The Michigan Historical Collections Web Archives document the activities of individuals, organizations, and voluntary organizations in the state of Michigan, with particular emphasis on websites and other resources related to religious groups, social justice, ethnic communities, business, and politics. These materials complement and/or supplement additional physical and digital archives held by the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120101101904/http://thinkprogress.org/
2011 was a big year for ThinkProgress’ video output. Between catching the Republican presidential candidates flying off into various forms of extremism, filming Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) being booed at his own town hall, exposing a sitting Senator imploring the Koch brothers for campaign funds, unearthing a clip of Ronald Reagan making the same tax policy arguments as Obama, and skewering Mitt Romney for editing Obama out of context, ThinkProgress was able to drive both the news cycle and the course of national debate with the unique video content we found. So here, in honor of the year’s end and measured in both traffic and political impact, are ThinkProgress’ ten biggest video moments from 2011:
The headlines of 2011 were driven by global warming disasters and the popular uprising against the powers-that-be who have accumulated profit at the expense of the future of humanity. The United States faced the most billion-dollar climate disasters ever, with 14 distinct disasters costing at least $53 billion to the U.S. economy. Stymied by the election of the science-denying Tea Party Congress, the Obama administration failed to pass climate pollution or oil and coal safety legislation in response to the disasters of 2010. The administration fought back attacks on investment in renewable energy and stopped the rush to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, spurred by mass protests.
This afternoon, Obama signed the controversial Defense authorization bill, despite his reservations about provisions related to the treatment of terrorism suspects. The National Journal reports:
President Obama signed on Saturday the defense authorization bill, formally ending weeks of heated debate in Congress and intense lobbying by the administration to strip controversial provisions requiring the transfer of some terror suspects to military custody.
“I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” Obama said in a statement accompanying his signature.
Social conservatives are lauding Rick Santorum’s “surge” to third place in the Iowa polls, but his new forthrightness about his positions may backfire. In a recent interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Santorum explained that not only would he support a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, he supports invalidating all currently legal same-sex unions:
SANTORUM: I think marriage has to be one thing for everybody. We can’t have 50 different marriage laws in this country, you have to have one marriage law…
TODD: What would you do with same-sex couples who got married? Would you make them get divorced?
SANTORUM: Well, their marriage would be invalid. I think if the constitution says “marriage is this,” then people whose marriage is not consistent with the constitution… I’d love to think there’s another way of doing it.
Watch it:
He went on to claim that “same-sex couples can contract for everything” except government benefits and compared the loving marriages of many gay and lesbian couples to having a friend or an aunt.
A recall of controversial Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker now appear inevitable. In just 28 days, activists collected 507,533 signatures. Organizers have until January 17 to collect 540,208 signatures, which is equal to 25% of the state’s 2010 general election turnout. To be safe, recall advocates have set a new goal of 720,277 signatures by the deadline.
The recall efforts success has propted the Scott Walker’s campaign to take aggressive action to invalidate signatures. Walker sued his own Government Accountability Board, arguing the proceedures adopted by the board to review signatures aren’t agressive enough. Without citing any concrete evidence, Walker alleged to Fox News that there was massive fraud in the signature gathering effort. The case is still pending.
Nevertheless, Walker has changed his tone in recent days and acknowleged making mistakes in pursuing his an anti-union effort in his first few days in office. Walker told the LaCross Tribune that “that he’s made mistakes in how he’s gone about achieving his agenda” and “he regretted not having done a better job of selling his changes to state government.” Walker also said he regretted his statements on a phone call with a man pretending to be billionaire David Koch. He said his comments on the call, where he referred to his plan to undermine collective bargaining as “dropping a bomb” and admitted he considered planting troublemakers among the protesters, were “stupid.”
Notorious Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing increasing fire over his office’s failure to adequately investigate hundreds of sex crimes, including dozens of alleged child molestations. Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has previously gone easy on the sheriff, joined the critics. While he stopped short of calling for Apraio’s resignation, in an interview with 3TV news in Phoenix, McCain said he was “outraged” and “astonished that there hasn’t been more outcry about the failure of these investigations.” Watch it:
McCain put out a statement earlier this month taking a much more circumspect stance, saying he was merely “concerned” with the report on the sex crimes, so today’s comments suggest the political winds may be turning against Arpaio.
The sheriff, who has made a dubious name for himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” for his hardline stance on undocumented immigrants, is also facing significant heat over a Department of Justice investigation, the results of which were released earlier this month, alleging that his department has systematically violated civil rights laws.
Nonetheless, presidential hopeful Rick Perry held a campaign event with Arpaio this week in Iowa. Perry has dodged most questions on the Department of Justice investigation or the sex crimes allegations, but a spokesperson told TPM, “Governor Perry knows Sheriff Arpaio as a dedicated law enforcement professional fighting to keep his neighbors safe in the wake of federal failures to secure the border and deal with border crime,” he added.
Santorum ‘Proud’ Of His Earmarks, Including Vote For The ‘Bridge To Nowhere’ |
Earmarks has become despised by many voters, but at a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday, Rick Santorum defended his use of them during his 12 years in Congress. The former Pennsylvania senator said he was “proud” of his earmarks, explaining, “Go and look at the Constitution. Who has the responsibility to spend money? Clearly, in the Constitution it is the Congress.” While agreeing that the practice has been “abused,” Santorum even defended his vote for the so-called “bridge to nowhere” — a proposed bridge from Ketchikan, Alaska, to an island with 50 residents and the town’s airport. “You had a city that was separated from its airport,” Santorum explained.
The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system.
In an interview with PBS News Hour, Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters described the effect of the hundreds of billions of tons of global warming pollution as being like “steroids for the atmosphere,” intensifying extreme weather to unprecedented results:
We look at heat waves, droughts, and flooding events. They all tend to get increased when you have this extra energy in the atmosphere. I call it being on steroids for the atmosphere. Normally, you have the everyday ups and downs of the weather, but if you pack a little bit of extra punch in there, it’s like a baseball hitter who’s on steroids. You expect to see a big home run total maybe from this slugger, but if you add a little bit of extra oomph to his swing by putting him on steroids, now we can have an unprecedented season, a 70 home run season. And that’s the way I look at this year. We had an unprecedented weather year that I don’t think would have happened unless we had had an extra bit of energy in the atmosphere due to climate change and global warming.
Watch the program:
Nationwide, more than 6,000 heat records were broken this year. On average, the U.S. has three or four events every year that are considered major natural disasters. But, this year, there were at least fourteen billion-dollar disasters. Damages are expected to exceed $53 billion.
$227.8 Million |
That’s how much the National Rifle Association raised last year through a complex mix of corporate partnerships, merchandizing, membership dues and anti-Obama fear mongering. A separate but affiliated organization, the NRA Foundation, distributed $21.2 million in grants last year — most of it to the NRA itself. Although some portion of the foundation’s grants went to local charitable organizations, there are a number of unexplained discrepancies between what the foundation claims it gave and what that charities indicate they actually received.
NEWS FLASH
Gingrich Would ‘Look At’ Sarah Palin For Vice President Or Cabinet Job |
GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who takes every opportunity possible to assure voters that he is the most serious candidate in the race, said he would be open to appointing Sarah Palin to a high level job in his administration. As Right Wing Watch reports, during a Wednesday night tele-town hall hosted by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, a caller asked the former Speaker if he would consider Palin as a running mate. Gingrich responded that Palin “is certainly one of the people you would look at” and told the caller that he is “a great admirer of hers.” He also floated the idea of appointing her Secretary of Energy because, he said, “I can’t imagine anybody who would do a better job of driving us to an energy solution than Gov. Palin.” “Tell her that she would certainly be on the list of one of the people we would consider,” he added.
In recent days, Ron Paul has tried to distance himself from damaging newsletters from the late 1980s and 1990s by attributing racist and anti-gay statements to ghost writers and disavowing the most incendiary sentiments. “It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all…I think it was terrible,” Paul said of the letters, which blamed AIDS on the gay community and likened black people to criminals. “It was tragic, and I had some responsibility for it, because the name went out in my letter. But I was not an editor. I (was) like a publisher.”
But despite his denials, CNN’s Peter Hamby reports that Paul included many of the controversial ideas in his 1987 book, “Freedom Under Siege: The U.S. Constitution after 200-Plus Years.” That work — published under Paul’s name — attributed AIDS to the gay “lifestyle” and suggested that victims of sexual harassment should simply quit their jobs:
In one section of the book, Paul criticized people suffering from AIDS or other contagious diseases for demanding health insurance coverage. “The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care,” Paul wrote. [...]
“Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity,” Paul wrote. “Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardly acceptable.”
Indeed, Paul did not disavow authorship of the newsletters until 2001 and defended their contents throughout the 1990s. For instance, in 1996, “Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson” and explained that his comments on blacks contained in the newsletters should be viewed in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.”
Appearing in New Hampshire as a surrogate for his father, Matt Romney suggested to a group of voters that Mitt Romney would not release his tax returns until Barack Obama released “his grades and his birth certificate.”
Q: Will Romney eventually open his tax returns, so we can see what’s going on like most candidates will do and have done?
TAGG ROMNEY: We have no idea.
MATT ROMNEY: He has not said that he will not do it. He has also not said that he will. It’s a matter of time until that issue comes up because I think everyone has to get a chance to do that. So I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not sure he knows the answer to that. But he will do everything that he needs to do. He’s certainly not afraid of anything. Hiding anything. I heard someone suggest the other day that as soon as President Obama releases his grades and birth certificate and sort of a long list of things then maybe he’d do it.
Of course, responding to a cacphony of conspiracy theorists, Barack Obama has already released his birth certificate. Craig Romney can view it here.
Earlier this month, Catholic Cardinal Francis George of Chicago raised more than a few eyebrows for comparing the the gay rights movement to the Klu Klux Klan. George made the comments after organizers of the city’s gay pride parade briefly considered rerouting the event past Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church.
“The Chicago Gay Pride Parade has been organized and attended for many years without interfering with the worship of God in a Catholic church,” George wrote. “When the 2012 Parade organizers announced a time and route change this year, it was apparent that the Parade would interfere with divine worship in a Catholic parish on the new route. When the pastor’s request for reconsideration of the plans was ignored, the organizers invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church. One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940′s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.
“It is terribly wrong and sinful that gays and lesbians have been harassed and subjected to psychological and even physical harm. These tragedies can be addressed, however, without disturbing the organized and orderly public worship of God in a country that claims to be free. I am grateful that all parties concerned resolved this problem by moving the Parade’s start time so as not to conflict with the celebration of Mass that Sunday.”
Truth Wins Out (TWO) has formed a Change.org petition calling for George’s resignation and Equally Blessed, an umbrella group of pro-LGBT rights Catholic organizations, said the Cardinal “has demeaned and demonized LGBT people in a manner unworthy of his office.” TWO is also taking out a full page ad in this Sunday’s Chicago Tribune calling on George to step down.
King at a Paul campaign event in August (courtesy Gage Skidmore)
Just days before the Iowa GOP caucuses, one of the state’s most high profile conservative politicians is strongly warning Republicans against voting for Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). In an interview with Politico, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) suggested a Ron Paul presidency would be “dangerous” because of the candidate’s libertarian foreign policy positons:
“Iowa Rep. Steve King’s assessment on Ron Paul, one of the two co-frontrunners going into his state’s caucuses next week: “He’s not dangerous unless he’s president.” [...]
“I don’t think that the Paul supporters have really stepped back and thought about what would happen if Ron Paul were operating out of the Oval Office and the commander-in-chief of our armed forces,” King said.
Paul’s campaign has soared in recent days, leading the field in Iowa in some polls. Finally taking his candidacy seriously, a number of high profile Republicans and conservative leaders havepubliclycondemned the unorthodox Texas congressman.
Social conservatives are lauding Rick Santorum’s “surge” to 
The year 2011 brought the most billion-dollar climate disasters to the United States ever, piling history-making events on top of each other to catastrophic results. The litany of disaster included a scorching drought that rivaled the Dust Bowl summer of 1936, a tornado season twice as bad as the great 1974 tornado outbreak, and flooding worse than the the great 1927 flood on the Mississippi River. This year of disaster was the result of the unlimited burning of fossil fuels, which has trapped increasing amounts of heat in the atmosphere, disrupting our climate system. 
In recent days, Ron Paul has tried to distance himself from damaging newsletters from the late 1980s and 1990s by attributing racist and anti-gay statements to ghost writers and disavowing the most incendiary sentiments. “It 
Earlier this month, Catholic Cardinal Francis George of Chicago raised more than a few eyebrows for 
