Some times what looks like a Conspiracy is a Conspiracy …
Posted: April 23, 2011 Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, John Birch Society in Charge, religion, religious extremists | Tags: extremist christians and anti-environmental policies, Green Dragon, People for the American Way 11 CommentsA lot of discussions here over the last three months–as well as blog posts–have been centered around what seems to 
be a concerted effort in Congress and Statehouses around the country to restrict women’s right to abortion, attack collective bargaining rights, and disable environmental protection laws and agencies. This has come behind a similar set of laws aimed at restricting the rights of the GLBT community, immigrants, and religious minorities. A flurry of laws supposedly demonstrating state and federal interest in restricting constitutional rights all look and sound mighty familiar.
Bostonboomer and I have been trying to figure out which set of right wing “institutes” have been manufacturing these attacks, laws, and lies. We figured it was an unholy reliance of christian religious extremists and corporate interests like the Koch Brothers. Neither of us had really dug into it yet, however. Thankfully, People for the American Way has saved us some research in one of these areas. There’s an excellent internet monograph up called ‘The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection. You can read it online or as a down-loadable and printable pdf .
One of the things that I find most confusing is why the religious right would want to harm “god’s creation”? I’d understood that some fundamental christians had actually taken up the call to protect the earth. However, that old testament verse that gets interpreted as “you’re on top of the world, it’s a gift to you, now go use it like you see fit” still seems to get the shaking and the rolling going among those whose erections depend on feeling godlike and wealthy. PFAW says it’s basically “dominion theology”. So, what is this toxic brand of superstition?
In the last decade, as evangelical Christian leaders increasingly became involved in conservation, “creation care” and taking action against global climate change, the alarms went up in corporate America that many traditional members of the conservative coalition were becoming advocates for environmental protection. To counter the rise of the faith-based environmentalist Evangelical Climate Initiative, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance emerged. The ISA, propped up by business interests including Exxon Mobil, has peddled misleading and false claims to make the case that climate change is a myth. In 2007, the ISA was renamed the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and became more belligerent and zealous in its anti-environmental activities.
The Cornwall Alliance is led by E. Calvin Beisner, who believes that since God granted humans “dominion” over the earth, humans have a right to exploit all natural resources. As Randall Balmer writes in Thy Kingdom Come, Beisner “asserts that God has placed all of nature at the disposal of humanity.” Balmer quotes Beisner’s own summary of his dominion theology: “All of our acquisitive activities should be undertaken with the purpose of extending godly rule, or dominion.” As Balmer notes, “the combination of dominion theology from the Religious Right and the wise use ideology of corporate and business interests has created a powerful coalition to oppose environmental protection.”
According to a report by Think Progress, the Cornwall Alliance is a front group for the shadowy James Partnership. Both the James Partnership and the Cornwall Alliance are closely linked to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an anti-environmental group that is “funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil, $60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.” CFACT is also part of a climate change denialist network funded by the ExxonMobil-financed Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Beisner is a CFACT board member and an “adjunct fellow” of the Acton Institute, which is primarily funded by groups like ExxonMobil, the Scaife foundations and the Koch brothers. Beisner is also an adviser to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is financed by the oil-backed Earthart Foundation, the Koch brothers, and ExxonMobil.
In fact, Beisner is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials. Despite claiming to be an authority on energy and environmental issues, he received his Ph.D. in Scottish History.
In 2009, Beisner’s Cornwall Alliance cosponsored a climate change denial conference led by the Heartland Institute, a pro-corporate group funded by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Family Foundations, and the Scaife foundations. Other organizations funded by energy corporations that cosponsored the conference include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, and Americans for Prosperity.
The Cornwall Alliance has been enormously successful in recruiting Religious Right leaders to promote its anti-environmental cause. In 1999, the group started recruiting prominent Religious Right figures to sign the “Cornwall Declaration,” a document that attacks environmentalists, saying they “deify nature or oppose human dominion over creation” and promote “erroneous theological and anthropological positions.” Among its signatories were Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Chuck Colson of the Colson Center, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America, Daniel Lapin of Towards Tradition, and Frank Pavone of Priests for Life. The president of CFACT called himself “a driving force” behind the declaration.
You can see it’s the same old interlocking directorates of hate and intolerance. They even have drafted a new “evangelical declaration of global warming that says “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming” and maintains that “reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures.” Yes, they believe in religous hokum pokum above the overwhelming evidence for evolution and climate change. Science holds no sway compared to something contrived by the Nicene Council to Romanize the known world in the 3rd century which was basically a conglomerate of all the superstitions of the day. Yes, Constantine locked the priests up of every local cult and told them they could not come out until they had invented a “Roman” religion and that’s exactly what they did. We’re still suffering from that grand kidnapping to this day. They’re working hard on painting conservation and environmental protection as “anti-Christian” too.
In 2007, Jerry Falwell warned that environmental action was “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” away from evangelism and religious faith, and a year later James Dobson and Gary Bauer slammed Rev. Richard Cizik, a principal evangelical supporter of environmental protection, and his allies for “using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”
The Cornwall Alliance has coordinated with Religious Right leaders to accuse Christians who believe in environmental protection not only of attempting to divide the faith community, but of promoting a dangerous anti-religious and anti-Christian agenda. The group calls the environmentalist movement “The Green Dragon” and earlier this year produced a star-studded documentary to help slay it.
The Cornwall Alliance’s documentary, “Resisting the Green Dragon,” includes appearances by a who’s who of Religious Right leaders: Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association; Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America; David Barton of WallBuilders; Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College; radio show host Janet Parshall; and anti-gay activist Bishop Harry Jackson.
In heartfelt interviews for the documentary, these activists claim that the environmental movement (The Green Dragon) is promoting an anti-religious agenda: Parshall derides the Green Dragon’s “lust for political power” and “spiritual deception,” and calls the environmental movement “deadly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ”; Fischer labels it a “threat to the Christian faith”; Perkins claims that environmentalists are “pointing people away from God and into humanism” and support “an unbiblical view”; Beisner says “the green movement threatens liberty”; and Farris warns that environmentalists are “scaring little children to achieve [their] political ends.” Barton adds a summary of the dominion theology: “Mankind is the apex of creation; He placed it over the planet, over the environment.”
Anyway, I’m not going to print out the entire 8 pages of the pdf here although I will beg you to to read it. Like I said, it’s the cast of usual cretins who’ve found a new cause célèbre and source of the kind of green they worship. Why can’t we just declare all these folks public enemies or terrorists or something worse and stuff them altogether with bibles in orange jumpsuits at Guantanamo? Oh, and just think, all those oil and gas companies get to deduct all those contributions to these nutty groups from their revenues. It’s one of the reasons that they don’t pay much in taxes. Think about that next time you fill up at anything affiliated with Exxon Mobil or better yet, go fill up some place else.
So many of them, so few lions …
Friday Morning Reads: Postcards from My Family On Earth Day
Posted: April 22, 2011 Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, morning reads | Tags: John Muir, National Parks, National Wetlands, National Wildlife Refuges, Teddy Roosevelt, The Koch Brothers, Yosemite 28 Comments
Good Morning!
I watched a wonderful episode of American Masters on PBS called ‘John Muir in the New World’ on Wednesday night. Actually, I’ve watched several escapist things the last few days including another PBS special on British Explorer Col. Percy Fawcett called Searching for Z . Earlier, I had watched the Presidents series from American Experience including the one dedicated to US President Teddy Roosevelt. What brings my attention to these three men is that they all were committed to wilderness, exploration, and conservation. They were huge figures in their life times. They fought a series of battles to keep the world’s geological marvels and wilderness away from men that wanted to exploit them down to the last tree and rock. We are seriously short of fighters like this these days.
This all got me thinking about how my grandparents set off with my mother, her sister and her brother in Studebakers to explore the nation’s new National Park System in the mid twenties. My mother saw to it that my dad took my sister and me back to every place she’d seen as a kid and then some in the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve seen nearly all of the National Parks now thanks to my mom and the family gypsy spirit. I also took my daughters right back there too. I was especially impressed by Dinosaur National Monument, Yellowstone National Park, and Mesa Verde as a kid. My oldest daughter got taken to a lot of them initially in baby backpacks. We’ve spent a lot of time in Rocky Mountain National Park too. Little Miss Doctor Daughter made her first trip to Washington DC at six months. Then later, when she was older, we walked the same paths that I had walked in the 1960s and 1970s out in Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. I seriously doubt the paths were there when my grandparents took my late mother, but I know she talked about dropping a hankie in the handkerchief pool and watching the mudpots. I loved the paint pots. Little Miss Doctor Daughter preferred morning glory pool and the Yellowstone Falls. We share a fascination with dinosaurs too.
The latest notch on my well worn National Park tourist belt is our Gulf Islands National Seashore along the Gulf Coast. I’ve seen them with and without the BP oil. One of the hardest hit areas is near Pass a Loutre, a 66,000 acre Wetlands and bird sanctuary in Plaquemines Parish. It’s a few hours drive from my home. There’s a bunch of National Refuges down here including Delta National Wildlife Refuge and Breton National Wildlife Refuge. Actually, the entire French Quarter is a National Park. I live in between it and the Chalmette Battlefield that was the site of the Battle of New Orleans. They are both about 1 mile on either side of me. Barataria is just to the south and is my favorite National Historical Park to hike these days. It’s where Jean LaFitte and his pirates hung out and has some of the best swamp habitat around. The swamp iris in bloom are a thing to behold. I always take my friends there who’ve never seen an alligator in the wild. Breton National Refuge is the second oldest National Refuge in the country. It was established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
If you watch the special on John Muir, you’ll see how Roosevelt and Muir were responsible for saving the Giant Redwoods of Sequoia National Park , El Capitan, and the wonders that are Yosemite National Park and Yosemite Valley. One of their great failures was the inability to stop Woodrow Wilson and Congress from blocking human hysteria and greed–left over from San Francisco’s great fire–from building a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley that was part of the National Park. That controversy led to the founding of the Sierra Club and a greater realization on the part of US citizens every where that there are things in this country left to us by nature, geology, history, or whatever you want to call it that are special beyond belief and should be beyond capitalization. My daughters are the third generation in my family to be completely awed by the power of the Great American landscape. I only wonder what will be left to their children and grandchildren.
I know this is a weird morning post for you to read and that you were expecting a lot of newsy links. Instead, I spent the evening scanning some postcards and photos that my grandmother and mother collected. That side of my family just kept traveling around the US back then and most of us still do the same today. I want to leave you with some links to think about, however before I leave you with some postcards from my late mother and her family.
Monument Valley National Park Meets the Brothers Koch
Once upon a time, my wife and I ventured in our Western travels to see Monument Valley, that place made legendary by a gazillion John Ford/John Wayne westerns as “THE ARCHETYPAL WEST,” so much so that you couldn’t film a car commercial for many years, and in some cases to this very day, without putting Monument Valley in the background.
And there was a line of cars and Winnebagos (or whatever you call five tons of steel dragging another couple tons of car, motorcycles, mountain bikes, or whatever other trailer gear makes for an enjoyable “roughing it” in the West, complete with satellite dishes and a portable generator for the bug-zapper). It was late spring, and the crowds weren’t what they were going to be, once school let out and the station wagons were unleashed on an unsuspecting West filled with price-gouging gas stations. Gas was still at winter “local” levels.
The run into Monument Valley is famously desolate, and you can see the spires of rock towering in the distance down a straight-line road that’s a favorite of cameramen of all ages and persuasions.
And when you get there, there’s the obligatory gatehouse for collecting tolls, and if you read the signs, you’ll notice that it’s “Monument Valley Tribal Park” which oughtn’t surprise you, since you’ve been on the Navajo Reservation — a chunk of land that embraces an area as large as West Virginia, and completely swallows the Hopi Reservation within it — for many miles now.
Koch brothers now at heart of GOP power
The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch no longer sit outside Washington’s political establishment, isolated by their uncompromising conservatism. Instead, they are now at the center of Republican power, a change most evident in the new makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Wichita-based Koch Industries and its employees formed the largest single oil and gas donor to members of the panel, ahead of giants like Exxon Mobil, contributing $279,500 to 22 of the committee’s 31 Republicans, and $32,000 to five Democrats.
The Koch Bros. and Corporate Welfare
For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador, one of the ten biggest domestic cattle ranching operations, has something in the neighborhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit.
Back before there was Al Gore, there was John Muir. Only, John Muir not only talked the talk, he climbed the mountains and studied the rocks. He also wrote all about it so that people cooped up in big cities could know the marvels of the wide-open west. He wanted them to feel inspired and to come experience the power and overwhelming forces of nature and wilderness for themselves. There were some bad guys back then, but think about this. Koch Industries has spent $55 million dollars trying to fight the science of climate change and seeking to undermine environmental laws. They are out to destroy our national treasures and our heritage that so many people have fought for over a century to protect. What would John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt say about Koch Industries?
John Muir
This excerpt from a letter by John Muir was written on August 30, 1899 on the Alaskan Wilderness.
And what a glorious trip it was for you girls, flying like birds from wilderness to wilderness, the wildest and brightest of America, tasting almost every science under the sun, with fine breezy exercise, scrambles over mossy logs and rocks in the spruce forests, walks on the crystal prairies of the glaciers, on the flowery boggy tundras, in the luxuriant wild gardens of Kodiak and the islands of Bering Sea, and plashing boat rides in the piping bracing winds, all the while your eyes filled with magnificent scenery—the Alexander Archipelago with its thousand forested islands and calm mirror waters, Glacier Bay, Fairweather Mountains, Yakutat and Enchantment Bays, the St. Elias Alps and glaciers and the glorious Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, and the Aleutian Peninsula with its flowery, ley, smoky volcanoes, the blooming banks and bracs and mountains of Unalaska, and Bering Sea with its seals and Innuits, whales and whalers, etc., etc., etc.
It is not easy to stop writing under the exhilaration of such an excursion, so much pure wildness with so much fine company. It is a pity so rare a company should have to be broken, never to be assembled again. But many, no doubt, will meet again. On your side of the continent perhaps half the number may be got together. Already I have had two trips with Merriam to the Sierra Sequoias and Coast Redwoods, during which you may be sure the H.A.E. was enjoyed over again. A few days after I got home, Captain Doran paid me a visit, most of which was spent in a hearty review of the trip. And last week Gannett came up and spent a couple of days, during which we went over all our enjoyments, science and fun, mountain ranges, glaciers, etc., discussing everything from earth sculpture to Cassiope and rhododendron gardens—from Welsh rarebit and jam and cracker feasts to Nunatak. I hope to have visits from Professor Gilbert and poet Charlie ere long, and Earlybird Ritter, and possibly I may see a whole lot more in the East this coming winter or next. Anyhow, remember me to all the Harrimans and Averells and every one of the party you chance to meet, Just to think of them!! Ridgway with wonderful bird eyes, all the birds of America in them; Funny Fisher ever flashing out wit; Perpendicular E., erect and majestic as a Thlinket totem pole Old-sea-beach G., hunting upheavals, downheavals, sideheavals, and hanging valleys, the Artists reveling in color beauty like bees in flower-beds; Ama-a-merst tripping along shore like a sprightly sandpiper, pecking kelp-bearded boulders for a meal of fossil molluscs; Genius Kincaid among his beetles and butterflies and “red tailed bumble-bees that sting awful hard”; Innuit Dall smoking and musing, flowery Trelease and Coville; and Seaweed Saunders our grand big-game Doctor, and how many more! Blessed Brewer of a thousand speeches and stories and merry ha-has, and Genial John Burroughs, who growled at and scowled at good Bering Sea and me, but never at thee. I feel pretty sure that he is now all right at his beloved Slabsides and I have a good mind to tell his whole Bering story in his own sort of good-natured, gnarly, snarly, jungle, jangle rhyme.
There! But how unconscionably long the thing is! I must stop short. Remember your penitential promises. Kill as few of your fellow beings as possible and pursue some branch of natural history at least far enough to see Nature’s harmony.
The Blob Lives On!
Posted: April 21, 2011 Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, Gulf Oil Spill | Tags: BP, coastal restoration, Deepwater Drilling, Deepwater Horizon, Louisiana, Oil Gusher, wetlands 11 Comments
It’s been a year since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon killed 11 people outright and destroyed an entire ecosystem. It’s the worst environmental catastrophe to ever hit the US. The US celebrates Earth Day on Friday, yet, I never hear one politician make hay over the “lessons of 4/20”. This is because policy makers refuse to learn the lessons. They’d rather sell oil and tainted seafood than deal with the real issues of the disaster.
Most of the coastline of Louisiana is still coated with oil either right in the marshes or just below the surface. The Oyster populations are way down. Dead Dolphins and Sea Turtles are washing up onto the beaches in record numbers. Where is the outrage? Where is the move to seek justice? Where are the calls about what we’re going to leave to our children?
No one who could make this right is carrying the banner to do so. Thousands of small businesses that rely on the Gulf are still hurting and going under. Those that are hurting include people who fish, oyster, shrimp, and run services businesses that support other businesses or tourist trade. It’s an ongoing tragedy and one that’s been ignored for the most part. The Times Picayune editorial staff and even Republican Politicians in the area who are obsessed with drilling for oil and the oil industry here aren’t shying away from pointing fingers and blame. BP is doing the same half-assed job of cleaning up that they did of drilling on the Deepwater Horizon. There is no justice and no peace down here on the Gulf. Real people are dying and local economies are going under. There has been more guffaw in Washington DC over defunding Planned Parenthood than making things right for people impacted by the BP Oil Gusher. Just ask Congressman Markey who has tried endlessly to pass bills to make it right and hasn’t got one through yet.
The oil lurking just under the soil in the marshes of Pass a Loutre Wildlife Management Area is a testament to that. The area was thick with roseau cane a year ago, Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham told reporters this week. “It was a thick, luscious, green tropical marsh,” he said. Now it is “weathered, stressed, unhealthy.”
The shoreline has visibly retreated in the past year, shrinking several yards from where the water line had been marked in the days after the spill. That is discouraging to Louisianians and ought to worry all Americans, given the importance of our coastal wetlands to the creation of fish and other marine life.
The state created the Pass a Loutre Wildlife Management Area nearly 100 years ago, and it has been an important refuge for migratory birds. Now, the state is using air cannons to keep the birds away from the oily marshes.
This is just one spot on the Gulf Coast that is still suffering from the massive amount of oil that spilled from BP’s well last spring and summer.
In some locations, we are losing 5 feet of marshes and shore line a day. Deep Horizon oil is everywhere and making things much worse. All you have to do is talk to the people that live in the affected areas like Grand Isle or Plaquemines Parish or Barataria Bay to see and hear about oil oozing along the coastline.
The noise of the cannons, combined with the swish and flash of metallic strips flapping from poles above the cane, are designed to keep birds from settling into the oily area.
“This is the very terminal end of the Mississippi Flyway,” said Todd Baker, biology program manager for Wildlife & Fisheries. “You get a wide variety of birds, waterfowl, neotropical migrants, raptors, all of them. When they come through, this is the first piece of land they see. When they leave, this is the last place they rest up before they jump across the Gulf of Mexico.
“The hazing cannons are not foolproof,” Baker said, as a Louisiana red-winged blackbird chirped from atop a cane stalk a few yards away.
About 15 miles away as the birds fly — or 30 by boat — Graves used a shovel and his hands to dig about a foot beneath the surface of a spit of sandy beach at the end of South Pass, turning over black-stained sand that smelled like diesel.
Here’s some testimony from people whose health has been impacted by working on the clean-up. There will probably be lots more of them in the coming months in years.
What does it say about a government that will not make right injustices done to so many people for the benefit of a profit-seeking company? What does it say that our media only shows up to report this story on anniversary days? How do we explain to our children that we no longer have an entire lifestyle or set of animals and birds or group of human beings because oil is more important than anything?
The silence of Congress is deafening and deadly. They’ve been more concerned with gutting the EPA than learning the lessons from this deadly oilspill and its omnipresent aftermath. Shame on them and every one else who has forgotten their fellow Americans and the country they profess to love. This is killing people and it’s killing our land. We should be talking about the lessons of 4/20 daily. Instead, we’re just learning how much more Congress loves their donors than the people they are supposed to represent. It’s a damn shame.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: April 5, 2011 Filed under: Environment, Foreign Affairs, Japan, Libya, MENA, toxic waste, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics 25 Comments
What's with all the bad news?
Good Morning, politics junkies! Let’s get right to the news.
The best news as far as I’m concerned is that Eman al-Obeidi is still alive and still telling her story. I was so afraid she would be killed if she refused to recant. Read all about it in Wonk the Vote’s late night post from last night.
This story made me laugh out loud. Awhile back, Maine’s right wing tea party nut Governor ordered that a mural that celebrates Maine’s labor history be removed from the Labor Department building. The Governor thinks it’s unfair that the mural didn’t celebrate the bosses along with the workers.
So the mural was removed, but it turns out it had been paid for by a Federal government grant and the feds now want their money back.
Whoops: The governor of Maine’s decision to remove a pro-labor mural from the state’s Department of Labor may cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, all because he wanted to “send a message.”
Apparently unknown to Maine’s recently elected Republican governor, the mural targeted by his ire was initially paid for by a federal grant — the terms of which he violated by having it removed.
And now, according to the Associated Press, the U.S. Department of Labor has officially demanded reimbursement.
The grant, awarded in 2008 to pay for the 37-foot-long mural, fulfilled 63 percent of the $60,000 historical art project.
If the state decides against putting it back up, they’ll be forced to repay 63 percent of the mural’s fair market value, which has likely gone up since it became a centerpiece in Republicans’ battle against workers.
Bwaaaahahahahahahaha!!
That world famous right wing nut tea party Governor in Wisconsin’s antics are still making news. It seems Scott Walker, who thinks school teachers are overpaid, is not as worried about saving money when it comes to pleasing wealthy donors.
Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.
Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.
So how did this kid get his big-time job?
His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and longtime lobbyist for the Madison-based Wisconsin Builders Association, which bet big on Walker during last year’s governor’s race.
The group’s political action committee gave $29,000 to Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, last year, making it one of the top five PAC donors to the governor’s successful campaign. Even more impressive, members of the trade group funneled more than $92,000 through its conduit to Walker’s campaign over the past two years.
Total donations: $121,652.
According the The Hill, 41 senators have committed to filibuster any spending bill that defunds Planned Parenthood.
The group, led by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), includes thirty-nine Democratic senators and two Independents, Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Bernie Sanders (Vt.).
It’s just large enough to sustain a filibuster to block any spending bill that cuts Planned Parenthood funding from passing the upper chamber.
Let’s hope they stick to their guns this time. Frankly, I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’m not sure how many of the people who object to the UN approval of intervention in Libya realize that the UN has had troops in the Ivory Coast for awhile now. Today UN helicopters
attacked President Laurent Gbagbo’s forces in Ivory Coast, destroying their weapons at four places where they had been shelling civilians, a UN spokesman said.
The helicopters fired four missiles at a Gbagbo military camp in the main city of Abidjan, witnesses told Reuters. “We saw two UN MI-24 helicopters fire missiles on the Akouedo military camp. There was a massive explosion and we can still see the smoke,” one said. The camp is home to three battalions of the Ivorian army.
Hamadoun Toure, spokesman for the UN mission in Ivory Coast, said in an email: “We launched an operation to neutralise heavy weapons Gbagbo’s special forces have been using against the civilian population for the last three months. We destroyed them in four locations.”
The French are helping out too. Of course the massacres have already happened there….
The BBC is reporting that the presidential residence in Abidhan has been “taken.”
Forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the country’s internationally recognised president, said they had taken the building after a day of fierce combat.
A spokesman for Mr Ouattara, Patrick Achi, told the BBC it was not yet clear whether Mr Gbagbo had been inside.
Earlier, UN and French helicopters attacked targets near the residence.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the attacks were ordered to defend civilians and were not a declaration of war on Mr Gbagbo.
Hmmmm…protecting civilians…”not a war.” That sounds familiar somehow. Nahhh, I must be imagining it.
Yesterday the Daily Mail reported that two of Gaddafi’s sons have offered to “get rid of their father” if Saif can take over for him.
The opposition forces won’t accept that, but there are definitely negotiations going on to remove Gaddafi. The UK has announced that any defectors from Gaddafi’s regime will be treated fairly, and Scottish authories are meeting with defector Moussa Koussa regarding the Lockerbie bombing.
In Japan, Tepco is dumping highly radioactive water directly into the ocean.
Tepco began discharging 11,500 tons of water yesterday, enough to fill 4 1/2 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to make room to store more highly contaminated fluids. The United Nations nuclear watchdog said the partial meltdown at the station was a result of “errors” from the time a March 11 quake and tsunami knocked out pumps used to cool reactors and spent fuel.
Meanwhile, even more toxic water is still leaking from damaged reactor core. What a mess!
That’s about it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?
Friday Reads
Posted: March 11, 2011 Filed under: collective bargaining, Domestic terrorism, Environment, Environmental Protection, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, right wing hate grouups, The Media SUCKS, the villagers | Tags: Climate change, General Clapper, Islamophobia, Libya, Peter King, polar ice sheet mass loss, Senator Lindsay Graham, Wisconsin 19 Comments
Good Morning!
I’ve noticed that we seem to be seeing a lot of change recently along with a lot of people that would prefer to stick their heads in the sand and try to legislate the world back 100 years. It really seems like science, voter sentiment, and the world are at odds with the vision of our leaders these days. Here are some examples.
A study done by the U.S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was just published in Geophysical Research Letters here provides some pretty clear evidence that the polar ice sheet mass loss is accelerating at a rate that is increasing exponentially.
It’s been clear for a while that the polar ice sheet mass loss is accelerating (see Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier”).
But the new study is a bombshell because of its credibility and thoroughness — and because it provides perhaps the most credible estimate to date of the sea level rise we face in 2050 on our current emissions path, 1 foot.
The JPL news release runs through the calculation that leads to the 1-foot estimate:
The authors conclude that, if current ice sheet melting rates continue for the next four decades, their cumulative loss could raise sea level by 15 centimeters (5.9 inches) by 2050. When this is added to the predicted sea level contribution of 8 centimeters (3.1 inches) from glacial ice caps and 9 centimeters (3.5 inches) from ocean thermal expansion, total sea level rise could reach 32 centimeters (12.6 inches). While this provides one indication of the potential contribution ice sheets could make to sea level in the coming century, the authors caution that considerable uncertainties remain in estimating future ice loss acceleration.
It is always worthwhile to make clear that the projections are uncertain. On the other hand, one would have to say that the uncertainty is greater on the high side — since the rate of human-caused warming is itself projected to accelerate, and the poles are the place where the planet is heating up the most, much faster than expected (see “Deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice: Oceanographer at AGU: Western Antarctic Peninsula is seeing “the highest increase in temperatures of anywhere on Earth”).
Senator Lindsey Graham wants Director of National Intelligence General Clapper to resign because he answered a question truthfully. It’s even unclear if Graham was even in the hearing for the entire committee interview.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in an exclusive interview with Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron, called for Gen. James Clapper to resign or be fired as Director of National Intelligence, citing his comments before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning, on which Graham sits.
Clapper had stated his belief that the Qaddafi regime, in the long term would “prevail” in Libya, and also assessed China and Russia to be primary threats to the United States.
Graham told Cameron that he lacks confidence in Clapper’s understanding of his job, that President Obama should “repudiate” Clapper’s remarks, and that this is the third time Clapper has faltered in this way.
Clapper clarified that North Korea and Iran are “of great concern,” but questioned whether they pose a “direct mortal threat” to the United States. The intelligence chief seemed to be focused on which countries have the capability, not necessarily the intent, to threaten the United States.
WonktheVote posted a thread earlier this week showing that the threat of terrorism in the US comes more from white, right wing military groups than from radicalized American Muslims. This evidence contrasts Peter King’s McCarthyism style hearing yesterday which relied on only personal stories. There were no people invited to testify from law enforcement, the FBI, or Homeland Security. Understandly, so there’s more evidence on who we should fear at C&L. Dave Niewert must’ve read her!!! Niewert document 22 cases in these kind of violence in the last tw0 years and shows a map. They’ve occurred all over the place.
In their eagerness to promote Peter King’s dubious and nakedly Islamophobic hearings on homegrown Islamic-radical terrorism, O’Reilly and his Fox colleagues have openly sneered at suggestions that we ought to do the same for right-wing extremists and their mounting acts of violence. This case definitively underscores that need, embodied in the 22 cases we’ve documented over the past two and a half years:
Simultaneously, it’s also not very clear that the Islamic radicals pose a serious threat in terms of domestic terrorist activity. Certainly, there’s plenty of reasons to believe that the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism is wildly overstated — not least of which is the fact that, as Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress reported, terrorism incidents in the USA have been coming from non-Muslim sources at nearly twice the rate as that of Muslims.
Lexington at The Economist had this to say about the hearings.
It is indeed hard to find much to like in Mr King. The representative for Long Island has approached this most sensitive of subjects with the delicacy of a steamroller, plus an overactive imagination and a generous dollop of prejudice. To be clear: he may not be prejudiced against America’s Muslims (the “overwhelming majority” are “outstanding Americans”, he says) but he long ago prejudged the question his own hearings are supposed to answer, being already firmly of the view that the country’s Muslims are doing too little to counter radicalisation within their ranks. He is the author of a novel, “Vale of Tears”, in which a heroic version of his thinly disguised self busts a home-grown al-Qaeda cell at a Long Island Islamic centre. His own attitude to terrorism, though, is conveniently elastic. In the 1980s this Irish-American Catholic sympathised strongly with the Irish Republican Army, going so far as to compare Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the terrorist group’s political wing, to George Washington.
Beyond these objections to his person, prejudices and past, most of the available evidence suggests that Mr King’s central thesis is overblown, if not flat wrong. Muslim co-operation with the authorities is not perfect, but by most accounts—including those of Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, and Eric Holder, the attorney-general—the community has in general worked hard to expose terrorist plots in its midst. In one prominent case last year, for instance, five men from northern Virginia who had travelled to Pakistan in search of jihad were convicted after their families tipped off the FBI. The Triangle Centre on Terrorism and Homeland Security, a research group affiliated with Duke University and the University of North Carolina, reported recently that 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting terror attacks in America since the felling of the twin towers in 2001 were turned in by fellow Muslims.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka calls Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker the “mobilizer of the year”.
While blasting Walker and Wisconsin’s Republican legislators for their “absolute corruption of democracy” in passing an anti-labor bill, the leader of the nation’s largest union group thanked the governor for getting activists fired up. “We probbably should have invited him here today to receive the Mobilizer of the Year Award,” Trumka said Thursday morning while speaking to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. “Wisconsin is the beginning — it’s pushing the start button” for pro-labor activism.
ED Kain at Forbe’s American Times says that the GOP’s war on collective bargainning will turn out to be its Waterloo.
And not just Wisconsin, but also Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Florida, and the rest of the over-reaching state Republicans. Governors like Scott Walker, Rick Scott, and Jan Brewer are riding on the coattails of the Tea Party, but they’ve become blind to the dangers of their radical policies.
In Wisconsin, Democrats are already promising to step-up recall efforts. But the recalls are only a small part of what is likely going to be a huge anti-Republican backlash across the nation, as working Americans finally realize what that party actually stands for: an playing field heavily tilted toward the rich and powerful, toward corporate power, and against worker rights.
Wow, what a week! What’s been on your mind and your reading and blog list?
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