Antarctic sea ice mystery coming into clearer focus

One of the measurements climate change deniers, like to use for obfuscation are changes in coastal Antarctic sea ice. The changes are small compared to the rapid loss up north, but some of them are increases. Naturally, the same people who pay attention to every microgram of gain down under somehow manage to dismiss the glaring losses happening in the Great White North — not to mention the thousands of thermometers the world over — but when a couple of hundred miles of sea ice apepars down south they are on it bay-bay! Well, that’s how their particular right-wing con works. But now some researchers have a tentative explanation for the observation: [Read more…]

This is what traditional media just doesn’t seem to get

Of course I had to turn on the talking heads this fine Sunday morning. One would assume the weekend after a Presidential election the talk would be all about Obama, the campaign, the results, and maybe some thoughts on what lays ahead. Of course that’s not what happened, it was all about how Republicans are going to deal with the many elephants in their house with hints of the evil deficit monster closing in yet again. Exhibit A of our broken celebrity centered media.

I found this on Hullabaloo taken from the clip above and it’s quite illustrative. Frum states the obvious and the entire assembled panel simply ignores his valid point and moves on: [Read more…]

What pray tell is a conservative then?

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Watching honest conservatives flail around trying to face the many elephants in their house has been a bit entertaining these last few days. Two such moderates I listen to more than others are Megan McCain of House McCain and Steve Schmidt from MSNBC, they both seem pretty straight forward and accurate. And listening to them and others like David Frum, it struck me, if the GOP does what they collectively suggest, excise the anti-science morons, get rid of abortion-under-no-circumstances as  a 100% do or die issue, tamp down on hatred of gays and immigrants, address racial prejudice, all while holding out an olive branch to minorities, and accept that sometimes, taxes might have to go up and down in some brackets, plus try to remove the worst of grifters … what is left that defines a conservative?

I mean … that’s pretty much it man. You strip out all that hatred and exploitation, most of the willful ignorance and monolithic, stubborn stupidity out of the GOP, and, well, they’d be democrats or democratic leaning indies. Or maybe just completely non political. Right? Because the entire modern Republican Party is a con job wrapped around giving rich people more money and power, and tricking the rest of the electorate to vote to give rich people more money and power.

That’s sad to say, but if we’re doing some intra-party soul searching on the heels of a crushing defeat, that’s the truth.  So yeah, I think the GOP may be way, way more fucked than even McCain or Schmidt realize and it’s hard to see how they ever get out of that trap.

I have a message for CEO’s and small business owners

If you survived the Great Recession then you’ve obviously done some things right. Well done, and grats! I bet one of the things you did right was keeping a lid on labor costs and focusing on business and customers that paid off. In a brutal recession, you are in driver’s seat in terms of labor. You can pick and choose among the cream of the crop for rock-bottom, bargain wages. The question is how will you survive and thrive as the recession comes to an end?

Because my guess is around half of you are at risk of fucking that up royally. One of the ways you might fuck it up is by not adjusting to the reality of fuller employment. It makes sense ethically to reward those employees who stuck with you through the darkest days. It makes business sense to pony up to retain and/or attract the higher performing employees who can carry your business to ever greater profitability in the expanding earnings environment ahead. And the companies that do the latter first will be able to pick and choose among the best and brightest in their respective fields at reasonable wages. The companies that drag their feet might end up fighting over the scraps left behind for premium pay. How you act now may well determine which group you fall into next quarter and next year.

 

Team Romney may have been hoisted by their own willfully ignorant petard

How did Team Romney blow it so badly? I offer the possibility that Team Obama was simply more effective in a digital age against a less than ideal candidate. But details of a 20th century, top-down clunky Romney campaign are emerging. It’s hard to say how big of a difference it would have made had Team Romney paid attention to actual poll data, instead of basically making up their own reality out of whole cloth. But word is Romney and Ryan were both stunned when electoral reality came home to roost: [Read more…]

It finally caught up to me

I was up for basically two or three days straight, even when I did close my eyes for a few minutes it was mostly in a sitting position in front of a screen of some kind. Finally, last night around 10 PM, it caught up with me. I went down like an obsolete skyscraper and only woke up a few hours ago. And what is one of the hop topics on the intertoobz and cables newzes when I rise from the crypt? Conservative con artists fleecing their own. Mostly centered around K-K-Karl Rove’s Crossroads which scammed almost half a billion dollars out of wealthy conservatives and delivered precisely nothing.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Political junkies all over have always looked on, bewildered, at the wanton exploitation of religious Americans, married Americans, libertarian Americans; pretty much anyone of any age occupying any social strata, who can serve as an easy mark for dozens of conservative grifters. Makes you wonder how all that started and why conservatives put with it: [Read more…]