One of the biggest problems with the debate in today’s political world is that there are a significant number of people who pay far, far too much attention to Fox News.

The reason this is bad is that Fox News is deliberately partisan, and worse still, they are liars. They intentionally coordinate their message with whatever the Republicans are pushing, and they do not hesitate to lie.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

(here’s the link if you can’t see the embedded video: http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/002577/ )

This video shows Sean Hannity claiming that then-Senator Barack Obama, then-Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator Harry Reid were against the use of the process called “reconciliation”.

Today the Democratic Party is in the majority in the Senate and is possibly going to use reconciliation to get some health care reform through.

The thing is… Hannity is a liar. In the segment, there’s a little insight into the truth- these Senators were NOT speaking about reconciliation. They were discussing the Senate potentially using the “nuclear option”… but what they referred to as the “nuclear option” is NOT the reconciliation process.

The nuclear option, in the context of the Senate, is a process that would basically use a parliamentary procedure to end a filibuster. This is different than reconciliation, which prevents a filibuster from starting in the first place. Slate ran a pretty good explanation of it.

The nuclear option was being discussed by Reid, Clinton, and Obama in 2005 when the Democrats were trying to stop some of the Bush Administration’s judicial appointments.

The point here is that reconciliation to pass changes to spending and the law is a different deal than the nuclear option- and Hannity KNOWS that. He knows that very well, and yet in today’s context he aired that video of Reid, Clinton, and Obama, trying to make it look like they were against reconciliation just a few years ago and now are for it.

In other words, he’s lying. Worse still, he’s using his lie to smear his political opponents. (It’s one thing to merely lie about what your side wants; it’s another thing to lie about the other guys’ morality.)

And do you know why Hannity had to use video of Obama, Reid, and Clinton talking about the nuclear option and NOT video of them talking about reconciliation? It’s because they didn’t oppose the use of the procedure back then. Oh, they opposed the bills that the Republican majority in the Senate were trying to pass, but they didn’t speak out against reconciliation.

In other words, Hannity couldn’t find video that actually makes them hypocrites, so he used video of them talking about something else. It was a deliberate choice to try and make his opponents look bad.

Oh, by the way, reconciliation? That process has been used 22 times to pass bills in a method that avoids filibusters since 1980. (See this and this.)

Out of those 22 times, 16 of them were accomplished by Republican-majorities in the Senate. That’s right- over 70% of the times that a party used reconciliation, it was the Republicans.

So remember, the next time you see some Republican Senator like Alexander, Hatch, McConnell, Gregg, Grassley, or Snowe talking about how bad the Democrats using reconciliation would be, remember that THEY were the ones who used it just a few years ago to pass some of President Bush’s tax cuts.

I’ve read some stuff recently from the deniers- the folks who deny that climate change is happening, or that human activity has something to do with it.

One theme that you hear from them a lot is that there’s this huge industry that’s got a lot invested in ensuring that we all believe that climate change (aka “global warming”) is a real phenomenon. They act like there’s this great big conspiracy, led by… Al Gore, I guess, to make us all believe in climate change so they can radically change our economy and enslave us all for the next thousand years.

It’s ridiculous, of course, but it plays to people’s fears. (Whenever you can scare people, you can motivate them; fear is an intensely powerful motivator. Why else do you think that the radical nutjob right wing keeps pushing the negative images of Obama at us?

As a post on Daily Kos said the other day…

Heading into 2009, it seemed that Democrats had all the advantages: a President-Elect riding sky-high approval ratings; an overwhelming advantage in the House of Representatives; and a supposedly filibuster-proof majority as soon as the challenges to Senator-Elect Franken’s victory had made their way through the courts. Republicans were overwhelmingly unpopular because of their disastrous stewardship of our nation’s economy and military. Democrats were discussing implementing popular policies that would make a huge difference in the lives of regular people. Conservative ideologues had only one option: the hail mary.

There’s only one thing that can make a Representative from an unpopular Party stand up to a popular President pushing for popular policy: the Party base. The best way to unite the base? Scare base voters about Obama so much that resisting Obama became easier than resisting the base. And the best way to scare base voters about Obama? Well, when your target is the first ever non-white President, is named Barack Hussein Obama, is the son of a Kenyan, and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, the easiest way to scare the white Christian base is self-explanatory.

Republicans have been playing dog-whistle politics ever since Lee Atwater theorized on how to use taxes as a subliminal code for racism, but getting people to believe that a highly popular and historic President is a Bolshevik racist Muslim who is ineligible to hold his office and wants the terrorists to win? That requires a totally different frequency and amplitude.

In other words, they push this story because it’s all they’ve got.

Same thing with the climate change denialists. They latch onto the stories about some of the studies around climate change, like the one that has been exposed for the scientists deliberately choosing to ignore some data that didn’t agree with their conclusion, and later trying to delete emails that showed what they’d done.

Never mind that there’s dozens of OTHER studies that show the same thing (the problem in question had to do with whether or not growing cities, specifically in China, were the reason that temperature readings were showing a steady and fast increase). The deniers point to the single discredited study and scream that it proves the whole thing is a farce.

Well, no, it doesn’t; it proves that particular study is flawed and we should ignore it, but when there’s one flawed study showing “X” and a dozen other studies that nobody can find any scientific flaws with that ALSO proves “X”, the reality is that “X” is probably true.

Okay, I’m rambling a bit… but getting back to the theme- money and power. What the deniers claim is that there’s this huge group of people, motivated by money and power, who want to push climate change upon us.

I was reading a blog entry (by ex-Red Sox pitcher, and noted conservative, Curt Schilling, of all people) about climate change and there was a commenter who said something about how the scientists who were covering up their data in the flawed study and that the “left” would say they were just cleaning out their hard drives.

Actually, amongst the scientists, the guys who did this kind of thing- covering up contrary evidence that invalidates their study- are now outcasts. They’re discredited and shunned.

You know why? Because those few bad apples are giving all the rest of the scientists a bad name.

The “industry” around climate change is tiny compared with the industry that’s directly threatened by the implications of the scientific evidence. The evidence points to activities that crank carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and says “these are warming up the planet.”

The oil, natural gas, and coal industries are huge. They’re gigantic. They’re far, far bigger than any “industry” that’s currently existing or even proposed. Just look at the Forbes listing of the biggest corporations in the world… here’s the top ten:

1. Royal Dutch Shell (oil company)
2. Exxon Mobil (oil company)
3. Wal-Mart (retailer)
4. BP (oil company)
5. Chevron (oil company)
6. Total (oil company)
7. Conoco Phillips (oil company)
8. ING group (banking)
9. Sinopec (oil company)
10. Toyota Motor (automobiles)

7 of the top 10 corporations in the world are oil/gas companies.

To suggest that the climate change “side” of the argument is somehow this big, powerful cartel that’s dedicated to enslave the rest of us is utterly ridiculous. Climate change has nothing to do with politics, left or right.

In fact, it’s awfully ironic that “conservatives” are the ones defending these mammoth, multinational oil corporations and their TRILLIONS of dollars of revenue. Conservatives should, by their name, believe in conserving the earth. Instead, they’re on the side of the guys who want zero restrictions on pumping oil and gas from the ground and into the atmosphere.

Money and power? Believe me, it’s ALL on the side of those who’re denying climate change. You know what the revenues of those oil companies mentioned above is?

$2,204,676,000,000.

That’s over TWO TRILLION dollars- just among 7 companies.

If you take the top 20 petroleum companies, their total revenues are $3,608,244,000,000.

[b]Three and a half trillion dollars.[/b]

Don’t EVEN pretend that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have far, far, far more to lose, and far more money, than the scientists who are, by and large, working in non-profit colleges and universities around the world.

Doubt the science if you want- that’s up to you. But don’t be fooled into which side has all the money and power- that’s the side that’s likely spending way, way more to manipulate you into believing their propaganda.

For a while, I’m trying out this new theme. It’s mostly because it’s simpler and I think it’ll facilitate the use of Google Calendar for my Seattle Mariners season ticket group.

We’re about to launch into the process of selecting our games, and with 18 shares picking 81 home games (with two pairs of seats for each game) we need an easy way to get/keep everyone on the same page in terms of picking order, games already selected, etc.

Google Calendar is quite possibly the coolest thing since, I dunno, sliced bread. It just rocks, so we’re putting it to good use!

Anyway, I like the theme a bit, but mostly it’s a two-column deal so hopefully our calendar will display well on everyone’s browsers.