Month: June 2012

The denouement:

“That is false, in a variety of ways. I don’t believe that it’s substantively true,” Noam Scheiber, author of The Escape Artists, told TPM by phone Thursday morning.

On Wednesday Romney said President Obama and his aides believed the health care reform law would harm the recovery but pushed for it anyway, and sourced the argument to Scheiber’s book. But the claim is not true.

“There are a couple of claims wound up together there in Romney’s remarks,” Scheiber said. “One claim is that [Obama’s team] knew that the Affordable Care Act itself — something about the Act — would derail the recovery…. They do not believe that it’s substantively true. So it’s not something that they felt, and it’s not something I argue in the book.”

Will Romney retract? Will any journalist ask him to? I wouldn't hold my breath on either of those scenarios. The lie is dissected here.

There’s a vote in the swing state this fall legalizing pot. Could an Obama endorsement help him win re-election – or will he cautiously straddle this the way he did marriage equality for a while? James Higdon makes the case for boldness:

Pareene tears his hair out:

Let’s all agree to just not pretend the president made an "oral sex joke" at his gay fundraiser last night, because that’s stupid. It’s stupid, and most of the people with jobs as political reporters are at least literate, and understand that this thing did not happen. So don’t repeat it, or even write that "some say" they thought it maybe happened. This would’ve been fodder for one 200-word Wonkette post back in 2006, maybe.

David Biello freaks out about a new study linking global trade to species extinction:

The primary culprit in at least 30 percent of such looming extinctions, according to a new analysis published in Nature on June 7? Global trade. By linking the list of threatened species prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to a list of some 15,000 globally traded commodities as well as more than 5 billion supply chains—i.e. the route that takes rubber from a tree to your car’s tire—the authors of the study revealed that Americans, Europeans and Japanese are largely eating, drinking and wearing the primary causes of the sixth mass extinction in the planet’s history. That’s because palm oil plantations in Indonesia, mining in Madagascar and forestry in Papua New Guinea are providing the fundamental inputs of the global economy at the expense of a long list of animals, plants, fungi and microbes.

Why you should care (aside from the mass death of fuzzy, adorable animals):

[T]his loss of biodiversity has a whole slew of impacts, according the majority of scientific research published in the last 20 years. Losing species means environments that are less productive for life as a whole, less stable, and more likely to change in function (bye bye clean water). In fact, this loss of biodiversity may be the single largest environmental change we humans are foisting on our home planet, outpacing even climate change.

(Chart by the Center for Biological Diversity)

Nate Silver unveils his first election forecast. His model currently gives Obama just over a 60 percent chance of winning but "the edge could easily swing to Mitt Romney on the basis of further bad economic news":

The forecast currently calls for Mr. Obama to win roughly 290 electoral votes, but outcomes ranging everywhere from about 160 to 390 electoral votes are plausible, given the long lead time until the election and the amount of news that could occur between now and then. Both polls and economic indicators are a pretty rough guide five months before an election.

He believes that Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and Pennsylvania are the key states:

The model suggests that the campaigns might do best to concentrate their resources. As much as campaign operatives love to talk about how they are expanding the map, contemplating unusual parlays of states in which they reach 270 electoral votes, the election is very likely to come down to a mere handful of states. In many ways, the relative ordering of the states is more predictable than how the election as a whole will play out.

Guatape, Colombia, 12 pm

What Romney said:

A book that was written in a way that's apparently pro-President Obama, was written by a guy named Noam Scheiber and in this book he says that there was a discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country and they knew that before they passed it.  But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead.  The idea that they knowingly slowed down our recovery in order to put in place Obamacare, which they wanted and they considered historic but the American people did not want or consider historic, is something which I think deserves a lot of explaining, because I think the President’s responsibility is to put people back to work. To get people out of poverty and to help people have good jobs and have prospects for a brighter tomorrow.

Chait fisks:

Not only is it false for Romney to say Obama "knowingly slowed down our recovery," it’s not even true that Obama knowingly passed up a chance to accelerate the recovery. The notion that anybody in the administration believed that the health care law would actually slow down the recovery is complete fiction. It does not appear in the book anywhere and it’s pretty obviously untrue.

Earlier lies rounded up here. At this rate, Romney may beat Palin's record – but his lies are calculating. Hers were a function of being psychologically unbalanced.

The trailer for Django Unchained is finally out:

TNC says the film isn't for him:

It is not merely wrong to focus on the militarism of the Civil War because those who do so generally don't want to talk about slavery. It is wrong because such a focus says that the only thing important about war are those who carry the guns. But any serious investigation into slavery, and its violent end, reveal that to be false. Frederick Douglass standing up to his master and stomping a mud-hole in Covey the slave-breaker is iconic. His wife, Anna Murray-Douglass, risking her own freedom and her own life to facilitate his escape, is not.

Earlier thoughts from TNC here. Alyssa Rosenberg has mixed feelings:

The movie may turn out to be an exploration of how much Django enjoys the work he’s meant to do to earn his freedom, but there’s something uneasy about suggesting that slavery under one set of conditions is unbearable while under another it’s sort of awesome. But Django Unchained might be a more interesting movie if it explores what it means to hold a man hostage against his liberty, and what you’ll do to achieve it.

"There is no government that supports, or will support, settlements more than my government," – Benjamin Netanyahu, as quoted by his lead spokesman to Arab media.

Waldman warns that "if Romney wins he will be under enormous pressure to make sure that anyone he appoints will be not just conservative, but extremely conservative":

[I]f Mitt Romney were president and one of the four liberal justices stepped down, it would be the end of 5-4 decisions. It would also be the end of all the "What will Anthony Kennedy do?" discussions, since Kennedy won't matter much anymore. There would be five highly partisan, ideologically ambitious justices who would have the majority on every question that came before them. If Kennedy retired during a Romney presidency, we'd be left with many 5-4 decisions, but they'd all be decided in the conservatives' favor, and the effect would be the same.