Isn’t part of what we’re doing at the Lake help with Krugman’s statement:

What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

I think it is. Good morning SD. An extra hug this morning for the loss of your dear tiger.

Bro,
Missed you yesterday. So sorry to hear of the loss of your dear friend. Deepest condolences. Rest well, Kismet.

Morning BT & Firepups:

A moment of silence for the poor, oppressed Koch Brothers…OK, that’s enough. Now we can all start laughing and pointing and ridiculing again. (I thought that moment of silence would never end.)

Hedges is up…

Missed you around here over the weekend…

Yes, in a very big way.

Wouldn’t have been very good company, I’m afraid.

Damn, still not firing on all cylinders.

Mornin’, BT, pups

So sorry to hear about your loss SD.

Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world.

What Krugman didn’t say is that Cronon was exhibiting a scrupulousness that those Republicans have almost certainly never exhibited. How about it? Anybody else as tired as I am about the pot calling the sink black? Republicans use “un American” over and over on anybody who has the temerity to disagree with them and their lapdog press just puts it out there without comment or at most turns it into a “he said, she said” kind of exchange. Enough!

Operation Stupid is still stupid. I call bull!@#! if you don’t think there aren’t US or British special forces among those people pushing in Libya right now. If they aren’t actively working with the resistance, they are on the ground independently directing fire and providing recon.

All we need is for those guys to get captured or killed and things will change dramatically. Operation Stupid, a no-fly zone, that has turned into a no-drive zone, which will soon incorporate US or NATO ground forces since I sincerely doubt that the opposition has sufficient momentum or force to overthrow the Libyan regime.

We aren’t going to piss hundreds of millions away and then walk away “Well, I guess they didn’t have what it took to win..” We will get to that critical mass where we will publicly use SF or NATO forces to nudge the opposition over the hump.

This opportunity will not be wasted and we will break our arm patting ourselves on the back declaring what a wonderful president Obama is and how we need to re-elect him.

What about Manning? What’s going on with him? Or jobs…

I’m gathering that you experienced the loss of a friend. Condolences…

I have enormous respect for Juan Cole but it’s still Operation: Stupid.

NYT Editorial this morning about the William Cronon matter:

A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin

Lost Kismet to oral cancer Fri morning. She’d have been 19 in June.

Morning BT and firepups,
SD, sorry to hear about the loss of your good friend.

In a posting this morning on posting on Elizabeth Warren, Yves Smith writes in passing

Early on, it cut off institutional funding of liberal interest groups that failed to maintain message discipline [linked to a 2009 piece by Jane on the Veal Pen]. Our DC contacts tells us the Obama has now moved up the food chain and is working to defund think tanks deemed to be too pinko (for instance, we were told of one, with all the particulars, that was dumped by a longstanding $1 million a year donor).

Does anybody know which think tank this refers to?

Edit: SD, sorry for your loss.

Sorry for your loss. I’m not going to pretend to imagine how you must feel. 19 years is a long time. I’m certain you gave Kismet a very good life, though. You can be proud of that.

Related to the Regressives’ attempting to intimidate Prof Cronon and other academics:

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

Ladies and Gentlemen: We have a candidate.

And on a related note…

It is definitely what we are trying to do, but the academic context is different. I recall a case a couple of decades ago in Arizona where an economics professor published a run of the mill cost-benefit analysis of a Gila River irrigation project and found that it the net benefit was resoundingly negative. The AZ legislature (or the powers that be, I can’t remember) went after him tooth and nail. I don’t know if he was already tenured, but the University was put on notice not to promote him, and he wasn’t promoted.

Beyond the individual cases of the kind Krugman is writing about, there is the more invidious threat of funding cuts to state universities that don’t censure their employees. On the whole, university administrators are not a courageous lot, less so now that the administrations are increasingly dominated by management types taking advice from McKinsey. A threat to defund a program is a credible threat. The Republican congress was on the way to doing this in the spring of 2004, when the Abu Ghraib business derailed the project. At the time they were going after Middle East Studies programs whose professors weren’t parroting the Bush party line. I believe they had Juan Cole in their sights.

It’s not just government funding. Cole got shot down at Yale because some very heavy benefactors put the squeeze on Rick Levin. Now, Levin is a guy who is on our side, so you can’t imagine how tight that squeeze was.

A lot of academics I work with do not have the faintest notion of how fragile is our freedom to work and write as we please.

In good news, incumbent WI Supreme David Prosser’s hometown newspaper is endorsing his April 5 opponent, JoAnne Kloppenberg.

Edit that would be the Appleton Post-Cresent.

It’s part and parcel of their ridiculous war on science which I think started out as an attempt to discredit anybody and anything that didn’t support their ideology but has since morphed into a denunciation of all science while they ironically use their cell phones, computers, twitter account and pharmaceuticals.

Thanks for the reference.
“The party refuses to say why it wants the messages…”
Does the GOP want to know which search terms Professor Cronon used to gain information from historical databases the State of Wisconsin subscribes to in his research?

Oh, Man, whoever produced that needs to keep it up throughout the campaign.

I saw that at HuffPo (about the only thing HuffPo’s good for any more).

I have a feeling she might produce more of them. Nothing like caustic humor to stand this shit on its head…

Does anybody know which think tank this refers to?

I wonder if it isn’t Fred Bersten’s Institute for International Economics (renamed the Peterson Institute for obvious reasons). Every since Brookings went over to the Dark Side, this has been a haven for liberal-minded economics. I hadn’t realized Peterson had got his dirty mitts into it, and will check out the story the next time I am in DC.

Today show reporting on Johnson billionaire heir facing charges of sexually abusing stepdaughter. From Racine.

Is this the Kochroach in-state crony who has funded Fitzwhozitstan?

….
SD, sweet memories to you to sustain you now.

I haven’t given HuffPo any traffic since they prostituted themselves out to aol and I sure as hell won’t be now that they’ve given Breitbart a column.

•Maybe we should build more solar and wind.

Not according to Obama and his center-right administration.

In the next couple of days, Evergreen Solar will close its doors on its state-of-the-art facility in Devens, Massachusetts, which it built at great expense at the same time Obama was campaigning to become president. At Devens, they produced high-quality, low-cost solar wafers that did not waste silicon during production. Without any help from the Obama Adminisrtation, they had to close the doors at Devens and open a factory in Wuhan, China (where the government helps A LOT with solar):

Without comprehensive federal energy policy and with the continued balkanization of the U.S. market into 50 markets, the U.S. will continue to lag behind Germany, China and others.

Now Suniva has stopped building its factory in Michigan and will likely have to take the jobs overseas:

Suniva Inc. put on hold its plans to build a new solar cell factory in Michigan and suspended negotiations with the Department of Energy regarding a federal loan, VentureWire has learned.

Norcross, Ga.-based Suniva, hailed by the Obama administration and others as a model of a U.S. business that keeps manufacturing jobs in the country, is now considering building a large factory at a number of global locations.

As we head into the 2012 election cycle, remember:

Obama will look you straight in the face and lie to you.

Obama will smile at you and lie to you.

Obama will point at Republicans and tell you that they’re the problem while lying about what he’s doing to support green jobs and the American middle class.

When it comes to the neuron challenged, DWTS watchin’ couch potatoes if ya can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit. Works for the Regressives, why not us?

Obama will look you in the eyes and lie. Obama will smile and lie. Obama will point at Republicans and tell you that they’re the problem while lying about what he’s doing to support green jobs and the American middle class.

Definitely worth repeating.

When he (Gordon J. F. MacDonald) wrote his chapter, “How To Wreck The Environment,” for the book Unless Peace Comes, he was not kidding around. In it he describes the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.

He also said that these types of weapons would be developed and, when used, would be virtually undetectable by their victims.

Actually Huff backed off Brb after a lot of protest, as I recall.

Morning All.

They took him off the front page. He’s still writing a regular paid column for them.

AstroPower of Delaware, a once-thriving solar cell manufacturer, was driven into bankruptcy by the Bush administration.

According to the all-knowing wiki, he’s always been there:

He was a researcher for Arianna Huffington, and helped launch her website, The Huffington Post.

Arianna got her money in cash, not stock, according to Ratigan this a.m. on MoJo. Smart.

Off to swim in the great capitalist cesspool.

US KIA Afghanistan: 1,514

US KIA Irak: 4,441

Iraki, Afghan and Pakistani casualties: estimates vary to over 1.5M

US MBS 2011: 10,664 and counting

Four Legs Good Two Legs Bad

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things.

Namaste

No war but class war

Never. Give. Up.

Whoa, that’s some heavy shit. What little respect I still had for Arianna just went down the tubes.

Condolences and thinking of you SD.

Good Morning Blue Texan and Firedogs -

It’s Emptywheel’s Birthday !

(((Southern Dragon)))

Know that you were Kizzie’s beloved

OK – the problems of the present are getting boring – the lies of Obama even more so.

So – with Hillary saying she is not going to allow the left to lie/dump on/go into an anyone but Hillary mode in 2016 – by means of her just not running-, who replaces Obama in 2016? Cory Anthony Booker – the Mayor of Newark – seems a winner – at least to me. Any other names? For those that said “I’d vote for a women, just not this women”, are there any women who could break through from the left? MSM will do its white male only thing, so if there is to be a break from that again, it will take time to develop. And if White Male Only is a given, who on the left is interesting with a real chance of winning?

Yeah…mine too. Thanks for that twolf1

oh NOES………………..i didnt know….sad,sad for SD family of critters

With a Canadian accent, no less!

Have to find somebody in the Democratic Party who’s not a fuckin’ neoliberal first.

A-yup. The most effective way to trigger the klaxons at the RNC and their allies nowadays is apparently to mention ALEC. Not only does this cause the Wisconsin governor and his legislative buddies to commit FOIA abuse to harass you, it makes movement conservatives in Minnesota wear out their fingers sending Tweet after Tweet telling everyone “move along, nothing to see”:

Photo: Leatherface, the model ALEC legislator? (Since ALEC’s defenders say there’s no story here, will the general  public be allowed to learn which Minnesota legislators are members–and read the model legislation the group puts together? After all,members of the Chamber of Commerce and NFIB prudly display their membership, often on their business doors).

No wonder she got all that air time on the reichwing airhead shows.

Booker’s enthusiastic endorsement of Michelle Rhee was all I needed to know

I am Centrist™, Here Me Roar !

I’ve read all of his blog articles and his op-ed in the NYT. If you haven’t, FYI they are asking for all emails that contain a lot of words INCLUDING the names of the 8 officials targeted for recall.

IMHO the entire purpose is to intimidate him. They aren’t looking for research, they’re looking for ways to smear him.

Keeping you in my thoughts SD.

x2

I saw those closing of US Solar manufacturing and wondered if German Solar used China – they lead the world as to installed solar (at 1% of total energy produced) – but are they making the stuff? The German companies are
Aleo Solar
Bosch Solar Energy
Centrosolar
Centrotherm Photovoltaics
City Solar AG
Concentrix Solar
Conergy
Flabeg AG
IBC SOLAR
Juwi
Odersun
Phoenix Solar
Q-Cells
Roth & Rau
Schott AG
Singulus Technologies
SMA Solar Technology
Solar Millennium
SolarWorld
Solon SE
Sulfurcell

I have not followed the economics of the business – although I know it does not get the massive subsidy that nuke plant construction gets.

Sorry, missed this. Condolences.

Ariana was a piece of work and then she wasn’t, but she’s back to being a pig with lipstick. YUCK

We’ve got that ************** here trying to finish Jeb’s job of destroying the public school system.

That was unfortunate – indicating poor advisors on education and a bias for Team Black. But Booker appears to be doing good in other areas.

I just thought the discussion should start – thanks for your comment.

ALEC looks to be even more powerful — and secretive — than the Council for National Policy.

Members of the local and national Chambers of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Businesses aren’t afraid to own up to it — in fact, as Sally Jo Sorensen of BSP notes, they often post their memberships in these groups on their business doors. Most ALEC members don’t even admit to being members.

Southern Dragon – Was there ever a cat that was so loved? I can think of one, and Min is playing with Kismet at the Rainbow Bridge. Hugs and scritches to you and yours.

I saw that – insert dark joke about her “reviewing the numbers” with Arthur Laffer

jaysus !

New post up top…

According to Bill Cronon, ALEC is a very exclusive and secretive club.

How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join.
…
What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you.
…
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member.

(The elipses are where I took out the references to ALEC membership brochures.)

A group of friends were discussing starting a non-profit that gives grants to support green energy development/manufacturing here in the US only.

FOIA filings work both ways. I would pull a wide range of key words from the “Ooops Koch” call for starters and request emails from all GOP in the Wisc. legislator as well as the Gov.

Thought police? At least we have the right to investigate elected leaders.

We need to start regional worker-owned companies to replace the corporate non-existent manufacturing sector. With the Fed loaning money at near zero interest to the banksters, et al, why not to stimulate manufacturing at home?

Great idea. Wisconsinites lurking? Get hot.

Sorry I didn’t respond right away, had some “honey-do” lists of things to get done and stepped away from the computer.
There are so many issues here, I just cited one of them. I did read about the different names that they cited in the FOIA including the eight up for recall. Today, when time allows, I am going to go back to Professor Cronon’s site for an update.
These repubs are trying anything and everything to silence any critics.
The fact that ALEC has truly been exposed is sending them into massive protection mode.
I loved the analogy by Phoenix Woman at #51 with “the sounding of the Klaxons going off…”

AstroPower of Delaware, a once-thriving solar cell manufacturer, was driven into bankruptcy by the Bush administration.

That’s not surprising. But Obama made some pretty specific promises. He reneged. He lied to everyone who supported/worked for/contributed to/voted for him.

Obama promised CHANGE, and screwed us all.

Sally Jo’s been aware of ALEC since 2003, and she’s glad to see that the rest of the nation’s finally waking up to the threat they pose. Of all the Koch-funded groups, they’re very likely the most dangerous to our democracy, our way of life, and the planet as a whole.

I’d also advocate removing the (banker-bought) lending restrictions placed on credit unions. Credit unions have done better than most banks over the past few years, mainly because they didn’t indulge in the same sorts of shenanigans but also in part because they don’t pay their top people tens of millions each per year.

I would include names of other GOP govs in the FOIA search. After all, this Wisc lawlessness does appear to be a conspiracy to break the law. Similar actions happened in Ohio.

Premeditated actions like that, in multiple numbers, are not accidents.

So, were the US or British forces on the ground doing all of those things when the protests began? Do you really think that the Libyans are not very bright or able to work things out without us ‘guiding’ them? With many of the Libyan army personnel coming over to the rebel side, even not being well trained, why can’t they be doing their own work? Admittedly it has been many years since I was there, but the Libyans that I knew were quite capable of doing their own work. If it turns out that we were actually behind this, then I make an abject apology. Until then, I support the rebels and our helping them.