Eideard

The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks. DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an “insider” at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.

The scheme includes spending $100,000 for spreading the message in K-12 schools that “the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science”, the documents said…

The Heartland Institute, founded in 1984, has built a reputation over the years for providing a forum for climate change sceptics. But it is especially known for hosting a series of lavish conferences of climate science doubters at expensive hotels in New York’s Times Square as well as in Washington DC…

The documents posted on Desmog’s website include confidential memos of Heartland’s climate science denial strategy, its 2012 budget and fundraising plan, and minutes from a recent board meeting. The fundraising plan suggests Heartland is hoping for a banner year, projecting it will raise $7.7m in 2012, up 70% from last year.

The papers indicate that discrediting established climate science remains a core mission of the organisation, which has received support from a network of wealthy individuals – including the Koch oil billionaires as well as corporations such as Microsoft and RJR Tobacco.

The documents confirm what environmental groups…have long suspected: that Heartland itself is a major source of funding to a network of experts and bloggers who have been prominent in the campaign to discredit established science.

Heartland is anxious to retain its hold over mainstream media outlets, fretting in the documents about how Forbes magazine is publishing prominent climate scientists such as Peter Gleick. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out,” Heartland documents warn…

The plan also notes the difficulty of injecting non-scientific topics in schools. “Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. [That means real science] Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education,” the fundraising plan said.

Creeps and cretins. The usual cabal of anti-intellectual, anti-science blabbermouths who show up to serve as flunkies for corporations profiteering from polluting enterprises, once again. Sure is nice to see it documented though for folks who need a little bracing in the backbone department. Like the White House.

UK-based Diageo, the world’s biggest liquor company that sells Captain Morgan’s rum, is enjoying a $2.7 billion subsidy from the U.S. Virgin Islands, aided in part by a tax break rubber-stamped by Congress annually with little public debate.

Recipients of more than $30 billion of tax breaks like these hope to catch a ride on the payroll tax legislation expiring next month, with special interests – from Diageo to Nascar racetrack owners to major U.S. banks – lobbying to win renewals of their preferences in the sprawling U.S. tax code.

Popular items…like a shorter write-off period for motorsports complexes that primarily benefits owners of Nascar tracks, are in the mix.

“…Once you get into that caboose, you catch a ride every year,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan federal spending watchdog group…

The last time lawmakers revamped the tax code was 1986. That took years to do and came only after President Ronald Reagan made it a priority and was safely ensconced in a second term…

Obama and lawmakers fought through the end of 2011 over renewing the payroll tax cut for workers, settling on a two-month fix. Businesses see a potential to attach breaks onto any deal that may emerge from the need to address the expiration of those tax cuts at the end of February.

“People are looking at the payroll tax legislation as a potential vehicle and kind of licking their chops,” said Marc Gerson, a former tax attorney for House Republicans, now representing business interests at Miller & Chevalier…

One big tax break that is on a yearly lease helps financial institutions defer taxes on some income, such as royalties from a patent, earned abroad. Critics say the provisions helps big banks and other firms dodge taxes. That provision costs the government about $4 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Even if I feel it likely that Obama will be re-elected given the crap clump of candidates the Republicans offer, experience has taught us that he and the Dems can’t be trusted anymore than Republicans to actually produce significant change. Standard liberal packages and the odd touch of civil rights are no less than what we are owed for putting them into power in the first place.

The need for serious reform of archaic Congressional rules which clog potential progress, tax reform, an end to lobbying rules still filling Congress with the stink of the Gingrich counter-revolution – and a law, thank you, limiting election expenses and the power of corporate donors over ordinary folks – all need to be enacted in the next Congress or two. Ain’t nothing like starting to put on the heat, now.

Why is this man laughing all the way to the bank?
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The tentative deal to avoid a crushing debt default is at best a mild relief for the U.S. economy that nearly stalled in the first half of the year and has yet to show signs of any realistic pickup…

Market reactions today to lousy job and manufacturing numbers indicate even less.

The prospect of spending cuts is the last thing the U.S. economy needs right now, many commentators say.

Economists were stunned on Friday when data showed the U.S. economy grew just 0.4 percent in the first three months of this year — perilously close to contraction — and picked up unimpressively to 1.3 percent in the second quarter.

Against the backdrop of the weak economic recovery, the divided political parties in Congress appear to have agreed on one thing early on in their dispute over how to raise the U.S. debt ceiling: that spending cuts to narrow the deficit should be phased in slowly. They will be phased in from 2013…

About $1.5 trillion of the planned savings will be decided by a bipartisan congressional commission, leaving unanswered the question as to whether the United States has the political will to tame the country’s growing debt pile once and for all.

Obviously done to eliminate possibility of responsibility for cuts to Medicare which kick in automatically if no consensus is reached.

Any relief, however, is likely to be short-lived. U.S. jobs data on Friday will probably prove another reminder of the weak U.S. economy. Unemployment is expected to remain at 9.2 percent, according to a Reuters poll.

The budget deal “does nothing to restore household and corporate confidence,” said Mohammed El-Erian, chief executive of bond fund investment giant PIMCO.

“So unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise, growth will be lower than it would be otherwise, and inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise,” El-Erian told ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour.

All this lying crap has been about is introducing austerity to the nation’s economy without using the word. Some European nations aren’t as cowardly as Congress would have us be and actually name silly policies for what they really are. Austerity as resolution to recession has been a Republican mantra since the days of Herbert Hoover – with recurrent levels of failure. About as hackneyed a piece of bad advice as trickle-down economics/Reaganomics. You simply extend the pain.

Addendum: Here’s Paul Krugman’s take on the whole disaster.

And the only Good News UPDATE about the vote in the House, today. The return of Gabrielle Giffords. Unannounced, she showed up on the floor to vote:

Which side are you on, boys – which side are you on?

A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled against a former death row inmate who sought damages from the state after prosecutors hid crucial blood tests that would have earlier proven his innocence. The 5-4 decision Tuesday involved John Thompson, who came within weeks of execution and had spent 18 years behind bars before being set free after the new forensic evidence came to light.

At issue was whether a district attorney’s office should be held liable, under a “failure to train” standard, when one of its prosecutors unconstitutionally withholds exculpatory evidence from a criminal defendant.

Then-New Orleans area District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. claimed his office should not be held fully responsible after one of his staff attorneys violated long-standing, accepted procedures on handling evidence in criminal trials.

Thompson’s lawyers said the DA’s office as a whole should be held liable for the poor training of prosecutors working under Connick…

A landmark 1963 high court ruling — Brady v. Maryland — said prosecutor have a sworn duty to turn over evidence that may show a defendant is innocent. But in a subsequent opinion, the high court said individual prosecutors cannot be sued for any constitutional violations in the courtroom.

The Thompson decision further limits when defendants can sue for so-called “Brady” violations.

In a rare oral dissent, Ginsburg spoke from the bench to strongly criticize the majority’s conclusions.

“The record in this case abundantly shows flagrant indifference to Thompson’s rights,” she said. “The conceded, long-concealed prosecutorial transgressions in Thompson’s trials were neither isolated nor atypical. They were just what one would expect given the attitude toward Brady pervasive in the district attorney’s office.”

Ginsburg was backed by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

At least there still are four judges left on the Supreme Court who believe in justice for ordinary people. The remainder are stuck in history with their corporate bedbuddies and apparently every incompetent prosecutor they can protect from responsibility for their actions.

Soldier who thinks these kids admire something more than his hardware
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The Pentagon announced $178 billion in cost savings over five years but softened the blow by recycling much of the money into other programs and helping pay down the budget deficit by trimming its bureaucracy.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon would achieve the savings partially by taking the extraordinary step of reducing U.S. troop levels. He also announced cuts or cancellations of poorly performing weapons programs, including a $13-billion Marine Corps landing craft, designed by General Dynamics Corp.

The budget proposal is already raising hackles in some quarters of Congress, which ultimately controls the Defense Department’s budget…

Hackles belonging to members of Congress beholden to the military-industrial complex. Fools whose understanding of economics are grounded in [1] 19th Century imperial economics and politics – and [2] personal gain.

Gates said the military services had come up with $100 billion in savings over five years that would be redirected within other military programs. He said an additional $78 billion would go toward deficit reduction, made up primarily of $54 billion in Pentagon-wide savings, changes to economic assumptions, and cutting troop strength beginning in 2015.

The plan calls for cancellation of a ground-launched missile built by Raytheon Co, and the second overhaul in a year of the Pentagon’s largest weapons program: Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Under the proposal, the Pentagon would trim its force levels by up to 47,000 U.S. troops starting in 2015. That is long after U.S. troops are due to leave Iraq at the end of this year. It is also the year when U.S. war planners hope to hand over responsibility for Afghan security to local forces.

Someday – just maybe, someday – we may elect a Congress which will turn the dollars dedicated to death and destruction, imperial power and greed, to ends productive for our whole nation.

Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic bill on Tuesday to end tax deductions enjoyed by companies that close their U.S. plants and move overseas.

With a largely party-line vote of 53-45, Democrats failed to muster the 60 votes needed to clear a Republican procedural hurdle against the measure, which would also give employers a tax break to hire new U.S. workers.

Five members of the Senate Democratic caucus broke party ranks and opposed the bill, including Max Baucus, chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee…

“Why in the world would millions of Americans who are losing their jobs be subsidizing operations that are closed up, and the cost of doing that, and sending jobs overseas?” Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow said.

The bill also takes on a hot tax topic known as “deferral,” the ability of companies to defer taxes on income earned abroad.

President Barack Obama’s budget aims to sharply curtail that practice. The bill would repeal deferral for companies that close or cut a business in the U.S. and start or expand overseas with the intention of importing goods for sale in the United States.

The Party of NO knows when to say, “Yes” – they just left out the part about to whom.

Traditional anonymous political activist

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies would certainly seem to the casual observer to be a political organization: Karl Rove, a political adviser to President George W. Bush, helped raise money for it; the group is run by a cadre of experienced political hands; it has spent millions of dollars on television commercials attacking Democrats in key Senate races across the country.

Yet the Republican operatives who created the group earlier this year set it up as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, so its primary purpose, by law, is not supposed to be political.

The rule of thumb, in fact, is that more than 50 percent of a 501(c)(4)’s activities cannot be political. But that has not stopped Crossroads and a raft of other nonprofit advocacy groups like it — mostly on the Republican side, so far — from becoming some of the biggest players in this year’s midterm elections, in part because of the anonymity they afford donors, prompting outcries from campaign finance watchdogs…

Neither the Internal Revenue Service, which has jurisdiction over nonprofits, nor the Federal Election Commission, which regulates the financing of federal races, appears likely to examine them closely…

This is arguably more important than ever after the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case earlier this year that eased restrictions on corporate spending on campaigns…

“I can tell you from personal experience, the money’s flowing,” said Michael E. Toner, a former Republican F.E.C. commissioner, now in private practice at the firm Bryan Cave…

“The Supreme Court has completely lifted restrictions on corporate spending on elections,” said Taylor Lincoln, research director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, a watchdog group. “And 501(c) serves as a haven for these front groups to run electioneering ads and keep their donors completely secret…”

In fact, the I.R.S. is unlikely to know that some of these groups exist until well after the election because they are not required to seek the agency’s approval until they file their first tax forms — more than a year after they begin activity.

“These groups are popping up like mushrooms after a rain right now, and many of them will be out of business by late November,” Marcus Owens said. “Technically, they would have until January 2012 at the earliest to file anything with the I.R.S. It’s a farce.”

RTFA for more sleazy details. The Republicans have the current market cornered – partly because they’re on the outside, partly because the Obama side depends on lots of small donors who enter the hunt for votes more or less on the honesty side of the spectrum. Serious corporate money no longer has to worry about oversight, anyway.

The Republican Supreme Court has engineered that aspect of buying and selling political favors/votes to favor the wealthiest individuals and corporations for the foreseeable future.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A U.S. congressional committee, slighting the Pentagon for a fourth straight year, cleared continued work on an alternate engine by General Electric Co and Rolls-Royce Group Plc for the multinational F-35 fighter jet program.

The U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, in its version of a defense spending bill for the fiscal year starting October 1, added $485 million for the program on Wednesday in a move with bipartisan support.

Without competition, Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp unit, would have a decades-long monopoly on the projected $100 billion engine market for the more than 3,000 F-35s due to be bought by the United States and partner countries.

The Defense Department has tried to kill the second engine for four years as unaffordable and unnecessary. It has failed to persuade Congress, which holds the purse strings.

The panel, one of four congressional committees with jurisdiction over military spending, also approved the purchase of eight Boeing Co advanced F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets beyond the 22 the Pentagon had sought along with 12 Boeing EA-18G “Growler” electronic attack aircraft for $2.8 billion.

That action came in a late night amendment sponsored by Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican from Missouri, where the F-18 is manufactured…

The legislation also provides an increase of $88 million for cooperation with Israel on missile defense.

RTFA. The more things change the more they stay the same.

We should continue to throw out the obviously useless. The corporate bootlickers and buttkissers.

Wall Street banks and allied interest groups have spent $600 million and hired 243 political insiders to represent their interests before Congress and U.S. policymakers since early 2008…

The labor-backed study, which tracks the lobbying and campaign spending of major banks from the 2008 government-brokered buyout of Bear Stearns to the Senate’s current financial reform debate, said Wall Street’s lobbyists include former top aides to Senate Democrats Harry Reid, Christopher Dodd, Charles Schumer and Tim Johnson.

During the 2008 presidential race, securities and investment firms gave Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign nearly $14.9 million and Republican John McCain about $8.7 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Researchers found 28 former legislative directors and 33 former chiefs of staff among Wall Street’s army of lobbyists, as well as 54 former staffers to the House Financial Services Committee, the Senate Banking Committee or current members of those panels.

Former aides to Republican Senator Richard Shelby and former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt have also been working to represent Wall Street’s interests, the study said.

The list of lobbyists also includes former officials from the White House, Treasury Department and government agencies…

The six biggest Wall Street institutions — Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo — have accounted for a disproportionate share of the lobbying and campaign activity.

The study was paid for by “gigantic” left-wing sources like the Service Employees International Union. Their group is probably responsible for less than $10 million and damned few Congressional staffers.

Michael Steele measures the narrowness of Republican honesty
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Remember “soft money,” the shadowy torrents of unregulated cash supposedly designated for “party building” or other such nebulous activities that caused such political heartburn in the 1990s?

The ban on soft money was one of the few provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act to survive challenge in the courts.

Now the Republican National Committee is making a major new legal effort to remove the ban. It intends to take its challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Soft money used to be an equal opportunity issue for Democrats and Republicans back in the 1990s, and a prime culprit in the obscene amount of money being spent on campaigns. In 1997, President Bill Clinton conceded soft money had fueled a blitz of Democratic party advertising, but argued Republicans had abused it more. The “abuse” was that both parties had used soft money, as opposed to “hard money,” indirectly or directly to influence specific elections…

The latest challenge to the soft money ban is pretty much an all-Republican effort.

The soft money ban received a major boost last month in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the federal appeals court in Washington sometimes called the second most powerful court in the United States. The appeals court upheld the ban, but the setback for the RNC was strictly temporary…

The proposed challenge was part of a legal presentation to the RNC, Politico reported. The Supreme Court upheld the soft money ban in a “facial” challenge — the ban allegedly was unconstitutional on the face of it. But the new RNC challenge would be “as applied” — a challenge based on how the ban was being applied.

Politico reported the presentation said the RNC expected to ask for immediate expedited review in the Supreme Court if it lost on the lower level.

In fact, the RNC did lose its challenge in the Washington appeals court last month. The appeals court said it had a simple reason for ruling against the RNC: The challengers wanted the appeals court to do something the Supreme Court had yet to do.

The Republican Party is now carrying forward the projected strategy – which will give the Supreme Court another opportunity to return the most political power to the corporations with the most money.

An American tradition that has little or nothing to do with democracy or liberty. Not that today’s conservatives would notice.