• “Developing wind power off the Atlantic Coast would create twice as many jobs and produce twice as much energy as opening the area to oil and gas drilling — and it would avoid worsening the climate disruption that’s already taking a toll on the region.” Every day the wind blows. And every day is another day that the wealthiest, most technologically advanced, and self-proclaimed greatest nation on earth still doesn’t have a single offshore wind farm operating along any of its more than 12,000 miles of coastline. Pathetic.
• Today is January 28. Michael Anglin Jr. was unarmed when he was killed by police on January 28, 2000. Michael was 15 years old. Timothy Stansbury was unarmed when he was killed by police on January 24, 2004. Raheim Brown was unarmed when killed by police on January 22, 2011.
• For Whom The Bell Curves: After 15 years, Andrew Sullivan says he’s done with blogging. I’m so old that I once published Sully in a pre-blog print magazine.
• Conservative columnist Byron York writes about the Republican Party’s 2016 “Palin Problem.”
York collects a round-up of conservative disappointment following Sarah Palin’s crude, incoherent speech at the recent GOP “Freedom Summit” in Iowa, and urges his party to keep her off the stage and out of the spotlight in the future. It’s an odd column. York notes that “conservatives still empathize with her over the beating she took from the media in 2008,” but seems unable to see that the substance of that criticism in 2008 is identical to the substance of the criticism he and other Republicans are belatedly making now. York, essentially, resents “the media” for recognizing back then what he and his buddies are only now, finally, willing to acknowledge.
The GOP’s “2016 Palin Problem” is no different from its 2008 Palin Problem. Or from its 2015 Ernst Gohmert King King Cruz Etc. problem.
• “Borrowers in the middle and top of the distribution are the ones that contributed most significantly to the increase in mortgages in default after 2007.” That’s from a new study of the role mortgage defaults played in the financial crisis that caused the Great Recession of 2008.
It’s kind of a no-duh finding — it took a lot of money to cause a global meltdown, and poor people, by definition, don’t have a lot of money, as Max Ehrenfreund summarizes: “Rich people tend to take out larger mortgages, of course, but the fact is that the amount of money poor borrowers failed to pay back was just never that significant.” Poor borrowers suffered the most in the Great Recession, which also turned millions of middle-income people into poor people. But poor people didn’t cause it. That was the central myth that sparked the creation of the “tea party” — those irresponsible poors were to blame. That was always an obvious lie, and this study is just more proof confirming the foolishness and falsity of that claim.
• Local elected officials are writing letters to the FCC in support of the Comcast/Time Warner merger. … Well, actually, that’s not quite true — local elected officials have been signing their names to letters to the FCC in support of the Big Cable mega-merger. But they didn’t write those letters themselves — Comcast did. They’re working hard to turn 21st-century “broadband” into the 19th-century railroad system.
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