It’s a not-so-widely acknowledged fact that lots of tea partiers actually can’t stand one another. That’s true of the leaders of Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express, two of the movement’s most influential groups. …Chris Good, Atlantic
But that’s not the whole story, according to Good.
Mitt Romney’s candidacy is already dividing activists, and the sniping has already begun between Tea Party Express and Tea Party Patriots, two groups that have been at odds, on and off, since 2009.
“Whoever the Republican nominee is will have to have the support of the Tea Party movement, the entire Tea Party movement,” Tea Party Express co-chair Amy Kremer told “Fox News Sunday” this past weekend, even if that nominee turns out to be Mitt Romney.
With former House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s group FreedomWorks already opposing Romney, Tea Party Patriots fired back at Kremer in a press release specifically about her statement. …
The tea partyers, whether whole or in fragments, have a bad name. They’re the ones, not Paul Revere, who are stirring up enemies of independence and good faith in America. Good puts it another way, writing that “the tea party movement has by now become synonymous with angry Republicanism.” We know the destructive force of angry Republicanism. What the radicals and know-nothings like the tea partyers don’t seem to have caught onto is that others see them as not only spiteful but willfully ignorant of present circumstances as well as history — and nothing like a Republican.
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James Surowiecki has praise for Elizabeth Warren as well as a warning to Wall Street and some reminders.
History suggests that business doesn’t always know what’s good for it. And, at a time when Americans profoundly distrust the financial industry, a Warren-led C.F.P.B. could turn out to be the friend that the banks never knew they needed.
How is that?
The core principle of Warren’s work is also a cornerstone of economic theory: well-informed consumers make for vigorous competition and efficient markets. That idea is embodied in the design of the new agency, which focusses on improving the information that consumers get from banks and other financial institutions, so that they can do the kind of comparison shopping that makes the markets for other consumer products work so well. …
…Over the past century or so, new regulatory initiatives have inevitably been greeted with predictions of doom from the very businesses they eventually helped. Meatpackers hated the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, but it rescued the industry from the aftereffects of the publication of “The Jungle.” Wall Street said that the creation of the S.E.C. would demolish stock trading, but the commission helped make the U.S. the world’s most liquid and trusted stock market. And bankers thought that the F.D.I.C. would sabotage their industry, but it transformed it by effectively ending bank runs.
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There’s nothing new in the message that follows. What’s problematical about it is not just America’s role in creating the problem but that the ramping up of bad news comes at a time when voters are overloaded with financial and other troubles. Environmental crises? Can’t cope with them now. Nonetheless, as Elizabeth Kolbert reports, it’s bad and getting worse.
For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.
What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last. Each additional ton of carbon dioxide that’s spewed into the atmosphere contributes to further warming, thus increasing the risk of violent weather. The day after the President visited Joplin, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, in Paris, announced that, despite the economic slowdown, global CO2 emissions last year rose by a record amount, to almost thirty-one billion metric tons. “I am very worried,” Birol said. “This is the worst news on emissions.”
Cross posted from the blog Prairie Weather.