Courtesy Mother Jones:

Last year, Beluga Shipping discovered that there’s money in global warming.

Beluga is a German firm that specializes in “super heavy lift” transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multiton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic.

Beluga had received contracts to send materials on a sprawling trip that would begin in Ulsan, South Korea, head north and west to the Russian port city of Archangelsk—located near the border with Finland—and wind up in Nigeria. Normally, this route requires Beluga’s ships to navigate an 11,000-mile route through the Suez Canal. But in 2008, its executives decided that global warming had eroded the Arctic’s summer sea ice significantly enough that their ships could travel the Northeast Passage along the north coast of Russia. Previously, a cargo ship could only safely navigate that route if an icebreaker went ahead, smashing a route through thick ice.

Now, a warming climate had—for six to eight weeks beginning in July—transformed much of the route into mostly open water, studded with ice floes that the Beluga ships could navigate. So the executives got permission from the Russian government to travel along the coast, paid a transit fee of “a comparably moderate five-digit figure,” and sent the ships on their way. Four months later, they’d finished the trip. Compared to the old Suez Canal journey, this shorter route saved an enormous pile of money: It cost $300,000 less per ship in lower fuel and bunker costs. Global warming had boosted the company’s revenues by more than half a million dollars in one year alone.

When I interviewed Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg via email this spring, he said he envisions using the Northeast Passage regularly. Indeed, he’s planning on another trip this summer. He said that since the shorter passage requires generating far less C02, it’s “greener”; it’s also more ironic, since it was high concentrations of C02 that helped melt the route in the first place.

“I am convinced,” Stolberg added, “that the Arctic will become an area of quite regular sea traffic at least during summer.”

If you looked merely at the realm of politics, it would be easy to believe that the question “Is climate change really happening?” is still unresolved. In recent months, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor. Doubters seized on “Climategate“—leaked emails from bickering atmospheric scientists—to argue that the evidence in favor of warming is being cooked. Other skeptics unearthed shoddy parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s main report, such as the fact that it cited non-peer-reviewed work by an activist group when it predicted that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. And all along, conservative politicians have hissingly denounced global warming as a shady liberal scheme: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahomafamously called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” These attacks appear to be working. A spring Gallup study found that Americans’ concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

Continued at Source.

Repiglican Congressman from Virginia, Eric Cantor, held a press conference yesterday to breathlessly announce that his campaign office had been targeted by gunmen, and that he has been receiving “threatening” emails. Only problem is, he refuses to let anyone see these emails, he refused to answer any questions after his drama queen press conference, and the Richmond, Virginia Police Department released this statement (hat tip to TPM!):

The Richmond Police Department is investigating an act of vandalism at the Reagan Building, 25 E. Main St., Richmond, Virginia. A first floor window was struck by a bullet at approximately 1 a.m. on Tuesday, March 23. The building, which has several tenants including an office used by Congressman Eric Cantor, was unoccupied at the time.

A Richmond Police detective was assigned to the case. A preliminary investigation shows that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window. The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds. There was no other damage to the room, which is used occasionally for meetings by the congressman.

What this boils down to is some boob fired their gun into the air, and the bullet just happened to find its way to Cantor’s office window. The stray bullet had enough velocity left to break the window, but not the blinds. Fans of the show Mythbusters may recall the episode they did, which examined the myth that bullets fired in the air are fatal when they fall back to Earth. The conclusion?

Bullets fired into the air maintain their lethal capability when they eventually fall back down.

BUSTED / PLAUSIBLE / CONFIRMED

In the case of a bullet fired at a precisely vertical angle (something extremely difficult for a human being to duplicate), the bullet would tumble, lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and is therefore rendered less than lethal on impact. However, if a bullet is fired upward at a non-vertical angle (a far more probable possibility), it will maintain its spin and will reach a high enough speed to be lethal on impact. Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most states, and even in the states that it is legal, it is not recommended by the police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been injured by falling bullets, one of them fatally injured. To date, this is the only myth to receive all three ratings at the same time.

It’s only fitting that the party that can’t get a damn thing right, has to make up wild-assed stories about magic bullets. Leave it to the party of NO CLUE to play the victim, after their political tactics have blown up in their face.

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Yeah, cry us a river, fraudster!

President Barack Obama dared Republicans on Thursday to try to repeal his newly signed healthcare reform but warned that their effort would backfire as he touted the measure’s benefits.

“If they want to have that fight, I welcome that fight,” Obama said in prepared remarks for delivery in Iowa in his first big speech since enacting the most sweeping new U.S. social policy in decades.

“I don’t believe the American people are going to put the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat. We’ve been there already and we’re not going back,” he said.

“Well, I say go for it,” Obama said, goading his critics. “If these congressmen in Washington want to come here to Iowa and tell small business owners that they plan to take away their tax credits and essentially raise their taxes, be my guest.”

Continue reading this article over at Reuters.

The GOP strategy for reconciliation is pure hardball. Democrats want to pass a clean bill, so Republicans will make Dems vote down politically charged amendments

So far, the GOP has filed 32 amendments. But these 10 are our picks for the most ridiculous:

• Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK): To reduce the cost of providing federally funded prescription drugs by eliminating fraudulent payments and prohibiting coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists for drugs intended to induce abortion.
• Vitter: Prohibiting use of funds to fund the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). (Adding to the ridculousness, ACORN folded just this week.)

You can read the rest of TPM’s list here. Wow, these wingnuts sure are stupid!

Courtesy Alternet:

Wielding the gavel used by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., to mark the passage of Medicare some 45 years ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made history Sunday night as she ushered in a new era in health care, lowering the gavel to signal the final passage of health-care reform legislation, which is now on its way to President Obama’s desk. The bill passed with only three votes to spare, 219-212, with 34 Democrats voting against the bill.

It took the first African-American president and the first woman Speaker of the House to do what generations of politicians had failed to do: create a federally regulated health-care reform program that extends health insurance coverage to the majority of Americans. Given the vitriol and epithets hurled at Democratic lawmakers by anti-health-reform protesters this weekend, it appeared that the faces of those who led the health-care reform effort had more to do with the ground-level opposition represented by the Tea Party protesters than the actual substance of the bill, which was obscured by false accusations of a “government take-over of the health system” — and worse.

“This is what change looks like,” Obama told reporters after the House vote. “This isn’t radical reform,” he said, “but it is major reform.”

While the bill doesn’t come close to fulfilling the promise of the sort of universal coverage favored by progressives, it will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, create access to health insurance to 32 million currently uninsured Americans. But the victory came at the expense of a further erosion of women’s reproductive rights, even as it proscribed discrimination against women in premium costs and gender-specific pre-existing conditions.

-Source.

*Related:  What’s in the Bill, Courtesy Reuters.