10. I had to put a jacket on. Yesterday.
9. It was snowing at that one place where it usually doesn’t snow, and they showed it on Fox, and Steve Doocy seemed really surprised. He raised his eyebrows in that way he has of letting you know this is not what he expected.
8. There are bloggers following this stuff on the internet in places where they’ll also sell you gold and gas masks, and they can show all kinds of stuff the scientists said would happen, but then didn’t happen.
7. Every time they have a guy telling you it’s true on TV, or in an article, they have another guy telling you it’s false. Every time. What does that say?
6. Some of those bloggers have degrees that sound technical.
5. You could see your breath just last week.
4. Also on Fox they had that guy who used to play that character you liked in that show you watched, and he was not convinced at all about this.
3. The senator said so, and he’s spent his life talking to experts from energy companies who study this kind of thing. They come to his office when they bring the money, and they leave really impressive Powerpoint presentations about it.
2. This one time my friend Steve was out at the lake house, back when we were both 12, because Steve’s friend Troy found a Playboy there, so we were looking for it on our dirt bikes, because Troy said it wasn’t even torn up or anything. But it was really hot, and that was like, years ago. So I went back last summer, and it was much cooler.
1. Jesus just wouldn’t dick us over like that.

—Paul Bibeau
10 True Facts That PROVE Global Warming Is A Hoax

This is the toxic tribalism that repeats itself over and over throughout the west. Western victims are mourned and humanized, while victims of western violence are invisible and thus dehumanized. Aside from being repugnant in its own right, this formula, by design, is deeply deceptive as propaganda: it creates the impression among western populations that we are the victims but not the perpetrators of heinous violence, that terrorism is something done to us but that we never commit ourselves, that “primitive, radical and inhumanely violent” describes the enemy tribe but not our own (It’s the same tactic that explains why we hear so much about American journalists imprisoned in adversary nations such as Iran and North Korea, but almost nothing about Muslim journalists imprisoned for years without charges by the U.S. Government: thus deliberately creating the false impression that only those Bad Countries, but not us, do this).

—Glenn Greenwald
The Key War on Terror Propaganda Tool: Only Western Victims Are Acknowledged

In recent years, the money preoccupation has trickled upward, shaping our ideas about college as well as K–12 schooling. Not so long ago, private college was a luxury that few could afford. But in the nineteenth century, first Horace Mann and then Charles Eliot led the charge to make ability rather than heritage the price of admission to college. Though the intention was to recognize that wealth or lofty ancestry was no guarantee of intellectual ability, motivation, or academic inclination, it also came from the realization that a college degree opened doors and changed one’s future trajectory. During the same period, the introduction of excellent state university systems provided another avenue for bright and motivated adolescents with no money to get a college education. But as with K–12 education, when college changed from being a luxury for a few to a necessity for all, it redefined itself. Where once it had been a place to expand one’s horizons, read great books, get exposure to new disciplines, and learn how to participate in intellectual discourse, it now became another step toward getting a job or moving up a career ladder. The focus turned from getting a college education to getting a college degree.

—Susan Engel
The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools

Excerpted at Salon, We’re Teaching Our Kids Wrong: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Do Not Have the Answers.

If Mitt Romney had defeated President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, a lot of things would be very different today. Had fortunes been so reversed, Romney would likely have come into office with a lock on Congress, and thus the power to pass a big tax cut and repeal (or at least hobble) the Affordable Care Act. When the economy improved and unemployment fell below six percent much earlier than Romney promised, Republicans would have claimed credit and Romney would have faced an easy path to re-election.

Romney’s successes — or his perceived successes — would have rehabilitated the Republican party’s reputation, and the public would have once again presumed that conservatives had effective ideas about economic and fiscal policy. The New Deal consensus would have dwindled, possibly enough for Republicans to shrink, devolve, or privatize parts of the safety net. With time on their side, conservatives would have looked forward to gaining decisive control over the Supreme Court for a generation.

The first black president of the US would have left office humiliated by a white electorate, and the Democratic Party would have regressed, fearful that the country would not stand for long behind minority political leaders, and progressive social policy.

—Brian Beutler
Ignore the Cynics: 2016 Is an Extremely Important, Exciting Election

Presidential elections are really important. It matters a lot whether Hillary Clinton becomes President in 2017 or whether a Republican does. But there just isn’t all that much going on in the actual campaigns. Except, that is, in the minds of campaign journalists:

Try to imagine a voter who is aware that Hillary Clinton has made inequality a key campaign theme, who agrees that this is the issue that should be the focus of policymaking in 2017-2020, who is aware of Clinton’s policy proposals to combat inequality, who agrees with Clinton’s policy proposals to combat inequality, and who yet decides not to vote for her because she thinks Clinton has adopted this all out of expedience.

Why would that happen?

—Matt Yglesias
Matt’s Newsletter: Paternity Leave Edition

I’ve always thought of the drone war in terms of the melon vendor and the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. There’s an al Qaeda operative buying a melon from a vendor. Meanwhile, a guy with a goat cart comes up the other side of the road. Suddenly, here comes death from above. The terrorist is dead. So is the melon vendor. So is the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. They’re all blown into equally tiny bits. How do we think the families of the melon vendor and the guy with the goat cart are going to take this? We create a desire for retribution with which our grandchildren may have to cope. And we may never know the names of the melon dealer or the guy with the goat cart, the way we now know the names of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. We may never know the name of the melon dealer until his grandchild blows up an airplane. And none of that should be surprising because that’s also what happens when you make war, any kind of war, in a place.

—Charlie Pierce
Drone Wars: Oops, They Did It Again

Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign is running into an unusual problem without precedent in the post-Reagan era: his tax cut is too big. The trouble is not so much that his tax cut is substantively too big — within the context of a Republican primary, a “too-large tax cut” does not even make linguistic sense; it would be like saying “Reagan is un-good.” Rubio’s slightly different problem is that his tax cut is so gargantuan that nobody in the party actually believes it…

The supply-siders are afraid that Rubio’s plan to cut taxes for the middle class would cost too much, forcing him to “fix” his plan by curtailing his promises to rich people…

Rubio’s plan is so wildly grandiose and unrealistic that even so math-challenged a figure as Steve Moore realizes it won’t add up. One of the things you learn growing up is that winning a bet for a dollar is worth more than winning a bet for a million dollars, because no kid ever pays up a million-dollar bet. Rubio’s plan is so crazy and unrealistic it might as well be no plan at all.

—Jonathan Chait
Has Marco Rubio Finally Created a Tax Cut So Huge Republicans Don’t Like It?

For decades now, I’ve been arguing that when it comes to politics, liberals and leftists need to stop talking about race and focus instead on class. It’s not that racism doesn’t exist and cause genuine suffering, I would argue, but race divides the majority from the minority, while class could, and should, unite them. The way to help poor black and Latino people is to help poor people, period. (Wealthy black and Latino people can help themselves.) I still believe this, but I’ve also come to believe it’s hopeless.

Initially I understood the primary roadblock to be identity itself. People of color insisted on identifying themselves first and foremost as people of color, and they looked to leaders who served as reflections of their ideal selves. On those rare occasions when transracial and transethnic movements succeeded in America, they did so through the paradigms of race and ethnicity rather than by transcending them. Many responses are possible to Werner Sombart’s famous 1906 question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” The most obvious, however, is that the patch-quilt racial and ethnic composition of the US working class has made it easy for capitalists to divide and rule.

But another reason — one whose power and resilience I admit to have underestimated — is the problem of institutional white racism. Events of the past year or so — together with some of the research I did on inequality for my recent Nation eBook, Inequality and One City: Bill de Blasio and the New York Experiment, Year One — have convinced me that people of color, especially black males, live in a different country from the one in which whites live, whether rich or poor.

—Eric Alterman
Race Matters (but Not To Conservatives)

To examine American policy in the Middle East is to reveal the rationality of US support for Israel. A proxy state, Israel aids America’s longstanding effort to control the world by controlling oil.

A 1945 State Department memo pointed out that Saudi “oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the great material prizes in world history.” That same year, President Roosevelt — who had established a close bond with Saudi Arabia — wrote to King Ibn Saud, assuring him that the US would take no hostile action against Arab nations and would not back the formation of a Jewish state without first consulting him.

Roosevelt died a week later, and his replacement, Harry Truman, was also reluctant to side squarely with the Zionist cause. But in 1947 — here it seems AIPAC’s forbearers had an impact — Truman supported a UN partition plan that called for the creation of a majority Jewish state covering 56.47% of “Mandatory Palestinian.” Truman faced dissent from the State Department, which feared that such a stance would threaten the country’s core interests…

So the American interest in controlling the Middle East’s economic resources — and preventing other countries from doing so — was clear; unclear was whether American support for a Jewish state served that interest.

Resistance to Zionism in the US political establishment began to melt away with Israel’s victory — and land grab — in 1948. Its strength impressed officials like Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg, who wrote in a memo that “the power balance in the Near and Middle East has been radically altered,” and that Israel “has demonstrated by force of arms its right to be considered the military power next after Turkey.” He concluded that “as the result of its support to Israel, the United States might now gain strategic advantages from the new political situation.”

Still, US government support was relatively tempered — it gave its ally virtually no military assistance in the fifties — until Israel’s next big military victory, in 1967. Arab nationalism — particularly in the form of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser — threatened American hegemony in the region, as did the Soviet Union, which backed Egypt and Syria in the war. By defeating a coalition led by Egypt, Israel performed a valuable service for the United States (and for Saudi Arabia, which was fighting a proxy war against Egypt in Yemen.)

It’s widely accepted that the Six-Day War birthed the special relationship between Israel and the United States. No less significant, however, was Black September — the 1970–71 civil war in Jordan, which became another proxy battle in the Cold War. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would call it “a test of our capacity to control events in the region.”

—David Mizner
It’s Not Just the Lobby

You may have forgotten that Big Chicken was considering a campaign for president of the United States. (Certainly, the United States had.) You may be thinking to yourself, how can anyone run for president when his stance on every public issue has to begin with the phrase, “To the best of my recollection…”? You may ask yourself, hey, isn’t this the guy whose former aides are currently singing the Alleluia chorus to various grand juries? But he’s back now with some bold thoughts about the country’s “entitlement crisis,” and it is clear that Big Chicken has signed onto granny-starving in a big way. Oh, dear Lord, Joe Scarborough and David Brooks are going to be fighting over who will be first to touch the hem of his garments.

—Charlie Pierce
The Passion of Big Chicken: Bad Ideas Come in Big Packages