Kansas Legislature Passes Discriminatory
Anti-Muslim Bill By Calling It A ‘Women’s Rights’ Issue

Frank Gaffney warning of Sharia

Oklahoma passed a Sharia ban by ballot in 2010, but that measure has been deemed facially unconstitutional by the courts because it specifically targets Muslims for discrimination. Because of Oklahoma’s experience, state legislatures are moving bills that are more oblique about their discriminatory intent. South Dakota, Louisiana, Arizona, and Tennessee have all passed laws that ban “foreign law in American courts” and don’t mention Muslims or Sharia by name.

Kansas’ proposed anti-Muslim law also similarly asserts it is about promoting “American law for American courts.” (Note: the Constitution already establishes this in its Supremacy Clause.) Kansas Republican state Sen. Chris Steineger noted, the measure was “presented” to him as a bill specifically targeting Muslims:

But Sen. Chris Steineger, R-Kansas City, said a marketing campaign by supporters of the bill inundated him with materials that “explain why sharia law is coming and Muslims are trying to take over America.”

“I thought that was quite ludicrous at the time, and I still do,” Steineger said. “I pointed this out, because this was not presented as protecting the Kansas Constitution. The proponents of this measure, clearly by the literature they gave me and by the video link they directed me to, they presented this as protecting us against sharia law. Despite the fact that this doesn’t mention sharia, that’s how this whole issue was presented.”

Indeed, Kansas was bombarded by anti-Sharia emails and letters from out-of-staters. The bill’s sponsors and advocates proclaimed that it was really about protecting “women’s rights.” The bill helps “women know the rights they have in America,” said sate Rep. Peggy Mast (R). “To me, this is a women?s rights issue,” said Sen. Susan Wagle (R). Nevermind that these same legislators have been engaged in a war against women’s health, Planned Parenthood, the right to choose, and so many other far more relevant “women’s rights” causes.

Right-wing legislators have been pushing Sharia bans across the country; roughly 20 other states are also considering similar legislation. The anti-Sharia legislative movement was spawned by David Yerushalmi, an influential Islamophobic lawyer who we profiled last year in Fear, Inc.

The anti-Sharia movement continues despite the fact that no evidence has been provided that there is any threat that a Sharia takeover is occurring. Kansas Republican state Sen. John Vratil “said he quizzed the bill’s supporters on when a Kansas court had ever based a decision on sharia law and had yet to be provided with an example.” As Vratil asserted, “Ladies and gentleman, this is a solution in search of a problem.” True, unless you are someone who views the increasing presence of Muslims in America as the problem.

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James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic
Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now

The response by NOAA’s Martin Hoerling to James Hansen’s recent op-ed — posted on this blog and DotEarth — does not reflect the scientific literature.

I’m traveling, so let me focus first on Hoerling’s incorrect statements about drought (and I’ll deal with extreme weather later). As readers know, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece on the threat posed by drought after they read one of my posts examining the latest science on prolonged drought and ?Dust-Bowlification.?

The Nature article, which is basically a review of recent drought literature, is here (subs. req?d). Most of the text is here.

The research I did for that article — and the comments of the expert reviewers I sent it to — is why I know Hoerling is quite wrong when he writes this:

In his recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Jim Hansen asserts:

?Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California?s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.?

He doesn’t define ?several decades,? but a reasonable assumption is that he refers to a period from today through mid-century. I am unaware of any projection for ?semi-permanent? drought in this time frame over the expansive region of the Central Great Plains. He implies the drought will be due to a lack of rain (except for the brief, and ineffective downpours)….

But facts should, and do, matter to some. The vision of a Midwest Dustbowl is a scary one, and the author appears intent to instill fear rather than reason.

That’s a very serious attack on Hansen — if it were true. But it isn’t, and it should be retracted.

The fact is that the recent literature examining warming-driven drought in America could not be clearer in warning about a ?semi-permanent? (or worse) drought in both the South West and the Central Great Plains and “More and more of the Midwest.” Here are two studies that lay things out starkly:

• Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ?Drought under global warming: a review? (2010)
• Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico” (2011)

I would also add the 2010, Environmental Research Letters article ?Characterizing changes in drought risk for the United States from climate change.?

And that’s not even counting the Journal of Geophysical Research study that Hansen himself co-authored in 1990, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” which projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

As an important aside, contrary to what Hoerling states, Hansen was not implying the drought will be due to lack of rain (by itself). Everyone seriously writing about warming-driven drought knows we are talking about a combination of factors, ones that I laid out in my Nature article:

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun?s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season.

Obviously, since Hansen coauthored an article titled, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” we know he understands the drought conditions are driven by more than precipitation changes. The whole point of that 1990 paper was to examine the impact of warming-driven evaporation on soil moisture and drought.

It is quite surprising that Hoerling doesn’t appear to know the drought literature given that, as Revkin notes, he “runs an effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assess the forces contributing to extreme weather events!”

Hoerling says it is reasonable to assume Hansen means “a period from today through mid-century.” Hansen says the “semi-permanent drought” will develop “over the next several decades.” That would clearly seem to mean that these conditions will evolve by just after mid-century, the 2050s and 2060s. This is the first period of time where aggressive action today could substantially change the projected climate.

Dai’s paper projects drought conditions over the Great Plains and Midwest. He is in the process of revising his analysis, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in Hansen’s time frame for the U.S.

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And this isn’t just Dai’s finding. Michael Wehner et al. find the drying has the same signature. The study is behind a firewall, but you can see a PDF of a  PowerPoint presentation here.

Of course, just because several models project this future doesn’t make it a certainty.  As I note in the article, “drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US Southwest and the drying seen at the global level⁷, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable.”

On the other hand, these models most certainly are not the worst-case scenario. Dai is modeling A1B (720 ppm), whereas we are on track for worse than that. A  plausible worst-case scenario is here (and below):  Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ?Hellish Vision? of 7°F (4°C) World ? Which We May Face in the 2060s!

Hansen’s use of the term “Dust Bowl” since that is the term widely used in the drought literature (see below). We are talking conditions that become as bad as the original Dust Bowl by mid-century and then get much, much worse for a long, long time. The Nature editors made repeated use of the term ?Dust-Bowlification,? and I was particularly delighted that one of the leading experts in the field that I sent the piece to, Jonathan Overpeck, also liked the term.

Indeed, Hoerling’s critique is really only about whether the semi-permanent drought conditions will extend outside the U.S. SW to include most of Northern U.S. great plains. The literature is very clear that the Southwest is very likely headed for Dust Bowl conditions:

• In 2007, Science (subs. req?d) published research that ?predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest? — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. And they were also only looking at a 720 ppm case.
• In December 2008, the Bush Administration quietly released a US Geological Survey stunner: SW faces ?permanent drying? by 2050, which found:

The serious hydrological changes and impacts known to have occurred in both historic and prehistoric times over North America reflect large-scale changes in the climate system that can develop in a matter of years and, in the case of the more severe past megadroughts, persist for decades. Such hydrological changes fit the definition of abrupt change because they occur faster than the time scales needed for human and natural systems to adapt, leading to substantial disruptions in those systems. In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.

• NOAA: Climate change ?largely irreversible for 1000 years,? with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.  This January 2009 PNAS paper finds

… the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop….   Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ?dust bowl? era

So again, the ‘debate’ such as it is, is how far into the northern US Great Plains and Midwest these Dust Bowl conditions will extend — and that’s without even considering the impact of the increasingly early loss of the winter snowpack, which most of these studies don’t even model. Since the recent literature suggests the droughts will extend that far, Hansen’s warning is justified by the literature.

And Hansen’s use of the phrase “semi-permanent” is fully warranted.  Given that the drought conditions just keep getting worse and worse as long as we keep warming –  and are ?largely irreversible for 1000 years? (according to a NOAA-led paper), “semi-permanent” seems like a rather mild word.

Given how catastrophic it  to the nation and the world if our breadbasket were indeed hit by these conditions, Hansen’s warning seems fully justified and Hoerling’s response does not.

Finally, it’s always worth repeating that much of  human behavior and government policy is driven by the desire to avoid it worst-case scenarios,  which is why we have fire insurance and catastrophic health insurance — and a military budget equal to that of the next 16 countries combined.

In we look at the plausible worst case for climate, we get both continuing high levels of emissions and high carbon-cycle feedbacks.  That possibility was discussed in a Royal Society Special Issue on a 7°F (4°C) World, which notes ?In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.?

This would be the worst-case for the 2060s, but is in any case, close to business as usual for 2090s:

This is indeed 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic. The drought conditions that would be created by such warming over most of the central and western U.S. are beyond imagining.

And there is every reason to believe that the earth would just keep getting hotter and hotter:

• Science stunner ? On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter:  Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 ?may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models?

Indeed, Steve Easterbrook?s post ?A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment? shows that for the scenario where there is 9°F warming by 2100, you get another 7°F warming by 2300.  Of course, folks that aren?t motivated to avoid the civilization-destroying 9°F by 2100 won?t be moved by whatever happens after that.

So if folks want to quibble about whether the semi-permanent Dust Bowl that the SouthWest is headed to by mid-century might not spread to the northern U.S. Great Plains for, say, another few decades, well, I must say they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

How many major scientific articles have to be published before people realized that our current emissions path we are simply headed towards  self-destruction of modern civilization, where feeding 9 billion people will be exceedingly problematic to say the least.

Related Post:

• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security

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Even Tony Perkins Thinks Rand Paul’s
Anti-Gay Joke Was Unacceptable

Speaking at a Christian conservative group in Iowa on Friday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made an anti-gay joke at President Obama’s expense: ?Call me cynical, but I wasn?t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer.? On Face the Nation this morning, anti-gay activist Tony Perkins was asked to comment on Paul’s joke, and he practically leaped out of his skin to distance himself from the senator:

I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. I don’t think this is something we should joke about. Ah, we’re talking about individuals who feel very strongly one way or the other, and I think we should be civil, respectful, allowing all sides to have the debate…but I think this is not something to laugh about, to poke fun of other people about.

Watch it:

On Meet the Press, RNC Chair Reince Priebus similarly refused to defend Paul. “I don’t know what he meant by that,” Priebus said.

This is hardly the first time Sen. Paul found himself so far out of a limb that even leading conservatives had to distance themselves from him. Last year, Paul came out against the nearly fifty year-old federal ban on whites-only lunch counters — claiming that permitting racial segregation is the “hard part of believing in freedom.” Even Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) disagreed with Paul on this point.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Perkins, of all people, felt the need to distance himself from Paul on a gay rights issue. Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council which was labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He’s blamed gay people for everything from undermining “military security,” to shrinking the economy, to actively trying to “recruit” high school students into a gay “lifestyle.” He once accused a jelly bean manufacturer of “sexualizing candy,” and he’s praised discredited “ex-gay” therapies for rescuing a woman from gay “bondage.”

And even that guy thinks Mr. Paul’s a little too disrespectful towards gay people and their allies.

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Andrew Sullivan: 'I Never Understood The Power of
a President's Words Till That Day'

Click here to view this media

Andrew Sullivan articulates beautifully what it means to have the President of the United States say there is no difference between the two of them, that they are equals, that Sullivan and by extension, the LGBT community as a whole, are not outsiders.

I had someone ask me via email this week how I could possibly defend President Obama's Christianity in light of his endorsement of marriage equality. The exact questions were:

Can you reconcile, using scripture, Christianity with same sex marriage? This is not an issue on which a Christian can ride the fence because God calls unnatural affections an abomination. What do you say?

My answer is that I absolutely can reconcile it with Scripture. As Stephen Colbert highlighted this week, the Bible says nothing about marriage equality. It does have plenty to say about what we're supposed to be doing, but says nothing about passing judgment on our brothers and excluding them or hurting them based on our differences. It says nothing about barring people from access or shoving them into an exclusionary category, but does say that as far as it is possible, to live in peace with one another, to love one another, to treat others as I want to be treated and to care for the least among us as if they were our brothers and sisters.

Andrew Sullivan's moving answer to Chris Matthews' question just affirms that for me. I'd like to think I spent my time on this planet doing good for others, not pushing them into categories that stigmatize and exclude them.

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There is nothing "free" about the market

By @TedFrier

The free market is just a tool. Within limits, it allocates economic resources and rewards more quickly and more efficiently than human beings are able to do operating in some centralized bureaucracy where every decision must be consciously made by a finite group of men and women.

But in an important essay today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explains how The Free Market has also become a religion, embraced by the narrow plutocracy who benefit most from the market's undemocratic and anti-egalitarian decisions and because the purportedly neutral and impartial market provides after-the-fact "moral" legitimacy to economic outcomes that we already know can be manipulated by insiders with economic and political power.

Reviewing a new book by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Friedman quotes the author when he points out that over the last three decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, America has "drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society" in which everything is up for sale, including the values that govern "every sphere of life."

Some of the examples Friedman offers are trivial, if offensive: the Russian rocket blasted into space with a Pizza Hut logo emblazoned on its side; the deal New York Life Insurance has with Major League Baseball wherein play-by-play announcers must recite every time a runner slides safely into home plate: "Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life;" and even the elementary schools that are getting into the act by courting corporate sponsorship, such as the New Jersey school whose "ShopRite of Brooklawn Center" made it the first public school in America to rename a gym in exchange for a corporate donation, in this particular case $100,000 from the grocery chain giant.

Why should we worry about this trend, asks Friedman? "Because market values are crowding out civic practices."

When public schools support commercial advertising "they teach students to be consumers rather than citizens," says Friedman. "When we outsource war to private military contractors, and when we have separate, shorter lines for airport security for those who can afford them, the result is that the affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public spaces that forge a sense of common experience and shared citizenship get eroded."

The seamless equating of free markets with the public good - and with democracy -- that is now such an automatic part of Republican Party rhetoric and ideology is an invitation to the erosion of those cultural values and habits of mind upon which a democratic society rests, as any conservative who has not already sold their soul to the New American Oligarchy will tell you.

"Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life, says Friedman, in what Professor Sandel calls "the skyboxification of American life."

Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, says Friedman, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. "At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart."

Exactly. The income gap between the top 1% and the middle class that is both steep and climbing is only the most obvious symptom of the fracturing and polarization of society along many other axises as well, which those who benefit from this status quo are loath to talk about as they try to intimidate with charges of "class warfare!" anyone who does.

"The great missing debate in contemporary politics," Sandel writes, "is about the role and reach of markets."

It is therefore not enough to say "let the markets decide," because given what we now know about the operations of markets and the ability of a few to manipulate those supposedly "free" markets to their own advantage, such thinking is an invitation to the dismantling of a republic in favor of rule by a few -- an oligarchy.

"Democracy does not require perfect equality," says Sandel, "but it does require that citizens share in a common life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good."

But maybe it's a sneering contempt for a shared national life, or even the common good, which explains why Republicans have elevated refusal to compromise into a political virtue or why Mitt Romney says openly: "I really don't worry about the poor."  


Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/KiVdF_kA8x0/there
-is-nothing-free-about-the-market

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The Incorrigibles

One of the things I like best about human beings is our persistent incorrigibility. Even when we don?t want to we often escape expert predictions of our behavior. Call it the human uncertainty principle. As soon as you know where we are you lose[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/zM07uOtPDHY/

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Who am I (80)

There?s more! You?ll find a collection of previously published Who Am I teaser images in our Who Am I Gallery. How many can you identify? Occasional Planet?s ?Who Am I? features people who have made important contributions to liberal thought, progressive politics, human rights, enlightened education, and ?small-d? democratic principles?both in the US and internationally. [...]Related posts:

1. Who am I? (32)
2. Who am I? (6)
3. Who am I? (9)

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That GOP Gay Marriage Memo

You may already have seen the following memo on the gay marriage issue from President Bush's 2004 pollster Jan van Lohuizen. I believe Josh Green was the first to publish it at Bloomberg. Others have picked it up since. It seems to have circulated[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/1QkCe5vC2eg/that_gop_gay_ma
rriage_memo.php

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Former Murdoch journalist: stories made up,
lived in culture of fear

Anyone who has been paying attention can't be surprised. The Rupert Murdoch empire has been bullying opponents for years so it's perfectly believable that they also bullied employees. The former Murdoch journalist raises a key point about the way Murdoch's News Corp is run. News Corp desperately needs to be investigated because there's too much smoke around its operations. The Guardian:A...

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Even Tony Perkins Thinks Rand Paul’s
‘Any Gayer’ Joke Was Unacceptable

Speaking at a Christian conservative group in Iowa on Friday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made an anti-gay joke at President Obama’s expense: ?Call me cynical, but I wasn?t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer.? On Face the Nation this morning, anti-gay activist Tony Perkins was asked to comment on Paul’s joke, and he practically leaped out of his skin to distance himself from the senator:

I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. I don’t think this is something we should joke about. Ah, we’re talking about individuals who feel very strongly one way or the other, and I think we should be civil, respectful, allowing all sides to have the debate…but I think this is not something to laugh about, to poke fun of other people about.

Watch it:

On Meet the Press, RNC Chair Reince Priebus similarly refused to defend Paul. “I don’t know what he meant by that,” Priebus said.

This is hardly the first time Sen. Paul found himself so far out of a limb that even leading conservatives had to distance themselves from him. Last year, Paul came out against the nearly fifty year-old federal ban on whites-only lunch counters — claiming that permitting racial segregation is the “hard part of believing in freedom.” Even Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) disagreed with Paul on this point.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Perkins, of all people, felt the need to distance himself from Paul on a gay rights issue. Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council which was labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He’s blamed gay people for everything from undermining “military security,” to shrinking the economy, to actively trying to “recruit” high school students into a gay “lifestyle.” He once accused a jelly bean manufacturer of “sexualizing candy,” and he’s praised discredited “ex-gay” therapies for rescuing a woman from gay “bondage.”

And even that guy thinks Mr. Paul’s a little too disrespectful towards gay people and their allies.

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