Breitbart, explained: the conservative media giant that wants Trump to burn down the GOP

It’s hard to grapple with where the conservative movement is today without understanding Breitbart.com. The publication has long had a huge audience, but its larger influence became clear last week after Donald Trump appointed Breitbart’s longtime chair, Steve Bannon, to be his campaign’s CEO.

The post Breitbart, explained: the conservative media giant that wants Trump to burn down the GOP – Vox appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

• Leaked Heartland Institute documents include plan for climate disinformation curriculum in schools | Climate Science Watch
• Business & Technology | INFLUENCE GAME: Leaks show group’s climate efforts | Seattle Times Newspaper
• Heartland leak: much more than just a memo | Carbon Brief
• Rabett Run: Will the Real Anonymous Donor Please Stand Up
• #DenialGate – Get it All Here « Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Politics

• Alan Grayson: One Percent. Actually, Half of That
• Foster Freiss, Santorum backer, jokes about using aspirin as birth control – The Washington Post
• How a Filthy Rich 196 People Will Buy Our Election | Economy | AlterNet
• Daily Kos: Republicans are having a cow over Obama possibly reducing U.S. nuclear arsenal to 300 warheads
• Daily Kos: Mitt Romney’s auto bailout claims take a beating

Science

• Ratio Primoris (Reason Foremost): A Discussion With Dawkins And Krauss 

The Media

• Andrew Breitbart At CPAC: Conservative Activist Calls Liberal Tactics ‘Outrageous, Dehumanizing’ While Defending Larry Craig Brietbart the serial liar (the Brientbart Tag here) says what!
• Fox News Commenters Spew Racism at Whitney Houston | Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• Pat Buchanan, MSNBC Part Ways: Network Drops Conservative Commentator 4 Months After Suspending Him

The Culture Wars

• I saw this interview myself the other day and rolled my eyes in amazement too as I listened to her both with her intolerant position and what I knew were her lies about what she has said in the past: Alvin McEwen: Maggie Gallaghers Disastrous Interview on Up with Chris Hayes.

  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

  Maggie Gallagher, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), an anti-marriage-equality group, was interviewed on the Feb. 11 edition MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, and it didn’t go well for her. Gallagher was vigorously challenged in regard to NOM’s position on marriage equality and her alleged personal animus toward the LGBTQ community. This led her to get defensive, and she made a bunch of denials that can be easily disproven (the pertinent stuff begins at 8:44 of the video).

• Real Sceptic » Miss Piggy: if they take what I say seriously, they’ve got a real big problem
• “Ex”-Gay: Arrest Dan Savage! | Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Atheism

• How to Destroy an Atheist in an Argument – YouTube
  

The post What I'm Reading Thursday, February 16, 2012 appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

• On the record setting idiocy from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani: ‘I Jumped Up Out Of My Chair And Cheered’ When Gingrich Said Palestinians Are An ‘Invented People’ | ThinkProgress
• And more Giuliani idiocy on another front: Giuliani: Gingrich like Reagan, best connects to ‘Reagan Democrats’ [VIDEO]
• Giuliani Brings His Knife to Morning Shows to Carve Up Romney – ABC News
• Giuliani ridicules Romney – POLITICO.com
• Elizabeth Warren Comes Out For Full Equality For LGBT People | ThinkProgress
• Where the Ryan-Wyden Medicare Plan Leaves the Entitlement Debate | Swampland | TIME.com
• Combat Operations In Iraq End a Second Time, Gingrich Loses Coveted Gary Busey Endorsement
• The Federal Pie Chart Where Does Your Income Tax Really Go?
• Michele Bachmann Busted By PolitiFact On Claim About PolitiFact (VIDEO)

Politics – Newt Gingrich

• Newt Gingrich: Gay People Choose To Be Gay Like Priests Choose Celibacy | ThinkProgress
• CHARTS: The 10 Craziest Facts About Newt Gingrich’s Tax Plan | ThinkProgress
• Newt Gingrich on Iraq: A Timeline of Questionable Judgment – Conor Friedersdorf – Politics – The Atlantic

Climate & Climate Politics

• Bill Chameides: Global Warming: What Happens When You Factor Out the Other Factors.
• Climate Feedback: Nature Climate Change website – coming soon
• Sen. Franken’s colloquy with Sen. Whitehouse on climate change | Climate Science Watch 
  Here is the full transcript of the colloquy [PDF] as published in the Congressional Record.
• “ClimateGate” News:
  • Britain – Computer Equipment Seized in Climate E-mail Inquiry – NYTimes.com
  • Climategate Investigation Warms Up Globally: UK Police Seize TallBloke’s Computers, DOJ Tells U.S. Denier to Preserve Records | ThinkProgress
  • 3,500 Words On Hacked Climate Emails, But The Weekly Standard Still Comes Up Empty | ThinkProgress

Economics & The Economy

• Study: People Receiving Unemployment Insurance Work Harder To Find Jobs | ThinkProgress
• The $200 Trillion World: Who Owns All the Wealth? – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic (a hat-tip to my friend and building industry colleague Allan Edwards)
• And as a result of another online conversation with Allan where I had to look up the book by Nobel prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict I found this article Joseph Stiglitz’s 4-Point Plan For Fixing The Economy – Business Insider.
  

  Here are some of his suggestions:

  • Repeal tax-cuts for rich Americans.

  • End wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost trillions of dollars.

  • Increase stimulus and programs that would get Americans back to work because it will generate massive tax revenues.

  • A Medicare D, with a provision that allows the government to negotiate prices instead of going with those set by pharmaceuticals. He believes this move alone could save the U.S. trillions.

  • A “Homeowners Chapter 11″ that would allow homeowners to continue to possess their homes, while they restructure their debt and continue to pay down their mortgages. He says, “It doesn’t do any body any good to force these people out of their homes… An economy in which you have homeless people and empty homes doesn’t make any sense, and that’s where we’re going.”

• Wealthiest Americans pay bulk of federal income tax collected | cleveland.com
• What Percentage of Federal Individual Income Taxes Do Rich People Really Pay?
• Policy Basics: Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go? — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• 9 Things The Rich Don’t Want You To Know About Taxes

Right Wing Journalism

• Little Green Footballs – Andrew Breitbart’s ‘Big Journalism’ Bloggers Use Antisemitic Nazi-Era Cartoon

International News

• France sentences ‘Carlos the Jackal’ to another life term – latimes.com

The post What I’m Reading Thursday, December 15, 2011 appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

• Mother Jones — Breitbart Silent About Big Error on His Big Government Site | Mother Jones
• Media Matters for America — Confirmed: Breitbart Sites Won’t Correct Obvious Factual Errors and..
• Andrew Revkin of the NY Time — Cosmic Breitbart Climate Blunder

Revkin makes a great point that I think speaks to the damage this kind of propaganda causes:

“It’s no wonder that, despite occasional shifts in polls and deeply polarized small factions at the edges of climate discourse (nourished by this kind of material), the public largely remains disengaged on the issue.”

Despite being caught I am pretty sure Breitbart and Street are feeling pretty good about themselves.

The post More About Breitbarts Climate Disinformation Efforts (ie. Lies) appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

• What The Press Is Getting Wrong About Solyndra | ThinkProgress.
• Frances Beinecke: GOP Leaders Resume the Worst Attack on Public Health Safeguards in History
• A hat tip to Tamino and his reader who tipped him off for this video interview with Prof. Naomi Oreskes author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming:
  
• When Words Fail: Does a Warming World Need a New Vocabulary? | NationofChange
• Bill Clinton Slams U.S. Climate Deniers: “We Look Like a Joke” | ThinkProgress
• Global Warming, the Tea Party, and Unwavering Certainty
• Could Personality Differences Help Explain the Reality Gap on Climate Change?
• Real Sceptic » The Tobacco “Scepticism” Template
• New peer reviewed paper: clouds have large negative cooling effect on Earth’s radiation budget « Wott’s Up With That?

Energy

• Arnie Gunderson: Lessons from Fukushima « Climate Denial Crock of the Week

The Other Stuff (Misc. Politics,News, Opinion, etc.)

• Andrew Breitbart, Does He Really Want Another Civil War? | Assassin Actual — Brietbart, geez, not a fan here at all. The guy, his minions, and his publications are the epitome of what it means to be a propagandist (see what I wrote in Pure Fabrication, Lies and Global Warming Denial Propaganda from Non-other Than Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government here). This is Cavalry Officer in the U.S. Army serving in Iraq right now commenting on the madness that is Breitbart.
• Breitbart Wants Armed Conflict | Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• Bill O’Reilly Will Quit Fox News!!!!! | The X Blog
• Rick Santorum Apparently Contacted Google About His Google Problem (And In So Doing, Worsened It)
• Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives
• Nikki Haley Refuses to Let Facts Get in the Way of Policy | Firedoglake
• Daily Kos: Chamber of Commerce sues NLRB to block new rule requiring union posters in workplace —
  

  “…It’s like a parody: The Chamber of Commerce is seriously suing to prevent workers from being notified of rights they already have under the law, by means of a poster no one will likely read anyway. And note that the poster doesn’t just tell workers that they have the right to join a union and bargain collectively, and that their employers are prohibited from trying to dissuade them from exercising their rights in specific ways. It also tells them, by the way, that they have the right not to join a union and that unions are prohibited from trying to exert pressure on them to join. But it’s clear which set of information the Chamber thinks workers will respond to more strongly.”

Alt-Med & Woo

• Reiki: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you can get what you need : Respectful Insolence

The post What I'm Reading Tuesday, September 20, 2011 appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

The post What I'm Reading Wednesday, September 7, 2011 appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

The lead author of the paper Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation Jasper Kirby was on Nature in a podcast (listen to it at 21:44) and said unequivocally the effects he observed in his research would only occur in the uppermost atmosphere where clouds actually don’t even form and “you cannot use my research to make any definitive statement on the effect of cosmic rays on climate.”

I will repeat what he said “you cannot use my research to make any definitive statement on the effect of cosmic rays on climate.“

Again one more time,… the lead author of the paper said “you cannot use my research to make any definitive statement on the effect of cosmic rays on climate.“

(thanks to Scott Mandia’s CERN Cloud Paper: Cirrus-ly Being Spun « Global Warming: Man or Myth?,  ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change | The Way Things Break  & ConCERN Trolling on Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate Change for enlightening me on the subject)

And then I spot this evening this unbelievable piece of propaganda and distortion on Breitbart’s Big Government website:

Nature Journal of Science Discredits Man-made Global Warming

by Chriss W. Street

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

[…]

What is interesting is I’m looking at the list of co-authors on the paper on the Nature website and I can’t seem to even find this ‘Professor Jyrki Kauppinen’ that Chriss W. Street is quoting. Here’s the list:

Jasper Kirkby, Joachim Curtius, João Almeida, Eimear Dunne, Jonathan Duplissy, Sebastian Ehrhart, Alessandro Franchin, Stéphanie Gagné, Luisa Ickes, Andreas Kürten, Agnieszka Kupc, Axel Metzger, Francesco Riccobono, Linda Rondo, Siegfried Schobesberger, Georgios Tsagkogeorgas, Daniela Wimmer, Antonio Amorim, Federico Bianchi, Martin Breitenlechner, André David, Josef Dommen, Andrew Downard, Mikael Ehn, Richard C. Flagan, Stefan Haider, Armin Hansel, Daniel Hauser, Werner Jud, Heikki Junninen, Fabian Kreissl, Alexander Kvashin, Ari Laaksonen, Katrianne Lehtipalo, Jorge Lima, Edward R. Lovejoy, Vladimir Makhmutov, Serge Mathot, Jyri Mikkilä, Pierre Minginette, Sandra Mogo, Tuomo Nieminen, Antti Onnela, Paulo Pereira, Tuukka Petäjä, Ralf Schnitzhofer, John H. Seinfeld, Mikko Sipilä, Yuri Stozhkov, Frank Stratmann, Antonio Tomé, Joonas Vanhanen, Yrjo Viisanen, Aron Vrtala, Paul E. Wagner, Hansueli Walther, Ernest Weingartner, Heike Wex, Paul M. Winkler, Kenneth S. Carslaw, Douglas R. Worsnop, Urs Baltensperger & Markku Kulmala

In fact searching the Journal Nature for ‘Jyrki Kauppinen’ I get “Sorry, no results were found. Please search again.”

So searching some more via Google this time to see if I can find where the quote from ‘Professor Jyrki Kauppinen’ saying “I think it is such a blatant falsification” comes from I find an an article on the denial aggregator web site Climate Realists dated Wed April 14th 2010 which has a Finish newspaper article about a study led by Kauppinen in which he claims to have found (according to the translation) “increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide to explain only 5-10 percent of observed global warming” and that “Kauppinen intends to publish the research findings to Nature , the June issue of Science magazine“.

So unless I just fell off a turnip truck it looks to me like the Breitbart employed author Chriss W. Street has written a deceitful little piece that says:

• “Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man.” —That’s a lie, Lie #1, it doesn’t say that at all. Again the lead author on the paper has said unequivocally the effects he observed in his research would only occur in the uppermost atmosphere where clouds actually don’t even form and “you cannot use my research to make any definitive statement on the effect of cosmic rays on climate.“
• “…One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen,…” — That a lie too, Lie #2, Kauppinen wasn’t one of the paper authors at all. He didn’t work on it.
•  “…summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.” — Lie #3, Wanting Brietbart’s readers to believe Kauppinen was talking about the paper that he claims Kauppinen worked on Street pulled a newspaper quote Kauppinen made commenting about a paper he wrote 15 months before the Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation paper was ever even published.

It amazing to me that someone can write a whopping lie like that. But then again I realize it a Breitbart publication. Maybe Chriss W. Street is a relative of James O’Keefe another infamous Breitbart liar.

The lies, deceit, and manipulation of the truth in the article don’t stop there though. It leaves the topic it supposed to be about (the CERN Cloud paper) and then just goes on to recite all the latest global warming denial propaganda talking points.

Really the whole piece is quite a spectacular lie. Right out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.

The post Pure Fabrication, Lies and Global Warming Denial Propaganda from Non-other Than Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.