Kit Stolz

How far we have come on global warming — not!

Yesterday Jason Margolis for The World had an absolutely first-class analysis of the presidential politics of global warming. He began with the GOP front-runner's silence on the issue, which Margolis contrasted against the GOP candidate of four years ago. Here's what John McCain said about climate change while running for President as a Republican:

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

Amazing. Today Mitt Romney ignores climate change, while Newt Gingrinch describes his call for action on it "the stupidest thing he's ever done," and Rick Santorum calls global warming a hoax.

Liberals and Democrats shouldn't self-congratulate, though, because President Obama is as silent on the issue as is Romney. He mentioned climate change in the State of the Union address only to say that nothing could pass Congress on the subject. That is, he blamed the GOP for the inaction.

And "we the people" are no better, as Margolis points out:

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

Campaign finance reform — John McCain's other signature issue. No wonder he lost.

For a shockingly entertaining explanation of the power of global warming, take a look at the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Jerry Meehl talking about climate change…and steroids in baseball.

Clint Eastwood: It’s halftime in America

A TV news station asks the horserace question about perhaps the biggest ad of the Superbowl this year: Clint Eastwood's. Which has to do with "Imported from Detroit" car company. Will this be as big a hit as was last year's adored Emimem commercial?

Short answer: Yes. As with the rapper, Eastwood risks his credibility as an artist by selling out in order to reach the widest possible audience — but succeeds brilliantly.

Forty-one years ago Eastwood was Dirty Harry, the character who first and most memorably in modern times raged against the government. To have the face of anti-government rage now appropriate the language of Ronald Reagan's most famous commercial and speak for Detroit and, implicitly, the government effort to save the city, the state, and the industry…well, that's huge.

Romney attacks: Obama tugs gently at the heartstrings

Andrew Sullivan is not happy with Mitt Romney's victory speech in Florida:

8.44 pm. Everything this man says is a lie. He's doubling down on the big lies I tried to counter in that Newsweek piece. The president Romney is describing does not exist. Obama is demonizing and denigrating every sector of the economy? That is a pure lie. As is the repeated lie that Obama is an appeaser. Has Romney understood what has happened to the Iranian economy these past few months? Does he think Osama bin Laden thinks he was appeased?

Let me just say right now: this speech is the most dishonest, manipulative, disgusting series of lies I've heard in a very long time. And its core premise: that the president hates this country, whereas Romney believes in it. As I said: disgusting. I'm with Newt on this. The man will say anything to gain power.

David Corn tweets it simply:

Romney, in short: Obama is the other, other, other, other, other.

How does the crack Obama campaign handle this? They try to show he's human. First, the president sings (briefly) Al Green, and Green, in the audience, declares that the prez "nailed it." Then, as New York magazine points out, David Axelrod sends out a photo of the Prez, taking good care of his dog. Inside the car. Unlike Romney's famous transportation of the family dog Seamus across New England in a crate on top of the car. (Today it's revealed that when the Romney family finally reached their destination, the Irish setter actually ran away — all the way to Canada. Understandably.)

By contrast the Obama campaign launches a Facebook 'Bark for Obama" page, featuring loving pet owners and their cute dogs, completely with charming bumper stickers. Build that approval rating.

Back on the trail, Romney is becoming legendarily awkward. Even right wing hawks and supporters are appalled at the geeky ineptitude of his rhetoric. Jonathan Chait has a theory why:

It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.

Maybe. But Ted Rall's idea is more fun:

In the 2012 Presidential election it will be one other versus another, apparently.

Bumbling environmentalists, according to Carl Hiassen

The great newspaperman and comic/detective novelist discusses journalism, esp. environmental journalism, with Curtis Brainard:

Newspaper cutbacks are a recurring theme in your novels. How do you see them affecting environmental journalism?

They’re a grave threat, because the first things that tend to go are investigative and explanatory journalists. Everything becomes shorter and more bite-sized. Environmental journalism can be complicated. It’s one of the most important things to do, yet it’s also one of the first things they start hacking at.

Amen. I've managed to place a few longer stories in recent months, but it ain't easy, and only a fool would do it for the money. Good to see a genial man like Hiassen find a way to make it work.

Irony is that the interview with the journalist bemoaning cuts is too short!

Ormond beach: the beautiful problem

My cover story this week in the Reporter, on "the broken mirror" of Ormond Beach. This is about 1500 acores along about two miles of beach in South Oxnard, astonishingly rich in shorelife, somehow trying to hold its beauty and vigor amidst monocultural agriculture and heavy industry.

And here's a picture I took, of a young biologist named Chris Kahler, of VC Shorebirds, and his friend and fellow volunteer Walter Fuller, in his beachside office. How Walter explaind his job to me:

“I’m the gatekeeper at one spot, and the property caretaker for the area, and it’s a big property!” he laughs, referring to the roughly two-mile stretch of white sand and dunes between Port Hueneme to the north and the Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu, to the south.

“It’s like I’m taking it on as my responsibility. When I’m out on the beach, I’m watching for injured birds or dead birds; and when the gate’s open I’m watching the parking lot, and if I see any break-ins I notify the appropriate authorities."

Great guys.

CA Fish and Game proposes regs to save sea bass species

Here's my story from the Santa-Barbara Independent. I thought the quote below was the memorable from the hearing, from one of the agency's commissioners at the hearing, about the dangers of fishing aggregations of spawning fish. Fishing massed groups of spawning fish can mislead anglers into unwittingly devastating a fish population in real trouble, a phenomenon scientists call "hyperstability":

Michael Sutton, one of two California state Fish and Game Commissioners at the meeting, called for a consideration of a seasonal closure during spawning season to allow the two species to repopulate. “Fishing spawning aggregations is a really dangerous practice,” he said. “If a seasonal closure would alleviate that, we need to consider that. A seasonal closure would have a significant impact on the industry, but so would a ban of fishing these species for several years.”

No one else at the hearing backed Sutton's idea, as far as I could tell, though it appears to be the idea that most likely to allow the beloved barred sand bass to repopulate. Here's a Fish and Game chart of where the barred sand bass are caught off the SoCal coast: "hotspots" (spawning grounds) in red:

Dozens of tornadoes devastate the South — in January

A rare mid-winter brace of hurricanes devastates the South; 150-mph winds recorded. Two dozen or so tornadoes sweeps through four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina — killing six people, injuring a hundred or more, and leaving countless others homeless.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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Amazing more people weren't killed. Some of the survivors intend to move away from tornado country, just months after the last visited by record-setting storms, the likes of which destroyed Joplin.

In eastern Alabama, a suspected twister splintered trees and demolished mobile homes at a pair of housing parks near the Auburn University campus. Less than seven months ago, a massive tornado roared past the campus of archrival University of Alabama in the western part of the state. It was the worst bout of weather for the state since about 250 people were killed during the tornado outbreak in April. Both campuses were spared major damage this time.

Jeff Masters: The calendar says it's the coldest month of winter, but today's weather is more typical of March, as a vigorous spring-like storm system has spawned a rare and deadly January tornado outbreak

No small storm system, that — almost looks to deserve a name.

Can the Romneytron 9000 elicit emotion from humans?

Bright young Brit Tim Stanley reports on the ground from South Carolina and very convincingly argues that Newt Gingrich didn't win the primary.

Willard Romney lost it.

Newt Gingrich will deny it, but the South Carolina vote was really a referendum on Romney. He lost it because he is slipping in the area that was previously his one selling point: electability. The Bain mess and his absent tax returns were compounded by the overturning of his “victory” in Iowa. Without the illusion of being unbeatable, there is no reason for conservatives to vote for Romney. Crucially, they told exit pollers that they now believe Newt is more likely to win against Obama than Mitt in November. That’s an illusion, too. But when you hate someone as much as some sections of the Tea Party hate Romney, you don’t see them as they really are. Poor Romney has become, unfairly, a stand in for all the elitism and bad faith of the Republican establishment. He has a tough fight ahead.

What can Romney do? How can he connect with the public? Election experts agree that he remains the best-funded, least offensive, and most-likely-to-succeed candidate for the GOP.

But like Richard Nixon, no one seems to actually like the guy. He needs to show something human that people can latch on to and trust emotionally. Hell, even Richard Nixon had to do that.

Won't be easy. The joke on Romney is that he's either just boring (SNL) or actually a robot (from Rall, Drum, and others).

The Romneytron 9000 as Kevin Drum put it.

In the South Carolina debates, Gingrich successfully turned attacks on his character into attacks on the press, and more importantly, in doing so connected with the audience. They thrilled at his fiery attack on "elites" — meaning the likes of handsome, well-paid, well-educated, intelligent questioner John King.

(Curiously, in his looks John King is almost exactly as stolid and Ken-like as Mitt Romney.In a dramatic sense, they are worthy if slow-moving opponents, in an Megatron vs. Optimus Prime sort of way. And as mentioned below, Prime got a terrific shot in on Megatron in the last battle over Megatron's income tax returns.)

Richard Nixon had a somewhat similar problem, when he was running for Governor of California in the early 60's. People just didn't like him. After a bad loss, he lashed out at his famous "last press conference." In true bitterness he said:

"You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentleman, this is my last press conference."

In a practised, familiar, move, Newt Gingrich turned his negative into a positive, by blaming the press for his situation. Will Romney try something similar?

Surely it's too late to play "me too" — Newt's all but patented that move.

Maybe he'll find a way to tug at the heartstrings, such as Richard Nixon's infamous Checkers speech?

No — no one can pity the billionaire unable to buy his wife the coat she wants.

Romney has been accused of being Nixonian — by his neighbors, in fact. According to a story in the New York Review of Books:

When I ask locals about their impressions of Mitt, I get a recurring response: Nixonian. “The overriding passion of his life seems to be to become president,” a conservative economics professor tells me. “I can’t think of a single issue over which Romney would risk reelection in order to stick to a principle.” A University of Massachusetts journalism professor puts it more positively: “He can be as cagey as Nixon, and he can be almost as smarmy, but he is also able to think strategically.”

Romney may be able to think strategically, but can he act strategically?

That appears to be his challenge. Can he pick up the mantle of Reagan — or at least, Nixon — and make some sort of emotional connection with the electorate?

What are the chances? Hasn't managed it yet, near as I can tell.

Dreamed in the sunbeams: John Muir

From his unpublished journals written in his sheep-herding days, before Muir came to stay in Yosemite Valley:

Dreamed in the sunbeams, when the sheep were calm, the plan of a hermitage: walls of pure white quartz, doors and windows edged with quartz crystals, windows of thin smooth sheets of water with ruffling apparatus to answer for curtains. The door a slate falke with brown and purple and yellow lichens. And oh, could not I find furniture! My table would be a grooved and shining slab of granite from the bed of the old mountain glaciers, my stool a mossy stump or tree bracket of the big dry, stout kind, and a bed of the spicy boughs of the spruce, etc., ad infinitum.

John Muir, January 21, 1869 [from John of the Mountains]