Coal executive Robert Murray is hosting a fundraiser on Thursday night for the climate deniers' favorite GOP presidential candidate, Rick Perry. Murray is the CEO of the Ohio-based Murray Energy Corporation and will be hosting the event at the White Palace Ballroom of Wheeling, West Virginia.

It's not hard to see why Perry and Murray would like each other. Both Murray and Perry are both vocal (and often colorful) climate change deniers. Murray called global warming an "elitists' ill-conceived 'global goofiness' campaigns" in a 2007 speech to the New York Coal Trade Association. Murray also used a horrific collapse at a Utah mine that his company owned as yet another occasion to rail against attempts to regulate global warming.

Murray has personally lobbied against coal ash and air quality rules. Via the Washington Post, here's what Murray wrote to Congress about EPA Clean Air Act rules earlier this year:

"Jobs and lives are being destroyed by Mr. Obama and his out-of-control, radical U.S. EPA and his appointees to it," chairman and chief executive Robert E. Murray wrote. He concluded: "America, our industry and jobs, are under siege by Mr. Obama and his U.S. EPA."

Meanwhile, Murray's company has had at least seven coal slurry spills in the past decade from a single site. The company also wracked up 7,747 "significant" health and safety violations at their mines between 2000 and 2009, totaling more than $18 million in fines.

As Politico reported earlier this month, Murray is asking for contributions of $2,500 per guest for Perry's campaign chest.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Twitter is great for staying up-to-date on, well, pretty much everything: the news, celebrity gossip, your roommate's best-friend's breakfast. But a new paper out today in the journal Science suggests that Twitter can also be used to track peoples' moods. The researchers found that, across the globe, tweets are predictably upbeat or cranky based on the local time of day.

Cornell University sociologists Scott Golder and Michael Macy spent two years collecting 509 million tweets from 2.4 million users in 84 different countries (albeit with a notable dearth of representation from Africa). Using a well-established text analysis tool, they scored tweets based on their use of hundreds of positive words (like "happy" or "enthusiastic") or negative words (like "sad" or "anxious"). When Macy and Golder plotted these scores against the tweet's time stamp, they found what should come as no surprise to anyone who works a nine-to-five: peoples' moods are best early in the morning, slowly deteriorate as the day wears on, then finally pick up in the evening (read: after happy hour). And, cultural differences be damned, the same was true worldwide, suggesting mood is hard-wired in the human psyche.

"Twitter is a goldmine for being able to observe human behavior," Macy said. "We all have basically the same biology, and the pattern we found was very robust."

[Read more]

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

On the Daily Show last night, Bill O'Reilly was griping about the great $16 muffin affair and Jon Stewart had no idea what he was talking about. So the whole thing passed without any pushback, and now millions more people think Uncle Sam is paying $16 for hotel muffins.

Once again, then: it's a myth. There were no $16 muffins. It's just an artifact of the way hotels aggregate costs for events and bill them all to a few line items instead of breaking down every charge separately. In fact, for the event in question, DOJ came in exactly on budget. All the details are here.

Now, can we please hear no more about this?

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed Thursday from Law Professor Jonathan Turley blasting the Obama administration's record on civil liberties and declaring that "the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties." Turley's op-ed focuses on the Obama administration's undeniable policy continuity with the Bush administration on national security matters. Issues that might generally fall under the umbrella of "civil liberties" like gay rights or voting rights aren't included. Turley writes:

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

Turley's political analysis is overstated, but his policy analysis is not. There's nothing particularly unusual about Democrats' silence on matters of civil liberties and national security, which is easily attributable to mere partisanship. Declaring it the function of a kind of mental affirmative action is silly. The same civil libertarian groups who were fighting Bush, like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, are doing so now. What they lack is the support or amplification provided by prominent Democrats in Congress when the president was a Republican. Turley also lets the GOP entirely off the hook, as though there's nothing unusual about a party whose mantra is "small government" offering no opposition whatsoever to the expansion of the national security state. Perhaps it's just that Turley's expectations for Republicans are so low that he doesn't even see the contradiction as worth noting. 

[Read more]

• Print
• Email
• Tweet