall tales than ever before.
And those stories worked like a charm in 2009. Amplified by broadcast bloviators and a compliant mainstream media, advocates for burying our collective head in the sand convinced millions of Americans that climate change isn’t happening, isn’t caused by people, or wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway.
Here are five of the top 10 tall tales in the 2009 climate change denier’s storybook.
Read the rest of my Media Mayhem column on climate change tall tales at the Mother Nature Network.
The top 9 non-climate-change eco-stories of 2009
My wife, my editor, my family, my dog — they all tell me I’m obsessed with climate change. (My best friend does, too, but I discount that opinion because he’s an oil prospector.)
Well, you know what. I pay attention to other stuff. And speaking on behalf of the climate change-obsessed, allow me to prove it. Here, as the year draws to a close, is my list of the top 9 environmental stories in 2009 that had absolutely nothing to do with climate change.
Read the rest of this week’s Media Mayhem column at Mother Nature Network.
Is AJC a climate change denial outfit?
The radical transformation of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from a force for progress and reason in Georgia to a pandering servant of what its editors apparently believe is its right-wing readership hit a new milestone today.
While the rest of the world — even Fox News! — has moved on to the U.N. climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, the AJC has pretty much ignored that historic event. Instead, it remains obsessed with a non-issue: the so-called “Climategate” “scandal,” which even some conservatives are beginning to acknowledge is overblown and inconsequential. Read more
Radio host: ‘My heart goes out’ to Huckabee
Four cops were shot to death last weekend in Seattle, allegedly by a man who’d been granted clemency in 2000 by Fox TV host and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee (over the objections of prosecutors) when he was governor of Arkansas.
The response from right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher? “My sympathy, my heart goes out to Mike Huckabee right now.”
Really, Mr. Gallagher? You heart Huckabee? What about the victims’ families?
My point isn’t that Huckabee must necessarily be hammered over an eight-year-old decision of his (which, granted, appears now to have been a bad one). It’s that people like Gallagher out to be called out on their hypocrisy: Did Gallagher say anything like that when Lee Atwater was savaging Michael Dukakis over Willie Horton to help get George H.W. Bush elected?
Georgia Tech prof engages skeptics on climate dispute
The last time Georgia Tech hurricane expert Judith Curry drew attention from the popular media she was a little miffed.
In 2005, Curry and a colleagues testified before a Senate committee on a study they’d authored, which found that global warming was making hurricanes stronger. An aide to Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., responded by accusing them of “espousing minority views that a vast majority of scientists dispute.”
Curry, who chairs Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was puzzled afterward that the press focused on the politics surrounding the aide’s outrageous comments rather than on the groundbreaking study, which after all was published only days after Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans. She still says climate-change deniers “slandered” and “libeled” her and her colleagues.
Now, however, Curry’s diving willfully into the eye of the media storm surrounding the politics of climate change — and she’s again drawn attention from national media…
See the rest of this article at my environmental website My Green ATL
‘Climategate’ — more bluster from deniers
There’s nothing people like more than a good fight. How else to explain that e-mails stolen from a climate research center in Great Britain warranted, in just a few days, more than 15,000 blog comments, wall-to-wall cable coverage and a front page article in the New York Times, while the most comprehensive review of actual climate change research since 2007 went virtually unnoticed?
Where the Hell is Smarmy, Ga.?
This just in from ... Smarmy, Ga.
There it was, right under the headline in the Wall Street Journal that said “Builders Downsize The Dream Home.” Dateline: “SMARMY, Ga.”
Wait a second. Smarmy? I’ve never heard of a Smarmy, Georgia. And, sure enough, there doesn’t seem to be such a town.
As the Nov. 13 article — and I might note, it’s a damn good article — makes clear, the dateline should have been Smyrna: The story focuses on Smyrna-based John Wieland Homes and other builders who are rethinking their McMansion-building habits now that it’s a bit more clear that most folks can’t afford McMansions.
Hmmm … smarmy. Webster’s offers up two definitions, neither of them very kind:
1. revealing or marked by a smug, ingratiating, or false earnestness <a tone of smarmy self-satisfaction — New Yorker>
2. of low sleazy taste or quality <smarmy eroticism>
With Smyrna’s transformation over the last couple of decades from white-flight haven to somewhat declining inner-suburb, one could argue that the city is traveling from the first definition to the latter.
It seems most likely, thought, that the typo didn’t hold any hidden meaning. I couldn’t get a hold of Michael M. Phillips, the writer, to find out how the error got into the paper. (he’s on assignment overseas). And a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman couldn’t tell me how it happened — only that the Journal ran a correction: “The Smyrna, Ga., dateline in this article was incorrectly given in some versions as Smarmy, Ga.”
My explanation: “SMARMY” seems just the word that might replace “SMYRNA” in a spell check. Doncha think?
If not, though — if these Yankees came down here and tried to call the good townspeople of Smyrna “Smarmy” on purpose — there will be Hell to pay! Hell to pay, I tell ya.
Much a-flu about something
Here’s this week’s Media Mayhem column on the Mother Nature Network.
Now, let’s see what happens when you suck up information on, say, the swine flu.
To read the rest, go to the Mother Nature Network.
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