the revolution will not be televised

The Ignorance and The Arrogance

2007-07-10T13:42:00.001-06:00

Important story re (more of) Bush ignoring science and quelching dissent

Ah, the ignorance; ah, the arrogance ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070710/pl_nm/bush_surgeongeneral_dc;_ylt=Ak5T4NFkPW3aQ2kmzxUhDlBh24cA

Diary of a Madman ?

2007-05-01T14:13:00.000-06:00

The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President
By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted January 17, 2007.

The longer Bush is in office, the more his psychology becomes clear. He's not a well-meaning doofus; he's a madman.

Back in the year 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote and was shoe-horned into office by the Supreme Court in spite of clear conflicts of interest on the part of Scalia and Thomas, the psychology of Little George was known to only a few.

To most of us he seemed like a doofus -- a more or less well-meaning guy who enjoyed running things like baseball teams and the State of Texas if not too much work was involved. Had been an alcoholic and a drug user, but had apparently come clean in some hazy, quasi-religious way -- that was his personal history to many Americans (if not to all those who met with Karl Rove behind closed doors and heard the truth).

At any rate, I remember thinking that Bill Clinton had done such a good job over the years getting the budget into a surplus and winning good feelings around the world that it really didn't matter who of the four who were running (Gore, Bradley, McCain, Bush) might win. They all seemed about the same in lots of ways.

What we really needed was some respite from Clinton's own penchant for mischief. I liked Clinton. I remember that The New Yorker magazine asked me for my take on the Lewinsky scandal, and I said that on balance, in spite of the brouhaha, I still preferred a president who would make love, not war. Clinton was a flawed human being, that was evident, but he knew it. He never didn't know it. And he was always trying to make amends.

But he was exhausting -- or the media made him exhausting. I thought we were due for a rest.

Little did we know, of course, that the neocons thought we were due for a war. Thinktank gun-jockeys looking for a fight. Do they personally have some human qualities? Who cares. May they rot.

At any rate, what I think happened is that when the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn't reckon with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to control.

The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it. When Baker engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the "perks" Bush offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy alliance -- goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right there at the pivot was Little George.

It's pretty clear that Little George requires a constant stream of flattery and cajolery to keep him going, and this was to be supplied by Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes, and Condi Rice. At the same time, his words (and ideas) were going to be supplied by Michael Gerson, who was his favorite speech writer for five or six years, a man who hides his unscrupulous neocon soul beneath a holier-than-thou, falsely modest self presentation. Christian soldier in every sense of the word, and someone who has largely escaped the contempt he deserves for the mess we are in.

At the same time, Little George has a hard time with bad news, so he was never going be told the truth -- he can't take the truth, as Jack Nicholson might say -- this is evident in the famous 9/11 film of Bush reading about his pet goat when he gets news of the WTC. Talk about dumbstruck and unprepared and feckless and doltish! No, I don't think Little George planned the Trade Center attacks. If he had, he would have practiced a smarmy fake reaction, and he didn't.

But he did get a feel, just a little feel, right after the attacks, of what it might be like to lead the nation. He got a feel and he liked it, and for the purposes of the neocons, it was a good feel and it gave them something to build on in their plan to overcome the cautious side of his nature, represented by B/S/B. The neocons, as we know to our sorrow, never pay back anything they owe, except perhaps with betrayal, so even though B/S/B got them into office, they were never going to listen to B/S/B unless they absolutely had to.

How do you build yourself a madman? Well, first you flatter him, and then you try never to make him angry, and then you feed him ideas that flatter him even more by making him seem to himself sentimentally visionary and powerful and righteous. You appeal to his already evident mean streak and his hot temper by reminding him all the time that he has enemies, and you cultivate his religious side so that the sense of righteous victimization inherent in extreme religion comes out.

If he were not already an ignorant, dependent, fragile, and rigid person, he would not be susceptible to this sort of conditioning, but by temperament and practice, he has nothing of his own to counter your efforts. Then you hire a few shyster-sycophants like John Yoo to tell him (ignorant as he is, with no actual understanding of the Constitution), that as president he can do whatever he wants.

So, here he is, Little George, caught between the devil (Cheney) and the deep blue sea (fifty-some years of being infantilized by B/S/B). Cheney and Rumsfeld, aided by Rice and Miers and Hughes, convince him that his masculinity will only be enhanced by doing all the masculine things he missed out on over the years, especially making war. And Gerson gives his war a virtuous, godly gloss.

And Gerson's words come out of his mouth so often that he believes them and thinks they are his. In the meantime, Karl Rove continues to think that he is the maestro, playing Little George (and his base and the rest of the nation) like his own personal piano. Playing the president, for Rove, means enhancing Little George's actual dependency while encouraging him to think that he's the boss (allowing him to call you "Turdblossom," for example, and isn't it telling that "turd" seems to be Bush's favorite imprecation, rather than, say, "fuck"?).

Bush is the worst possible president because he is simultaneously unusually ignorant for a president and unusually shallow, as well as desperate for a success he can call his own. I can see how in a certain sort of era -- say an era of prosperity and world peace (can you think of one? I can't) an unusually ignorant and shallow man could bump along in the presidency for a few years without creating havoc and destruction, but these years didn't happen to be peaceful and prosperous, they happened to be delicate and dangerous.

Clinton knew that, and he approached his compromising and self-contradictory foreign policy tasks with care. But Bush and his fellow boors were so blind that they adopted as their motto "anything but Clinton", sheer contrarianism and resentment. It wasn't enough to them for the US to be powerful, as it was in the Clinton years, or to be generally respected and appreciated -- they wanted something more sensational -- power they could feel, power that was erotic and fetishistic, power that was uncomfortable for others, power that would make them feel big by making others feel small, power that would show Clinton up.

That's the tit Little George has been sucking for the last six years -- the deluded propaganda of the neocons, addressed first to him and through him to the rest of us. What we saw the other night, when he proposed more war against more "foes" was the madman the last six years have created. This time, in his war against Iran, he doesn't even feel the need for minimal PR, as he did before attacking Iraq. All he is bothering with are signals -- ships moving here, admirals moving there, consulates being raided in this other place. He no longer cares about the opinions of the voters, the Congress, the generals, the press, and he especially disdains the opinions of B/S/and B. Thanks to Gerson, he identifies his own little ideas with God (a blasphemy, of course, but hey, there's lots of precedent on this), so there's no telling what he will do.

We can tell by the evidence of the last two months that whatever it is, it will be exactly the thing that the majority of the voters do not want him to do, exactly the thing that James Baker himself doesn't want him to do. The propaganda that Bush's sponsors and handlers have poured forth has ceased to persuade the voters but succeeded beyond all measure in convincing the man himself.

He will tell himself that God is talking to him, or that he is possessed of an extra measure of courage, or he that he is simply compelled to do whatever it is. The soldiers will pay the price in blood. We will pay the price in money. The Iraqis will pay the price in horror. The Iranians will pay the price, possibly, in the almost unimaginable terror of nuclear attack. Probably, the Israelis will pay the price, too.

Little George isn't the same guy he was in 2000, the guy described by Gail Sheehy in her Vanity Fair profile -- hyper-competitive and dyslexic, prone to cheat at games, always swinging between screwing up and making up, hating criticism and disagreement, careless of others but often charming. He is no longer the guy who the Republicans thought they could control (unlike, say, McCain).

The small pathologies of Bush the candidate have, thanks to the purposes of the neocons and the religious right, been enhanced and upgraded. We have a bona fide madman now, who thinks of himself in a grandiose way as single-handedly turning the tide of history. Some of his Frankensteins have bailed, some haven't dared to, and others still seem to believe. His actions and his orders, especially about Iran, seem to be telling us that he will stop at nothing to prove his dominance. The elder Bush(es), Scrowcroft, Baker, and their friends, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gerson, and the neocons have made the monster and in the process endangered the country, the Constitution, and the world, not to mention the sanity of wretches like Jose Padilla (for an analysis of the real reason Gitmo continues to exist, see Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate, here.

Maybe the bums planned this mess for their own profit, or maybe they planned to profit without mess; maybe some of them regret what they have wrought. However, they all share the blame for whatever he does next.

Man With a Plan

2006-12-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

As opposed to Bush and the Neocons, here's an actual PLAN for Iraq. Imagine that.

"The Way Out of War" by George S. McGovern and William R. Polk.

http://www.harpers.org/TheWayOutOfWar.html

Judging the Homeless?

2006-11-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

We have all heard it a million times - "I feel sorry for the homeless, but I refuse to give them money because I know they will spend it on booze." And yes, they just might. But, I might add, who could blame them? I am not condoning alcoholism or the use of alcohol to avoid reality, but it is certainly understandable how one in their situation might choose to drink, to dull the emotional or physical pain, to make the cold seem a little less cold, to drown the monotony, to forget for a just a little while. Most of us have done the same more than once, right?

But more importantly, who are we to judge them or try to make decisions for them? Who are we to withhold charity because we do not approve of their decisions or lifestyle? Why should we allow are generosity to be conditional? Generosity should never be conditional. This is why I oppose the requirement by some homeless shelters that residents attend religious services and/or pray in order to stay in the shelter.

Of course we should encourage the homeless to make productive, healthy decisions. Of course, we should encourage them to spend their money on food rather than alcohol. But we need to stop judging them. We need to stop trying to make decisions for them. And we need for our compassion to be unconditional. We should not withhold generosity for fear that they might make unwise decisions.

"The most premeditated of murders"

2006-11-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

"An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

Albert Camus---"Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death" (1966).

"Standard-issue Republican conflation" or "When in doubt, Cheat"

2006-11-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

From the Boise Weekly
NOVEMBER 8, 2006

HOLD YOUR NOSE AND THINK OF CHAKE-CHAKE

GOP voter-blocking makes democracy fun, even worthwhile

By TED RALL

DAYTON, OHIO-- You'd never guess that my friend Ken is so cynical. He's white and Harvard educated and comes off as the ultimate straight arrow in his off-the-rack suit. "Whether I vote or not doesn't matter," he likes to explain. "There's no chance that the outcome will be affected."
Indeed, there's only one known instance of a modern election having been decided by a single voter. On January 18, 1961, the Afro-Shirazi party won the parliamentary seat of Chake-Chake on Pemba Island in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) by one vote, granting it victory in the general elections. Ken might feel differently if he lived in Chake-Chake.

Widespread apathy can affect millions of votes and hundreds of races on Election Day, leading to sweeping political changes and even optional pre-emptive wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people. But there's nothing that you, as an individual, can do to change such a trend. You can cast your one vote. Or not.

Even if you lived in Florida in 2000, which was declared a Bush win after the Supreme Court ordered officials to stop counting the ballots, the most that you could have accomplished was to have nudged Bush's margin down to 536 or up to 538. Even under ideal circumstances--reliable machines, politically neutral and incorruptible supervisors and a thorough process to ensure that every vote is counted--your vote, as an individual decision, cannot change which candidate wins or loses. Voting is a gesture, symbolically supporting the democratic process the way attending church flamboyantly expresses faith without demonstrating it--nothing more.

And these are not ideal circumstances.

This year's mid-term elections, coming on the heels of the brazenly stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, find the electorate in a grim mood that makes my friend Ken look like a relative Pollyanna. Eight percent of whites and a whopping 29 percent of blacks (up from 15 percent in 2004) told Pew Research Center pollsters that they don't trust the government to count their votes.

"This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we're having to go out of our way to counter them this year," says Democratic strategist Donna Brazile about get-out-the-vote drives directed at blacks, who vote Democratic at least 90 percent of the time. Given recent history, overcoming their distrust is an uphill battle.

The Republicans' theft of the key state of Florida in 2000 has been exhaustively documented by shelves of books and newspaper recounts. One, a July 15, 2001 New York Times report titled "How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote," looks at the GOP's propaganda campaign to pressure Republican-dominated canvassing boards to illegally accept hundreds of absentee ballots mailed in by overseas military personnel after Election Day. Based on this incident alone, Gore won Florida by 202 votes.

On November 24, 2000, vote counters for predominantly Democratic Miami-Dade county fled their office when scores of young goons hired by since-disgraced Republican leader Tom DeLay "trampled, punched or kicked" election officials, a scene that was broadcast on national television. "When the ruckus was over," reported The Times, "the protesters [sic] had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting."

Miami-Dade, it later turned out, put Gore over the top by thousands more votes.

Blacks, the most reliably liberal voting bloc, were specifically targeted by Republican operatives determined to deny them their right to vote. Police officers loitered outside polling places, threatening them with arrest if they did not produce identification cards. (This thuggery is illegal.) More than 200,000 "felons," most of them black and many of them without criminal records, were purged from voting rolls by the state's Republican-run board of elections. The truth is, Florida was never close. Exit polls, which had never been wrong, were again correct. Al Gore won by many thousands of votes.

In 2004, Ohio was the state that determined the race for the White House. Once again, the secretary of state was a partisan Republican who had campaigned for George W. Bush, J. Kenneth Blackwell. As they had done in Florida four years earlier, Republican operatives posted cops outside inner-city precincts to intimidate black voters. They "purged" the rolls of registered voters who had missed two consecutive elections, disproportionately targeting areas with a large African-American population. And Blackwell added a few ingenious new tricks.

"In several of the state's pro-Kerry cities," write the authors of the new book What Happened in Ohio?: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, "the secretary of state [Blackwell] effectively engendered a classic 'Catch-22' situation: as boards of election changed long-standing Democratic precinct locations shortly before the elections, Blackwell simultaneously disseminated out-of-date voter rolls to county officials, ensuring that many new voters would not be on precinct rolls given to poll workers. Then, to people who were confused as a result and did not end up at the correct precinct, he offered provisional ballots, but subsequently refused to count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct--which was often simply the wrong table in the correct building and room ... Because of voting machine shortages, misinformation sent out by the secretary of state's office and/or improper signage at the precincts, many people waited for hours in the wrong precinct line in a newly relocated precinct. Often, these people found themselves ineligible to receive a provisional ballot unless they stood again in a different line."

Blackwell is off to bigger and better things this year, running for governor. But Republicans are still trying to stop Democrats from voting. In Orange County, south of Los Angeles, desperately trailing GOP Congressional candidate Tan Nguyen mailed a sleazy letter to 14,000 Latino Democrats warning that "If you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in incarceration, and possible deportation." Standard-issue Republican conflation: Naturalized immigrants are allowed to vote.

Intellectually, I know Ken is right. My vote can't change a thing. But I'll do anything George W. Bush doesn't want me to do. Even if I have to pretend I live in Chake-Chake.

Mission Abandoned ?

2006-11-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

New York Times

November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

As Bechtel Goes
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn't accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq's population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers' money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they've already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there's no more money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn't and didn't? Finally, if we've given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?

There's no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never had enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may have felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayers' dollars.

Consider the symbolism of Iraq's new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called "the most essential civil security project in the country." It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion for Iraq reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we'll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that's easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction already winding down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen's jurisdiction. And now, finally, Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October.

The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive to do the job right, so they didn't.

You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee chairmen with subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq money went.

But that's all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered," he declared. "You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people." But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.
And we're not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. I don't know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

Speaking Their Mind

2006-11-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

Subject: FW: NY Times editorial
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:34:41 -0700

Editorial
The Difference Two Years Made
Published: November 5, 2006

On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.

That is why things are different this year.

To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House — and for the most part, the Senate — during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.

Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition — and even the more moderate members of their own party — out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.

The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.

That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.

For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.

An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.
Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.

After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.
In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.

This election is indeed about George W. Bush — and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

Vote early and vote often

2006-11-03T14:04:00.000-07:00

The Revolution says Vote No on Prop 2 in Idaho

From Defenders of Wildlife:

Election Day is just four short days away -- and greedy out-of-state developers are trying to pull a fast one on Idaho voters. Don't be fooled by their elaborate and deceptive campaign attacking the protections for our wolves, salmon and other imperiled creatures.Proposition 2 -- the so-called “takings” initiative -- offers a no-win situation for our communities and our wildlife, all for the benefit of profit-hungry special interests.If passed, greedy developers could skirt the laws that protect our environment or force local communities to pay out millions -- even billions -- to land speculators, corporations and other special interests.
With only four days left before Election Day, here are three simple things you can do to stop Prop 2:

Learn More
Visit our web site to learn more about this harmful measure.

Spread the Word
Forward this email to as many other Idahoans as you can.

VOTE NO ON PROP 2
On November 7th, do your part to reject Prop 2 -- for our wildlife, our wild places and our communities.Two years ago, voters in Oregon passed a similar measure. Since then, wealthy developers in that state have filed nearly 3000 claims demanding over $5 billion in compensation from local taxpayers. Oregon communities can no longer regulate growth and development in a way that protects their way of life -- and urban sprawl is now a greater threat than ever to the state’s precious wildlife habitat, farmlands and open spaces.It’s such a mess in the state that, according to a recent poll, Oregon voters now oppose the measure by nearly a 2-1 margin.Don’t make the same mistake. Reject Prop 2 this November 7th.If the greedy developers win this fight, our communities and wildlife lose. It’s up to us to stop Prop 2 and ensure Idaho's wildlife and communities get the protection they deserve. VOTE NO on PROP 2 -- it is one of the best things you can do this November 7th to protect local communities and our wildlife.For more information, please visit our web site. Please don’t forget to forward this message on to all your friends, family, and neighbors in Idaho.

From Idaho Conservation League:

Vote to Protect Clean Air, Clean Water, and Quality of Life on November 7!
By voting NO on Proposition Two, you will be protecting Idaho.
Proposition Two could cost taxpayers millions if not billions of dollars.
Proposition Two allows speculators to dodge local land laws putting our quality of life at risk.
Proposition Two is being funded by New York City tycoon Howard Rich. It is not for Idaho, and its costly for taxpayers.
Proposition Two will change the character of our neighborhoods and rural lands forever. We cannot let outsiders do that to Idaho.
Vote NO on Proposition Two on November 7.
For more information on Proposition Two, go to www.neighborsprotectingidaho.org .

Keeping Score

2006-10-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

The League of Conservation Voters , perhaps the preeminent enviro-political organization, has released its latest rendition of its Environmental Scorecard, in which it rates the voting record of each US Senator and Representative.

The Environmental Scorecard may be found here

Separate But Unequal

2006-10-27T14:46:00.000-06:00

On October 25, 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court (Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow, et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris, etc., et al. (A-68-05)) ruled that "every statutory right and benefit conferred to heterosexual couples through civil marriage must be made available to committed same-sex couples."

The Court held:

"Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married
heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds
that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex
couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the
civil marriage statutes.

A victory for justice, right?! Well ...

The Court dropped the ball on the issue of whether gays or lesbians should be allowed to be "married". Instead the Court deferred the issue to the state legislature.

"The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to samesex
couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process."

So, equal rights, but not necessarily the same rights. Protection, but not Equal Protection. Hmmm... equal but separate, separate but equal. Where have I heard that before ...

You'll pardon me if this victory feels a little hollow.

"This Land Ain't Your Land ..."

2006-10-27T12:45:00.000-06:00

From The Wilderness Society:

Stop the Public Lands Giveaway!

A little-known 19th Century statute is threatening to crisscross your public lands with a spider web of roads and development. The bill attempts to use an antiquated mining law loophole to allow the bulldozing and paving of thousands of miles of new roads through federal lands, and to open pristine areas to development and off-road vehicle use all across the West.

H.R. 6298 would re-interpret an obscure rights-of way law known as Revised Stature 2477, part of the 1866 Mining Law, to turn over a huge number of old rights-of-way claims on federal lands to state and local governments. Removing federal protections from these lands, which include national parks, wildlife refuges, national monuments, wilderness areas, and other sensitive federal lands, would have major consequences and serious environmental impacts throughout the West.

Even worse, the bill would hand over many lands that have little connection to legitimate transportation needs, and many that were never truly used as highways at all. Every place where there has ever been a cow trail, old mining track, dirt footpath, carriage way, off-road vehicle route, or even a river could be at risk. This bill has established such a low bar for proving a claim that essentially any line that has ever appeared on any map at some point in the last two centuries could be considered to be a "highway."

In addition, the bill would also waive the environmental review and public involvement requirements** of the federal National Environmental Policy Act, taking away the public's right to have a voice in the decisions affecting our public lands.

Lands at Risk

The bill jeopardizes millions of acres of public lands, including:

o Alaska: Thousands of miles of claims have been made, including areas within Denali National Park, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and Katmai National Park, some of the world's most pristine wild lands;

o California: San Bernardino County has alleged more than 2,500 miles of routes in the Mojave National Preserve;

o Utah: There are an estimated 15,000 claims in the state, including jeep trails, cow paths, streambeds, and long-abandoned mining tracks, many within the proposed "America's Redrock Wilderness Act;"

o Colorado: Moffat County, Colorado has claimed 240 miles of trails through Dinosaur National Monument, including part of the Yampa River itself.

From The Revolution :
Get off your ass and do something! Write your congresspuppet http://action.wilderness.org/campaign/stop_RS2477

** Sound familiar?! Bush and his Republican Band of Eco-Butchers are at it again

All Bush is saying, is give War a chance

2006-10-26T17:34:00.000-06:00

Concerning North Korea's recent apparent nuclear testing:

What do we expect? Do as we say, not as we do? You're part of the Axis of Evil, and we attack Axis of Evil countries preemptively, but don't defend yourself? We can violate the spirit and letter of the agreement, but you may not?

From United For Peace & Justice:

Dear friends,

North Korea's apparent nuclear test is chilling evidence of how the Bush administration's policy of shunning negotiations has failed. There is no doubt: People in the U.S. and around the world are far less safe than we were five years ago.

If North Korea did test a nuclear explosive device, it is a setback to the global efforts to stop the spread of nuclear arms. It could destabilize northeast Asia, the wider Asian continent, and have negative repercussions around the world. As a supporter of the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide, starting here at home, United for Peace and Justice views this development with alarm.

But the primary blame for this situation lies with the Bush administration, not North Korea. The nuclear test is a direct reaction to the Bush administration’s policy of shunning negotiations and threatening North Korea with war and regime change.

In 1994 North Korea signed an agreement with the U.S. to suspend its nuclear weapons program and allow international inspections and monitoring of its nuclear facilities. In return, the U.S. agreed to not make military threats against North Korea, to supply fuel oil to replace the lost nuclear power, and to help build two modern atomic power plants.

But beginning in 2002, the Bush administration slowly gutted its part of the agreement. It branded North Korea as part of an “axis of evil,” threatened war, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants, tightened a long-standing economic embargo, and obstinately refused direct bilateral talks. The White House even threatened the limited use of nuclear weapons in a regional conflict with North Korea. All of this in a context that goes back more than 50 years. The U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty that world formally end the Korean War and still maintains some 30,000 troops in South Korea.

As the Bush administration geared up to launch war on Iraq -- another country named as part of Bush's "axis of evil" -- North Korean officials had reason to worry that the U.S. might attack their country, too. Predictably, the North Korean government responded by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelling atomic energy agency inspectors, and beginning to develop nuclear weapons.

For eight years (1994-2002) direct negotiations with the North Korean government reduced the threat of nuclear proliferation and war on the Korean peninsula. So why are Bush administration officials telling us it’s impossible to negotiate with North Korea?

They, and their neoconservative allies, are calling for sanctions, isolation, and even military threats to impose "regime behavior change." But this is the same recipe that brought us the disastrous Iraq war, and will only deepen North Korea’s resolve to develop nuclear weapons, potentially setting off a new nuclear arms race in the region.

There is only one way to address the current crisis: Direct negotiations with North Korea. The Bush administration must negotiate an agreement providing assurance it will not launch military attacks against North Korea, offering material aid, and taking steps towards normalizing relations in return for a commitment from North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. As even former Secretary of State James Baker said earlier this week, “It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

In Cahoots?

2006-10-25T21:16:00.000-06:00

I really hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I shy away from tales of secret deals between world giants and power giants. But this seems too coincidental to ignore.

Noticed that gas prices have dropped dramatically in the past few weeks? And why? Generally, gas prices are dependent on the stability of world oil supplies and the greed of Big Oil executives. Now we know the second factor hasn't changed. But the first factor, if anything, has gotten worse in the past months. So in theory, and following time-tested supply and demand economics, the price of gas should have RISEN recently.

Instead, we have seen a dramatic drop in gas prices in the past few weeks. The past few weeks, leading up to an election. The past few weeks, in which House and Senate seats thought to be solidly in Republican corners are hotly contested. The past few weeks, in which the Republicans' deathgrip on the US Congress appears to be in serious jeopardy.

How could this happen? Statistics consistently show that Big Oil contributes to political candidates at an astronomical amount and rate. They also show that Big Oil tends to contribute to Republican candidates over Democratic candidates at a rate of nearly 3 1/2 to 1. Clearly, Big Oil is solidly in the Republican camp.

We could write books about how the Republican leaders are Big Oil's bitches.

Big Oil has allies in the White House and Congress, who support more oil over alternative energy sources, support drilling efforts over conservation efforts, support tax breaks for the wealthy and big business over individuals and the middle class, and support deregulation of environmental standards over protecting the environment.

Big Oil remains Big Oil with a Republican congress. Big Oil can read polls and feel what we all feel, which is that the tide may be changing and the Republicans may be out on their asses. It's about fucking time. Big Oil knows that Americans are becoming more aware of the poor state of affairs, and the poor state of the economy, under Republican rule. All of which bodes very poorly for Big Oil's opportunity to continue to fleece the people, the country and the planet for trillions in profits.

They must keep the power status quo. So, the Powers-That-Be in Big Oil agree to drop prices, dramatically increasing that ever-elusive presidential "approval factor" by artificially manipulating public perception of the reality of the economy in favor of Republicans. Historically, the gas pump is one of the first places where the consumer forms their public opinion of the economy.

In other words, dramatically lower gas prices equates to a happier populus, which equates to less voter dissatisfaction, which leads to lower turnout at the polls and a decreased "throw-the-bums-out" attitude. All of which provides substantial assistance to the Republican hold on power.

But wait a minute, I'm suggesting that the Big Oil tycoons voluntarily lose profits. Hard to believe, right? Not if you consider the long term, the Big Picture, the stakes they hold in the Oil War Game. In the long run, keeping the Oil Whore Republican party in power tips the cost-benefit analysis so far in their favor, it's a wonder they don't engage in this type of abhorrent behavior more often.

...Or maybe they do ...

WWF is not a ridiculous pro wrestling league

2006-10-23T15:09:00.000-06:00

From the World Wildlife Fund:

WWF Pledges Amazon Commitment at Clinton Global Initiative

At the Clinton Global Initiative in New York this September, WWF affirmed its commitment to the Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) Program, which conserves 193,000 square miles of the Amazon's richest and most threatened habitats. Using conservative estimates, WWF calculates that ARPA will reduce deforestation by preventing 250 million tons of carbon from being released by the continued forest burning and clearing that would otherwise destroy these irreplaceable habitats, home to such gorgeous birds as the blue-fronted Amazon. That equates to keeping approximately 120 million passenger cars off the road for an entire year! WWF pledged to raise $70 million, on top of the $15 million already contributed, over the ten-year duration of the program.

P.S. Kudos to President Clinton for continuing his good work.

Power to the Sisters

2006-10-12T12:04:00.000-06:00

The Revolution CAREs

Find out how CARE is empowering women around the world to be catalysts for change in their communities.

Read more about their work to fight global poverty or download their Annual Report.

Not Guilty

2006-10-11T14:39:00.000-06:00

Another victory for Justice, from our friends at the Innocence Project:

http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/100706ManFreed.html

Brooklyn Man Free After Wrongfully Convicted 21 Years Ago

BROOKLYN--- DNA tests prove that Scott Fappiano did not commit a rape in Brooklyn for which he was convicted in 1985. Twenty one years after he was wrongly convicted of rape, Scott Fappiano was released from prison Friday.

Fappiano was convicted based on significantly flawed eyewitness identification procedures and his innocence was almost impossible to prove because New York City's trouble evidence preservation system lost items that could be subject to DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project. Ultimately, the Innocence Project located evidence at a private DNA lab which had merged with another private lab that had received two items of evidence from Fappiano's case in 1989 and kept it in storage. A wealth of other evidence that could have been tested years earlier was never located in the New York Police Department's storage facility.Fappiano was released from custody after the Innocence Project filed a motion to vacate his conviction.

In 1983, the NYPD officer and his wife were asleep when a man broke into their home, restrained the man and raped his wife. At trial, the only evidence against Fappiano was an eyewitness identification from the rape victim, the cop's wife--an identification that was made in lineups that the Innocence Project said were deeply flawed and unreliable. The victim's cop husband viewed the same lineup but did not select Fappiano who was five inches shorter than the 5'10" perpetrator described by the victim.

Despite blood-typing tests which excluded Fappiano as the source of what police initially believed was critical crime scene evidence left by the perpetrator (cigarettes and stained clothing), the prosecution twice took the case to trial. At his trial in 1984, the jury could not reach a verdict, voting 11-1 for acquittal, and he was retried in 1985, when the jury convicted him. He was sentenced to a term of 20 to 50 years in prison.

"Scott Fappiano's case is the starkest yet in a long line of New York cases where innocent people were convicted based on eyewitness misidentification. In case after case, we have proven that faulty eyewitness identification procedures in New York lead to wrongful convictions", Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison said. "Nobody can look at these cases and say there isn't a serious problem---yet New York still hasn't taken problems with eyewitness identification seriously and implemented reforms". The Innocence Project also said that the NYPD's inability to locate evidence in Fappiano's case demonstrates the urgent need to reform the city's system of collecting, preserving and retrieving such evidence.

Earlier this summer, another Innocence Project client, Alan Newton, was exonerated a full 12 years after he initially requested DNA testing. In his case, the evidence was finally located in the NYPD Pearson Place Warehouse, in the exact location it was supposed to be in the first place. On Tuesday, Oct. 10, the New York State Assembly Committee on Codes is holding a public hearing in Manhattan on evidence preservation and retrieval problems. Newton is expected to attend the hearing. "Scott Fappiano could have been exonerated more than three years ago, when the Innocence Project began searching for the evidence in his case, if the NYPD had adequate policies and procedures for its evidence warehouse", Morrison said. "New Yorkers have to wonder have many innocent people are sitting in prison because the NYPD can't find evidence that could be subjected to DNA testing". Indeed, the DNA which established Fappiano's innocence, a 23-year-old pair of sweatpants, were only located because a portion of that material happened to have been preserved outside the NYPD's custody. Last year, Orchid Cellmark Inc, a DNA laboratory based in Princeton, NJ, discovered two vials of DNA material containing spermatozoa from the perpetrator of the rape for which Fappiano had been convicted. The material had been submitted to a now-defunct DAN laboratory, Lifecodes, for attempted, but unsuccessful, DNA testing in the case in 1989, and, following a corporate acquisition of the former Lifecodes lab, Orchid Cellmark obtained and diligently catalogued dozens of boxes of Lifecodes' old DNA materials. New DNA teting by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office scientifically confirmed that the evidence came from this case and that Fappiano was not the rapist.

In New York City, the Innocence Project has six open cases and 17 closed cases where evidence in NYPD custody has still not been found after years of searching. At Tuesday's legislative hearing, the Innocence Project will share details about some of those case and the organization's efforts to work with NYPD leadership to resolve the systemic problems.There have been 183 DNA exonerations nationwide. In 75% of these cases, eyewitness identification played a role in wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project which is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. 10-07-06
© 2006 North Country Gazette

That pesky Sixth Amendment ...

2006-10-04T11:07:00.000-06:00

From People For The American Way :

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 – License to Torture?
S. 3930 PASSED

After a much-publicized disagreement between some prominent Senate Republicans and the White House over the president’s proposed bill on military detainees, the so-called “mavericks” on the Senate Armed Services Committee capitulated and allowed passage of a bill – The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (S. 3930) – that undermines Sixth Amendment rights granting the accused access to the prosecutorial evidence, leaves the Bush administration wide latitude in interpreting Geneva Convention mandates, and abandons Habeas Corpus rights that date back to the Magna Carta. This unconstitutional legislation comes as a response to Supreme Court decisions rebuking the Bush administration’s detainee and military tribunal policies, and legitimizes the un-American practices of indefinite detentions and the harsh mistreatment of detainees, more characteristic of oppressive dictatorships than a free society. The House had already passed similar legislation granting President Bush his requested expansion of executive power.

Wake up and Dissent

2006-10-04T10:59:00.000-06:00

"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people"
-- Louis Brandeis

Spring Has Sprung

2006-09-28T22:50:00.000-06:00

Climate changes shift springtime

A Europe-wide study has provided "conclusive proof" that the seasons are changing, with spring arriving earlier each year, researchers say.

Scientists from 17 nations examined 125,000 studies involving 561 species.

Spring was beginning on average six to eight days earlier than it did 30 years ago, the researchers said.

The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, shows changes to the continent's climate were shifting the timing of the seasons, the scientists said.

One of the paper's lead authors, Tim Sparks from the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), said the findings did not go as far as pointing the finger of blame at human-induced climate change.

"We can't tell that from our study but experts have already shown that there is a discernable human influence on the current climate warming."

But Dr Sparks said it did show that there was a direct link between rising temperatures and changes to plant and animal behaviour.

"We need to look at change over very large areas and we need to examine as many species groups as possible because there has been some mild criticism that people have cherry-picked the results they presented.

"We have gone for the most complete coverage possible that we could in Europe to try to see if there was still this effect," he said. "It is very conclusive that there is."

The team examined 125,000 observational series of 542 plants and 19 animal species in 21 European countries from 1971 to 2000.

The results showed that 78% of all leafing, flowering and fruiting records were happening earlier in the year, while only 3% were significantly delayed.

Dr Sparks said horse chestnut trees, which grow all over the continent, were particularly good indicators.

"It is a good example because it is easy to identify, and it has distinctive phases of leafing, flowering and producing conkers."

He hoped the findings would now focus attention on the potential consequences of changes to the behaviour of plants and animals.

"If you have species that are dependent on each other changing at different rates, that could just break down the food web.

"For example, caterpillars feed on oak trees, and birds feed on the caterpillars. Unless these species remain synchronised, there could be problems for any one or more of those elements of the food web."

"Political" Science

2006-09-27T10:07:00.000-06:00

With regard to the Bush Administration's take on science, I think the problem is more complex than a tendency to simply disregard sound environmental and ecological science. I think that the Administration has its own set of scientists, if you will, who will produce just the type of scientific findings that will justify their actions. Make no mistake, science is not inherently objective and value neutral. That it takes on this appearance makes it dangerous at times. You can pretty much make science say whatever you want or need it to. The problem, I would argue, is that science, insofar as it is used in the policy-making arena, is far too political. We need to disentangle science and politics.

Science, Schmience; Laws, Schmlaws

2006-09-26T16:46:00.000-06:00

Last week in The Revolution, we discussed a major environmental court victory, in which a federal court blasted the Bush administration's attempted repeal of the so-called "Roadless Rule", which would open up forests to logging, construction and harmful development. The Court indicated that Junior and the Eco-Butchers failed to consider the environmental impacts of its decisions. The Court reinstated the "Roadless Rule," protecting more than 58 million acres of national forest.

Not a week later, and the same result. On Monday, a federal judge in Alaska blocked the sale of oil and gas leases within 389,000 acres of shallow lakes and wildlife-rich tundra in northern Alaska, including some of the more important wetlands in the Arctic. Again, science and the environment were ignored, in the name of oil development. The decision, by Judge James K. Singleton Jr., focused on the administration's failure to to adhere to environmental requirements, but also touched on the lack of appropriate input and review.

This is not really news to those who have followed this administration and don't wear fucking blinders. However, this is a combination of three of the worse attributes of this Clan of Fascists: no respect for the law, no respect for the planet, no respect for science, and no respect for the public's right to know and participate.

I can't figure out which is worse in a president: Refusing to follow the rules, completely ignoring science, or blatantly shutting out the public from participating in their democratic government.

So True

2006-09-26T16:22:00.000-06:00

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools."

- John Muir, naturalist, writer, conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club

"The Wrong War"

2006-09-26T15:49:00.000-06:00

THE WRONG WAR

Backdraft: How the war in Iraq has fueled Al Qaeda and ignited its dream of global jihad.
By Peter Bergen
July/August 2004 Issue

President Bush's May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he declared. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror." In fact, the consensus now emerging among a wide range of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals is that the opposite is true: The invasion of Iraq not only failed to help the war on terrorism, but it represented a substantial setback.

In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement -- a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. "If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he'd want under his Christmas tree," one senior intelligence official told me. Another counterterrorism official suggests that Iraq might begin to resemble "Afghanistan 1996," a reference to the year that bin Laden seized on Afghanistan, a chaotic failed state, as his new base of operations.
***
Read the full article http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/07/07_401.html

Taking Care of Your Mother

2006-09-26T14:37:00.000-06:00

A land ethic is part of our moral responsibility to care for Mother Earth because of her intrinsic value.

The beauty, the power, the majesty are valuable, and should be valued.

As a Mother, she gives us life, and that too is deserving of protection. But this protection should go beyond that necessary for the survival of humans. We have a duty to repair the damage we have done, to prevent future deterioration of the planet, and to place a high priority on preserving her beauty.

In and of itself, the beauty, the power and the majesty deserve protection, when she cannot alone protect herself.

War on the Poor

2006-09-25T13:56:00.000-06:00

"Bush does not seem to understand that, while it is not a sin to be born to privilege, it is a sin to spend your life defending it. John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that. They knew the narrowness privilege can breed. This administration, despite its early pledges of "compassionate conservatism," has in fact adopted policies that amount to a war against the poor and the middle class.

The Bush tax and budget cuts were not made in order to jump-start the economy or balance the budget; they were simply massive cash transfers. Social programs are being slashed to pay for the war in Iraq, tax giveaways for the wealthy, and new defense contracts for arms makers who just happen to be big Republican campaign contributors."

from Campaign 2006: The Issues, the Stakes, the Prospects
Commentary: The choices are stark, the consequences are momentous.
By Arthur I. Blaustein
September 19, 2006
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/09/issues_stakes_prospects.html

War May Have Been a Bad Idea (Imagine That)

2006-09-25T10:51:00.000-06:00

From AlterNet: http://us.f389.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?search=&Idx=1&YY=91871&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b

Another Reason to Declare Peace:

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat
The Bush administration claims the US occupation of Iraq is combating the threat of terrorism. Sixteen US government spy agencies have drawn the conclusion that the war, in fact, increases this threat. Let's bring this report to the attention of our members of Congress this week as we call on them to legislate a concrete and rapid plan to end the US occupation! Read the article in the New York Times.

A Land Ethic

2006-09-24T08:58:00.000-06:00

Over fifty years ago, the prophetic Aldo Leopold argued for a "land ethic," asserting that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." My question (up for philosphical debate) is this: is a land ethic our moral responsibility because there is something intrinsically valuable about the nature environment and all of its components (an ecocentric position)? Or, is a land ethic our moral responsibility because of what the natural environment provides for the human race, ie. a means of survival (more of a utilitarian argument)? Before you jump to the "both" conclusion, think about the different policy and management implications of each.

Feminization of poverty

2006-09-22T17:04:00.000-06:00

Here's a great article about a panel Hillary Clinton chaired:

“Women do 66 percent of the work in the world, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 5 percent of income and 1 percent of the property,” said Ann Veneman, the former secretary of agriculture who is now executive director of Unicef. “We need to convince not only governments, but major multinational corporations who do business in these countries, to help be a partner in changing conditions.”

There's a reason we have laws, mr. president

2006-09-22T16:44:00.000-06:00

This is why accused terrorists need some form of hearing. How truly disturbing. And yet, Junior and the Neocons press on, pushing for a system in diametric opposition to the same legal principles our country was founded upon.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14897315/?GT1=8506

TORONTO, Sept. 18 - Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to
Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.

The report, released in Ottawa, was the result of a 2 1/2-year inquiry that represented one of the first public investigations into mistakes made as part of the United States' "extraordinary rendition" program,
which has secretly spirited suspects to foreign countries forinterrogation by often brutal methods.
The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer
consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda "watchlist," without justification, the report said.

Arar was also listed as "an Islamic extremist individual" who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that
day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O'Connor.

Coffin-sized dungeon

Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced
to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

O'Connor concluded "categorically there is no evidence" that Arar did anything wrong or was a security threat.

Although the report centered on Canadian actions, the counsel for the commission, Paul Cavalluzzo, said the results show that the U.S. practice of renditions "ought to be reviewed."
"This is really the first report in the Western world that has had access to all of the government documents we wanted and saw the practice of extraordinary rendition in full color," he said in an interview from Ottawa. "The ramifications were that an innocent Canadian was tortured, his life was put upside down, and it set him
back years and years."

Arar, who came to Canada from Syria when he was 17, said in Ottawa that he was thankful that he had been vindicated. He expressed surprise and anger at learning Monday that Canadian authorities also
had asked U.S. authorities to put his wife on the al-Qaeda watchlist.

"Today Justice O'Connor has cleared my name and restored my reputation," he said at a news conference. He said the individual Canadian officials should be held accountable: "Justice requires no less."
[. . .]
Since Sept. 11, the CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people in its effort to dismantle terrorist networks. Many of them have been secretly taken by
"extraordinary rendition" to other countries, hidden from U.S. legal requirements and often subject to torture.
[. . .]

Fervent Messianism

2006-09-22T14:17:00.000-06:00

The Disastrous Rule of a Mayberry Machiavelli
By Sidney Blumenthal, AlterNet. Posted September 20, 2006.

http://www.alternet.org/stories/41808/

Bush ran as a moderate, tacked right and governed ineffectually -- before 9/11. Since then he has become the most radical American president in history, and arguably the worst.

The following is an excerpt from How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006).

No one predicted just how radical a president George W. Bush would be. Neither his opponents, nor the reporters covering him, nor his closest campaign aides suggested that he would be the most willfully radical president in American history.

In his 2000 campaign, Bush permitted himself few hints of radicalism. On the contrary he made ready promises of moderation, judiciously offering himself as a "compassionate conservative," an identity carefully crafted to contrast with the discredited Republican radicals of the House of Representatives. After capturing the Congress in 1994 and proclaiming a "revolution," they had twice shut down the government over the budget and staged an impeachment trial that resulted in the acquittal of President Clinton. Seeking to distance himself from the congressional Republicans, Bush declared that he was not hostile to government. He would, he said, "change the tone in Washington." He would be more reasonable than the House Republicans and more moral than Clinton. Governor Bush went out of his way to point to his record of bipartisan cooperation with Democrats in Texas, stressing that he would be "a uniter, not a divider."

Trying to remove the suspicion that falls on conservative Republicans, he pledged that he would protect the solvency of Social Security. On foreign policy, he said he would be "humble": "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us." Here he was criticizing Clinton's peacemaking and nation-building efforts in the Balkans and suggesting he would be far more restrained. The sharpest criticism he made of Clinton's foreign policy was that he would be more mindful of the civil liberties of Arabs accused of terrorism: "Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that." This statement was not an off-the-cuff remark, but carefully crafted and presented in one of the debates with Vice President Al Gore. Bush's intent was to win an endorsement from the American Muslim Council, which was cued to back him after he delivered his debating point, and it was instrumental in his winning an overwhelming share of Muslims' votes, about 90,000 of which were in Florida.

So Bush deliberately offered himself as an alternative to the divisive congressional Republicans, his father's son (at last) in political temperament, but also experienced as an executive who had learned the art of compromise with the other party, and differing from the incumbent Democratic president only in personality and degree. Bush wanted the press to report and discuss that he would reform and discipline his party, which had gone too far to the right. He encouraged commentary that he represented a "Fourth Way," a variation on the theme of Clinton's "Third Way."

In his second term, Clinton had the highest sustained popularity of any president since World War II, prosperity was in its longest recorded cycle, and the nation's international prestige high. Bush's tack as moderate was adroit, shrewd and necessary. His political imperative was to create the public perception there were no major issues dividing the candidates and that the current halcyon days would continue as well under his aegis. Only through his positioning did Bush manage to close to within just short of a half-million votes of Gore and achieve an apparent tie in Florida, creating an Electoral College deadlock and forcing the election toward an extraordinary resolution.

Few political commentators at the time thought that the ruthless tactics used by the Bush camp in the Florida contest presaged his presidency. The battle there was seen as unique, a self-contained episode of high political drama that could and would not be replicated. Tactics such as setting loose a mob comprised mostly of Republican staff members from the House and Senate flown down from Washington to intimidate physically the Miami-Dade County Board of Supervisors from counting the votes there, and manipulating the Florida state government through the office of the governor, Jeb Bush, the candidate's brother, to forestall vote counting were justified as simply hardball politics.

The Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, by a five-to-four margin, perversely sanctioned not counting thousands of votes (mostly African-American) as somehow upholding the equal protection clause of the 15th Amendment (enacted after the Civil War to guarantee the rights of newly enfranchised slaves, the ancestors of those disenfranchised by Bush v. Gore). In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that counting votes would cast a shadow on the "legitimacy" of Bush's claim to the presidency. The Court concluded that the ruling was to have applicability only this one time. By its very nature, it was declared to be unprecedented. Never before had the Supreme Court decided who would be president, much less according to tortuous argument, and by a one vote margin that underlined and extended political polarization.

The constitutional system had ruptured, but it was widely believed by the political class in Washington, including most of the press corps, that Bush, who had benefited, would rush to repair the breach. The brutality enabling him to become president, while losing the popular majority, and following a decade of partisan polarization, must spur him to make good on his campaign rhetoric of moderation, seek common ground and enact centrist policies. Old family retainers, James Baker (the former Secretary of State who had been summoned to command the legal and political teams in Florida) and Brent Scowcroft (elder Bush's former national security adviser), were especially unprepared for what was to come, and they came to oppose Bush's radicalism, mounting a sub rosa opposition. In its brazen, cold-blooded and single-minded partisanship, the Florida contest turned out in retrospect to be an augury not an aberration. It was Bush's first opening, and having charged through it, grabbing the presidency, he continued widening the breach.

The precedents for a president who gained office without winning the popular vote were uniformly grim. John Quincy Adams, the first president elected without a plurality, never escaped the accusation of having made a "corrupt bargain" to secure the necessary Electoral College votes. After one term he was turned out of office with an overwhelming vote for his rival, Andrew Jackson. Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, also having won the White House but not the popular vote, declined to run again. Like these three predecessors Bush lacked a mandate, but unlike them he proceeded as though he had won by a landslide.

The Republicans had control of both houses of the Congress and the presidency for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was elected. But Eisenhower had gained the White House with a resounding majority. He spent his early years in office trying to isolate his right wing in the Congress, quietly if belatedly encouraging efforts to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy. Eisenhower greeted the Democratic recovery of the Congress in 1954 with relief and smoothly governed for the rest of his tenure in tandem with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. The outrageous behavior of the Republicans during the brief period in which they had held congressional power and unleashed McCarthy was a direct cause of their minority status for 40 subsequent years. But the Republicans who gained control of the Congress in 1994 had not learned from their past.

The Republican radicals in charge of the House of Representatives remained unabashed by their smashing failures of the 1990s. They were willing to sacrifice two speakers of the House to scandals of their own in order to pursue an unconstitutional coup d'état to remove President Clinton. (It was unconstitutional, strictly speaking, because they had rejected any standards whatsoever for impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee in contradistinction to the committee's exacting standards enacted in the impeachment proceedings of President Nixon.) Now these Republicans welcomed the Bush ascension as deus ex machina, rescuing them from their exhaustion, disrepute and dead end. They became Bush's indispensable partners.

Immediately upon assuming office, Bush launched upon a series of initiatives that began to undo the bipartisan traditions of internationalism, environmentalism, fiscal discipline, and scientific progress. His first nine months in office were a quick march to the right. The reasons were manifold, ranging from Cheney and Rumsfeld's extraordinary influence, Rove's strategies, the neoconservatives' inordinate sway, and Bush's Southern conservatism. These deeper patterns were initially obscured by the surprising rapidity of Bush's determined tack.

Bush withdrew from the diplomacy with North Korea to control its development and production of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell, after briefing the press that the diplomatic track would continue, was sent out again to repudiate himself and announce the administration's reversal of almost a decade of negotiation. Powell did not realize that this would be the first of many times his credibility would be abused in a ritual of humiliation. Swiftly, Bush rejected the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming, and presented a "voluntary" plan that was supported by no other nation. He also withdrew the U.S. from its historic role as negotiator among Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs, a process to which his father had been particularly committed.

In short order, Bush also reversed his campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and canceled the federal regulation reducing cancer causing arsenic levels in water. He joked at a dinner: "As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water. To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating." He appointed scores of former lobbyists and industry executives to oversee policies regulating the industries they previously represented.

As his top priority Bush pushed for passage of a large tax cut that would redistribute income to the wealthy, drain the surplus that the Clinton administration had accumulated, and reverse fiscal discipline embraced by both the Clinton and prior Bush administrations. The tax cut became Bush's chief instrument of social policy. By wiping out the surplus, budget pressure was exerted on domestic social programs. Under the Reagan administration, a tax cut had produced the largest deficit to that time, bigger than the combined deficits accumulated by all previous presidents. But Reagan had stumbled onto this method of crushing social programs through the inadvertent though predictable failure of his fantasy of supply-side economics in which slashing taxes would magically create increased federal revenues. Bush confronted alternatives in the recent Republican past, the Reagan example or his father's responsible counter-example of raising taxes to cut the deficit; once again, he rejected his father's path. But unlike Reagan, his decision to foster a deficit was completely deliberate and with full awareness of its consequences.

Domestic policy adviser John DiIulio, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, who had accepted his position in the White House on the assumption that he would be working to give substance to the president's rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism," resigned in a state of shock. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told Esquire magazine. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis ... Besides the tax cut ... the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."

After just four months into the Bush presidency, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who had served for 26 years as a moderate Republican in the House and the Senate, left his party in response to Bush's radicalism. "In the past, without the presidency, the various wings of the Republican Party in Congress have had some freedom to argue and influence and ultimately to shape the party's agenda. The election of President Bush changed that dramatically," Jeffords said on May 24, 2001. Overnight, the majority in the upper chamber shifted to the Democrats.

Bush spent the entire month of August on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. His main public event was a speech declaring federal limits on scientific research involving stem cells that might lead to cures for many diseases. Bush's tortuous position was a sop to the religious right. On August 6, three days before his nationally televised address on stem cells, he was presented with a Presidential Daily Brief from the CIA entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S." CIA director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States "the system was blinking red." The Commission reported: "The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature ... We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States."

By September 10, Bush held the lowest job approval rating of any president to that early point in his tenure. He appeared to be falling into the pattern of presidents who arrived without a popular mandate and lasted only one term. The deadliest foreign attack on American soil transformed his foundering presidency.

The events of September 11 lent Bush the aura of legitimacy that Bush v. Gore had not granted. Catastrophe infused him with the charisma of a "war president," as he proclaimed himself. At once, his radicalism had an unobstructed path.

Bush's political rhetoric reached Manichaean and apocalyptic heights. He divided the world into "good" and "evil." "You're either with the terrorists or with us," he said. He stood at the ramparts of Fortress America, defending it from evildoers without and within. His fervent messianism guided what he called his "crusade" in the Muslim realm. "Bring them on!" he exclaimed about Iraqi insurgents. Asked if he ever sought advice from his father, Bush replied, "There's a higher Father I appeal to."

After September 11, the American people were virtually united in sentiment. Support for the Afghanistan war was almost unanimous. "The nation is united and there is a resolve and a spirit that is just so fantastic to feel," said Bush. But two weeks after he made this statement, in January 2002, his chief political aide, whom he called "The Architect," Karl Rove, spoke before a meeting of the Republican National Committee, laying out the strategy for exploiting fear of terror for partisan advantage. "We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America," said Rove. His strategy was premised on the idea that Republicans win elections by maximizing the turnout of their conservative base; his method was to polarize the electorate as much as possible. Rove's tactic was to challenge the patriotism of Democrats by creating false issues of national security in which they could be demonized. September 11 gave his politics of polarization the urgency of national emergency.

Sidney Blumenthal, author of "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006)," writes a column for Salon and the London Guardian.

Every little bit helps

2006-09-22T13:59:00.000-06:00

From World Wildlife Fund

12 easy steps for individuals to reduce their CO2 emissions
http://www.worldwildlife.org/climate/involved/individuals.cfm?enews=enews0906c

Here's 1 for our Mother

2006-09-22T12:10:00.000-06:00

And you all thought environmental victories under King George the Eco-Butcher were an endangered species! (Alright, so did I)

In short, BushCo violated the law (yes, a shocker, I know) (actually, 2 laws), specifically the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, when they repealed the 2001 Roadless Rule. The court reinstated the 2001 Rule nationwide and enjoined any management activity contrary to the Rule (except in the Tongass National Forest -- The court did not extend the Rule's protections to the Tongass because the Bush Administration had previously exempted the Tongass through a lawsuit settlement with the State of Alaska)

Regardless, we'll take 'em however we can get them. Chalk 1 up for Mother Earth.

Statement from The Wilderness Society President William H. Meadows on the Historic Court Decision Reinstating the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule

WASHINGTON, DC (Sep. 20, 2006) - “Today’s ruling is a victory for the millions of Americans from all walks of life who have told the US Forest Service, time and again, to protect our last wild national forests. Our national forests belong to the American people, who deserve to be heard when it comes to the fate of our wildest, most unspoiled forests. In fact, since 1999, millions of Americans have spoken loud and clear that they want the wildest parts of our national forests to stay that way.”

“This decision is a stark repudiation of the Administration’s push to ignore the public’s wishes and turn over our public lands to special interests. In the past two months, trees have fallen in Oregon as the first timber sales in roadless areas were rammed through in defiance of the wishes of the people and the Governor. We hope that today’s decision will mean the end to such short-sighted and ill-considered timber sales.”

“The one disappointment in today’s decision is that it also retains the controversial ‘Tongass exemption,’ which keeps the nation’s largest national forest – the Tongass in Alaska – from enjoying the same protections as the rest of America’s national forests. There are 9.3 million acres at stake on the Tongass, more than in any other forest, and they remain temporarily exempted from protection and open to industrial-scale logging. President Bush’s 2003 temporary exemption of the Tongass was justified by a Tongass forest plan that the 9th Circuit has since thrown out as illegal. Leaving the Tongass out of the Roadless Rule now won’t pass the red-faced test.”

“As we continue to work to gain protections for the Tongass National Forest, we applaud today’s monumental decision, which clearly finds that the Bush Administration's roadless plan is flawed and most appropriately restores the valuable protections and preservations for America’s most pristine areas.”

“History will show the 2001 Roadless Rule to be the right policy for protecting our nation’s unspoiled forests and today’s court decision to be a historic correction.”

If At First You Don't Succeed ...

2006-09-20T21:27:00.000-06:00

... Lie and Cheat

The Bush administration used illegal wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping techniques on Americans, all in the name of "fighting terrorism". They were rebuked by the courts, and told in no uncertain terms that such actions were illegal and in violation of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Bush administration imposed illegal detentions without due process of law and used illegal and immoral torture techniques on detainees, all in the name of "fighting terrorism". They were rebuked by the courts, and told in no uncertain terms that such actions were illegal and in violation of Geneva Conventions and time-honored military protocol.

So ...

Bush plays the terror and fear card, again, lies about the threat as well as the devil lurking in the details of his proposed legislation, and tries to do what he has already been told by the highest courts of the land is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, or all of the above. In other words, he tries to cheat rather than play by the rules.

The first piece of legislation would ratify the illegal NSA warrantless spy and wiretapping program, allowing warrantless spying on Americans with no judicial oversight. (Anyone remember "checks and balances" from 7th grade Social Studies? Yeah, uh, Bush was gone that day, sneaking booze from his Dad's liquor cabinet)
The second piece of legislation would modify the Geneva Conventions to Bush's twisted and illegal interpretation. Now, Sen. Frist has proposed legislation (S. 3886) which combines these two little slices of evil into one single fascist power grab.

Be afraid, people, be very afraid.

sources from The Revolution

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/26722prs20060913.html
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/index.html
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=21251&afccode=htcct5
http://actions.pfaw.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=enJHKINrFqG&amp;amp;amp;b=848149&aid=7511

We tax ethanol imports but we don't tax crude oil imports

2006-09-20T09:29:00.000-06:00

September 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Dumb as We Wanna Be

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
São Paulo, Brazil

I asked Dr. José Goldemberg, secretary for the environment for São Paulo State and a pioneer of Brazil’s ethanol industry, the obvious question: Is the fact that the U.S. has imposed a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to prevent Americans from importing sugar ethanol from Brazil “just stupid or really stupid.”

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty.

Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

“It’s really stupid,” answered Dr. Goldemberg.

If I seem upset about this, I am. Development and environmental experts have long searched for environmentally sustainable ways to alleviate rural poverty — especially for people who live in places like Brazil, where there is a constant temptation to log the Amazon. Sure, ecotourism and rain forest soap are nice, but they never really scale. As a result, rural people in Brazil are always tempted go back to logging or farming sensitive areas.

Ethanol from sugar cane could be a scalable, sustainable alternative — if we are smart and get rid of silly tariffs, and if Brazil is smart and starts thinking right now about how to expand its sugar cane biofuel industry without harming the environment.

The good news is that sugar cane doesn’t require irrigation and can’t grow in much of the Amazon, because it is too wet. So if the Brazilian sugar industry does realize its plan to grow from 15 million to 25 million acres over the next few years, it need not threaten the Amazon.

However, sugar cane farms are located mostly in south-central Brazil, around São Paulo, and along the northeast coast, on land that was carved out of drier areas of the Atlantic rain forest, which has more different species of plants and animals per acre than the Amazon. Less than 7 percent of the total Atlantic rain forest remains — thanks to sugar, coffee, orange plantations and cattle grazing.

I flew in a helicopter over the region near São Paulo, and what I saw was not pretty: mansions being carved from forested hillsides near the city, rivers that have silted because of logging right down to the banks, and wide swaths of forest that have been cleared and will never return.

“It makes you weep,” said Gustavo Fonseca, my traveling companion, a Brazilian and the executive vice president of Conservation International. “What I see here is a totally human dominated system in which most of the biodiversity is gone.”

As demand for sugar ethanol rises — and that is a good thing for Brazil and the developing world, said Fonseca, “we have to make sure that the expansion is done in a planned way.”

Over the past five years, the Amazon has lost 7,700 square miles a year, most of it for cattle grazing, soybean farming and palm oil. A similar expansion for sugar ethanol could destroy the cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, another incredibly species-rich area, and the best place in Brazil to grow more sugar.

A proposal is floating around the Brazilian government for a major expansion of the sugar industry, far beyond even the industry’s plans. No wonder environmental activists are holding a conference in Germany this fall about the impact of biofuels. I could see some groups one day calling for an ethanol boycott — à la genetically modified foods — if they feel biofuels are raping the environment.

We have the tools to resolve these conflicts. We can map the lands that need protection for their biodiversity or the environmental benefits they provide rural communities. But sugar farmers, governments and environmentalists need to sit down early — like now — to identify those lands and commit the money needed to protect them. Otherwise, we will have a fight over every acre, and sugar ethanol will never realize its potential. That would be really, really stupid.

Master of the Obvious

2006-09-19T20:00:00.000-06:00

"We are left with the unpleasant conclusion that the only motivation is political."

-- Iain Murray, one of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's resident climate skeptics in response to rumors of a new Bush climate policy.

Fractures on the Right

2006-09-19T17:43:00.000-06:00

Enough fractures=shattering (Goddess willing)

WESTERN ROUNDUP - September 18, 2006
Fractures on the right
by Ray Ring

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The West’s moderate Republicans battle their party’s extremists

Jim Nelson, who owns a highway construction company in Idaho, has been a regular backer of Republicans running for U.S. House and Senate seats. He’s contributed at least $7,500 to their campaigns since 1998. He’s also hosted fund-raisers at his house, where other supporters gave $1,000 each for the chance to hang with the candidates.

But this year, Nelson won’t back the GOP candidate for Idaho’s vacant House District 1 seat. He says Bill Sali is too radical, and calls him "a mistake."

Sali, a state legislator for 16 years, won a six-way Republican primary with only 26 percent of the vote, defeating several moderate candidates, including one Nelson supported. Sali aligns himself with a hard-line national anti-tax group, the Club for Growth, which has given his campaign more than $300,000. He also pushes a right-wing form of Christianity, taking uncompromising positions on abortion and calling for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a Boise park.

Sali’s abrasiveness has made him many enemies within his own party. Republican Bruce Newcomb, the former speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives, recently called Sali "an absolute idiot." Mike Simpson, a Republican who holds Idaho’s other House seat, once threatened to throw Sali out the window of the Capitol after Sali called him a liar. And in the ultimate snub, some party moderates, including Nelson, attorneys and other business folks, have formed a group to encourage Republicans to vote for a moderate Democrat, Larry Grant, in the general election.

Grant made his reputation as the top lawyer for Micron, the state’s biggest private employer. He talks about raising the minimum wage and boosting alternative energy sources. "He was raised in the farm valleys of Idaho, and got a full-ride scholarship to Columbia University," says Nelson. "He’ll help break the polarization in Congress, find common ground."

With hard-liners from both parties bumping off moderates in the Connecticut and Michigan primaries this year, national pundits say both parties are moving toward the extremes. But Idaho and other Western states are bucking the trend, and moving toward the center.

"Old-style Republicans"

In 2002, Republican business owners in Montana’s Flathead County grew concerned that anti-regulation, religion-pushing conservatives dominated the county commission. They backed a moderate candidate in the Republican primary, who beat the most ardent right-wing commissioner. In 2004, they formed Republicans for the Flathead and endorsed a Democrat, who then won a commission seat, defeating a right-winger.

This year in Flathead County, both parties’ candidates for the third commission seat are "level-headed people who don’t have an ax to grind," says Gordon Pirrie, a member of Republicans for the Flathead. To make progress on issues like explosive growth, Pirrie says, "We’re trying to stay in the middle and get some things done. The far end on both sides, they can throw rocks at everything you want to do, but none of them have a solution."

Last year in Colorado, many Republican leaders, including Gov. Bill Owens, decided that too many government programs were getting strangled by TABOR, the anti-tax measure voters approved in 1992. Saying it had prevented state revenues from keeping pace with growth, they successfully campaigned for a ballot measure that loosened TABOR’s grip. This year in Colorado, two popular moderate Republican legislators and retired Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell announced they would not run for office again because extremists had hijacked their party.

Some Colorado Republican business leaders openly back the moderate Democratic candidate for governor, Bill Ritter, because the Republican candidate, Bob Beauprez, is an anti-tax hardliner. "There’s a type of professional, business-oriented Republican who’s turned off" by right-wing rejection of taxes, abortion, stem-cell research and environmental regulations, says Bob Loevy, a Colorado College political science professor. "They’re old-style Republicans in the tradition of moderates such as New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and California’s Sen. Thomas Kuchel. Many of them live in upscale Denver suburbs. They’re doctors, lawyers. They’re probably not changing their party registration, but they vote Democratic when they see (an extreme right-wing) Republican on the ballot."

Moderate Republicans crossing party lines and independent voters helped elect centrist Democratic governors Dave Freudenthal in Wyoming and Janet Napolitano in Arizona in 2002. Both states have more Republicans than Democrats, but polls show both governors leading their conservative Republican challengers as they run for re-election this year.

In May, moderates in both parties formed Unity08, a national group based in Denver, which aims to "give the overlooked moderate majority a voice." Former oil-company owner Tom Stroock, a former chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party who helped found Unity08, says, "When Democrats ran Congress, they screwed up, and then when Republicans took over, they screwed up. We need to abandon factionalism and partisanship."

Party loyalty may hold, no matter what

It remains to be seen how strongly this Western trend will play out in November elections. In Idaho, for instance, Republican voters are expected to go for Butch Otter, a right-wing Republican who’s leaving the House District 1 seat to run for governor. Some of the state’s top Republican officeholders, after an initial flurry of discontent, have united to predict that Sali will take the House seat.

"Idaho’s Republican Party is not hemorrhaging," says Brad Little, a moderate Republican legislator who now supports Sali’s candidacy.

But at an Aug. 16 Boise fund-raiser for Sali, where Vice President Dick Cheney delivered the keynote speech, only three of the state’s other 84 Republican legislators attended — another snub. "The Republicans I know in the party hierarchy, it’s like they’re eating ground glass when they talk about Sali," says Nelson, who’s raising campaign money for Grant. "They still mouth the party line," but it’s not clear which way they’ll go in the privacy of the voting booth.

The author is HCN’s Northern Rockies editor.

"Timberrrrrrrrrr!!"

2006-09-19T15:29:00.000-06:00

I think the problem lies with how this administration deals with environmental issues. That is, they completely ignore science and the good health and safety of our environment, in favor of their special interest friends. Time and time again, they try to limit the public notification and input requirements that have been benchmarks of environmental law, and democracy for that matter, in America. They try to rewrite environmental legislation to gut public input, oversight, and enforcement.

This new forest bill allows them to sidestep the public input process and declare themselves in compliance with NEPA and ESA, just by saying so. It also gives carte blanche to the logging companies to turn it into a free-for-all money making operation, rather than a nice and necessary clean up following some Katrina-like disaster.

This bill also allows the administration to define emergency or disaaster as it sees fit. This essentially gives them the ability to open up an area, for excessive and inappropriate logging, based on the most flimsy of excuses. For example, a large logging company determines they may have to shut down operations in a specific plant. Some people may lose their jobs as a result. They contact their friends the Bushes, hey I need a favor, remember the $$ we sent your family over and over, blah blah. The administration declares an "emergency" (which they could do under this new legislation), give the contract to this company, and let the games begin.

As for reforesting, great idea. This bill doesn't require it however. Reforesting has nothing to do with this. Forest re-forest themselves, if not clear cut by humans, after fire or natural catastrophe. It's all part of the natural process, which we humans can't seem to let alone.

Getting Schooled

2006-09-19T12:35:00.000-06:00

This is a letter from over 30 past and present military leaders and experts, to President Clueless about his proposed legislation concerning torture, detainee policy and the Geneva Convention. Yet another example, by the way, of how this administration tries something illegal or improper, gets slapped down, then simply rewrites the rules rather than follow them! The Rule of Law means nothing to this president and this administration.

GENERAL JOHN SHALIKASHVILI, USA (RET.)
GENERAL JOSEPH HOAR, USMC (RET.)
GENERAL PAUL J. KERN, USA (RET.)
GENERAL MERRILL A. MCPEAK, USAF (RET.)
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER, USN (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL DANIEL W. CHRISTMAN, USA (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL PAUL E. FUNK, USA (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL ROBERT G. GARD, JR., USA (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL JAY M. GARNER, USA (RET.)
VICE ADMIRAL LEE F. GUNN, USN (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLAUDIA J. KENNEDY, USA (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL DONALD L. KERRICK, USA (RET.)
VICE ADMIRAL ALBERT H. KONETZNI JR., USN (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL CHARLES OTSTOTT, USA (RET.)
VICE ADMIRAL JACK SHANAHAN, USN (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL HARRY E. SOYSTER, USA (RET.)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL PAUL K. VAN RIPER, USMC (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN BATISTE, USA (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL EUGENE FOX, USA (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN L. FUGH, USA (RET.)
REAR ADMIRAL DON GUTER, USN (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL FRED E. HAYNES, USMC (RET.)
REAR ADMIRAL JOHN D. HUTSON, USN (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL MELVYN MONTANO, ANG (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL GERALD T. SAJER, USA (RET.)
MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL J. SCOTTI JR., USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL DAVID M. BRAHMS, USMC (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES P. CULLEN, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL EVELYN P. FOOTE, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL DAVID R. IRVINE, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL JOHN H. JOHNS, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL RICHARD O’MEARA, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL MURRAY G. SAGSVEEN, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL JOHN K. SCHMITT, USA (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL ANTHONY VERRENGIA, USAF (RET.)
BRIGADIER GENERAL STEPHEN N. XENAKIS, USA (RET.)
AMBASSADOR PETE PETERSON, USAF (RET.)
COLONEL LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON, USA (RET.)
HONORABLE WILLIAM H. TAFT IV
FRANK KENDALL III, ESQ.

September 12, 2006

The Honorable John Warner, Chairman
The Honorable Carl Levin, Ranking Member
Senate Armed Services Committee
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Warner and Senator Levin:

As retired military leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces and former officials of the Department of Defense, we write to express our profound concern about a key provision of S. 3861, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, introduced last week at the behest of the President.

We believe that the language that would redefine Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as equivalent to the standards contained in the Detainee Treatment Act violates the core principles of the Geneva Conventions and poses a grave threat to American service-members, now and in future wars.
We supported your efforts last year to clarify that all detainees in U.S. custody must be treated humanely. That was particularly important, because the Administration determined that it was not bound by the basic humane treatment standards contained in Geneva Common Article 3. Now that the Supreme Court has made clear that treatment of al Qaeda prisoners is governed by the Geneva Convention standards, the Administration is seeking to redefine Common Article 3, so as to downgrade those standards. We urge you to reject this effort.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions provides the minimum standards for humane treatment and fair justice that apply to anyone captured in armed conflict. These standards were specifically designed to ensure that those who fall outside the other, more extensive, protections of the Conventions are treated in accordance with the values of civilized nations. The framers of the Conventions, including the American representatives, in particular wanted to ensure that Common Article 3 would apply in situations where a state party to the treaty, like the United States, fights an adversary that is not a party, including irregular forces like al Qaeda. The United States military has abided by the basic requirements of Common Article 3 in every conflict since the Conventions were adopted. In each case, we applied the Geneva Conventions -- including, at a minimum, Common Article 3 -- even to enemies that systematically violated the Conventions themselves.

We have abided by this standard in our own conduct for a simple reason: the same standard serves to protect American servicemen and women when they engage in conflicts covered by Common Article 3. Preserving the integrity of this standard has become increasingly important in recent years when our adversaries often are not nation-states. Congress acted in 1997 to further this goal by criminalizing violations of Common Article 3 in the War Crimes Act, enabling us to hold accountable those who abuse our captured personnel, no matter the nature of the armed conflict.

If any agency of the U.S. government is excused from compliance with these standards, or if we seek to redefine what Common Article 3 requires, we should not imagine that our enemies will take notice of the technical distinctions when they hold U.S. prisoners captive. If degradation, humiliation, physical and mental brutalization of prisoners is decriminalized or considered permissible under a restrictive interpretation of Common Article 3, we will forfeit all credible objections should such barbaric practices be inflicted upon American prisoners.

This is not just a theoretical concern. We have people deployed right now in theaters where Common Article 3 is the only source of legal protection should they be captured. If we allow that standard to be eroded, we put their safety at greater risk.

Last week, the Department of Defense issued a Directive reaffirming that the military will uphold the requirements of Common Article 3 with respect to all prisoners in its custody. We welcome this new policy. Our servicemen and women have operated for too long with unclear and unlawful guidance on detainee treatment, and some have been left to take the blame when things went wrong.
The guidance is now clear.

But that clarity will be short-lived if the approach taken by Administration’s bill prevails. In contrast to the Pentagon’s new rules on detainee treatment, the bill would limit our definition of Common Article 3's terms by introducing a flexible, sliding scale that might allow certain coercive interrogation techniques under some circumstances, while forbidding them under others. This would replace an absolute standard – Common Article 3 -- with a relative one. To do so will only create further confusion.

Moreover, were we to take this step, we would be viewed by the rest of the world as having formally renounced the clear strictures of the Geneva Conventions. Our enemies would be encouraged to interpret the Conventions in their own way as well, placing our troops in jeopardy in future conflicts. And American moral authority in the war would be further damaged.

All of this is unnecessary. As the senior serving Judge Advocates General recently testified, our armed forces have trained to Common Article 3 and can live within its requirements while waging the war on terror effectively.

As the United States has greater exposure militarily than any other nation, we have long emphasized the reciprocal nature of the Geneva Conventions. That is why we believe – and the United States has always asserted -- that a broad interpretation of Common Article 3 is vital to the safety of U.S. personnel. But the Administration’s bill would put us on the opposite side of that argument. We urge you to consider the impact that redefining Common Article 3 would have on Americans who put their lives at risk in defense of our Nation. We believe their interests, and their safety and protection should they become prisoners, should be your highest priority as you address this issue.

With respect,

General John Shalikashvili, USA (Ret.)
General Joseph Hoar, USMC (Ret.)
General Paul J. Kern, USA (Ret.)
General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF (Ret.)
Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Daniel W. Christman, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Paul E. Funk, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard, Jr., USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Jay M. Garner, USA (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick, USA (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Albert H. Konetzni Jr., USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Charles Otstott, USA (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (Ret.)
Major General John Batiste, USA (Ret.)
Major General Eugene Fox, USA (Ret.)
Major General John L. Fugh, USA (Ret.)
Rear Admiral Don Guter, USN (Ret.)
Major General Fred E. Haynes, USMC (Ret.)
Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, USN (Ret.)
Major General Melvyn Montano, ANG (Ret.)
Major General Gerald T. Sajer, USA (Ret.)
Major General Michael J. Scotti Jr., USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David M. Brahms, USMC (Ret.)
Brigadier General James P. Cullen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Evelyn P. Foote, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General John H. Johns, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Richard O’Meara, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Murray G. Sagsveen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General John K. Schmitt, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Anthony Verrengia, USAF (Ret.)
Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, USA (Ret.)
Ambassador Pete Peterson, USAF (Ret.)
Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, USA (Ret.)
Honorable William H. Taft IV
Frank Kendall III, Esq.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/06913-etn-military-let-ca3.pdf

Gimme some sugar

2006-09-18T12:29:00.000-06:00

Ethanol has potential.
Still some problems, but still beats on oil on its worst day.
"Q . Are there disadvantages?
A . Yes. Ethanol is not readily available.
There's no energy-efficient infrastructure -- such as a pipeline -- to distribute ethanol. It has to be shipped by rail or truck, which requires more energy. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the cost of shipping ethanol accounts for 30 percent to 35 percent of the price.
Broad use of ethanol would mean turning more farmland to corn production. Corn has a high soil erosion rate; growing corn means more damage to topsoil and increased deforestation, according to the Center for Global Food Issues."
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060619/AUTO01/606190343

Sneakin through the back door

2006-09-18T11:33:00.000-06:00

This week, the US Senate will debate and likely pass HR 4200 - the so-called Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act. This will likely happen without much fanfare or hubbub.

However, in reviewing this bill, which I will affectionately term FERRA (as in, do you republicans mistake us FERRA idiot), I found that it is a microcosm of the methods and madness of king george the junior and his band of eco-butchers.

FERRA, in a nutshell: What's at Stake
Our public forests, when left to their natural cycles, are a thriving and diverse home to an endless array of wildlife, fish, and spectacular old growth stands. We treasure these roadless wildlands as places to camp, hunt, fish and hike, and we depend on these places for fresh water and clean air.
Almost 600 renowned scientists have stated that after events such as wildfire, nature knows best about how forests should recover.
View a copy of a letter from scientists here [pdf].
H.R. 4200 would permit aggressive salvage logging operations on federal lands that would degrade valuable fish and wildlife habitats. Logging after fires and other natural disturbances can be harmful to recovering forests, damaging water quality and the fish and wildlife that depend on them.
What's the Threat?
HR 4200 will change the way our public forests are managed. These national forests should be managed to benefit all of us -- for clean water, wildlife habitat, and recreation for our families. Instead, HR 4200 would make it easier to implement harmful logging after fires and other natural events. Science clearly shows that forests recover best after such events when left alone, and that logging and other related activities hurt, rather help, this recovery.
The legislation would also exclude the public from decisions regarding the management of our public lands, would remove protections for roadless areas and old growth forests, and would waive the Endangered Species Act for logging on an unlimited number of acres across the country.
Unfortunately, HR 4200 passed the House in May. However, with your help, the vote margin was narrow, indicating the controversy surrounding this bill. It is critically important that we now stop this legislation in the Senate.
Finally, promising schools that they will receive funding from HR 4200 is insincere. Based on a Congressional Budget Office's Cost Estimate, it is estimated that HR 4200 may generate approximately $3.4 million per year. This is negligible compared to what these schools require; for example, rural schools received a total of $394 million last year. The proponents of HR4200 are attempting to gain more support by creating an unfair link between logging our forests and funding rural schools. In the end, they can neither ensure that HR 4200 will generate nor meet anywhere close to the needs of rural schools.

Consider:

1. FERRA allows the department secretary (interior, agriculture) to bypass the time-honored public input process of NEPA (you know, the process that allows americans to decide what america should do about the land called america) by "Deem[ing] specified activities concerning the preparation and use of pre-approved management practices required by this Act and the use of emergency procedures provided under this Act to satisfy certain requirements of the Act and its implementing regulations." In other words, the secretary can declare NEPA compliance "because I said so, right here."

2. Ditto #1, except insert Endangered Species Act. We complied with the ESA, because right here we said we complied with ESA.

3. The title suggests the repubs are taking action which protects, even promotes, the environment. This is a common bit of trickery in which this administration engages ("Healthy Forests Act", "Clean Skies Initiative", etc. ad naseum). However, anyone paying attention knows better. One could write a book on this one; I'll probably blog the living crap out of it, soon.

4. They are considering attaching the legislation to un-related bills concerning school funding (Secure Rural School and Self Determination Act) and defense appropriations. Again, this is a tactic this administration uses regularly (i.e., attaching legislation which opened ANWR to oil drilling to legislation funding troop supplies in Iraq. The strategy is obvious: make the offensive bill part of other legislation which is important, even crucial.

With the ANWR bill, it was obvious: if you vote against opening this unparalleled and pristine wilderness area to unnecessary and damaging oil exploration activities, you obviously don't support the troops and must hate America. Hell, you might even be a terrorist. Somebody put a wiretap on that guy's phone.

With FERRA, to oppose the damaging legislation, you must oppose school funding and protecting America. You're not only a bad american, you're a bad person in general. Go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

5. Finally, once again, conservatives are using legislation to strip science and research from environmental protection. Part of the problem with being a conservative and being anti-environment is that science is not on their side. The solution? Strip science from the process and paint environmental protection as anti-people. (See my recent post on king george the lesser closing EPA libraries). Rocket Science, by rocket scientists.

This legislation once again allows the departments/agencies at issue to short-circuit the research and scientific process, and move directly to (presumably no-bid) logging sales, in the name of ...

6. ... National Security and Emergency Response.
Ah, the usual. Fear, fear, fear, the sky is falling, terrorists are hiding out in your closet, better vote for war-mongers and throw all caution to the wind. Respond now, think later (or preferably, never). Fear everyone, and everything. Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out. Waive all the rules, give up all your rights. Those paying attention see this time and time again with this band of knee-jerkers.

This time, they're using national disaster (which, of course, they will define for us). Remember how well junior and company responsed to Hurricane Katrina? Yeah, that should promote confidence in their ability to respond to national disaster. With FERRA, come "national disaster" time (remember, this is a group of green-haters who are well funded by oil companies, timber interests and extreme anti-regulatory types), which they will define, they get to bypass NEPA and ESA and go directly to liquidating our national forests.

Can you see it now? Joe Timber, having contributed substantially to repubs over the years, may have to shut down his timber operations because his company has overlogged a certain area. So he picks up the phone and calls in a marker to his friend Junior or Dick Cheney. They declare the "disaster", with no public input (hell, they hardly even have to "alert" the public), waive all applicable environmental laws, sign the no-bid contract, and away they go.

Apparently, we WILL get fooled again. And again. And again.

Dear god, let these next 2 years pass quickly. And would someone mind waking America up and closing the back door? We seem to have ECO-TERRORISTS sneaking through it.

The Energy Harvest

2006-09-16T18:57:00.000-06:00

The New York Times
September 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
São Paulo, Brazil

Any time that OPEC got a little too overzealous in pushing up oil prices back in the 1970’s, the legendary Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani was fond of telling his colleagues: Remember, the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.

What he meant was that the Stone Age ended because people invented alternative tools. The oil age is also not going to end because we run out of oil. It will end because the price of oil goes so high that people invent alternatives. Mr. Yamani was warning his colleagues not to get too greedy and stimulate those alternatives.

Too late — oil at $70 a barrel has done just that. One of the most promising of those alternatives is ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from corn, sugar cane or any biomass. I came to Brazil to try to better grasp what is real and what is not in the ethanol story, because no country has done more to pioneer sugar ethanol than Brazil.

My impression, after talking to a range of Brazilian experts, is that not only is ethanol for real, but we have not even begun to tap its full potential. With just a few technological breakthroughs, Brazil really could be the Saudi Arabia of sugar and we could actually achieve that energy dream of getting “barrels from bushels.”

Since the 1970’s oil shocks, Brazil has, with lots of trial and error, made ethanol part of its daily life. It hits you the minute you drive into a gas station in São Paulo, where you need two things: a credit card and a calculator. In rough numbers, sugar ethanol now sells here at a little over $2 a gallon and gasoline at a little more than $4 a gallon. Because sugar ethanol gets only about 70 percent of the mileage of gasoline, drivers here do the math each day and figure out if ethanol is at least 30 percent less than the price of gasoline. If it is, many will fill ’er up with sugar cane.

Brazilians have that luxury because there are 34,000 gas stations here that offer both gasoline and ethanol (compared with around 700 in the U.S.) and because 70 percent of new cars sold here can run on either gasoline or sugar ethanol. As a result, Brazil has replaced about 40 percent of its gasoline consumption with sugar ethanol.

I visited the Cosan sugar mill northwest of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest, where you fly in over an ocean of green sugar cane. The cane is harvested onto big lorries and trucked to the Cosan distillery. There, the juice is extracted and converted to either crystal sugar or ethanol. The remaining cane waste — called bagasse — is used to fuel huge steam boilers that produce enough electricity to both power the refining process and leave a surplus to be sold back to the grid.

It’s important to understand this process to appreciate just how “much more energy we could get from sugar cane” with just a few more breakthroughs, explained Plinio Mario Nastari, one of Brazil’s top ethanol consults.

Think of each stalk of sugar cane as containing three sources of energy. First, the juice extracted from the cane is already giving us ethanol and sugar. Second, the bagasse is already heating very low-technology, low-pressure boilers, giving us electricity. But if Brazil’s refiners converted to new high-pressure boilers, you could get three times as much electricity.

Finally, when the cane is harvested the tops and leaves are often just left in the field. But this biomass is rich in cellulose, the carbohydrate that makes up the walls of plant cells. If the sugar locked away in cellulose also could be unlocked — cheaply and easily by a chemical process — this biomass could also produce tons of sugar ethanol. There is now a race on to find that process.

A breakthrough is expected within five years, and when that happens it will be possible to extract “more than double” the amount of ethanol from each sugar stalk, said José Luiz Oliverio, a senior V.P. at Dedini, the Brazilian industrial giant, which has a pilot cellulosic ethanol project.

I asked Brazilian experts what they’d do if they were the U.S. president. The consensus answer: Require U.S. oil companies to provide ethanol fuel pumps at all their gas stations, require U.S. auto companies to make all their new cars flex-fuel and improve mileage standards, and get rid of the crazy 54-cent tariff we’ve imposed on imported sugar ethanol (to protect our farmers). And then let the market work.

Demand for ethanol would soar. This would push us faster down the innovation curve, so we’d solve the cellulosic ethanol problem quicker, and that would strengthen the democrats in our hemisphere and weaken the petrocrats in the Middle East. If only we were as smart as Brazil ...

In the Alternative

2006-09-15T10:57:00.000-06:00

More sources of information, ideas and actions
For Mother Earth
For The Revolution

For Peace and Justice:
By reducing our dependence on oil, and specifically foreign oil, we reduce our need to go to war to defend oil supplies and oil allies. We reduce the need to funnel billions of dollars in foreign aid each year to support military forces, expand military buildup in oil-producing regions, and force countries to invest in their individual war machines, thereby diverting money from investments in people, infrastructure, environmental protection and education.

Reducing the need for oil reduces the need for oil wars reduces the need for military buildup reduces the need for military expenditures reduces the need for reciprocal military buildup by neighboring countries reduces the need to divert funds from investments in people reduces the
injustice and lack of peace.

From Apollo Alliance: New Energy for States
Energy-Saving Policies for Governors and Legislators
http://www.apolloalliance.org/state_and_local/statepolicy_report.cfm

From Americans For Energy Independence: links that: help clarify the problem, support the solutions outlined in our ei2025 Plan section, help someone who is coming up-to-speed and lastly, that highlight complementary organizations
http://www.ei2025.org/facts_links.asp

From Natural Resources Defense Council: America's Oil Policies Current Failings, Responsible Solutions
http://www.nrdc.org/air/transportation/oilinx.asp

We Won't Get Fooled Again?

2006-09-14T17:39:00.000-06:00

Remember all the trumped-up reports of WMD's and nuclear capability in Iraq necessitating a war by bush and his band of renegade neocons?

Same shit, different day. Wake up people.

IAEA: U.S. report on Iran 'dishonest'

A recent House of Representatives committee report on Iran's nuclear capability is "outrageous and dishonest" in trying to make a case that Tehran's program is geared toward making weapons, a senior official of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060914/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_nuclear_us_2

I've Got The Power

2006-09-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

"Renewable Energy Is Capable of Meeting Our Energy Needs"
A report by Public Citizen

Website: http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/renewables/

Report: http://www.citizen.org/documents/RenewableEnergy.pdf

"Stupid is as Stupid does"

2006-09-13T15:28:00.000-06:00

Even Forrest Gump could figure this out.

The Bush administration attempts to limit information and resources for environmental protection. As if this environmental butcher hasn't done enough damage ...

Environmental Accountability Falls with EPA Budget
Washington Dispatch: In a move seen as poorly-guised attempt to restrict access to information, the EPA is quietly closing down its libraries.

(Excerpts from article)
The Bush administration has persistently chipped away at environmental legislation and enforcement for the last six years, leaving both the system and the environment distressed and damaged. President Bush’s proposed 2007 budget continues this trend, requiring the closure of the majority of the Environmental Protection Agency’s research libraries and sending nearly 100,000 original documents into warehouse storage.
***
These measures have prompted an outcry from EPA scientists and researchers who point out the obvious: without the valuable resources the libraries provide, they will be severely restricted in their mission to protect and enforce environmental law.
***
“They are trying to marginalize their own scientists and prevent them from reporting inconvenient findings,”
***
While EPA bureaucrats sit idly as the proverbial trees of knowledge are bulldozed, EPA employees have started speaking out. A mass protest letter signed by 10,000 EPA scientists and researchers — more than half of the agency’s workforce — accuses the library plan of being designed to “suppress information on environmental and public health-related topics.” An internal memo penned by the EPA’s enforcement branch and leaked to PEER also reflects deep concern.

Get Your Peace On

2006-09-13T11:31:00.000-06:00

Get Your Peace On

United For Peace and Justice
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/index.php

Righteous Babe

2006-09-13T11:23:00.000-06:00

Ani says:
"i'm looking out over my whole human family
and i'm raising my glass in a toast"

We say:
and Cheers to you

Ani's links for action:
http://www.righteousbabe.com/action/index.asp

My 2 cents (or, "not that you care, Senator, but here goes ...")

2006-09-13T11:11:00.000-06:00

September 13, 2006

Senator Larry E. Craig
United States Senate
520 Hart Building
Washington, DC 20510-0001

RE: Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006
Energy policy issues

Dear Senator Craig:

I received your correspondence dated August 25, 2006, in response to my letter and request to you concerning the above-referenced legislation. I appreciate your response to my inquiry.

However, Senator, I could not be any less impressed with the shortsightedness of your response, and your approach to energy policy in general. I do not need to tell you how serious of a problem our country has with oil dependence. We rely too heavily on oil, and therefore must use military force to protect our oil interests in the Middle East and surrounding regions. We spend billions of dollars in foreign aid to countries in that region, again to protect our oil interests. We send brave young men and women to their deaths to protect our oil supply.

Your answer, Senator? Drill for more oil.
Drill for more oil, regardless of the cost,
regardless of the loss of innocent human lives (American and Iraqi),
regardless of the environmental impact of oil drilling and development,
regardless of the environmental impact of fossil fuel burning,
or regardless of the fact that this policy simply furthers our oil dependence.

Senator, your policies are ridiculous, short-sighted, dangerous, deadly, harmful to our planet, and do nothing to address our dependence on oil.

I urge you to consider more intelligent and more long-term solutions. We need to focus our efforts on actions that will actually help, rather than the nonsense you have advocated to date.
I urge you to advocate the following:

1. Increasing fuel efficiency standards in automobiles
2. Increasing research and development funding for alternative energy sources
3. Promoting a progressive tax code which penalizes energy consumption and rewards alternative energy usage and development
4. Focusing funding on developing solar and wind energy, instead of paying for oil wars in the Middle East
5. Educating the American public about the dangers of oil dependence and further drilling, and the benefits and advantages of developing alternative energy sources, and
6. Educating the American public about the advantages and benefits of energy conservation

I recognize that promoting and advocating increased fuel efficiency standards carries a political risk. However, as persons educated on energy issues are well aware, even a minor increase in CAFÉ standards would reduce oil consumption by billions of gallons of oil each year, thereby reducing oil dependence.

Although this should not be a partisan issue, it clearly is. You and your party have an absolutely atrocious record, especially in the past 10 years, concerning energy-related issues. These should be issues which you and your party begin to embrace, for America, for American citizens, for your constituents, and for the health and safety of our planet. I strongly urge you to reconsider your entire approach to energy issues, starting with the legislation at issue and with CAFÉ standards.

Thank you for your attention hereto. I look forward to a more intelligent and enlightened approach from you concerning energy policy.

Sincerely,

(peacecart)

Ani's "Self-Evident"

2006-09-13T10:14:00.000-06:00

yes,
us people are just poems
we're 90% metaphor
with a leanness of meaning
approaching hyper-distillation
and once upon a time
we were moonshine
rushing down the throat of a giraffe
yes, rushing down the long hallway
despite what the p.a. announcement says
yes, rushing down the long stairs
with the whiskey of eternity
fermented and distilled
to eighteen minutes
burning down our throats
down the hall
down the stairs
in a building so tall
that it will always be there
yes, it's part of a pair
there on the bow of noah's ark
the most prestigious couple
just kickin back parked
against a perfectly blue sky
on a morning beatific
in its indian summer breeze
on the day that america
fell to its knees
after strutting around for a century
without saying thank you
or please

and the shock was subsonic
and the smoke was deafening
between the setup and the punch line
cuz we were all on time for work that day
we all boarded that plane for to fly
and then while the fires were raging
we all climbed up on the windowsill
and then we all held hands
and jumped into the sky

and every borough looked up when it heard the first blast
and then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed
and the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar
looked more like war than anything i've seen so far
so far
so far
so fierce and ingenious
a poetic specter so far gone
that every jackass newscaster was struck dumb and stumbling
over 'oh my god' and 'this is unbelievable' and on and on
and i'll tell you what, while we're at it
you can keep the pentagon
keep the propaganda
keep each and every tv
that's been trying to convince me
to participate
in some prep school punk's plan to perpetuate retribution
perpetuate retribution
even as the blue toxic smoke of our lesson in retribution
is still hanging in the air
and there's ash on our shoes
and there's ash in our hair
and there's a fine silt on every mantle
from hell's kitchen to brooklyn
and the streets are full of stories
sudden twists and near misses
and soon every open bar is crammed to the rafters
with tales of narrowly averted disasters
and the whiskey is flowin
like never before
as all over the country
folks just shake their heads
and pour

so here's a toast to all the folks who live in palestine
afghanistan
iraq

el salvador

here's a toast to the folks living on the pine ridge reservation
under the stone cold gaze of mt. rushmore

here's a toast to all those nurses and doctors
who daily provide women with a choice
who stand down a threat the size of oklahoma city
just to listen to a young woman's voice

here's a toast to all the folks on death row right now
awaiting the executioner's guillotine
who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads
to find peace in the form of a dream

cuz take away our playstations
and we are a third world nation
under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
who stole the oval office and that phony election
i mean
it don't take a weatherman
to look around and see the weather
jeb said he'd deliver florida, folks
and boy did he ever

and we hold these truths to be self evident:
#1 george w. bush is not president
#2 america is not a true democracy
#3 the media is not fooling me
cuz i am a poem heeding hyper-distillation
i've got no room for a lie so verbose
i'm looking out over my whole human family
and i'm raising my glass in a toast

here's to our last drink of fossil fuels
let us vow to get off of this sauce
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes
and find that train ticket we lost
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river
and peeked into all the backyards
and the laundry was waving
the graffiti was teasing us
from brick walls and bridges
we were rolling over ridges
through valleys
under stars
i dream of touring like duke ellington
in my own railroad car
i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches
in a grand station aglow with grace
and then standing out on the platform
and feeling the air on my face

give back the night its distant whistle
give the darkness back its soul
give the big oil companies the finger finally
and relearn how to rock-n-roll
yes, the lessons are all around us and a change is waiting there
so it's time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets
and clear the air
get our government to pull its big dick out of the sand
of someone else's desert
put it back in its pants
and quit the hypocritical chants of
freedom forever

cuz when one lone phone rang
in two thousand and one
at ten after nine
on nine one one
which is the number we all called
when that lone phone rang right off the wall
right off our desk and down the long hall
down the long stairs
in a building so tall
that the whole world turned
just to watch it fall

and while we're at it
remember the first time around?
the bomb?
the ryder truck?
the parking garage?
the princess that didn't even feel the pea?
remember joking around in our apartment on avenue D?

can you imagine how many paper coffee cups would have to change their design
following a fantastical reversal of the new york skyline?!

it was a joke, of course
it was a joke
at the time
and that was just a few years ago
so let the record show
that the FBI was all over that case
that the plot was obvious and in everybody's face
and scoping that scene
religiously
the CIA
or is it KGB?
committing countless crimes against humanity
with this kind of eventuality
as its excuse
for abuse after expensive abuse
and it didn't have a clue
look, another window to see through
way up here
on the 104th floor
look
another key
another door
10% literal
90% metaphor
3000 some poems disguised as people
on an almost too perfect day
should be more than pawns
in some asshole's passion play
so now it's your job
and it's my job
to make it that way
to make sure they didn't die in vain
sshhhhhh....
baby listen
hear the train?

Clean-up Time

2006-09-12T14:41:00.000-06:00

This deserves a mention in The Revolution.
Thanks for the heads up, Edward.

"Unwinding Bush: How Long Will It Take To Fix His Mistakes?"
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200610/bush
by Jonathan Rauch (Atlantic Monthly)

History judges good presidents by what they do, bad ones by how long they take to undo. Although history hasn't yet caught up with President George W. Bush, midterm elections are about to—and those are often a referendum on presidential performance. Now is therefore as good a time as any to jump to a conclusion: the question history will ask is whether Bush's presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon's or only as bad as Jimmy Carter's.

Five years ago, with the ruins of the Twin Towers still smoking, many Americans— I should own that I was one of them— looked at Bush and thought they saw a Churchill, or at least a Truman: a leader fortuitously equipped for a difficult job at a critical moment. Bush'spartisans are still holding out for misunderestimated greatness, to be vindicated in the end. They think Bush will be to the war on jihadism what Truman was to the Cold War: the guy who established the course that will see the country through decades of peril. To those disinclined to suspend judgment for fifty years, however, Bush's course is looking less like a long road than a dead end.

Even many conservatives have lost faith; in a recent interview with CBS News, no less a conservative luminary than William F. Buckley declared, "There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush." For the disenchanted—again, including me—the relevant points of reference now are not Churchill or Truman but Nixon and Carter.

One of the best ways to judge a president is to ask, Did he solve more problems than he created? This test is more severe than it may seem, because presidents are prone to mischief and grandiosity. With Presidents Reagan, Bush Senior, and Clinton, the country had a good run. Reagan curtailed inflation and rebuilt U.S. strength; Bush broke the back of the deficit and closed out the Cold War peacefully;Clinton finished the fiscal cleanup and managed to assert U.S.supremacy while enhancing U.S. popularity. All made mistakes, but they got more right than wrong.

Nixon and Carter, on the other hand, both did some good things (Nixon went to China, Carter deregulated transportation); but both, in the end, turned in negative balance sheets. Carter's weak leadership drained American confidence and prestige, and his clumsy regulation of energy markets and dithering on inflation damaged the economy. Reagan, however, moved briskly to restore confidence, decontrol energy, and support the monetary tightening that subdued inflation. By the end of Reagan's first term, Carter's mistakes were memories. Carter took only a few years to undo, which made him more a downer than a disaster.

Nixon was a disaster. Unwinding him took decades, not years. It was Nixon whose cynical pump priming and absurd wage and price controls ignited double-digit inflation and bequeathed it to three succeeding presidents, with aftershocks (for instance, the savings and loan crisis) that lasted into the George H. W. Bush years. It was Nixon whose fiscal policies—cutting defense unsustainably while expanding entitlement programs—caused the deficit crisis that would torment every president through Clinton. Watergate and the administration's mendacious handling of Vietnam undermined confidence in government for a generation. Nixon's mistakes—and there were others—were gifts that kept on giving.

As for the current president, Buckley isn't quite right. Bush will leave a legacy, in the form of four headaches.

The fiscal mess. Bush's tax cuts and spending increases turned a $236 billion federal surplus in fiscal 2000 into a deficit of more than $400 billion four years later, an astonishing reversal. That the current year's deficit may come in at something like $300 billion is little cause for comfort; with Baby Boomers due to retire and an expensive Medicare drug benefit kicking in, the country's fiscal position is weak.

The Iraq mess. The invasion was a gamble; the failure to scrub the prewar intelligence and properly manage the postwar occupation were mistakes. The gamble might still pay off, but the mistakes have astronomically raised the gamble's cost in lives, money, prestige, and U.S. strategic focus and position (Iran has been the invasion's signal beneficiary).

International opprobrium. The Iraq adventure fueled a precipitous decline in America's image abroad, and Bush's pugnacious style during his first term and his tin ear for foreign opinion made a bad situation worse. This is more than just a public-relations problem. National prestige is diplomatic capital; the more unpopular America becomes, the higher the price of foreign support. Mark Malloch Brown,the UN's deputy secretary-general, recently said that suspicion of the United States has grown to the point where "many otherwise quite moderate countries" are inclined to oppose anything we favor.

An extralegal terrorism war. If the country seriously intends to prevent terrorism, then spying at home, detaining terror suspects, andc onducting tough interrogations are practices that the government will need to engage in for many years to come. Instead of making proper legal provisions for those practices, Bush has run the war against jihadism out of his back pocket, as a permanent state of emergency. Hee ngages in legal ad-hockery and trickery, treats Congress as a nuisance rather than a partner, and circumvents outmoded laws and treaties when he should be creating new ones. Of all Bush's failings, his refusal to build durable underpinnings for what promises to be a long struggle is the most surprising, the most gratuitous, and potentially the most damaging, both to the sustainability of the antiterrorism effort and to the constitutional order.

How long will unwinding Bush take? Because of demographic headwinds, balancing the budget looks like a long-term project, requiring a decade if things go well, two or three decades (or forever) if not. Some of today's anti-Americanism, by contrast, may be anti-Bushism that will prove quick to dissipate. The Iraq situation could tip one way or the other, but Bush himself has acknowledged that the disposition of U.S. forces in Iraq "will be decided by future presidents" (note the plural).

In principle, a domestic legal framework for the war on jihadism could be constructed in several years by a determined president and Congress (new treaty arrangements, such as a much-needed update of the Geneva Conventions, would take longer); or, much less desirably, the courts might wind up piecing together a ramshackle framework over a decade or more.
All in all, a reasonable guess is that unwinding Bush will take more than a decade but less than two, meaning the job will be harder than unwinding Carter but easier than unwinding Nixon. In doing it, however, Bush's successors will have one useful ally: Bush himself. Albeit grudgingly, he has begun working with Congress on terrorism-war legislation; in the realm of foreign policy, as former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke noted recently in Foreign Affairs, "George W. Bush's second administration has made a serious, and partially successful, effort to undo some of the damage the first Bush team caused." (Carter also tried to be a self-unwinder, changing course on détente and fiscal policy, but he ran out of time. Part of FDR's genius was that he unwound himself at least twice.)

Bush has two years left to unwind himself; and if he's lucky, he'll have a Democratic House or Senate to help. He has been cursed with a Republican Congress that has indulged his worst tendencies—but that problem, at least, the voters might soon unwind.

Old MacDonald had a CAFO

2006-09-12T14:23:00.000-06:00

In response to treehugger's comment:

CAFO's always win out over the environment because ranchers always get what they want.

I mean really, from a political standpoint, how can one oppose agriculture (providing life to people) and business (providing life to capitalism) without being a bad american. Might as well be pissing on the flag.

Oh yeah, and we eat too much meat. Eat your veggies.

... and Justice for All ...

2006-09-12T13:57:00.000-06:00

I agree in principle. That's why The Revolution stands for Mother Earth and Peace & Justice.

On the one hand, actions that help the planet help everyone. We need to be vigilant to ensure that justice for all includes justice for our Mother.

On the other hand, that's all good and well, but what about being able to EAT that day?! Not FREEZE to death that day?! We need to be vigilant to stand for justice for those who may be powerless or overpowered.

These factors all need to weighed when determining the best course of action. The causes of Peace and Justice and Planet Earth ought to go hand in hand rather than go fist to fist.

Check out this clearinghouse of information of environmental justice:
Environmental Poverty Law Program
http://www.legalaidnc.org/Programs/eplp/services/library.asp

... for peace, justice and Mother Earth ...

Green Elitism

2006-09-12T09:21:00.000-06:00

One thing that I continually struggle with as a "Greeny" is the tendency of environmental organizations and their causes to be elitist at times. I think that environmentalism is sort of inherently elitist. After all, isn't saving old growth forests, darter snails, and salmon habitat really the business of those who are privileged enough not to have to worry too much about the direct effects of such things as poverty, homelessness, racism, war, and genocide.

And without a doubt, sometimes, environmentalist causes do run counter to those of under-privileged or disenfranshised peoples. Take the spotted-owl versus timber-dependent communities controversy in the northwest for example. Here, an owl did take priority over the economic well-being of some poor, rural communities, thanks to the ESA. As another example, how does NIMBY-ism impact those communities who lack the clout, time, and resources to fight polluting facilities and waste dumps. Inevitably, they lose out.

This is why I am so drawn to environmental justice causes. Environmental justice is environmentalism for "real people." Unfortunately, environmental justice issues are not something that mainstream environmental organizations will take up. Why? Because mainstream environmental orgs are elitist. Why are they elitist? Because their members are elitist and their members define their missions and drive their activities. Members of environmental organizations are white, middle class yuppies, after all. They are worried about whether or not they will be able to breath clean air while hiking through Arches National Park and not whether or not their drinking water is giving them cancer.

Look at me, ruthlessly criticizing a cause that is so near and dear to my heart. But I think it is important that we are able to critically analyze the organizations that we support. I think it is critical that we are able to anticipate the repercussions of their actions. And I have real concerns that in supporting my local environmental organizations efforts to prevent a power plant from being built in my backyard, I am helping to ensure that it will be built in the backyard of someone much poorer and politically powerless. I am worried that in supporting efforts to protect a rainforest in South America, that I might be helping to ensure that an indigenous tribe is up-rooted and displaced so that some rich American can have somewhere to build their resort. I think we "greenies" have to think about these things. I think that mainstream env. orgs. must incorporate environmental justice causes into their agenda.

Fool Me Once, shame on you; fool me twice ...

2006-09-11T15:47:00.000-06:00

Great stuff from Mother Jones. Always listen to your Mother.

Lie by Lie: Chronicle of a War Foretold: August 1990 to March 2003

http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/index.html

We have met the enemy, and it is us

2006-09-11T15:18:00.000-06:00

9/11: What Changed Is What We've Done to Ourselves

There's a good piece by Jonathan Raban in the Independent on what really changed after 9/11. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1372676.ece

"Since September 11..." we say, as if the attacks were what changed everything. The month is right but the day wrong, because the real metamorphosis has arisen not so much from what Mohamed Atta and his co-conspirators did to us on September 11 as what we've subsequently done to ourselves - and continue to do, today, tomorrow, and in the foreseeable future (incredibly foreshortened though that has become). On September 12, still in shock at the extraordinary injury inflicted on the US, we woke to essentially the same world we'd been living in before the phones began to ring. The death toll - then estimated at 10,000-plus - was horrifying, on the scale of a major earthquake or tsunami, but the globe continued to revolve on its accustomed axis, as it does after even the most devastating seismic killers. ...

Not 9/11, he argues, but 9/18 is "the real date to circle."

That day, Congress rushed through its Authorization For Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the President, as the nation's commander in chief, to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against "those nations, organisations, or persons" that "he determines" were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, "...in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organisations, or persons." It's the "such" that's the key, the inclusion of nations, organisations, or persons "of that sort", which nicely covers, for instance, the invasion of Iraq, the arrest and detention of most of the prisoners now languishing in Guantanamo Bay, possible future military action against Iran, or Syria, or both, and heaven knows what else, since "such" is a term of potentially limitless capacity to make hitherto unguessed-at likenesses and connections.

The sloppily-worded AUMF endowed the administration with unique and wide-ranging powers. It has become the licence for the executive branch to wave at Congress and the judiciary whenever its actions are questioned or censured. On September 18 2001, the delicate balance between the three branches of government, as laid out in the American constitution, was thrown severely out of whack; since that day, one branch, the presidency, has enjoyed an unprecedented primacy over the others, and we've been living with the consequences of AUMF ever since.

(On "Terrorists")
"The terrorists" used once to mean the dubious entity of al-Qa'ida. Now it's an umbrella term, spread ever wider to shelter an astonishing variety of administration-designated bad guys: Hamas, Hizbollah, Kashmiri separatists, the Taliban, Ba'athist insurgents, Sunni jihadists, the Mahdi Army, the governments of Iran, Syria, North Korea. It's like Falstaff conjuring ever greater numbers of enemies heroically fought off: two, four, seven, 11 men in buckram... So Bush multiplies terrorists, and counts them by the million. Now they surround us on every flank and quarter, and if we don't fight them abroad (the traditional resort of domestically weak presidencies), we'll find ourselves combating them, hand to hand, on Walnut and Jackson in our own home town."

Silence is violence/in women and poor people ...

2006-09-11T14:10:00.000-06:00

Women Expose Street Harassment
By Elana Fiske, Ms. Magazine
Women who are cat-called on the street can put their harassers to shame with the help of a New York-based website.

http://www.alternet.org/stories/41324

Earth First ...

2006-09-08T17:30:00.000-06:00

... we'll trash the other planets later.

Tidy summary of the disaster that is Bush's record on the environment

http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/index.php

Sunshine on my Shoulder ...

2006-09-08T17:08:00.000-06:00

JOIN THE VIRTUAL MARCH: STOP GLOBAL WARMING

"By joining THE STOP GLOBAL WARMING VIRTUAL MARCH, we commit to each other that together, as our numbers grow, we will use our collective voices to demand that governments, corporations, and politicians take the steps necessary to stop global warming. Today I join this march, and I take the first step."

http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/

Their lips are moving, but all I hear is blah blah blah ...

2006-09-04T23:15:00.000-06:00

How can someone be "pro-life" when they spend so much time and effort advocating government-sponsored death? How can someone be "pro-life" when they spend so much time and effort advocating preemptive war?
They are so passionate about wanting to kill while crowning themselves champions of "life".
What hypocrisy.

(Example 2 is not a contradiction. First, no one is "advocating death" by abortion. Rather, we are suggesting that reproductive decisions ought to be left to women and their physicians, rather than white male farmer legislators from Sheepville Idaho. Second, a "person's life" starts when the "person" starts, at birth. Not when the condom breaks, righties!)

ps Thanks to my son Jeffrey for the snappy title

None Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

2006-09-03T23:39:00.000-06:00

Taunya wrote:

In light of all of the discussion around the criminal justice system
and the death penalty, I wanted to share an experience that I just had:

The research center where I work is contracted with the Idaho Supreme
Court to conduct a process evaluation of Mental Health Courts across the
state of Idaho. This is my project until I leave September 8th. I just returned
from Bonneville County (Idaho Falls), where they have a very well
established and very reputable Mental Health Court. I spent two days observing
staffings, court proceedings, conducting focus groups and doing interviews.
I was so moved by the program there that I wanted to stay and be a part of it.
It is truly amazing!
 
Mental Health Court resembles a complete paradigm shift in the criminal
justice system. The participants are viewed not as criminals, but as
individuals needing assistance so that they might improve their quality
of life and become productive members of society rather than repeating the
hospitalization/incarceration cycle over and over again as they have
been doing. The point, really, is to provide an alternative to incarcertions
and hospitalizations by putting them through an intensive treatment program
that involves everything from medication stabilization to counseling to
substance abuse treatment to vocational rehabilitation.


The court fully recognizes that up until now, the criminal justice system has failed these
individuals terribly. 
And it fully recognizes that these individuals do not belong in 
and cannot succeed in the correctional system.  


The Bonneville County Court is considered a model across the nation. It
was really made possible by the former Drug Court Judge there who
recognized that traditional courts were not working for individuals with mental
illness. He championed the cause, traveling across the country to visit
and learn about other Mental Health Courts and then beginning his own
without any financial or administrative support. Now, they have a great deal of
support and resources and it has been a great success.

I just wanted to share because it was so refreshing to see this
fundamental shift in the usually overly punitive, unsympathetic, irrational, and
terribly unsuccessful criminal justice system. Persons with mental
illness make up a large percentage of the prison inmate population and a great
many of them do not belong there and cannot be rehabilitated in prison.

Taunya

P.S. Interestingly enough, Paul is in the process of getting one of his
clients into the Mental Health Court here in Boise.

Death Penalty v. Abortion

2006-09-02T20:27:00.000-06:00

What do you all make of the contradiction inherent in both liberal and conservative positions on abortion and the death penalty? That is, the contradiction in being pro-choice and anti-death penalty or anti-choice and pro-death penalty? Personally, I believe that only the latter is a contradiction as life does not begin until birth, though others would disagree.

Death is Different

2006-09-01T16:08:00.000-06:00

When it comes to the criminal justice system, death is different.

We cannot simply assume that the trial process works. We cannot simply assume the appeal process works. People are wrongfully convicted.

That is, unfortunately, inevitable. However, in death penalty cases, a "mistake" (a sad way to label something that screws up many people's lives, usually permanently and beyond repair) cannot be undone.

Here's an organization who's sole purpose is to find cases where persons have been wrongfully convicted, and prove innocence by DNA evidence. Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck are at the forefront of this movement. Please take a moment to review:

http://www.innocenceproject.org/

"The Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, founded by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992, is a non-profit legal clinic and criminal justice resource center. We work to exonerate the wrongfully convicted through postconviction DNA testing; and develop and implement reforms to prevent wrongful convictions."

Peace-Lovin' Brother

2006-08-31T17:12:00.000-06:00

Edward writes:

According to the statistics below, it is much more expensive to execute someone than to incarcerate them for life.The great majority of this cost has to do with legal expenses. But then depriving someone of their life is so permanent that we don'twant to make a mistake, do we? And despite the procedures that we have, many people on death row have been exonerated in the past fewyears with DNA evidence.

From "The Economics of Capital Punishment" http://www.mindspring.com/~phporter/econ.html
A Duke University study found... "The death penalty costs NorthCarolina $2.16 million per execution over the costs of a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of imprisonment for life." ( The costs of processing murder cases in North Carolina / Philip J. Cook,Donna B. Slawson ; with the assistance of Lori A. Gries. [Durham, NC]: Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University, 1993.)

"The death penalty costs California $90 million annually beyond the ordinary costs of the justice system - $78 million of that total is incurred at the trial level." (Sacramento Bee, March 18, 1988)."

A 1991 study of the Texas criminal justice system estimated the cost of appealing capital murder at $2,316,655. In contrast, the cost of housing a prisoner in a Texas maximum security prison single cell for40 years is estimated at $750,000." (Punishment and the Death Penalty, edited by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum 1995 p.109 )

"Florida spent an estimated $57 million on the death penalty from 1973to 1988 to achieve 18 executions - that is an average of $3.2 millionper execution."(Miami Herald, July 10, 1988).
"Florida calculated that each execution there costs some $3.18 million. If incarceration is estimated to cost $17000/year, a comparable statistic for life in prison of 40 years would be $680,000."(The Geography of Execution... The Capital Punishment Quagmire inAmerica, Keith Harries and Derral Cheatwood 1997 p.6)

Figures from the General Accounting Office are close to these results. Total annual costs for all U.S. Prisons, State and Federal, was $17.7billion in 1994 along with a total prison population of 1.1 million inmates. That amounts to $16100 per inmate/year. (GAO report and testimony FY-97 GGD-97-15 )

Peace Sells, But Who's Buying?

2006-08-31T17:02:00.000-06:00

A Department of Peace? In THIS country? Please ...

Well, maybe ...

http://www.thepeacealliance.org/

Participate in an historic citizen lobbying effort to create a U.S. Department of Peace. There is currently a bill before both Houses of Congress (House Resolution 3760 and Senate 1756). This historic measure will augment our current problem-solving modalities, providing practical, nonviolent solutions to the problems of domestic and international conflict.Domestically, the Department of Peace will develop policies and allocate resources to effectively reduce the levels of domestic and gang violence, child abuse, and various other forms of societal discord. Internationally, the Department will advise the President and Congress on the most sophisticated ideas and techniques regarding peace-creation among nations. Learn more...
Join us now. Create a Department of Peace.

Natural Born Killers

2006-08-31T16:49:00.000-06:00

In response to a recent suggestion by a loved one that we start "frying everyone" instead of paying for them to be in prison:

Death row and the execution process is more expensive than life in prison. This is a common misperception among the general public, that frying everyone will save us lots of money. The issue of wrongful executions aside for now, see

http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/event2/costs.html
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/index.php
http://www.ncadp.org/fact_sheet3.html

www.msu.edu/~millettf/DeathPenalty/abolish.pdf

Sounds good, but doesn't actually work.

Does this thing work?

2006-07-21T17:27:00.000-06:00

Ok, so I have no idea what I'm doing here. But we'll give this a shot and try to have some fun along the way. Be patient. Have fun.

peacecart