Ted Cruz 's Climate Change Chicanery

Texas Senator Ted Cruz: Nothing to see here folks!

Well I'm sitting here making a late Sunday brunch while listening to A Prairie Home Companion on NPR with all the windows in my apartment wide open enjoying some amazing weekend weather.

Which wouldn't be all that unusual except for the fact that it's December 12th and it's partly sunny and 70 degrees outside here in central New Jersey.

The weather has been like this the past few days and local meteorologists are saying temperatures are somewhere between 20 to 23 degrees above normal for this time of year, so Republican Senator Ted Cruz picked a rather peculiar time to hold a Senate hearing to call into question the fact that human activity has influenced climate change.

The Tea Party poster boy and presidential candidate, who serves as the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, made headlines last Monday when he cherry-picked substantive climate change data to try and cast doubt on what the overwhelming majority of scientists agree on - that humans are changing the planets climate and contributing to global warming.

As Emily Atkin reported in an article on ThinkProgress.org, Cruz confused the Arctic with the Antarctic, quoted NASA climate research out of context and tried to poke holes in established scientific fact in an effort to prove that global warming is a myth.

The timing of Cruz's attack on science is part of a carefully planned Republican strategy to try and undermine the historic agreement on limiting climate change reached at the COP21 summit in Paris by almost 200 different countries including the world's biggest polluters, including the U.S., China and India.   

The deal calls for taking steps to keep global temperature rise to under 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, capping greenhouse gas emissions and providing $100 billion a year to small developing nations to help finance their efforts to transition their emerging economies to more climate-friendly energy sources like wind, solar and hydroelectric instead of relying on coal and oil.

Cruz's Senate hearings aren't surprising given that his largest campaign contributions by industry come from oil and gas companies and, or industries that represent them.

According to data compiled by OpenSecrets.org posted on the VoteSmart.org Website, the oil and gas industry has donated at least $952,380 to Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign.

It's rare to get almost 200 nations to agree on anything, and taking concrete steps to address climate change is in the long-term interests of humans, plants, animals, the oceans, rivers, lakes and the atmosphere - but the majority of Republican politicians in Congress view it exclusively from the one dimensional perspective of the financial interests of the oil, gas and coal industries.

While Republicans view entitlement programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicare that benefit average Americans with contempt, they're like zealots when it comes to protecting billions of dollars in lavish taxpayer-funded subsidies for America's oil and gas producers in the form of sketchy tax loopholes and other financial chicanery.

As an article on PoliticusUSA.com last June reported, a report by the International Monetary Fund showed that collectively, the world's countries provide a mind-boggling $5.3 trillion a year in taxpayer funds to subsidize fossil fuel companies that make huge profits even as they contribute to the pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which are altering the climate.

So Cruz using a Senate hearing as a platform to try and debunk climate change science is more about money than it is ideology, even though his sketchy arguments against human influence on climate change are largely ideologically driven.

Smog blankets the city of Beijing, China

In the meantime the evidence of global warming is all around us.

My friend Jeff just got back from a 12-day business trip to China where he spent time in the city of Shanghai.

He told me the pollution levels were bad enough to create near-constant overcast skies which at times could make it difficult to see store fronts across the street from his hotel.

It wasn't uncommon for him to see people walking around the streets wearing filter masks or even gas masks. 

He said Shanghai isn't nearly as bad as Beijing though.

On the very same day that Ted Cruz was holding his Senate Subcommittee hearing last Monday to deny that humans are contributing to climate change, hazardous levels of smog blanketing the city of Beijing prompted the first-ever "red alert" for toxic levels of smog that are some 20 times the level considered safe for the city's 20 million residents.

As Edward Wong reported in The New York Times last week, the smog prompted the government to shut down schools, businesses, factories and even some highways because of the lack of visibility caused in large part by fumes from coal burning factories and the millions of drivers who clog Beijing's roads.

Maybe Ted Cruz needs to take a fact-finding trip to Beijing; he could hold his hearings from there if the smog isn't too thick.

Anyway look for Republicans in Congress to continue doing what they can to undermine the U.S. honoring the commitments they agreed to in Paris while questioning whether man is influencing global warming.

In the meantime it's going to be 70 degrees in central New Jersey tomorrow - but I'm certain the 40 billion tons of CO2 that humans pumped into the atmosphere in 2014 have nothing to do with that.









 

'Witchcraft and Sodomy' & Other Texas Chicanery

"And I'll flood your little state too!'

The great state of Texas has been featured in the headlines of mainstream American media lately, unfortunately for reasons that are not really all that positive.

While the victims of the massive flooding in Houston, Austin and other parts of Texas have the sympathy of people around the globe, it also offers insight into just how totally detached from reality the extremist conservative mind-set in Texas really is these days.
 
For example, according to RightWingWatch.org, back on Thursday May 28th, eerily conservative talk radio host Bryan Fischer fielded a call from a concerned listener from College Station, Texas named 'Rebecca' who had some interesting theories on the cause of the unprecedented flooding that's taken lives and damaged property.

According to an article by Kyle Mantyla of RightWingWatch.org, "As Rebecca explained, the only parts of Texas that are underwater are the parts "that are overrun with witchcraft and sodomy" like Austin and Houston, which has a "sodomite mayor". On the other hand, the area where Rebecca lives is not underwater, even though she lives in a valley, and that is because "we kicked out abortion" and the people who live there hold conservative views."

Host Bryan Fischer was quick to agree with Rebecca's unusual supernatural explanation, adding that, "If you're going to attribute the flooding in Texas to some kind of supernatural cause, you can make a geographical connection between the flooding and the practice of the occult and witchcraft and the embrace of homosexuality,"

Personally I was unaware of the prevalence of Wiccan activity in Texas, or that sex between same sex couples in said state could affect the weather. Go figure!

Now Texas conservatives aren't the only ones freaking out about same sex couples getting married; or having sex and making it rain a lot.

Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily

As Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch reported yesterday, Joseph Farah (pictured left), the founder and editor of WorldNetDaily (which ran a six-part series on how soybeans cause homosexuality), issued an 'emergency plea' to governors and legislatures in all 50 states requesting that they be prepared to secede from the United States if the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on gay marriage.

Farah, who is profiled on the Website of the SPLC, insists that other countries that ban same-sex marriage, like Nigeria, Iran or Russia, should be prepared for "a pilgrimage of millions of Americans" seeking to flee the evils of same sex couples in monogamous long-term relationships.

Yup, I can see millions of right-wing conservatives packing up and heading to foreign countries they already despise. Anyway, let's get back to Texas.

It didn't really make large scale media headlines, but in Huntsville, Texas last Wednesday June 3rd at 6:18pm the state of Texas executed it's oldest death row inmate, Lester Leroy Bower, who'd been on death row for 31 years after being convicted of a quadruple shooting in an airplane hanger at a ranch outside Sherman, Texas in 1983.

Bower and his pro-bono legal team had maintained his innocence for years and claimed the state's case was flawed. Even though a witness has maintained for 26 years that she knew who killed the four men and it was not Bower, the state of Texas went ahead with the execution of the 67 year-old man who used his last words to proclaim his innocence in the death chamber with his wife and two sisters attending.

The strange pride the state of Texas seems to take in executions is ghoulish, but far be it from Texas to let something like facts or eyewitness testimony stand in the way of taking a human life.

Rick Perry rides again!

On a much lighter note our old friend Rick Perry (pictured left) is back in the news too; he hopes the public has forgotten "Niggerhead". We haven't.

The always quotable former Texas governor, who wants to eliminate so many departments from the federal government that he just can't remember them all, announced that he's tossing his own Stetson back into the crowded field of 2016 GOP presidential candidates.

Armed with a stylish new pair of glasses and a bagful of dusted off generic conservative talk-points, Rick is elbowing his way into the already overloaded Republican clown car and joining Senator Ted Cruz as yet another conservative Texan seeking the White House.

Cruz made headlines himself the other week when he weaseled out of answering a question about whether the Texas floods that have dumped trillions of gallons of water on Texas soil, caused the deaths of 28 people and caused billions of dollars in damage had anything to do with global warming.

According to an article by Emily Atkin on ThinkProgress.org, Cruz side-stepped the chance to defend his quasi-delusional beliefs about the 'myth' of global warming by saying, "At a time of tragedy, I think it’s wrong to try to politicize a natural disaster."  

But it's okay for him to use his position as a Senator to try and suppress science while accepting millions in political donations from petrochemical companies that dump millions of tons of toxic greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year?

So I guess "politicizing" global warming just depends on when you're doing it and who's paying you to do it, right Ted? 

It's often said Texas is like a different country, if you've ever been there you know why.

The Supreme Court is preparing to rule on whether Texas issuing license plates with the Confederate flag on them is protected by free speech in a case brought by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Between politicians who deny the science of climate change even as record flood levels devastate their state, nut-bag radio hosts who blame witchcraft and homosexual citizens for the weather and a state legislature who just voted to approve a law that would allow Texans to openly carry loaded handguns in hip or shoulder holsters, Texas is living up to it's reputation as a nation apart.

As I've blogged about before, Texas certainly has it's fair share of progressive locales like Austin, so it's not my intention to lump all Texans into one bin.

But if recent headlines are any measure of the state of the state, there are way too many delusional Texans who openly embrace chicanery.