Lipstick on a Pig

All the TV news coverage this week about the supposed "hidden meaning" of Sen. Obama's comments about putting lipstick on a pig show just how ridiculous and irrelevant some cable TV news programs have become. Chris Matthews of MSNBC spent most of his recent program with a bunch of "political strategists" who professed to know what this was all about. Of course, nobody agreed. Some said that he was calling Alaska Gov. Palin a "pig"; others said he was referring to Sen. McCain's continuance of President Bush's policies that have gotten the country in a big mess. (I'm quite sure the latter interpretation is the correct one, but this truly is much ado about nothing.)



Thankfully, Austin American Statesman columnist Jon Kelso decided to get to the bottom of this issue, by actually putting lipstick on a pig, a saga he recounts in today's column, It ain't as easy as it sounds to put lipstick on a pig. There's even a companion video.

Hopefully, Kelso's excellent work will put this issue to rest. I wonder if Matthews will be inviting John on his show anytime soon and, if so, what "experts" MSNBC will get from the "other side" to balance his comments. I nominate the handler for Bevo, the Univ. of Texas mascot.

Jerry

Friedman Nails Another One

Thomas Friedman nails another Op-Ed piece this morning in the New York Times, with Learning to Speak Climate.

Friedman has a knack for verbalizing what you already intuitively feel, but haven't quite put into your own words yet. I particularly like his characterization of how climate change is already affecting people's pocketbooks:

Most people assume that the effects of climate change are going to be felt through another big disaster, like Katrina. Not necessarily, says Minik Thorleif Rosing, a top geologist at Denmark’s National History Museum and one of my traveling companions. “Most people will actually feel climate change delivered to them by the postman,” he explains. It will come in the form of higher water bills, because of increased droughts in some areas; higher energy bills, because the use of fossil fuels becomes prohibitive; and higher insurance and mortgage rates, because of much more violently unpredictable weather.

Remember: climate change means “global weirding,” not just global warming.

Adding Rationality to the Climate Change Dialogue

There are two very thoughtful opinion pieces about climate change today in our nation's most prestigious newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In the Post, reporter Joel Achenbach has a terrific think piece called:

Global Warming Did It! Well, Maybe Not.

Achenbach does a terrific job in making it clear that "climate" and "weather" are very different things, and that by linking almost any weather anomaly to climate change in the end only confuses the issue and gives ammunition to the global warming "deniers." I think that he makes an important point, even if -- as I believe is the case -- climate change is making our planet's weather increasingly erratic.

In the New York Times, acclaimed Op-Ed columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman (the author of the best-seller The World Is Flat) has an equally insightful piece in:

The Iceman Cometh

In it, Friedman recounts his recent visit with leading Danish scientists, who are studying ice samples that go back tens of thousands of years so as to better understand climate change patterns long ago. Of course, what they find could help us understand (and hopefully mitigate) our current climate challenges.

Friedman's conclusion, to me, is chilling:

In an article just published in the journal Science Express, Dahl-Jensen’s team wrote about how it had discovered from the ice cores that the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland “changed abruptly” just as the last ice age ended around 11,700 years ago.

It seems to have been driven by a sudden change in monsoons in the tropics. The change was so abrupt that it warmed the Northern Hemisphere over Greenland by 10 degrees Celsius in just 50 years — a dramatic increase.

“It shows that our climate system has the ability to make very abrupt changes all by itself,” said Dahl-Jensen.

Some climate-change deniers would say that this proves that mankind is not important in changing the climate. Climate change experts, like Dahl-Jensen, say it’s not so simple: The climate is always changing, sometimes very abruptly, so the last thing that mankind should be doing is adding its own forcing actions — like pumping unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because you never know — you never know — what will tip the balance and send us hurdling into another abrupt change ... and into another era.

Jerry

It isn't the Thing That I Bought

This latest song from Max and the Marginalized puts words to something that's been rattling around in my brain lately -- that Barack Obama's positions on a number of issues seem to be "softening." That's a polite way of saying that he doesn't quite seem to be standing on the same principles he espoused in his successful primary run, and that made him my preferred candidate during the primaries.

I have no problem if a candidate openly changes a position on some key issue based on changing facts and his or her honest reassessment of that issue. While sticking to one's beliefs and convictions is usually noble, there are times when circumstances demand reconsideration. But wholesale abandoning of your principles strictly to attract more of "the middle" is blatant pandering, pure and simple.

It boils down to telling people what they want to hear, rather than what you believe. Of course, that's what politicians do, but I thought that Obama was more of a statesman than the typical politician.

Now I'm not so sure. I'm going to be watching both candidates closely to see if I can really tell what they believe as opposed to just what they say. If we can't discern the difference, how can we know what they'll do once they get in office?

We can't afford to have another individual in the White House like the current occupant. Our issues are way too pressing.

Jerry

Not Marginalized in the Least

I recently came across some very innovative new music by a group called Max and the Marginalized. It turns out that "Max" is Max Berstein, the son of Carl Bernstein (as in "Woodward and Bernstein") and writer/screenwriter Nora Ephron. He obviously has an amazing writing pedigree, and it shows. The band's unique concept is to record a new song about something in the news that they feel strongly about every week, and most of these songs are strongly political.

One of Max's songs is about the Bush Administration's tragically wrong-headed "abstinence-only" concept of fighting AIDS in Africa. Max even put out a video for this song ("Lectures for the Dying") focusing on Uganda:



This issue particularly resonates with me, because in the fall of 2005 I attended a presentation by Uganda President Museveni about his country's efforts to fight AIDS at the Hart Senate Office Building in DC. That meeting preceded my trip to Uganda the following January with University of Texas Professor Gary Chapman -- at the request of the President's office -- to help start up a new computer initiative there. In fact, we were told at one of the seven big "revival meetings" (the 10th slide in the slideshow) that Prof. Chapman and I attended out in the Ugandan boondocks that most of the audience members were HIV positive.

It's funny sometimes how things are connected.

Jerry

My Op-Ed Piece Today in the Statesman

The Austin American-Statesman today published my Op-Ed piece that takes a swing at Rush Limbaugh and his "ditto heads" on the topic of climate change:

We should've listened to the inconvenient truth a long time ago

This critical topic, of course, absolutely won't go away. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Dr. James Hansen's original warning to Congress about global warming (Associated Press Story), and Dr. Hansen gave a presentation at the National Press Club and briefed the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming.

The good news is that whoever wins the Presidential race will be infinitely more pro-active on this issue than the abysmal Bush Administration.

The bad news is that -- according to Hansen -- it's already too late to avoid major consequences of man-made warming, and he says that if we don't do something major soon to reduce CO2 the consequences will be dire and irreversible. His number one target: coal-based power plants.

My take is that the increase in greenhouse gases (such as CO2 and methane) are an important part of what's causing climate change, but there are clearly other major factors, too (sunspot activity, El Nino, etc.) These factors all conspire to create what many respected scientists call an "energy imbalance" that truly does threaten our planet's future in a big way.

We clearly need to reduce our (human) contribution to the Climate Change problem as aggressively as we can, because that's the part that we can control. These changes will take a long time to impact things (as Dr. Hansen often says, more radical climate change is already "in the pipeline"), but we need to do it for future generations.

This problem begs for national leadership on climate change, something that has been not only lacking, but has been undermined by the Bush Administration.

I can't wait for a new Administration and Congress.

Jerry

"Hair is Overrated!"

That's what the young fellow who checked me out at the HEB grocery store said this evening, right after he asked me "would you like to purchase our special today, hair gel?" and my response was "what the heck would I do with hair gel?"

He not only asserted that hair was overrated, but he tried pretty hard to convince me that his thesis was correct. "Sure, it can keep you warmer in the winter, but it's a real nuisance in the summer," he said, adding "I usually cut it all off when it starts getting really hot," which it certainly does here in central Texas.

His comments, I'm sure, were meant to make me feel less self-conscious when I asked about how I might actually use the product they were featuring in their daily special. But I found his remarks mildly condescending.

Did he really need to give me an explanation of how hair can be useful in the winter, but a pain in the ass in the summer? Didn't he realize that I once had hair, albeit and admittedly a while ago?

For one fleeting moment I wished I had brought a print of the black and white picture from 1952 I came across at Judy and Bill's place last Christmas that proved unequivocally that I indeed once knew what having hair on the top of one's head was like.

Jerry