Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

With Doctor Feelgood symbolically in the driver's seat he outdid his economic performance while serving two terms as California's governor by a wide stretch.  As the Californians who knew the real politician beyond the fluff and spin control stated with ominous sarcasm, "Just think, now we can share Ronald Reagan with the other 49 states."

The spinmeisters had done their best to bury reality in spin in California, where in eight years as governor the state's budget had doubled while absorbing the three largest tax increases in the Golden State's history.  That was just a warm-up for his two terms in the presidency, which saw Reagan's funny money policies of tax cuts for the rich and huge defense increases triple the national debt.

George W. Bush, son of Reagan's two term vice president, has made Reagan look like an amateur in the fiscal irresponsibility department.  America is now moving ever closer to a $10 trillion debt, better than tripling the best economic efforts of Doctor Feelgood.

Meanwhile it looks like those two "curmudgeons" who provided laugh lines for Reagan's active propaganda spouting crew, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, turned out to be correct in their dire warnings of where the planet was heading.

Now even the best efforts of the loquacious, drug-addicted talk show host Rush Limbaugh could ultimately camouflage reality as he for years ranted against scientists for promoting false fears about the Greenhouse Effect, global warming, and the potential destruction of Planet Earth.

While Limbaugh still doubtlessly has some of his well known dittoheads and Fox zombies still believing him, the same zealots who remain convinced that weapons of mass destruction actually do exist in Iraq, he is being challenged by some 53 former Nobel Prize winning scientists who adhere to the position expressed by Carter and Brown.

Since George W. Bush with help from Karl Rove has sought to reinvent reality to conform to his own greedy agenda, it is no surprise that he has responded to the growing global warming crisis by largely pretending that it does not exist, such as abandoning America's support and involvement in the Kyoto Protocols dealing with the subject of the Greenhouse Effect and its huge and tragic global implications.

With some arm twisting Bush finally agreed to study the issue of global warming since such a big noise was being raised about it, along with his Kyoto posture, but, as in all other fields, such studies would be done on his own terms.

This is where Bush and his cronies have run up against James Hansen, a government scientist who heads NASA's top institute studying the climate.  Hansen did not hold back in his comments to Scott Pelley in a 60 Minutes report that initially aired July 30, 2006.

Hansen believes that global warming is accelerating.  He point to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea.  When asked whether humans control the climate Hansen responded, "There's no doubt about that.  The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."

According to Hansen those human changes are driven by burning fossil fuels that pump out greenhouse gases like CO2, carbon dioxide.  Hansen believes that humankind has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable.

Now this is far from the scenario that Doctor Feelgood Reagan and Rush Limbaugh had provided.  We were told to abandon the voices of "gloom and doom," just like those "spoil sports" who actually claim that these so-called "conservatives" were spending the U.S. into economic oblivion.

Despite the fact that Hansen's position has been confirmed by leading scientists throughout the world the Bush administration has taken the liberty of blocking the message he is seeking to convey to a nation and world that need to receive it.  The era of censorship is alive and well.

Phil Cooney serves as chief-of-staff on the White House Council on Environmental Quality.  It is his heavy pen that deletes so much of James Hansen's message along with filling on the margins with more politically correct commentary.

Cooney makes the case for the group to which he zealously marches.  Unlike Hansen Cooney is not a scientist, he is a lawyer.  What was his job before going to work at the White House?

Phil Cooney had previously served as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute.  After serving heavy duty on behalf of the petroleum industry, Cooney was properly rewarded.  

He ultimately quit his White House position to go to work for Exxon-Mobil.