... and an entire state's economy will grind to a halt and never recover in following decades, indeed centuries, if we do not immediately mine copper in the Iron Range and build pipelines, pipelines everywhere, every which way ...

Man, those Republicans can tell a story. Talk about talking the talk. Remember the duo to the right [per the image here, as well as politically] and their jokester fun and games hijinks back in September 2008 - where they established their true economic and fiscal gravitas as caution and stay the course ruled the day? Remember that?

"Fiscal conservativism," I believe is the rubric under which they operated domestic economic policy like a well tuned Wall Street derivatives trading machine - like Paulson's Goldman Sachs (please don't say Lehman Brothers, Merrill, or WaMu) ...

Well, Kos tells yet another story - about how Chicken Little of GOP fame and fortune is aflutter again [or is it still] over - what a surprise - greenhouse gas curtailment policy and how it will entirely and unconscionably devastate entire segments of the US and world economy with perhaps only the insular North Koreans surviving the onslaught; spin on Karl Rove, spin on ...

... and tell it to the Koch brothers.

They willingly will buy in to the fiction since it greases their skids. And that is what it is about and all it is about, if you know who is who without needing a scorecard. ALEC offers a smorgesborg, but the Kochs are in it for their will to recklessly profit and pollute. The other stuff besides the union busting is window dressing for GOP groundlings like the Kiffmeyers.

Kos, however, tells the story of having your mind straight meaning to distrust and look beyond the "never let the facts get in the way of telling a good scary story" Republican mainstay fiction-mill stuff, where one debunking chart tells a separate and compelling story - one known as THE TRUTH.

This chart:

click the image to see the axes clearly

As Kos, in opening, explains:

Well, it's not
where we eat.

With the announcement this past week of President Obama's new greenhouse gas regulations, Republican knees were jerking to the point of spasms. If this weren't now such a standard reaction, the degree to which Republicans reflexively and dishonestly oppose any and all environmental protections would be astonishing. But Republicans long have proven that they just don't care about the state of the biosphere we just happen to inhabit. This is reason number one why the Republicans shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the corridors of political power. For their part, the traditional media fell back on their usual habit of promoting false balance or framing as politics, for an issue that is actually about scientific facts.

[multiple links omitted, image added - and they drink their water upstream.]

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hat tip to an attentive reader for emailing the chart and link