Year: 2013

First, a low of sorts:

But more to the point, Christopher Burt reviews the extreme temperatures recorded last year:

The Weather Underground climate extremes database follows 298 significant city sites in the U.S. which represent all climate divisions and major population centers. More importantly, they all have long periods of record (POR’s) dating back to the 19th century in most cases. This past summer some 22 of these 298 sites beat or tied their all-time absolute maximum temperature on record. This was the most since the infamous summer of 1936. No site recorded their coldest such.

Evan Lehmann notes that 2012 was "one of the most expensive weather damage years on record." And the effects were not evenly distributed:

Nearly all the world's economic damage from storms, drought, fire and earthquakes was centered in the United States as it experienced the highest temperatures ever recorded, according to Munich Re, a global reinsurance company. More than 90 percent of insured losses worldwide occurred in the United States, well above the 30-year average of 65 percent.

Despite these extreme conditions, Douglas Fischer reports that news coverage of climate change was down in 2012, "with worldwide coverage continuing its three-year slide."

On Saturday, in his first public speech in months, the Syrian dictator rejected any political compromise with the opposition. The world is not amused:

The West, including the U.S. and Britain, denounced Assad’s speech, which came amid stepped-up international efforts for a peaceful settlement to the Syrian conflict. On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also criticized the Syrian leader’s initiative. He accused Assad of "state terrorism" and called on him to relinquish power.

Dan Murphy argues the speech is proof that both the regime and the rebels now view the conflict as a "zero sum struggle":

To be sure, anyone going into a negotiation would want to do so from a position of strength. It's possible that Assad is striking a maximalist, defiant tone in public while entertaining compromises behind the scenes. But there were no indications of even a moderation of tone towards his opponents, routinely described as "terrorists" or agents of foreign powers, which would usually be taken as a signal that some sort of overture was being made.

And the deeply troubling news about chemical weapons does not reassure either. I have few doubts that Assad would use them. The crime family running Syria lost any semblance of humanity decades ago. Richard Spencer hears an echo of Gaddafi in Assad's speech:

Even the slogans were the same as the slain Libyan dictator: "God, Syria, Bashar, enough". Reminiscent too was the rambling delivery, leaping incoherently back and forth between vague peace proposals and unremitting imprecations against the opposition: "al-Qaeda", "armed criminals", "foreign terrorists" were also prominent in Col Muammar Gaddafi's vocabulary.

Al-Jazeera rounds up reactions from the Syrian opposition and Western statesmen.

More and more, the second term is coming into focus. The nominations of Kerry, Hagel and Brennan in the national security tent confirms that Obama intends to make his mark more emphatically in his second term than his first (which primarily meant cleaning up the mess from Bush-Cheney). All three are skeptical of resorting to military force; Kerry is a veteran diplomat and decorated veteran; Hagel has two Purple Hearts and is ideally positioned to defend cuts in Pentagon spending. Brennan has the confidence of the CIA, even as he appears to be intent on bringing its often unaccountable actions more firmly into the nexus of law, and checks and balances. Of course, they should all be grilled by the Senate – on Iran, Greater Israel, torture, secrecy and Asia. But they seem like sterling and solid picks to me.

But it's Hagel's potential for cutting the Pentagon – and the credibility he has a Nebraska Republican vet – that really hits home. When you look at the slo-mo fiscal pile-up, you can see Obama's logic. He has essentially dispensed with Item Number One: raising taxes on the very rich. Next up comes the fight to cut spending or increase revenues by roughly the sequester amount. On the table for cuts, we have Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Pentagon, now spending almost twice what it did ten years ago. I defer to David's core judgment:

As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history. Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be. According to the Government Accountability Office, if we act on entitlements today, we will still have to cut federal spending by 32 percent and raise taxes by 46 percent over the next 75 years to meet current obligations. If we postpone action for another decade, then we have to cut all non-interest federal spending by 37 percent and raise all taxes by 54 percent. As this sort of crunch gradually tightens, Medicare will be the last to go.

The polls agree (see above). If the cuts are not so much to the troops but to the massive defense contracting industry, then we could be in a whole new world. My sense is that Americans will want tax loopholes cut as a first resort (though nowhere near as much as would represent real tax reform), defense cut as a second resort and Medicare dead-last. (This isn't my preference. I'd rather see more serious cuts in Medicare, along with Simpson-Bowles radical tax reform and a radically reduced global footprint. But I'm just a blogger.)

Now that Obama has taken the tax rate issue off the table, all we know about US public opinion and the popularity of entitlements suggests that Obama has strategized to make the US government structurally more progressive, with defense being cut hard. Yglesias, who produced the above graph, notes:

I recently read David Karol's Party Position Change in American Politics which reveals that the politics of the defense budget is one of the most frequently flip-flopped non-procedural issues in modern politics. It's one where party leaders seem relatively unconstrained by constituency group commitments or ideology, and fairly free to engage in freelance gambits of various kinds. So given the gap between current polling and current elite positioning, it's a place where we might expect to see some surprisingly rapid changes.

How about back to the levels of Reagan in 1984 at the height of the Cold War, for example?

That would require a cut from around $700 billion to around $500 billion. Could we do that in four years? It seems to me that if we could almost double "defense" spending in the last decade, we should be able to cut it around 30 percent in four years. Leaving not a soldier behind in Afghanistan by 2014 would help.

(Graphs from Yglesias and simple serf)

In the wake of Dick Armey's frosty divorce from FreedomWorks, Pareene checks in on the lucrative scams on the right and how ordinary conservatives' donations fund a feedback loop between hacks and think tanks:

As Armey admitted to Media Matters, FreedomWorks at this point essentially raises money for the sake of raising money. It exists to bilk "activists." …

[W]hat are people who donate to this grass-roots conservative organization funded mostly by a few very rich people getting for their hard-earned money? In addition to paying Dick Armey $400,000 a year for 20 years to stay away, FreedomWorks also apparently spent more than a million dollars paying Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to say nice things about FreedomWorks, in order to convince listeners to send FreedomWorks money that FreedomWorks would then give to Limbaugh and Beck. It’s a pretty simple con.

The larger problem:

The problem this presents for the movement, beyond the threat of eventually bankrupting the people who give it power, is that the business of money-making, for consultants and media personalities and Herman Cains, is at this point getting in the way of the business of advancing conservative causes. The groups exert massive influence, and they only ever push the Republican Party to get more extreme. Apocalyptic hysteria is much more effective at getting people to open their wallets than reasonable commentary.

Every now and again, you get whiplash. Here is Bill Clinton’s former chief liaison with the gay community demanding that Chuck Hagel account more fully for his past statements and actions on gay people. Let me repeat: Bill Clinton‘s “principal adviser to Clinton on gay and lesbian civil rights issues” from 1993 to 1999. Think about that for a minute.

Socarides was paid to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in public and certainly didn’t quit over its passage, as any gay person with true commitment to gay equality would have. In this respect, I think of him as the opposite of Bob Hattoy, an old dead friend who, like Socarides, worked for the Clinton machine, but, unlike Socarides, didn’t put his gay soul on eBay to do so. Dee-Dee Myers said of Bob:

He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t necessarily helpful to the administration cause…. He had one foot inside and one foot outside.

Which brings me to Socarides. He had both feet firmly inside the administration’s cause and did all he could to back the Clintons against the real lives of gay people.

Recall: he was paid to spin the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, even as it doubled the discharges of gay servicemembers in the military under Clinton’s term. He was paid by an administration that made every effort to kill the marriage movement (believe me, I was there and saw it up-close), a movement in which Socarides was AWOL until the political tide safely turned. With Socarides as chief adviser, Bill Clinton also signed the law that made me and countless other non-Americans with HIV forbidden to enter the US and live under a brutal legal surveillance system which Clinton did nothing to change. Clinton even broke a clear campaign promise not to codify and sign the measure into law. How does a gay person work for someone who signs such a bill, stigmatizing countless people with HIV and putting the US on the same level as Saudi Arabia? And when will Socarides apologize to me and countless others for being there and not stopping it and not resigning?

In fact, I recall no moment in his career in which Socarides apologized for selling out the gay community in every single possible way in order to stay comfortably ensconced in the Clinton White House. And notice the gay issues Socarides focuses on:

[Hagel’s] record earned him a zero-per-cent rating (three times) from the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay-rights lobby. Among other things, Hagel voted against extending basic employment nondiscrimination protections and the federal hate-crimes law to cover gay Americans.

If you read Virtually Normal, you will find that I too opposed such initiatives because they ducked the core issue of how government treats its gay citizens, which, in my view, should come before the same government regulates the actions of its own citizens. And because hate crimes are a bullshit legal category. Would I be deemed by a Clinton-hack as insufficiently in favor of gay rights – back when Socarides was advising a president who was eviscerating them? The truth is: I would have been and was at the time. Because I was a limited government conservative – not because I was anti-gay at all.

Socarides summarizes with this statement:

Hagel will have to show not only some genuine regret for his past actions and statements about gay Americans but also a real command of the civil-rights issues facing the military in order to convince people of that.

Here’s a better idea: let’s have Richard Socarides not only show some genuine regret for his working for a president who signed more anti-gay laws than any other in American history – but also offer proof that he has evolved from enabling attacks on gay Americans to backing their rights. Let’s get that apology now, so that he and Hagel are on equal ground.

(Photo: Richard Socarides attends The 2012 Emery Awards at Altman Building on December 11, 2012 in New York City. By Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images.)

Their decline in the polling – now much more unfavorable than favorable – has extra sting when delivered by the pollster who specializes in over-sampling the white, the old and the Republican.