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McCaskill So 'God-Damn Mad' About Wartime Contracting Abuses. While channeling President Harry Truman and fuming about wartime contracting waste and abuse, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) dropped a "god-damn" just for emphasis at a Senate hearing Wednesday. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who chaired the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, was thanking McCaskill for her "excellent testimony," noting that he was struck by her reference to Truman who proceeded over a bumpy reconversion from a wartime economy.

"I know you're keeping that spirit alive," he told her. "It struck me that if we could go and interview him about this commission report and then release the transcript, we would have to delete several expletives. " Taking the bait, she gave her very own tribute to Truman in classically blunt McCaskill style.

"You know, I need to say for Harry Truman, 'This makes me god-damn mad,'" she said, referring to the billions of dollars wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan on contracting corruption and abuse. Meanwhile, Rep. UN faces historic test over Palestine. The Solid Ground movement. Democratic Underground. Romney: I’d Like To Repeal Wall Street Reform. By Tanya Somanader on August 25, 2011 at 11:15 am "Romney: I’d Like To Repeal Wall Street Reform" With the constant stream of Wall Street donations flowing into his campaign coffers, it was only a matter of time before GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called to repeal Wall Street’s number one enemy — the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

Though Congress enacted the law to provide vital consumer protections and to prevent Wall Street from spurring another financial crisis, Republicans have continually attempted to cripple the law piecemeal, either by attacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or weakening derivatives regulation. But Romney decided yesterday that a repeal of the law was necessary because, in part, the law’s length is too “overwhelming”: “The extent of regulation in the banking industry has become extraordinarily burdensome following Dodd-Frank,” Romney told a roundtable of 18 businessmen at The Common Man Restaurant.

Republicans Want to Increase Taxes on the Poor | Politeia. For the last two years the Republican Party has largely taken the position that taxes should never go up. They should only be lowered. For all the party’s talk of deficit reduction, Republicans balked during the debt ceiling negotiations at increasing tax revenues—even just by closing loopholes—to reduce the deficit. And at the recent Republican presidential debate in Iowa, every single candidate indicated that they would refuse even a deal that would cut ten dollars of spending from the federal budget for every dollar in new tax revenues. Reducing the deficit isn’t worth it, in other words, if it means raising taxes.

But it’s increasingly clear that in spite of their rhetoric lower taxes in general is not the Republican Party’s main goal. That doesn’t mean half of Americans pay no taxes, however. The Republican position, in other words, is not that taxes should be lower in general, but that—in spite of what Warren Buffett says—the rich bear too much of the tax burden. Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy. Politics. Finally, PolitiFact calls out GOP candidate on climate. Science? Who needs it? Photo: IowaPolitics.comAt long last, mainstream media begins to pay attention to the flat denial of basic climate science being pushed by right-wing Republican presidential candidates.

Last year, my work on Climate Zombies — climate-denying candidates running for Congress — earned me a snippet on a New York Times blog, but most mainstream media ran stories presenting climate science as an issue with two sides. Things have been changing as the media realize that people who deny climate science also deny other scientific realities.

PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking website, finally took on a Republican candidate for president over his claim that “scientists disagree about global warming” and found it false. Tim Pawlenty to The Miami Herald: Q: There is a strong case for man-made climate change, according to a University of Miami climate researcher I’ve spoken to. Pawlenty’s response piqued PolitiFact’s interest: It’s good that PolitiFact called out Pawlenty. Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment. By Joe Romm on February 16, 2011 at 5:12 pm "Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment" Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas.

These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique. Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming That’s from the first of two seminal studies in Nature, “Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes” (subs. req’d). Anthony Watts urges WattsUpWithThat readers to disrupt Forbes blog: “shout them down in the comments section” By Joe Romm on March 4, 2011 at 2:30 pm "Anthony Watts urges WattsUpWithThat readers to disrupt Forbes blog: “shout them down in the comments section”" Yes, discredited former TV weatherman Anthony Watts can’t stomach even a couple of scientists posting reasonable comments about an error-riddled piece from Heartland on a blog already over-run by the pro-pollution crowd.

He must marshall his readership to “shout them down in the comments section.” Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared scientists — and tried to get his followers to game online voting and pile onto other people’s comments sections (see Scientific American “horrified” by “the co-opting of the poll” by users of “the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That”). In a new post, he reprints another piece smearing climate scientists by Joe D’Aleo. Watts never retracted the attacks. Watts often feigns a demeanor of reasonableness, as when he had the chutzpah to write in June: Public opinion on climate just tipped. One of the hallmarks of tipping points is that you don’t know when you’re in one. There’s growing agreement that peak oil, for example, happened between 2004 and 2008.

Still, you’re never sure about such inflection points until well after the fact. This week, though, sure feels like the tipping point on public opinion on climate, and so I’m going to stick a fork in it right here, folks. Climate opinion just tipped. Why do I say that? In the last week: Australia, with huge coal reserves — but rapidly passing the Arctic as ground zero for climate impacts with epic fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and dust storms — passed a carbon credit law, with a tax coming up next.Canada rolled out regulations that will likely phase out coal by mid-century.Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” research was once and for all vindicated.Prominent Republicans like Jon Hunstman and Chris Christie agree that climate science is real, and there’s even pressure within the GOP to not become the anti-science party.

Behold The 'Hybrid PAC': All The Benefits Of A Regular PAC With The 'Super' Bonuses. Until now, there's been two kinds of political action committees. There's your classic PAC, capable of making contributions to federal candidates, but which only runs on donations from individual donors capped at $5,000. Than there are "super" PACs, fueled by unlimited donations from corporations and capable of making independent expenditures, but unable to donate directly to candidates. Now, thanks to a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission, you can have the best of both worlds with what the campaign finance world has already dubbed a "hybrid PAC. " If you're stuck with a regular old PAC, it's super easy to upgrade.

All you have to do is open a separate bank account. It all started when National Defense PAC, an organization that supports military veterans running for Congress, who support a balanced budget, asked the FEC for permission to create segregated back accounts so it could accept donations in excess of $5,000.