No Act Of God

In case you missed it, on Monday, a massive tornado - likely an EF-5 on the enhanced Fujita scale - ripped a 15-to-20 mile long path, up to two miles wide, through suburban Oklahoma with sustained winds at or near 200 mph. Already, this tornado is being classified as one of the worst in history.

As a staff filled with those who've lived many years in the Midwest, the damage in Oklahoma is worse than anything we can ever remember seeing. We have friends in Oklahoma, and Paul has a longstanding relationship with the award-winning weekly newspaper the Oklahoma Gazette. For many of our Nebraska readers, there are also still many longstanding ties to Oklahoma, the longtime collegiate rivals of the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

In short, this disaster is personal for us.

So it's with a great deal of anger that we read about the recent comments of imbeciles like Minnesota state Senator Glenn Gruenhagen, or Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, and his asinine opinion piece in the Washington Post on Sunday. Frankly, we don't have much time today for people like writer Andrew Leonard either, who before the body count in Oklahoma even reached above 25, was already waving the gutless white flag of surrender and delay on climate change.

Most scientists - and indeed most people in the world - agree that climate change is real. Whether man caused climate change, or has simply increased its rate of acceleration matters very little to the potential 100 million people, worldwide, likely to be killed by climate change related disasters in the next 17 years.

There are those who will point out that climate change has not been definitively linked to tornados - and we won't argue with that. However, as Greg Sargent notes today, "Why not use this as an occasion for an argument over climate change? ...Why shouldn’t major events such as tornados or mass shootings prompt policy — or, yes, political — arguments over how we should respond to them? Policy matters. How we collectively respond to disasters matters. What lessons we draw from disasters about larger questions — such as whether climate change is linked to extreme weather, and if so, what should we do about it — matters."

The folks who make their living on facts and numbers even more than we do - insurers - are VERY certain about climate change. And those businesses and insurance companies worldwide, are incredibly concerned about climate change.

For insurers, costs have risen from hundreds of billions of dollars annually to more than a trillion dollars last year. $70 billion in damages alone was just from Superstorm Sandy. Want to know why your homeowners or business insurance went up last year? Don't just blame President Obama. Blame the clowns in Congress for refusing to increase energy efficiency long ago, and for continuing to coddle the ignorant climate deniers while continuing to subsidize carbon-creating corporations with more than a trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money. Blame the multi-national corporations too, with their eyes on the next fiscal quarter, instead of the next quarter century - which is actually very bad business.

From agriculture to fishing, the world's food supply is also in serious danger. Estimates from organizations like DARA and Oxfam International say the political costs around the world over the next two decades will be mindblowing. Imagine a worldwide depression, including every nation, with no potential end in sight - and heat waves all year long. Then you've gotten somewhere into the ballpark of what experts think things may look like.

As we have tried to make clear many times before, weather is not the same thing as climate. That said, a repeated pattern of increasingly bad weather around the world IS a measurable sign of climate change. And the deadly storm in Oklahoma is just another example of this phenomenon.

It is long past time, regardless of the initiating cause, that every human on Earth do whatever possible to stop rapid climate change, NOW. This isn't some kind of act of God, that is beyond the influence of humankind.

It's long past time to stop placating the doubters and act.

What You Really Should Fear

As another week begins, some of our colleagues in the national media unfortunately already seem intent on continuing to drag forward the news leftovers from last week - even though the blast of supposed "scandals" resulted in exactly no political damage to President Obama, much to the consternation of Republicans. 

That kind of political dysfunction, as E.J. Dionne notes, has a growing number of people worried about the state of democracies around the world. What those same people should be worried about is that too often, the voters in those democracies are no longer hearing the kinds of news items from the media they need to make informed, educated decisions - including right here in America.

For example, over the weekend, it was confirmed that Republican Rep. Darrell Issa - one of the chief screamers about the IRS controversy - apparently knew about the IRS investigation nearly a year ago, in July 2012. Yet, when Issa grills former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman this week, we can bet the Congressman will conveniently forget that little fact.

Instead, Issa will likely concentrate on the fact that some Tea Party groups drew the interest of the IRS - though we highly doubt Issa will mention the history of serial cheating and tax code abuse some of these groups were already guilty of. Issa and others like him also aren't likely to mention that many nonprofit journalism groups with clean histories were also put under scrutiny by the IRS over the past few years.

If we believed in conspiracies, we might even be led to think that the U.S. government may have been trying to silence certain members of the media through both the IRS and AP/DOJ controversies for some time now. Sadly, the conditions for media freedom in America don't look to be getting much better anytime soon.

Yes, President Obama did have Sen. Chuck Schumer reintroduce a Federal shield law for journalists last week, that in some cases would protect members of the media from releasing their sources to the government. That action, however, is long overdue - and sadly, is not nearly enough. It's been confirmed the Schumer/Obama shield bill would not have protected the AP from the Department of Justice's recent grab of their phone records. Further, just proposing a bill does not make it law.

It's not just the Justice department that's taking aim at privacy issues.

The FBI has a new plan they're pushing forward, that would legally expand their powers to eavesdrop on what have previously been considered private internet communications, which might make it easier for them to catch "bad guys" around the world. However, it would also allow the FBI to spy on Americans easier than ever, including members of the media.

The fact is, the Justice Department already has similar legal allowances to those the FBI is attempting to acquire. The CEO of the AP insisted this weekend on CBS' Face The Nation program that the Justice Department's actions in grabbing the AP's phone records were unconstitutional - which is sadly, untrue. What the DOJ did was legal, albeit unethical.

The bigger problem is that every time either government or corporate interests eavesdrop and undermine the integrity of the news media, it makes sources more reluctant to talk - something the AP chief admits is already happening.

That some in Congress - especially on the right - suddenly seem to be concerned about freedom of the press now, after their demand for aggresive actions against the media last year is more than just hypocritical.

For many Americans, it may already be far too little, far too late.

Going Bulworth

For those of us lucky and blessed enough to still have weekends away from our primary employment, Fridays are almost always a good day to let things get a little bit loose, and even daydream a little bit about how we wish things were, instead of how they really are.

After all, it's been a long week filled with crazy controversies and fake scandals. When the week began, the right-wing tea partiers were insisting President Obama might be impeached "for real" this time. By the end of the week, the scandals were falling apart, evaporating, and even beginning to hurt Republicans, as the dueling schizophrenic right-wing Obama-hate narratives cancelled each other out.

It's enough stress to make any sane person want to "go Bulworth" - or at least fantasize about doing so, as the New York Times' Peter Baker revealed President Obama does from time to time.

"Going Bulworth," as Wonkblog's Ezra Klein revealed to the uninitiated, is "a reference to the 1998 movie in which Sen. Jay Bulworth, played by Warren Beatty, drops all pretense and begins saying exactly what he thinks" - and we think that's just the prescription for levity we could all use on a Friday.

After all, there's not much more we'd love to see than if some of the paranoid fears of the tea party fools really did come to life. The extremist nuts would get chased down the street by the IRS, the DOJ, the legal authorities, and maybe even the hand of God. We get it, wingnuts - you hate Obama because he's black, and because he undeniably beat your ignorant asses in back-to-back presidential elections. That said? He's the President, you lost, get over it. We survived eight years of George W. Bush, you'll survive eight years of Obama.

To the hacks in the media who think that Obama is somehow both a "power hungry leader" and a "weak onlooker"? You people are idiots, as Steve Benen, Greg Sargent, and Jonathan Chait all pointed out - though they generally used more civil language to label you than we just did.

We're still not as bad as the moron restaurant owners Samy and Amy Bouzaglo of Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Bouzaglos made their fame this week by also "going Bulworth" - on their customers, both in person and online. We don't think it's going too far when we say it's likely that whatever goodwill and business the Bouzaglo's had left after an ugly national TV appearance was destroyed when they got on Facebook, Yelp, and Reddit, and began telling their customers and anyone else exactly what they thought of them IN ALL CAPS - and with expletives. To make things worse, the couple lied about their heinous actions later, blaming their behavior on a random computer hacker.

Next Monday, when we all get back to work for one more full week - before a glorious Memorial Day weekend - we fully expect to be addressing real and serious topics like the sexual assault crisis in the U.S. military, immigration reform, and the always important fact that while the economy is better, millions of Americans still need a job, five years after the great recession.

For now, in a way President Obama can only dream of, we may just keep up our Bulworth-ing this weekend - at least until our spouses decide they've had enough of our attitudes.