Later On

One Congressman has received death threats.

Michael Steele denies GOP involvement.

Thanks to G.A. Russell on the ShaveMyFace forum for pointing out this useful table. Really worth a look. Note that there are 3 rows of different models—you have to scroll down quite a ways to get to the 2nd row and quite a bit more for the third.

From The Times-Picayune of New Orleans:

Former Democratic Congressman William Jefferson was found guilty of 11 of 16 corruption charges today by a federal jury. [...]

Jefferson was charged with soliciting bribes and other crimes for a series of schemes in which he helped American businesses broker deals in West African in exchange for payments or financial considerations to companies controlled by members of his family, including his brother Mose, his wife, Andrea, their five daughters and a son-in-law.

Jefferson, who represented the New Orleans-based 2nd Congressional District for nine terms, will now face sentencing by Judge T.S. Ellis III, who earlier meted out stiff sentences for lesser figures in the case. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Jefferson faced 235 years in prison if convicted on all counts, and will still face substantial prison time.

The verdict comes four years after the Aug. 3, 2005 raids of Jefferson’s homes in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., in which the FBI found $90,000 in cash hidden in the freezer of his D.C. home, money the government said Jefferson was going to deliver as a bribe to Atiku Abubakar, then vice president of Nigeria, to gain his help with a telecommunications deal in Nigeria being pursued by Lori Mody, a Northern Virginia businesswoman.

John Murtha, you’re next.

I’m blogging this especially for TYD: a great bicycle tool.

Astroturf:

Source: The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Virginia), July 31, 2009

"As U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello was considering how to vote on an important piece of climate change legislation in June, the freshman congressman’s office received at least six letters from two Charlottesville [Virginia]-based minority organizations voicing opposition to the measure," reports the Daily Progress. The letters were forged by a now-former employee of the Bonner & Associates lobbying firm, which specializes in "grassroots" campaigns. The groups whose names and stationery were used — the Hispanic advocacy group Creciendo Juntos and the local branch of the NAACP — expressed outrage. The local NAACP leader said his group supports the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, because "clean energy creates jobs in the urban setting." Bonner & Associates previously carried out Astroturf campaigns for the pharmaceutical industry. The firm’s current clients include BP, General Dynamics, Pfizer and the Financial Services Roundtable, according to Lobbyists.info. The firm’s founder, Jack Bonner, said the forged letters were found through "internal checks" and are "contrary to our policies." He told the Washington Post that the firm has "no clients" lobbying on climate change. However, the Daily Progress noted that "a grassroots campaign might not require public disclosure of lobbying activities or clients." The New York Times later reported that the firm was working for a coal industry front group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Congressman Perriello voted for the climate change bill. "It’s very unfortunate that opponents of this bill would resort to deception," his press secretary remarked.

The GOP is now promoting the story that the proposed healthcare reform measure will call for elderly patients to be euthanized. And, oddly, some people seem to believe that. Here’s a corrective article.

Very interesting article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. It begins:

In 1954, when James (Big Jim) Folsom was running for a second term as governor of Alabama, he drove to Clayton, in Barbour County, to meet a powerful local probate judge. This was in the heart of the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was in full effect. In Barbour County, the races did not mix, and white men were expected to uphold the privileges of their gender and color. But when his car pulled up to the curb, where the judge was waiting, Folsom spotted two black men on the sidewalk. He jumped out, shook their hands heartily, and only then turned to the stunned judge. “All men are just alike,” Folsom liked to say.

Big Jim Folsom was six feet eight inches tall, and had the looks of a movie star. He was a prodigious drinker, and a brilliant campaigner, who travelled around the state with a hillbilly string band called the Strawberry Pickers. The press referred to him (not always affectionately) as Kissin’ Jim, for his habit of grabbing the prettiest woman at hand. Folsom was far and away the dominant figure in postwar Alabama politics—and he was a prime example of that now rare species of progressive Southern populist.

Folsom would end his speeches by brandishing a corn-shuck mop and promising a spring cleaning of the state capitol. He was against the Big Mules, as the entrenched corporate interests were known. He worked to extend the vote to disenfranchised blacks. He wanted to equalize salaries between white and black schoolteachers. He routinely commuted the death sentences of blacks convicted in what he believed were less than fair trials. He made no attempt to segregate the crowd at his inaugural address. “Ya’ll come,” he would say to one and all, making a proud and lonely stand for racial justice.

Big Jim Folsom left office in 1959. The next year, a young Southern woman published a novel set in mid-century Alabama about one man’s proud and lonely stand for racial justice. The woman was Harper Lee and the novel was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and one way to make sense of Lee’s classic—and of a controversy that is swirling around the book on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary—is to start with Big Jim Folsom.

The Alabama of Folsom—and Lee—was marked by a profound localism. Political scientists call it the “friends and neighbors” effect. “Alabama voters rarely identified with candidates on the basis of issues,” George Sims writes in his biography of Folsom, “The Little Man’s Best Friend.” “Instead, they tended to give greatest support to the candidate whose home was nearest their own.” Alabama was made up of “island communities,” each dominated by a small clique of power brokers, known as a “courthouse ring.” There were no Republicans to speak of in the Alabama of that era, only Democrats. Politics was not ideological. It was personal. What it meant to be a racial moderate, in that context, was to push for an informal accommodation between black and white.

“Big Jim did not seek a fundamental shift of political power or a revolution in social mores,” Sims says…

Continue reading.

Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress:

Last night, Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) hosted a rowdy town hall meeting to discuss health care reform. Fox’s local Houston affiliate reporter, Duarte Geraldino, reported that he talked to the participants and found that “some attendees admit they don’t live in the district.” How did they get there? Geraldino noted “an internet campaign” by far right activists urging their allies to attend and heckle Democratic Representatives. Geraldino then aired a clip showing one participant acting disrespectfully towards Rep. Green. “Pay close attention to the man behind the congressman,” Geraldino says in this clip, “he seems to have forgotten the part about respect.” Watch it.

The crowd was so disrespectful that one frustrated attendee said he had come to the town hall with the intention of giving Rep. Green “a really hard time,” but changed his mind because he was fed up with another man who was “screaming behind my head for the last hour.” The attendee continued, “This is a free country, but I think there’s a certain degree of respect” required. “I won’t be quiet! I won’t sit down! And I won’t let this happen on my watch,” responded the angry conservative activist. Watch it:

During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Almost all the hands shot up. Rep Green quickly turned the question on the audience and asked, “How many of you have Medicare?” Nearly half the attendees raised their hands, failing to note the irony.

At another point, a small business owner who supported health reform asks the audience how many people in this room “do not have health insurance of some kind.”Only one hand seemed to be raised. “I think the people who are objecting,” she noted, “are the people who have insurance.”

Check out Politifact.com’s analysis.

Check it out.

Sharon Begley writes in Newsweek:

Among the phrases you really, really do not want to hear from climate scientists are: “that really shocked us,” “we had no idea how bad it was,” and “reality is well ahead of the climate models.” Yet in speaking to researchers who focus on the Arctic, you hear comments like these so regularly they begin to sound like the thumping refrain from Jaws: annoying harbingers of something that you really, really wish would go away.

Let me deconstruct the phrases above. The “shock” came when the International Polar Year, a global consortium studying the Arctic, froze a small vessel into the sea ice off eastern Siberia in September 2006. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had done the same thing a century before, and his Fram, carried by the drifting ice, emerged off eastern Greenland 34 months later. IPY scientists thought their Tara would take 24 to 36 months. But it reached Greenland in just 14 months, stark evidence that the sea ice found a more open, ice-free, and thus faster path westward thanks to Arctic melting.

The loss of Arctic sea ice “is well ahead of” what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast, largely because emissions of carbon dioxide have topped what the panel—which foolishly expected nations to care enough about global warming to do something about it—projected. “The models just aren’t keeping up” with the reality of CO2 emissions, says the IPY’s David Carlson. Although policymakers hoped climate models would prove to be alarmist, the opposite is true, particularly in the Arctic.

The IPCC may also have been too cautious on Greenland, assuming that the melting of its glaciers would contribute little to sea-level rise. Some studies found that

Greenland’s glacial streams were surging and surface ice was morphing into liquid lakes, but others made a strong case that those surges and melts were aberrations, not long-term trends. It seemed to be a standoff. More reliable data, however, such as satellite measurements of Greenland’s mass, show that it is losing about 52 cubic miles per year and that the melting is accelerating. So while the IPCC projected that sea level would rise 16 inches this century, “now a more likely figure is one meter [39 inches] at the least,” says Carlson. “Chest high instead of knee high, with half to two thirds of that due to Greenland.” Hence the “no idea how bad it was.”

The frozen north had another surprise in store…

…

Continue reading. It’s a good article, and she spells out the situation clearly enough that even denialist should be questioning their denial.

Now that we have some more observations, the IPCC report on climate change turns out to be way over-optimistic: what is actually happening is worse than they predicted. Take a look.

Interesting: the costs have been greatly exaggerated. Take a look at this post, which begins:

Let’s set aside for the moment that the Energy Information Administration (EIA) doesn’t fully model the House climate and clean energy bill — they utterly ignore a major cost containment provision and the clean energy bank, while underestimating likely efficiency gains.

The EIA analysis, “Energy Market and Economic Impacts of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” still finds that the average cost to households from 2012 to 2030 (discounted) is $83! A fact sheet can be found here.

As The Hill wrote in “EIA says costs of climate bill modest at first“:

The move by bill sponsors to give away pollution allowances rather than selling them appears to be a good one; the EIA credits the free distribution of credits with keeping energy costs from rising precipitously….

Electric bills would increase only 3 to 4 percent by 2020 under a carbon cap imposed by the bill.

Reuters reports that EIA finds the clean energy bill would “increase the energy costs of the average family by $142 a year in 2020 and by $583 in 2030,” adding:

The estimate from the U.S. Energy Information Administration is in line with cost impact projections made by the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency, and contradict claims by energy and business trade groups that consumers would pay thousands of dollars more a year under a government plan to fight global warming.

In fact, the only reason the energy costs rise so much in 2030 compared to 2025 is that the allowance distribution to regulated utilities phases out after 2025.  While the EIA is stuck in a relatively rigid analysis and reporting methodology, in the real world, the increased auction revenues would be given back to consumers, which would again offset their increased energy costs with tax cuts.  So while energy costs might jump post-2050, net impacts on consumers would not.

Continue reading. Note the links: they lead to the substantiation for the statements.

I’ve blogged about this before, but here’s a new article by Melinda Wenner in Mother Jones:

If the specter of obesity and diabetes wasn’t enough to turn you off high- fructose corn syrup(HFCS), try this: New research suggests that the sweetener could be tainted with mercury, putting millions of children at risk for developmental problems.

In 2004, Renee Dufault, an environmental health researcher at the Food and Drug Administration(FDA), stumbled upon an obscure Environmental Protection Agency report on chemical plants’ mercury emissions. Some chemical companies, she learned, make lye by pumping salt through large vats of mercury. Since lye is a key ingredient in making HFCS (it’s used to separate corn starch from the kernel), Dufault wondered if mercury might be getting into the ubiquitous sweetener that makes up 1 out of every 10 calories Americans eat.

Dufault sent HFCS samples from three manufacturers that used lye to labs at the University of California-Davis and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The labs found mercury in most of the samples. In September 2005, Dufault presented her findings to the FDA’s center for food safety. She was surprised by what happened next. "I was instructed not to do any more investigation," she recalls. FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek says that the agency decided against further investigation because it wasn’t convinced "that there was any evidence of a risk."

At first, Dufault was reluctant to pursue the matter. But eventually, she became frustrated enough to try to publish the findings herself. She had her 20 original samples retested; mercury was found in nearly half of them. In January, Dufault and her coauthors—eight scientists from various universities and medical centers—published the findings in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health. Although they weren’t able to determine what type of mercury was present, they concluded that if it was organic, the most dangerous form, then based on average HFCS consumption, individuals could be ingesting as much as 200 micrograms of the neurotoxin per week—three times more than the amount the FDA deems safe for children, pregnant women, women who plan to become pregnant, and nursing mothers.

But the FDA and the Corn Refiners Association, an industry trade group, claim there’s nothing to worry about…

Continue reading. (Industry trade groups always say there’s nothing to worry about. It’s pointless to ask them.)

I knew it! Here’s the story by Anahad O’Connor in the NY Times:

Avoiding caffeine, sticking to a schedule and drinking a glass of warm milk are the usual tips for a good night’s rest. But the right room temperature can also play a crucial role.

Studies have found that in general, the optimal temperature for sleep is quite cool, around 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. For some, temperatures that fall too far below or above this range can lead to restlessness.

Temperatures in this range, it seems, help facilitate the decrease in core body temperature that in turn initiates sleepiness. A growing number of studies are finding that temperature regulation plays a role in many cases of chronic insomnia. Researchers have shown, for example, that insomniacs tend to have a warmer core body temperature than normal sleepers just before bed, which leads to heightened arousal and a struggle to fall asleep as the body tries to reset its internal thermostat.

For normal sleepers, the drop in core temperature is marked by an increase in temperature in the hands and feet, as the blood vessels dilate and the body radiates heat. Studies show that for troubled sleepers, a cool room and a hot-water bottle placed at the feet, which rapidly dilates blood vessels, can push the internal thermostat to a better setting.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A slightly cool room and a lower core temperature are optimal for sleep.

Last night I watched James Coburn in The President’s Analyst, an interesting satire heavily flavored with the paranoia of the mid and late ’60′s. Worth seeing, I think. It’s partly comedy, but also shows some serious anger.

Thanks to The Younger Daughter for this item:

You’d think that dinosaur-loving creationists would be law-abiding citizens. Not so. Last week a South Carolina judge ordered the government to seize control of Dinosaur Adventure Land creationist theme park after its owners were convicted of tax fraud.

If you live in or around Pensacola, it just got harder to be a creationist who wants to see giant statues of dinosaurs. Dinosaur Adventure Land, which was packed with educational exhibits devoted to unmasking the lies of evolution, will be no more. No longer will children be taught how dinosaurs walked the earth 6000 years ago. All because park’s owners, Kent and Jo Hovind, owed the IRS just under half a million dollars in employee taxes.

According to the Pensacola News Journal:

[Kent Hovind] was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.

The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property…

Continue reading. Guess he skipped this verse in Matthew: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s".

Interesting article from two years ago on the causes of rosacea:

Researchers have solved a medical mystery that has eluded them for hundreds of years, demonstrating that an abundance of abnormal skin proteins causes the blotchy skin condition called rosacea.

In a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine’s online edition, scientists showed that people with rosacea had too much of an incorrectly processed protein called cathelicidin.

The results could aid researchers in designing an effective treatment for the disease affecting 14 million in the U.S.

"We haven’t had this kind of important finding in the study of rosacea for a long time," said Dr. Jenny Kim, a dermatologist with UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

Read the rest of this entry »