The Hollywood Liberal

Iran’s Dissidents, Released But Not Freed

In 1998, I visited the offices of Jame’eh (“Society”), the first independent newspaper in revolutionary Iran. Its staff had just published a story about a Revolutionary Guard commander’s secret proposal to behead emerging reformers. In its first three months, Jame’eh also exposed the misadventures of the secretive Ansar-e Hezbollah, or Helpers of the Party of God, and interviewed a former official who was released after being imprisoned for fifteen years, on charges of being an American spy. The paper ran acerbic satires, daring political cartoons, and unconventional news stories. It came out twice a day (three times if there was big news), and kiosks had a hard time keeping it in stock.

“Jame’eh has two functions,” Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, its young editor, told me then. “We are trying to build up the level of democratic discourse, and we are a good test case to see how much freedom the government can tolerate.”

Not much, it turns out, even a generation later.

…read more

Coal Company CEO Threatens To Sue EPA For ‘Lying’ About Climate Change

A Murray Energy spokesperson confirmed Tuesday that the company is planning sue the EPA over its position that climate change is real.

The post Coal Company CEO Threatens To Sue EPA For ‘Lying’ About Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Robert E. Murray, of Murray Energy Corp., speaks during a news conference Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Scott Sommerdorf)

The owner of the largest independent coal producer in the U.S. is threatening to sue the Environmental Protection Agency over its new regulations on carbon emissions from existing coal plants, saying the agency has been lying about the existence of global warming, and that the earth is actually getting colder.

In an extended profile published last month, Murray Energy Corp. founder Robert Murray told WV Executive that the EPA’s claims that climate change exists violates the federal Data Quality Act, which requires agencies to rely on quality, objective information to inform its decisions.

“Under the act, they are obligated to tell the truth, and they are not telling the truth about global warming,” Murray reportedly said. “They are not telling hardly any truth about the science. The earth has actually cooled over the last 17 years, so under the Data Quality Act, they’ve actually been lying about so-called global warming.”

Murray added, “This lawsuit will force them to not just take data from the environmentalists and publish it, as they have been doing, but to review that data and make sure it’s accurate.”

Of course, the EPA does not just take data from environmentalists to inform its position on climate change. A comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed research shows a 97 percent consensus among scientists that global warming is real and primarily driven by humans. And the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, a massive global effort to compile and analyze climate research by scientists and experts around the world, found that there is a 95 percent likelihood that human activities drove 74 percent of the observed global warming since 1950.

The argument that the earth is cooling has also been thoroughly debunked by peer-reviewed research, which shows both a slight increase in surface temperatures and an enormous increase in the temperature of the ocean, which fuels arctic ice melt and sea level rise.

A spokesperson for Murray Energy confirmed to ThinkProgress on Tuesday that Murray does believe the earth is cooling, and that the company is planning sue the EPA over its statements.

Murray Energy has already sued the EPA in March over what it called its “war on coal,” claiming the agency failed to evaluate how air pollution regulations would affect jobs in the coal industry.

The post Coal Company CEO Threatens To Sue EPA For ‘Lying’ About Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

New Jersey Unions in Revolt Against Christie’s Attack on Pensions
From: The Christie Watch

Unions representing hundreds of thousands of workers go to court against the governor.

What Won’t the GOP Do to Keep the Poor Uninsured?
From: Zoë Carpenter

The real tragedy of an alleged bribery scandal in Virginia is that hundreds of thousands will be denied health insurance.

Al Gore: Snowden Performed an ‘Important Service’ by Revealing Spying That Threatens Democracy
From: John Nichols

The former vice president says Americans deserved to know how far NSA spying has gone.

Two Points of View From Today’s House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing
From: Eli Clifton

Today in Washington, Representative Meeks makes a level-headed case for multilateral diplomacy with Iran, while Representative Vargas fears an iranian attack on Los Angeles.

Libya: A Dramatic Strategic Failure
From: Foreign Policy In Focus

Beset by infighting among militias and rampant arms trafficking, Libya in 2014 illustrates the dangers of Western military intervention.

GOP Is Paying Too Much Attention to Wall Street
Dave Brat, FOX News

Demise of the Tea Party Greatly Exaggerated
Davis & Camia, USA Today

Virginia’s Ugly Fight Over Medicaid Expansion
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
When it comes to heaping new kinds of crazy on top of all the old kinds of crazy, there is simply nothing like the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Madam Secretary Made a Difference
Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
WHEN politicians have trouble spinning their own glories, that’s a problem.So it was bizarre that Hillary Rodham Clinton, asked at a forum in April about her legacy at the State Department, had trouble articulating it. That feeds into a narrative — awaiting her memoir on Tuesday — that she may have been glamorous as secretary of state but didn’t actually accomplish much.