Politics
- Romney’s Likely Chief Of Staff Is Profiting From Obamacare | ThinkProgress
- Norquist: Bush Insulted Romney With Remarks on Tax Pledge | Video Cafe
- As governor, Romney picked winners and losers of his own | Reuters
It would be a triumphant moment for any governor: A cutting-edge company announces plans to build a new plant that will create hundreds of high-paying jobs and bolster one of the state’s most prominent industries.
For Mitt Romney, the June 2006 announcement by drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb served as a signature accomplishment as his four-year stint as Massachusetts governor drew to a close and a U.S. presidential bid beckoned.
The new facility came with a price tag: Romney and other state officials agreed to $67 million in tax breaks and other inducements to ensure the New York-based company picked Massachusetts over rival states like North Carolina.
Now as he mounts his second White House bid, Romney is hammering President Barack Obama for playing favorites with green-tech companies rather than letting businesses succeed or fail on their own. Romney is the presumptive Republican challenger to face Obama, a Democrat, in the November 6 election.
“Obama is giving taxpayer money to big donors and then watching them lose it,” Romney’s campaign said in an Internet video released on Tuesday.
It’s a powerful line of attack that connects failed ventures like Solyndra, the bankrupt California-based solar panel maker that defaulted on a $535 million loan from the U.S. Energy Department, with the trillion-dollar budget deficits and sluggish U.S. economy of the past four years.
But it might invite unfavorable comparison with Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. During that time, Romney pursued a hands-on approach to economic development that favored some industries over others and, in some instances, singled out individual firms for special favors.
Romney, a former private equity executive, backed tax breaks for film makers and biotech and medical-device manufacturers. His administration promoted venture capital-style funds that extended loans to start-up companies, some of which subsequently went out of business.
- Experts: Okla., not Texas, had hottest summer ever
Climate & Climate Politics
- The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines | Print Edition – Physics Today Naomi Oreskes reviews Michael E. Mann’s new book:
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.
In 1992 President George H. W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, committing the US—one of 166 signatories—to preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Since then, there has been a steady effort to cast doubt on the science that underlies that commitment and the integrity of the scientists who produced it. Those efforts have been well documented by many, including by me, as well as in a recent book by James Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science (Columbia University Press, 2011), which succinctly summarizes the entire disheartening story.
The latest contribution is Michael Mann’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, which recounts how he and coworkers Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes became targets of attacks that ranged from hate mail to subpoenas from the US Congress and the attorney general of Virginia. Why? Because their work demonstrated that the observed warming of the past 50 years is outside the envelope of the natural variability of the previous millennium, thus denying climate contrarians one of their most effective talking points.
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