60 Minutes Fails, Chapter Two: Renewable Energy

Fresh off its bogus Benghazi debacle, what does 60 Minutes do? It ups the bullshit ante, this time whilst dealing with solar and wind power:

“The Cleantech Crash,” which aired Jan. 5 and can be watched above, argues that renewable energy and other types of clean technology are a dying industry. Critics have called the segment a “hit job,” a “debacle,” an “about face” and even “Dumb & Dumber Part 3.”

One of the biggest issues with the segment, critics charge, is that it conflated the Silicon Valley clean tech venture capital scene with the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program for renewable energy.

[…]

The New York Times recently profiled the U.S. solar industry in a front-page story, noting that companies are benefitting from a “solar power craze that is sweeping Wall Street.” Despite the recent U.S. oil and gas boom, the country “has more than doubled electricity generation from wind and solar” in the past four years, notes the San Jose Mercury News’ Dana Hull.

“If 60 Minutes had taken just two minutes to call us, they could have gotten some of their facts straight,” Ken John, a vice president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, told the Washington Examiner. “In truth, America’s solar energy industry just closed the books on a record-shattering year in 2013.”

Daily Kos and Blue Virginia diarist lowkell has more on this here.

GOP/Media Complex Bows Down To Breitbart Lie Machine

NSFW Corporation’s Mark Ames and Max Blumenthal have this must-read story on the Breitbart sleaze factory in the aftermath of Andrew Breitbart’s death. It documents not just the sleaze and lies pumped out both before and after Breitbart’s passing, but also the obscene and corrupt panegyrics written to him by people who obviously know better but also know that right-wing business entities ultimately pay their salaries.

Case in point: Dave Weigel, who toolishly edits a Breitbart quote with the end effect being to disguise Breitbart’s lucrative partisan hackery under a faux-gonzo facade.

US Taxpayers, Not UK Grannies, Paid For BP Cleanup

Remember how British Petroleum and their Tory, Republican and other corporatist allies whined and whined and whined that Poor Widdle British Petroleum just couldn’t pay to clean up its own big-ass Gulf of Mexico oil spill because they’d have to starve all the grannies in the UK to do it?

Guess what? It was a big fat lie.

Not only do British pension plans have but minimal exposure to BP stock (1.5% at most), but guess what? BP stuck US taxpayers with the bulk of the cleanup bill:

It has become apparent that BP deducted essentially all of the costs of cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill from their taxes in 2010. According to an article in The Guardian, BP had paid $14 billion total in cleanup costs associated with the spill as of January 2012 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/03/bp-seeks-spill-costs-halliburton), yet, according to a recent Fox Article in 2010 ALONE they deducted $13 billion from their federal income tax as ‘business costs’ (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/22/bp-cut-tax-13b-losses-spill/)

As the author notes, the numbers come from different sources and thus vary somewhat, but it’s still got the stench of “massive con” all over it:

They came in and tried to exploit hard-to-reach resources, and their own ineptitude caused the failure of their project and directly resulted in negative externalities for the American people that are truly incomprehensible in scale. And then WE PAID FOR THE CLEANUP.

Seriously, people. You should be pissed.

I am, buddy. I am.

(Crossposted at MyFDL.)

How Breitbart And Other Cons Gamed The Legitimate Media Into Cowed Submission

The life and career of Andrew Breitbart, and of conservative “journalism” in general, may be summed up thus:

Breitbart knew the shtick all too well: Accuse journalists of contrived groupthink, partisan deception and indoctrination to needle them professionally, while transmitting that rote accusation to your audience. Insult and demonize them on any available level until they strike back like cornered animals, and—suddenly—there’s America’s proof: these liberal journo thugs want to silence an honest voice, and, golly, are they ever mad when they try to.

Breitbart trained the media like dogs, and he was still doing so, on Thursday morning, from beyond the grave. People joked that they didn’t know if his death was a hoax, and it’s a certainty that some asked because they were afraid of telling the truth about someone by then literally incapable of hurting them. It was like watching a sick rerun of a Stalinist apparatchik sitcom, where one functionary was unwilling to believe another that The Leader is really dead, each presuming the announcement might be a trap.

If you beat a dog long enough, it learns to cower before you reach for a switch.

The anemic response wasn’t all wariness. Numerous journalists, even ones on the other side of the ideological fence, were quick to note that Breitbart was generous and warm in private. But Breitbart also destroyed a woman’s career in public. He destroyed an institution that helps poor minorities in public. He called Occupiers rapists in public. He screamed at strangers and loved to talk about kicking their asses in public. Outside of books written by the Aqua Net-shellacked c-minus Sturmabteilung of FOX News, his stamp on history in 20 years will be a Coughlin-esque paragraph about race-baiting and fraud.

Res ipsa loquitor.