Morning Reads: "Contrarian" Climatologist Got Big Bucks From Big Oil -- and the Kochs

Good morning! Thanks to the all-powerful dog-food lobby (Big Kibble) it’s National Dog Biscuit Day. Give your best friend a treat!

On this date in 1954, the first mass vaccination of children against polio began. The field studies of Jonah Salk’s then-experimental vaccine would become one of the largest clinical trials in history. And in 1945, six Marines were photographed raising an American flag on Iwo Jima. It would quickly become an iconic image of World War II. In the following weeks, half the men captured in the famous picture would be killed in action.

Stat of the day: 20 percent — the share of US refining capacity that’s been knocked offline by the largest refinery strike in 35 years. According to Reuters, 6,550 workers at 12 refineries have participated in the labor action, which began on February 1.

“Crippled” –> A chilling report from Robert Samuels at WaPo on the impact of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on labor. A University of Wisconsin political scientist says that Walker has “effectively dismantled the financial and organizing structure of unions in Wisconsin.”

We’ve finally found a corrupt climatologist –> Greenpeace obtained documents showing that over the past 14 years, Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who insists that changes in solar activity are responsible for global warming, received over $1 million from “Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers,” according to The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg. AND: Justin Gillis and John Schwartz report for the NYT that “Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.”

Fingers crossed –> High-level talks between American and Iranian officials resume in Geneva today as the deadline for completing a framework for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program nears. Reuters has that story.

Lovegate –> Sad but true: following controversial comments by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the political world has spent the past five days debating whether the president of the United States loves America. Gaining particular attention has been this blistering piece on Giuliani at the NY Daily News by biographer and ace investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. At Bloomberg, Dave Weigel reports that many conservatives are frustrated by the debate because they want to paint Obama as a radical but believe the racist tinge of Rudy’s remarks are blowing back on them. BUT: Oliver Willis responds to Weigel’s report by writing that “this, like many other things, does not occur in a vacuum.” AND: Rudy took to the opinion pages of the WSJ (pay-walled) to apologize for the fact that you did not understand his words so it’s all your fault. No More Mister Nice Blog has the highlights. FACT-CHECK: NYT’s reporters Michael Barbaro and Michael Shear round up a bunch of Obama’s past statements about how much he loves America.

Cures for inequality? –> Economic Policy Institute head Larry Mishel writes in the NYT that while it’s good news that Washington is finally looking hard at our growing inequality, “the bad news is that both parties are offering tax cuts as a solution. What has hurt workers’ paychecks is not what the government takes out, but what their employers no longer put in — a dynamic that tax cuts cannot eliminate.”

What you can learn in school –> MoJo’s Rebecca Cohen visited some of the schools with the lowest vaccination rates in California to see “what they have to say for themselves.” The results don’t exactly make one hopeful for the future.

Be very afraid? –> Homeland Security Chief Jeb Johnson told CNN that he “takes seriously a threat made by Somali-based Islamist militants against shopping malls, including the Mall of America in Minnesota, and urged people going there to be careful.” BUT: You might want to take that with a grain of salt given the current heated debate around his agency’s funding, which, as TIME magazine’s Maya Rhodan notes, will expire in five days.

How far we’ve come –> Jim Galloway reports for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers is fighting two “religious liberty” bills that would codify the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians. What makes his opposition notable is that in the 1980s, Bowers defended Georgia’s anti-sodomy laws — and the arrest of two men for consensual sex behind closed doors — all the way to the Supreme Court in a landmark case called Bowers v. Hardwick.

Precision –> According to a new report by the independent Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, over the past five months US airstrikes have killed 1,600 people in Syria and all but 62 were fighters for the Islamic State or the Al Nusra Front. AND: At WaMo’s Political Animal, David Atkins finds similarities between the views of the Islamic State and Christian conservatives on a variety of social issues.

Legalize it –> Two Democratic House members filed separate bills on Friday that would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana at the federal level, just like alcohol. Matt Ferner has the details at HuffPo.

Oscars –> HuffPo’s Brennan Williams, Christopher Rosen and Irina Dvalidze explain why the Oscar Award nominees tend to be disproportionately white — and why it matters. AND: The Imitation Game, the biopic about Alan Turing, the genius who broke “unbreakable” German codes during World War II and was later prosecuted for his homosexuality, won for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay. Now his surviving relatives are pushing the British government to pardon 49,000 men who were convicted of the same crime. Agence France Presse has the details (via Raw Story).

And the Razzie goes to… –> Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, Rotten Tomatoes’ lowest-rated film ever, swept the anti-Oscar Golden Raspberry Awards for the worst film in 2014. CNN has the ugly details.

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