Kit Stolz

GOP Campaign Increasingly Resembles Unproduced Goldie Hawn Pic

The GOP campaign for the White House is looking
more and more like the screenplay for an unproduced Goldie Hawn film
from the 1980’s, a Goldie Hawn film expert said today.

Davis
Logsdon, who teaches at the University of Minnesota’s School of Film
and is considered the world’s foremost expert in the cinema of Goldie
Hawn, said that in choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running
mate Sen. John McCain was taking a leaf from an unproduced Hawn vehicle
from 1984 titled "Contestant in Chief."

"In the screenplay, an
evil presidential candidate chooses the American he thinks is the least
likely to catch on to his nefarious plans to destroy the country,"
Professor Logsdon said. "Enter Goldie, a former beauty pageant
contestant, small-town mayor and hockey mom."

Some of us were worried that with the imminent exit of GWB, political humor in this country would suffer. Obama, for all his brilliance, isn’t a funny guy. But with Sarah Palin on the scene, it appears we’re guaranteed at least a few more months of GOP hijinks.

Note that Borowitz’s item was written before today’s surprise announcement of an unwed teen mother-to-be in Palin’s family…but fits perfectly into the Hawn comedy idea.

Mold Warrior Attacks Yours Truly

Interesting: a couple of weeks ago I linked to an LA Weekly story about the battle over mold. I thought it was a fascinating piece, but Sharon Kramer, the controversial "mold warrior" at the center of the story, most certainly did not like it. In her defense (see her comment to the link above) she cites a Wall Street Journal article called "Amid Suits Over Mold, Experts Wear Two Hats," from January 9, 2007, that unfortunately does not appear linkable except in pdf form. Kramer sees the story as vindication: I see it as a writer raising questions (are expert witnesses who question claims of toxic mold truly objective?)

This is the nature of a controversy: Definitive answers are hard to find. Classic example. In the LA Weekly last week, editor Jill Stewart, attacked by Kramer, posts that Bruce Kelman won his libel suit against Kramer on August 27th in a jury trial. Definitive, no?

But the only confirmation I can find on the web is a post at Overlawyered, by a writer who complains he was somewhat misquoted in the original Weekly story, and suggests that if Kelman does win the case, it will be a "Pyrrhic victory." So I honestly don’t know if that counts as vindication for Kelman or not.

Readers can judge for themselves if the comments by Kramer fit her description in the original LA Weekly story linked above. She certainly resorts to invective at the drop of a hat. In many years of journalism, in many forms of commentary, this is the first time anyone has ever called me a hack. (In an email) Ouch!

Waiting for Gustav

As the hurricane, now listed at Category 4, spins its way north towards Louisiana, I can’t help but think of those in its path. Some bloggers are choosing to wait it out, despite the mandatory evacuation, such as Kyle LeBoeuf, who in Lafayette dared the hurricane to "bring it on!"

The taunting might be crazy, but the blogging and twittering…that’s fresh.

And if the hurricane was to look like this, which Gustav did as it passed over Jamaica, I’d want to stay too. [pic courtesy of Orville Powell]

No One Frames an Election Better than Bill Clinton

As Barack Obama, Matt Miller (of the influential radio show Left, Right and Center), and now Frank Rich of The New York Times all agreed, a well-known Democrat gave one heck of a speech this week at the Democratic National Convention.

No one frames an election better than Bill Clinton.

Here, I think, is the crux of his case:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

Look
at the example the Republicans have set: American workers have given us
consistently rising productivity. They’ve worked harder and produced
more. What did they get in return? Declining wages, less than ¼ as
many new jobs as in the previous eight years, smaller health care and
pension benefits, rising poverty and the biggest increase in income
inequality since the 1920s. American families by the millions are
struggling with soaring health care costs and declining coverage. I
will never forget the parents of children with autism and other severe
conditions who told me on the campaign trail that they couldn’t afford
health care and couldn’t qualify their kids for Medicaid unless they
quit work or got a divorce. Are these the family values the
Republicans are so proud of? What about the military families pushed to
the breaking point by unprecedented multiple deployments? What about
the assault on science and the defense of torture? What about the war
on unions and the unlimited favors for the well connected? What about
Katrina and cronyism?

America can do better than that. And Barack Obama will.

But first we have to elect him.

And here’s Bill Clinton in the media wilderness, courtesy of Cheapfilm:

It’s No Party at the LA Times

Miguel Bustillo, a first-rate reporter and writer who came up through the ranks of the LA Times, is leaving to take a job with the Wall Street Journal. American journalism is full of LA Times ex-pats: another is Robert Lee Hotz, was the top writer at the paper on global warming issues before he left for the WSJ. The LA Times hasn’t found a real replacement yet, as far as I can tell. The issue is covered haphazardly.

But what’s most interesting — and saddening — about this news is that Bustillo, like so many readers who happen not to live in Santa Monica or downtown L.A., can’t understand why Southern California’s best newspaper choose to give up its dominance in places like the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County. The paper was doing a superb job of covering Ventura County, both its issues, its people, and even its artists. Now we’re lucky if its issues get an occasional mention in the California section. When even the insiders can’t figure this out, you know something is terribly wrong (from Bustillo’s parting letter to his friends at the paper, via LA Observed)

I was fortunate enough to work on a lot of memorable stories. But the
one that will always resonate in my mind was the 1994 Northridge
Earthquake. I was 22 at the time, just starting out. The Valley edition
was treated like a minor league affiliate by some of the more pompous
denizens of Times Mirror Square. But on that day, the Valley newsroom
rose to that challenge like nothing I’ve seen before or since. It was
magic, and as I played my small intern’s part in the reporting that
day, I knew I had made a good career choice. That Pulitzer was richly
deserved. Some of the stringers who contributed to that coverage are
among this paper’s best reporters today.

I will never understand why the LA Times pulled back from Ventura and
the Valley. That was the biggest strategic mistake this paper ever
made. I bet anyone who worked in those places, covering local news like
I did, would agree.

Sarah Palin: Global Warming Doubter

The newly-chosen GOP vice-presidential candidate doesn’t really believe in global warming, unlike her would-be boss John McCain, according to a brief interview with far-right Newsmax:

What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?

A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other
state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute
it to being man-made.

This is a familiar right-wing argument, often heard from the likes of Dick Cheney, but complicated by the fact that Palin all but admits that the consequences of climate change could be serious, yet appears completely uninterested in the issue. This fits with her decision to sue the Department of the Interior over their long-delayed decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species.

Yesterday I said McCain would have to swing for the fences after the Democratic convention. He obviously has done that, and maybe connected — at least with the GOP base. Too soon to say much more, I think.

Meanwhile back on earth, Palin’s claim that the polar bear is doing just fine and that climate models that predict a dramatic loss of sea ice are "unreliable" took another big hit this week, when researchers said that northern hemisphere sea ice coverage had reached a low exceeded only last year.

Personally, the trend looks pretty clear to me…don’t need a modeler to see where the ice is going.

[image from the The Cryosphere Today, via the Polar Research Group at U. of Illinois]

STOP THE PRESSES! Rush Limbaugh Sees Environmental Problem

For perhaps the first time ever in his radio career, Rush Limbaugh has spotted an environmental problem.

He talked about how bad publicity thanks to Hurricane Gustave could hurt the image of the Republican convention on Wednesday. He asked former Republican candidate Mike Huckabee a question about it live on the air on Wednesday:

LIMBAUGH: If this hurricane bears down on New Orleans while the Republicans are in St. Paul, I can just see Obama and Biden in New Orelans with sandbags going down, handing out bottled water. You know half the media would decamp down there…what do you think the Republican Party would do, do you think?

HUCKABEE: I think they would call in Pat Robertson to pray it off the coast.

This hilarity brought a chuckle or two, and then some half-hearted Limbaugh shots at Fidel Castro and the media. (Available here, via TP.) It sounds like a joke that went sour.

But it’s notable because Limbaugh does freely concede that three scientific models that predict hurricanes’ likely travel path are "coalescing" around the possibility that Hurricane Gustave will hit New Orleans as a "Cat Five"

(Actually, that’s a big fat exaggeration, as the hurricane has usually been pegged at the Category Three intensity, and the location of landfall is said to be very uncertain, according to Jeff Masters’ Wunderblog.)

But it’s a striking contrast to Limbaugh’s usual knee-jerk denial around issues of science and his claims that anthropogenic global warming is "a hoax." Frequently he scoffs at the idea that some scientists not known by him might with confidence be able to predict the scope of a disaster to come.

In this instance, when the fortunes of the Republican party are at stake, he obviously believes them.

In other news, sort of, it’s good to see mention of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction outside a scientific conference, thanks in part to a spectacular lede from from Robert Boyd of the hard-hit McClatchey newspapers chain (here).

WASHINGTON — It was the greatest mass murder of all
time — poison everywhere! billions slain! — but the killer or killers
have never been positively identified.

Boyd explains that the National Science Foundation is spearheading a huge international study on the apparent cause of this unfortunate event, which turns out to have been a very bad case of global warming.

The end-Permian catastrophe is an extreme version of the
consequences of global warming, said Lee Kump, a geoscientist at The
Pennsylvania State University. "It reminds us that there are unexpected
consequences of CO2 buildup, and these can be quite dire, indeed."

The
lessons of the P-T massacre are "directly applicable to the present,"
said John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in
Milwaukee. He said the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2
"threshold" that could set off an environmental upheaval as great as
the one 251 million years ago.

Isbell said CO2 levels in the
atmosphere at the time of the P-T catastrophe reached 1,000 to 1,500
parts per million (ppm), far higher than today’s level of 385 ppm.
(That means there are 385 carbon dioxide molecules for every 1 million
total molecules in the atmosphere.)

CO2 levels are now rising by
2 ppm a year, and that’s expected to accelerate to 3 ppm a year. If
carbon emissions aren’t reduced, some researchers fear that by the end
of the next century, the CO2 level could approach what it was during
the P-T period.

The lava eruption in Siberia that set off this cataclysmic disaster is of a scope almost impossible to comprehend, of vast landscapes covered in burning lava. The good news in the story, as near as I can tell, is that after a few hundred million years, the earth has healed the site tof his disaster in Siberia rather nicely, according to the photograph by Jon Ransom:

Gustav and the GOP: Let’s Dance!

A plot from the National Hurricane Center (below)…Gustav could arrive in New Orleans just in time to compete with the Republican National Convention. As a Category 3 hurricane. One presumes that the city and the Republican leadership will be better prepared this time, but the news is still not good for a White House linked to disaster in the public mind…from a party which will open its national convention on Monday. With Bush. Something tells me he won’t joke about "the World’s Greatest Polluter."

Dr. Masters of Wunderblog: "Final landfall of Gustav could occur anywhere from Texas to the Florida
Panhandle. The latest GFDL model predicts landfall near New Orleans on
Sunday night as a Category 3 hurricane. The HWRF model picks
Mississippi on Monday morning, as a Category 3 hurricane. The NOGAPS
prefers the Florida Panhandle on Sunday night, and the ECMWF targets
central Louisiana on Monday morning."

“Burn All the Fossil Fuels” Right Here, Right Now

Ted Rall gets the fundamental absurdity of John McCain’s position on drilling right (below).

Yes, we can drill more, and possibly (according to the Energy Information Administration) reduce the price of gas by three or four cents in 2028.

(To specify, if we opened ANWR to drilling, the price of oil would fall by between forty-one cents on the low end, to $1.44 on the high end…per barrel. Today oil costs $116.33 per barrel, so we’re talking cents on the dollar…at best.)

Noted geoscientist Tim Barnett once described the Bush energy policy to a meeting of fire ecologists as "Burn Up All the Fossil Fuels As Fast As We Can." Sounds like McCain likes the idea…a lot.

True Conservativism

In a new book of essays by Gore Vidal, Jay Parini describes old-fashioned conservatism succinctly.

"…Vidal is conservative in many respects,” writes Parini. “He stands behind
individual choice, the limitation of executive power, and preservation
of the environment. Like his grandfather, he dislikes the empire. … He
would return us, if possible, to the pure republicanism of early
America.”

From my favorite new columnist, Bill Kauffman, in The American Conservative (here) .

Isn’t this what most Americans hold true?

Just wondering.