According to Gawker, “Patrick Lynch is the 51-year-old president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest and most influential union of the New York City Police Department.
“Over the weekend, Lynch blamed Bill de Blasio for the Saturday deaths of two Brooklyn cops who were murdered by a lone gunman from Georgia.”
“’That blood on the hands,’ he said at a press conference, ‘starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.’”
“To understand why he would say something so wrong and inflammatory, you need to delve into Lynch’s long, checkered history of issuing similarly insane statements. His public declarations over the past 15 years are essentially pro-police agitprop: Cops can do no wrong, while victims of their state-sanctioned violence always had it coming. They are also a deep well of masculine anxiety, hurt feelings, and barely disguised racism.”
At some point the U.S. media switched from using the term “global warming” to the term “climate change.” The was likely done to put the emphasis on the change in climate rather than an increase in temperature.
Global warming is very slow and it is about average temperatures. It doesn’t mean there is no fluctuation in temperatures. For example, the average winter temperature might go down one degree from last year – but the average summer temperature went up two degrees. You still have a net increase in average yearly temperature – even though the winter temperature was actually COLDER than last year! That’s because the summer was warmer than last year…
Scientists and science journalists like to say that one of the best ways to tell that climate change is real is to take a look at the changes we can already see: This year is on track to be the hottest ever recorded, and glaciers, corn, and even grizzly bears are responding to the warming.
However, all those changes won’t be enough to convince most conservative climate skeptics, a new study in Nature Climate Change finds.
A growing body of recent research suggests a person’s political ideology, economic philosophy, and religious beliefs cloud a person’s judgement about global warming. The study, which was released Monday, put that hypothesis to the test by analyzing Gallup polls taken just after the unusually warm winter of 2012.
It found that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of the warmer weather in their state tracked fairly well with actual satellite temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
However, “for people who said their local winter was warming, the observed temperature anomalies had no effect on the tendency to attribute that to global warming,” says Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University who authored the study.
In other words, the actual temperature had no bearing on whether people believed in climate change. Instead, McCright says, “one of the strongest predictors” is party affiliation: Republicans were far less likely to attribute the warming they felt to man-made climate change than were Democrats. Other variables, such as gender, age, and level of education, were far less reliable as predictors of a person’s global warming beliefs.”
According to CNN, “Republicans and outside groups used anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data ahead of the midterm elections, CNN has learned, a practice that raises questions about whether they violated campaign finance laws that prohibit coordination.
“…The profiles were publicly available but meaningless without knowledge of how to find them and decode the information, according to a source with knowledge of the activities.”
TYT video.
MSNBC wrote: “At least two outside groups and a Republican campaign committee had access to the information posted to the accounts, according to the source. They include American Crossroads, the super PAC founded by Karl Rove; American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the campaign arm for the House GOP.
“Just minutes after Moody asked the National Republican Congressional Committee about the scheme, the Twitter accounts were quickly deleted.
“And that doesn’t seem suspicious at all.
“The real trouble…is with the cypher. Using our hypothetical, if you’re the operative and I’m the super PAC staffer, and you publish the tweet for me to read, you might plausibly be able to argue that you weren’t deliberately sending me secret info, since your Twitter message was available to literally anyone who knew where to look.”
In the first national elections since the Supreme Court allowed even more money to flood our democracy through its April McCutcheon v. FEC decision, the tidal wave of spending was worse than the most dire predictions.
The “Money Midterms,” as some dubbed them, were predicted to be the most expensive in history. Local news stations struggled to keep up as spending on political ads skyrocketed. As of October 15, just 140 donors had made more than 60 percent of this cycle’s super PAC contributions. In a post-Citizens United political landscape where corporations and billionaires can literally spend as much as they want to influence elections.
The Daily Show is right: The most enduring “winners” in the midterms may be the wealthy interests that bankrolled their candidates of choice and can now expect to have the ears of their chosen representatives.”
The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur discusses Wolf PAC, Mayday PAC, and represent.us.
Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd why President Obama is so unpopular in Louisiana, Sen. Mary Landrieu first gave a long answer about energy policy. Then she waded into more difficult territory: race.
“I’ll be very, very honest with you; the South has not always been the friendliest place for African Americans,” Landrieu said. “It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”
She also said that women have struggled in the South, but her comments on race got much more attention — including a brief airing on “NBC Nightly News” — because that’s how it is with race.
Cenk Uygur, John Iadarola, Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show) and Wes Clark Jr. talk about it.
Fox News “contributor” Bo Dietl defended the Ferguson policeman who shot unarmed teen Michael Brown. He states “America has no color,” and then manages to bring in Muslims and black-on-black violence in Chicago. TYT video with Cenk Uygur.
OK, Fine. 