Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Campaign ad equating global warming with weather gets “pants-on-fire” rating
By now, almost everybody — with the possible exception of Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina — realizes there’s a difference between climate and weather. Fiorina, running in the California primary and ultimately aiming to unseat Democrat Barbara Boxer, paid for and appeared in a campaign ad slamming the sitting senator for being “worried about the weather” when there are serious concerns like terrorism to deal with.
Take a look here:
A few problems with this ad earned it the not-so-coveted beyond-false “Pants on Fire” rating from Politifact, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalism website that checks on the truthfulness of political advertising. First off, Boxer didn’t say she was worried about the weather. She said that climate change was “one of the very important national security issues” — a position in line with the Pentagon and the CIA. The site also found that it’s not an either/or thing, that focusing on climate change doesn’t necessarily mean neglecting national security. They took a look at Boxer’s record and found she has supported at least six bills against terrorism.
“Fiorina casts climate change as something you need to pack an umbrella for, or that prompts you to curse at the TV weatherman — which strikes us as not only a trivialization of climate change but also a failure to distinguish between two well-established scientific specialties,” Politifact said. “She also ignores Boxer’s lengthy record supporting bills against terrorism. So we have to light up the meter (the site’s Truth-o-Meter): Pants on Fire!”
Not surprisingly, Boxer’s campaign fired back in a press release, saying that, “during Fiorina’s tenure at HP, the company sold millions of dollars worth of high tech gear to intermediary shell companies selling to Iran, despite trade sanctions against Iran, a country that the U.S. State Department has named as a State Sponsor of Terror.”
Should be an interesting race. The California primary is on June 8.
Photo credits: REUTERS/Fred Prouser (Carly Fiorina at ”Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” panel Beverly Hills, California April 26, 2010. REUTERS/Fred Prouser)
Sarah Palin’s new focus
Admit it: we all wondered just what Sarah Palin would turn her time and talents to after she announced her resignation from the Alaska governor’s job, and now she’s given what looks like an answer. In an op-ed column in The Washington Post, Palin took a swipe at Washington insiders and the mainstream media for ignoring the economy, and then tipped her hand.
“Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges,” she wrote. “So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be: I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.”
In a brief story about this, we noted that Palin’s plans for spurring the U.S. economy include offshore drilling, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and exploring the possibility of nuclear power in every state.
We’re not the only ones who noticed Palin’s opening salvo. Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress Action Fund saw her column as “the first stop on Gov. Palin’s comeback tour.” In his opinion, Palin is definitely mulling a presidential run.
“She wants to make sure that she’s still seen as serious and relevant,” Weiss said. “Her policies, though, isolate her in the corner with big oil and big coal and Rush Limbaugh … It would not surprise me if she shows up in Iowa talking about ethanol or New Hampshire talking about nuclear power or in Louisiana talking about oil. That would appeal to primary or caucus-going voters on those states.”
Weiss told me he can’t wait for the Palin campaign, but others weren’t so enthusiastic. Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that will take up U.S. carbon-capping legislation in September, took time out from a hearing to pour cold water on Palin’s contention that tackling the causes of climate change would send the U.S. economy into a tailspin.
“Sarah Palin wrote this naysaying op-ed piece on why we shouldn’t move forward …” Boxer said. “So I would just tell the American people to take a look at history. Every single time we’ve gone forward to go after pollution, the naysayers have been wrong about the predictions, wrong about the gloom and doom and we have in fact led the world.”
Sarah Palin is doing this just to gain publicity. She is not qualified enough for any of this..
@ truthseeker18
In the 80s there was a “… dearth of actual empirical information” that the Soviet Union would ever actually attack the U.S. (i.e. it had never happened). Yet this did not stop Reagan and the Republicans from squandering scores of billions of taxpayer dollars on building more missiles.
As for “legitimate scientists on both sides of the debate surrounding global warming theory”
The preponderance of legitimate scientist do not seriously question that the huge emissions of greenhouse gases by humans will be affecting the global climate negatively.
I suppose that you do not consider the **possibility** of serious crop failures, invasive diseases, and rising water levels and all the political turmoil that would ensue as a security issue?