Chertoff: "A Vote For Lieberman & Republicans is a Vote to for Patriot Act II"

Readers are advised that no changes in U.S. laws since Bush entered the White House on January 20, 2001 were necessary to have done what the Brits did in uncovering these alleged plotters.


Political appointee, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff on Meet the Press: "If Democrats don't retake control over Congress in November elections, Bush is going to declare that the election gave him a mandate to pass laws for more invasive surveillance programs on American citizens, and do away with habeas corpus, (and also drop nuclear bombs on Iran)"

The AP reports:

The nation's chief of homeland security said Sunday that the U.S. should consider reviewing its laws to allow for more electronic surveillance and detention of possible terror suspects, citing last week's foiled plot.

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, stopped short of calling for immediate changes, noting there might be constitutional barriers to the type of wide police powers the British had in apprehending suspects in the plot to blow up airliners headed to the U.S.

But Chertoff made clear his belief that wider authority could thwart future attacks at a time when Congress is reviewing the proper scope of the Bush administration's executive powers for its warrantless eavesdropping program and military tribunals for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"What helped the British in this case is the ability to be nimble, to be fast, to be flexible, to operate based on fast-moving information," he said. "We have to make sure our legal system allows us to do that. It's not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants."

The Bush administration has pushed for greater executive authority in the war on terror, leading it to create a warrantless eavesdropping program, hold suspects who are deemed as "enemy combatants" for long periods and establish a military tribunal system for detainees that affords defendants fewer rights than traditional courts-martial.

Congress is now reviewing some of the programs after lawmakers questioned the legality of the eavesdropping program and the Supreme Court ruled in June that the tribunals defied international law and had not been authorized by Congress.

On Sunday, Chertoff said the U.S. is remaining vigilant for other attacks, citing concerns that terror groups may "think we are distracted" after last week's foiled plot. Attaining "maximum flexibility" in surveillance of transactions and communications will be critical in preventing future attacks, he said.

"We've done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency," Chertoff said. "But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they're helping us, not hindering us."

He said he expects the Bush administration to keep the U.S. on its highest threat alert for flights headed to the U.S. from the United Kingdom and at its second-highest level for all other flights.

"We haven't fully analyzed the evidence, and therefore, we're still concerned there may be some plotters who are out there," Chertoff said. "We also have to be concerned about other groups that may seize the opportunity to carry out attacks because they think we are distracted with this plot."

Still, Chertoff said he believed that the nation's airline screeners were well-positioned to catch future terrorists. He did not anticipate greater restrictions beyond the current ban on carrying liquids and gels onto airliners, such as barring all carry-on luggage.

"We don't want to inconvenience unnecessarily," he said. "I think we can do the job with our screening, screening training and our technology without banning all carry-on luggage."

Chertoff made the comments on "Fox News Sunday" and ABC's "This Week."

On "Meet the Press," David Gregory asked Chertoff:

MR. GREGORY: It is, of course, your job, a major part of your job, to understand how al-Qaeda thinks. This is what the vice president had to say this week with regard to that, after Senator Lieberman’s primary defeat. This is how Newsweek reported it: “Vice president, Dick Cheney, darkly warned that the Connecticut primary victory of antiwar candidate Ned Lamont over Sen. Joseph Lieberman would only encourage ‘Al Qaeda types.’ Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge bridled at his former colleague’s remark: ‘That may be the way the vice president sees it,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see it that way, and I don’t think most Americans see it that way.’” What’s your view of how al-Qaeda interprets our domestic politics?

SEC’Y CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, I stay out of domestic politics.

A political appointee, dispatched by the Bush-Cheney administration to make the rounds of the news programs on the Sunday following the U.S. pushing Britain to go public with their news of the alleged plot in order to change the subject of Ned Lamont beating Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary, and Chertoff claims to be staying out of domestic politics?!?!

Uh huh. . . watch now how Chertoff continues to not get into domestic politics:

SEC'Y CHERTOFF: What I do think is important is that we be very clear in our message to the world—and this has to be true on a bipartisan basis—that we are steadfast and resolute in the war against terror. I think if we suggest any weakness, that does encourage them to believe they can carry out their missions.

But I want to emphasize this, David. The targets here are all Americans. They, they do not distinguish between Republicans and Democrats. So we are all in this together, and this has to be a unified effort across the board.

"All Americans" are not the targets - They would love to get their hands on Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Stephen Hadley, Douglas Feith, and all other members of the U.S. government responsible for the policies and governments that continue to repress them in their countries. They know the difference between the U.S. government and the American people. But they can't get their hands on Bush, et al, who are hiding behind us, the American people.

The people in all of the countries in the Middle East would love real democracy in their nations, and the majority would vote out the governments that have been propped up by the west in a N.Y. minute and elect Shi'a clerics to represent and lead them. "People power." Where the resources of their nations belong to the people, and not the Royal families in the region or the puppet governments that the west has imposed on them. Nationalized oil.

MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you about our coordination with British authorities. What worked here?

Continuing not to stay out of domestic politics, Chertoff replied:

SEC’Y CHERTOFF: Well, what worked is deep relationships, trust, the fact that we did not have leaks prior to the takedown. You know, that’s one of the critical lessons out of this whole thing. The British trusted us with very sensitive information, and they were able to do it because they were confident we weren’t going to leak. That’s why leaks are so pernicious. Not only do they actually reveal secrets, but they undercut the basis of trust which is the foundation of our whole international effort.

I guess then that the American press corps can be trusted with information that legitimately needs to remain secret for the people's safety, and information that is kept secret for the political fortunes of Bush and the Republican party.

I am so ready for a change.


Filed under: Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security, David Gregory, Meet the Press, Al Qaeda, War on terror, reasons not to vote for Republicans, why they hate us

Drum Roll, Please . . . .

TCA's Teacher of the Year-Award Goes To:



This guy. He is a born-teacher; 'patience and even-demeanored' personified.

Filed under: dogs love gum

Bill Richardson Tries to Alpha-Wolf His Way to the Top of the 08 Ticket

. . . by wooing the netroots

The netroots are getting all moist over Bill Richardson since his call for Joe Lieberman to get out of the race for the Senate. Of course Lieberman should get out of the race, and all professional Democrats (in office and out) should be united behind the call. But it's not going to happen.

The netroots (bless all of our naive hearts) haven't yet absorbed the fact that the whole of Democratic party power is lining up to destroy the liberal democratic base and any candidate that we get behind and through primaries to nomination.

You'd think we would have learned that lesson after Howard Dean in '04.

The Democratic party machine, the DLC, the DSCC, are all working to get Joe Lieberman elected. Publicly, of course they're going to get behind Ned Lamont, but there is no way that they are going to stand still for a populist uprising with a populist candidate. [See 'TCA,' for July 24, 2006: "Bill Clinton's Trip to Connecticut - Sister Soldjah Redux]

Joe Lieberman, running as an independent, has a very good chance of winning - with very few of the Connecticut democrats' votes. If he pulls it off, the ball is in his court as to whom he will caucus with. It's possible that nationwide enough Democratic candidates running for the Senate will win which would give the majority back to the Democrats. Unless Lieberman chooses to caucus with the Republicans. The Democratic machine isn't going to take the chance of that happening, by offending Lieberman, cutting him off.

If Lieberman wins, he will be sitting in the catbird seat. If we thought he was an arrogant bastard before, we haven't seen anything like Joe Lieberman with concentrated power. And the Establishment in Connecticut knows this - Joe would be in a position to serve them, and Connecticut, very well. In a situation like that, don't count on that 48% who voted for Lieberman in the primary voting for Lamont. Lieberman could count on them, and the 13% of republicans and a substantial percentage of the independent voters. It's not pretty, but it's politics. The politics of pragmatism.

All the while Ned Lamont will be having rallies and giving speeches with respectable numbers of democrats showing up. Nothing overwhelming, no huge crowds, no groundswell of a movement. Let's face it, Lamont's no charismatic guy. He's no Mr. Excitement. The leaders of the Democratic party will send their $5000 checks to Lamont. In their sweet time. They will show up for a photo op, smile, shake his hand, say a few words to liven up the base, and then on their way out of town they'll pay homage to Ol' Joe privately. In some fat contributor's home, assuring the fat cat that Joe is 'Da MAN!' And he will rake in the really big money.

Every day that Joe Lieberman remains in the race is another step back for the Lamont campaign. Once Lieberman leaked that if he didn't get the Democratic nomination he would run as an independent (and the Democrats didn't disabuse him of that plan), Lamont's winning became an even longer longshot than it already was. Lamont's campaign thought if they just got through the primary, and won, they'd be home free. Every time Lamont has asked in an interview about Lieberman staying in the race as an independent, he's given the same old shrug, "It's up to him to decide":

MATTHEWS: If you beat Joe Lieberman tonight in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and you beat him by any margin, do you believe that you can talk him out of running as an Independent?

LAMONT: I don‘t think that‘s for me to talk him out of anything, but I‘ve said I‘m following the rules of the Democratic primary, I‘m going to support the winner of the primary and my hunch is there‘s going to be an awful lot of Democrats around the state and elsewhere who are suggesting maybe that‘s what the senator should do as well.

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that Chris Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut, will play a role in any power brokering to try to reduce the Democratic division here and have only one candidate with Democratic support, that means you?

LAMONT: I would hope so.

MATTHEWS: You hope he would come in and talk Joe out of running as a third party?

LAMONT: Look, that‘s his call to make.

MATTHEWS: But you‘d like him to do it, right?

LAMONT: I think it would be better for the Democratic Party. I think we should be united going forward. Look, this campaign, we‘ve got close to 30,000 Democrats that have registered in the last four months alone. That‘s a lot in a state like this. We‘ve got folks who are getting off the couches, coming off the sidelines, getting involved in this race and I think it‘s important that on August 9th, we be unified and go forward together.

MATTHEWS: Bill Clinton campaigned for Joe Lieberman in the primary. Whatever happens in the primary, do you believe that the winner of the primary, if it‘s you, would you go and call for Bill Clinton to campaign for you in the general?

LAMONT: Absolutely. I think he was a good president. I don‘t think in a heartbeat he would have had a unilateral invasion of Iraq and I would be proud to have him come back to the state.

Lamont's campaign should have been confronting Lieberman's plan, they should have been all over Lieberman and the DNC, and blowing the lid off of it when it first came out. They missed that window, and a couple of others since.

Lamont and his handlers don't seem to understand that as each event unfolds Lamont is being judged as much for what he doesn't do or say as for what he does do and say. Lieberman's staying in the race, his computer problems, his interview on LKL and everywhere else the day following the election, a new terrorist plot foiled all have served to make Lamont look ineffectual. That is death for a politician, especially during "wartime," when the opposition intends to make it an issue.

When Ned Lamont was declared the primary winner, Hillary announced that she was supporting him and that she had just written him a check for $5,000. Did you know that she gave $10,000 to Lieberman? That's some sweet set-up these politicians have. Our elected representatives set up their own PACs, so that they can buy other politicians from other districts and states, damn what the voters of those states want.

We have a broken system, and they're all part of it. Democrats and Republicans. The DSCC shouldn't even exist, incumbents backing each other in primaries. When voters complain about unaccountable and out-of-touch politicians, they have only themselves to blame for it.

And nobody should be lionizing Bill Richardson for doing what the whole of the Democratic party leadership should be doing. Calling for Lieberman to leave the race is Richardson kissing up to the liberal base for his 2008 run for the Presidency. Richardson risks nothing by calling for Lieberman to stand down. When no other Democrats join Richardson and Lieberman remains in the race, Richardson loses nothing for having tried. Richardson will be ahead of the game, as a champion of the left, when he's nobody that the left should ever be considering for any job. The guy is a conservative who is only in the Democratic party because you can't get elected in New Mexico unless you are a Democrat. He counts on voters being too ignorant to know his record. And it's worked out well for him.

Richardson is no 'man of the people.' He's from a wealthy and connected family. He was born in California to a Mexican mother, and got his anglo name from his father, an executive with Citibank. Richardson grew up in Boston, then went to Tufts where he a frat boy majoring in French and political science. He had his sites set on government early on - the State Department. The Henry Kissinger State Department. As a matter of fact, he went to work for Kissinger's consulting firm, years ago, and then again in 2001. Richardson has had a lot to answer for, throughout his career, and there are many people and groups still waiting to hear those answers. Not the least of which should be his part in Bush getting into the White House in 2004.

Richardson should be held to answer for (among so many of his undemocratic acts) what he did two years ago, which was to block Kerry voters' ballots from getting counted because it was politically expedient for him. It enabled him to get rid of an adversary in his own state, another Democrat. Had those ballots been counted, Kerry would have won New Mexico, and wouldn't have needed Ohio. Kerry would be in the White House today.

Recipe for a Cooked Election by Greg Palast:

A nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage

A nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage. Most are called "spoiled," supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted. This “spoilage” has occurred for decades, but it reached unprecedented heights in the last two presidential elections. In the 2004 election, for example, more than three million ballots were never counted.

Almost as deep a secret is that people are doing something about it. In New Mexico, citizen activists, disgusted by systematic vote disappearance, demanded change — and got it.

In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away — more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. The official number is bad enough — 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government’s Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count.

Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. Why doesn’t your government tell you this?

Hey, they do. It’s right there in black and white in a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election — in a footnote. The Census tabulation of voters voting in the 2004 presidential race "differs," it reads, from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives by 3.4 million votes.

This is the hidden presidential count, which, with the exception of the Census’s whispered footnote, has not been reported. In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called "spoilage." Spoilage, not the voters, picked our President for us. Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the three million ballots uncounted due to technical "glitches," millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.

Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, “It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.” That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the USA, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don’t get counted decides our winners.

In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney’s bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that’s not how it went down.

The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The principal means of the election heist — voiding ballots — went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale next time

Like a forensic crime scene investigation unit, we can perform a post mortem starting with the exhumation of more than three million uncounted votes:

Provisional Ballots Rejected. An entirely new species of ballot debuted nationwide in 2004: the "provisional ballot." These were crucial to the Bush victory. Not because Republicans won this "provisional" vote. They won by rejecting provisional ballots that were cast overwhelmingly in Democratic precincts. The sum of "the uncounted" is astonishing: 675,676 ballots lost in the counties reporting to the federal government. Add in the missing jurisdictions and the un-vote climbs to over a million: 1,090,729 provisional ballots tossed out.

Spoiled Ballots. You vote, you assume it’s counted. Think again. Your "x" was too light for a machine to read. You didn’t punch the card hard enough and so you "hung your chad." Therefore, your vote didn’t count and, crucially, you’ll never know it. The federal Election Assistance Commission toted up nearly a million ballots cast but not counted. Add in states too shy to report to Washington, the total “spoilage” jumps to a rotten 1,389,231.

Absentee Ballots Uncounted. The number of absentee ballots has quintupled in many states, with the number rejected on picayune technical grounds rising to over half a million (526,420) in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic.

Voters Barred from Voting. In this category we find a combination of incompetence and trickery that stops voters from pulling the lever in the first place. There’s the purge of "felon" voters that continues to eliminate thousands whose only crime is VWB — Voting While Black. It includes subtle games like eliminating polling stations in selected districts, creating impossible lines. No one can pretend to calculate a hard number for all votes lost this way any more than you can find every bullet fragment in a mutilated body. But it’s a safe bet that the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands of voters locked out of the voting booth.

The test kitchen

But do these un-votes really turn the election? Voters from both parties used provisional or absentee ballots, and the machines can’t tell if a hanging chad is Democratic or Republican, right? Not so. To see how it works, we went to New Mexico.

Dig this: In November 2004 during early voting in Precinct 13, Taos, New Mexico, John Kerry took 73 votes. George Bush got three. On election day, 216 in that precinct voted Kerry. Bush got 25 votes, and came in third.

Third? Taking second place in the precinct, with 40 votes, was no one at all.

Or, at least, that’s what the machines said.

Precinct 13 is better known as the Taos Pueblo. Every single voter there is an American Native or married to one.

Precinct 13 wasn’t unique. On Navajo lands, indecision struck on an epidemic scale. They walked in, they didn’t vote. In nine precincts in McKinley County, New Mexico, which is 74.7 percent Navajo, fewer than one in ten voters picked a president. Those who voted on paper ballots early or absentee knew who they wanted (Kerry, overwhelmingly), but the machine-counted vote said Indians simply couldn’t make up their minds or just plain didn’t care.

On average, across the state, the machine printouts say that 7.3 percent — one in twelve voters — in majority Native precincts didn’t vote for president. That’s three times the percentage of white voters who appeared to abstain. In pueblo after pueblo, on reservation after reservation throughout the United States, the story was the same.

Nationally, one out of every 12 ballots cast by Native Americans did not contain a vote for President. Indians by the thousands drove to the voting station, walked into the booth, said, “Who cares?” and walked out without voting for president.

So we dropped in on Taos, Precinct 13. The "old" pueblo is old indeed— built 500 to 1,000 years ago. In these adobe dwellings stacked like mud condos, no electricity is allowed nor running water — nor Republicans as far as records show. Richard Archuleta, a massive man with long, gray pigtails and hands as big as flank steaks, is the head of tourism for the pueblo. Richard wasn’t buying the indecision theory of the Native non-count. Indians were worried about their Bureau of Indian Affairs grants, their gaming licenses, and working conditions at their other big employer: the U.S. military.

On the pueblo’s mud-brick walls there were several hand painted signs announcing Democratic Party powwows, none for Republicans. Indecisive? Indians are Democrats. Case closed. The color that counts It wasn’t just Native Americans who couldn’t seem to pick a President. Throughout New Mexico, indecisiveness was pandemic ... at least, that is, among people of color. Or so the machines said. Across the state, high-majority Hispanic precincts recorded a 7.1 percent vote for nobody for president.

We asked Dr. Philip Klinkner, the expert who ran stats for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, to look at the New Mexico data. His solid statistical analysis discovered that if you’re Hispanic, the chance your vote will not record on the machine was 500% higher than if you are white. For Natives, it’s off the charts. The Hispanic and Native vote is no small potatoes. Every tenth New Mexican is American Native (9.5 percent) and half the remaining population (43 percent) is Mexican-American.

Our team drove an hour across the high desert from the Taos Reservation to Española in Rio Arriba County. According to the official tallies, entire precincts of Mexican-Americans registered few or zero votes for president in the last two elections. Española is where the Los Alamos workers live, not the Ph.D.s in the white lab coats, but the women who clean the hallways and the men who bury the toxins. This was not Bush country, and the people we met with, including the leaders of the get-out-the-vote operations, knew of no Hispanics who insisted on waiting at the polling station to cast their vote for "nobody for President." The huge majority of Mexican- Americans, especially in New Mexico, and a crushing majority of Natives (over 90 percent), vote Democratic.

What if those voters weren’t indecisive; what if they punched in a choice and it didn’t record? Let’s do the arithmetic. As minority voters cast 89 percent of the state’s 21,084 blank ballots, that’s 18,765 missing minority votes. Given the preferences of other voters in those pueblos and barrios, those 18,765 voters of color should have swamped Bush’s 5,988 vote “majority” with Kerry votes. But that would have required those votes be counted.

The voting-industrial complex

New Mexico’s Secretary of State, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, seemed curiously uncurious about Hispanic and Native precincts where nearly one in ten voters couldn’t be bothered to choose a president.

Vigil-Giron, along with Governor Bill Richardson, not only stopped any attempt at a recount directly following the election, but demanded that all the machines be wiped clean. This not only concealed evidence of potential fraud but destroyed it. In 2006, New Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled the Secretary of State’s machine-cleaning job illegal — too late to change the outcome of the election, of course.

But who are we to second-guess Secretary Vigil-Giron? After all, she is a big shot, at the time president, no less, of the National Association of Secretaries of State, the top banana of all our nation&rsquos elections officials.

Vigil-Giron, after putting a stop to the recount, rather than schlep out to investigate the missing vote among the iguanas and Navajos, left the state to officiate at a dinner meeting in Minneapolis for her national association. It was held on a dinner boat. The tab for the moonlight ride was picked up by touch-screen voting machine maker ES&S Corporation. Breakfast, in case you&rsquore curious, was served by touchscreen maker Diebold Corp.

At the time of this writing, Vigil-Giron is busy planning the next big confab of vendors and state officials -- this time in Santa Fe, "the city different." But aside from Wal-Mart signing on as a sponsor, nothing much is different when it comes to the inner workings of the voting industrial complex.

Except for one thing.

Where's the action?

While Vigil-Giron is greeting her fellow Secretaries and casually introducing them to this year's vendors, it is likely she'll keep quiet about a few things. Voter Action, a group of motivated citizens, some jumping into activism for the first time, sued the state of New Mexico in 2005 over the bad machines and the failure to count the vote. The activists ran a public campaign with their revelations about New Mexico's broken democracy. Last year, Voter Action invited our investigations team to lay out our findings to huge citizens' meetings in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Soon, the whole horrid vote-losing game was on local community radio and TV stations. It worked.

Governor Richardson, who ducked the issue for three years, and his Secretary of State, once openly hostile to reform, had to relent in the face of the public uprising. In February of 2006, Richardson signed a model law requiring that all voting in the state take place on new paper ballot machines, with verifiable tabulating systems. Richardson now claims the mantle of leader of the voting reform campaign.

Voter Action, successful in New Mexico, is now pursuing lawsuits in seven states to stop the Secretaries of State from purchasing electronic voting systems which have records of inaccuracy, security risks, and have been proven unreliable.

In New Mexico we learned, once again, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. To protect your right to vote, you must know what is happening in your state – before, during, and after Election Day – and be willing to hold your leaders accountable.

Getting Joe Lieberman out of that Senate seat is going to be like trying to wrestle an orangutan for Julia Roberts. It's made all the harder by the base's refusal to recognize Bill Clinton has never really been a champion of the left. And Hillary is to the right of Bill.

Technorati Tags: Technorati Tag, Technorati Tags, tags, categories, Democratic Party, DLC, politics, 08, 06, 04, 2000, Rebecca Vigil Giron, John Kerry, Secretary of State, elections, Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont, Hardball, Greg Palast, New Mexico, Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, The Constant American, Constant American

1/3 of Male Fish in Rivers are Changing Sex

A third of male fish in English rivers are changing sex due to 'gender-bending' pollution, alarming research shows.

I have little doubt that if the U.S. E.P.A. was out from under Bush's and Republicans' control, we would be discovering the same thing is happening in U.S. waterways.

Fiona MacRae at the Daily Mail reports:

Experts say female hormones from the contraceptive pill and HRT are being washed into our rivers and causing male fish to produce eggs.

The problem - which is country-wide - has raised fears that the pollutants could also be contaminating our drinking water - and even be affecting the fertility of men.

The Environment Agency study looked at the health of more than 1600 roach found in 51 rivers and streams around the country.

Overall, a third of the male fish were between sexes. However, in one waterway, near a particularly heavy discharge of treated sewage more than 80 per cent had female characteristics.

Tests showed the males developed female sex organs and were producing eggs. Such fish also produce less sperm and the sperm that is produced is of low quality. Females may also be affected, producing abnormal eggs.

Previous studies have that cod, trout and flounders are all being feminised.

Researcher Professor Charles Tyler said that the fish are swimming in a soup of oestrogen-like compounds, found in the Pill and in HRT.

The hormone, which is also produced naturally by women and found in industrial waste, is released into our waterways after surviving the sewage treatment process.

Prof Tyler, one of the country's leading authorities on the effects of oestrogen, said: 'There is a soup of oestrogen compounds, all with different degrees of potency and they are interactive in their effects - if you add them together, you add there are additional effects.

'This soup of oestrogen is responsible for causing these changes to the fish. It is abnormal. These fish should be male or female. The fact that we have got such a large proportion right across the country is not right.'

The Exeter University professor said it is too early to say what the long-term implications will be for Britain's fishlife.

While it may not initially have a big impact on stock levels, a reduction in the number of breeding males could lead to all sorts of genetic problems in later years.

'Effects like a change in how many males can contribute to the population can change the genetic structure of the population,' he said. 'In five years' item, the whole system could go belly-up.'

Human health could also be at risk, with oestrogen from contaminated food and water building up in our bodies.

Although there is no conclusive proof, it is thought the hormone, which has similar actions in fish and humans, could be partly to blame for falling sperm counts in men.

British men's sperm counts dropped by almost a third between 1989 and 2002, and one in six couples now have difficulty conceiving.

Prof Tyler said: 'There is certainly the potential for it to have an effect in humans - and possibly a marked effect.'

The Environment Agency is looking at ways of improving the sewage treatment process, to either remove oestrogen during the process or reduce the amount that is discharged into our waterways.

Filed under: fish, environment

P.S. Something Else You Can't Make Without Oil

Filed under: peak oil, environment

Eight Ways That Modern Medicine is Oil Dependent

Almost All Drugs are Petroleum-Based



Health care costs are expected to skyrocket anyway, as the bulk of the population (the baby-boomer generation) retires. And with the continuing rise in the price of oil, health care is going to be out-of-reach for many Americans.

Paul Roth at Energy Bulletin writes:

Most of our modern medical system is oil-dependent, just like the rest of society. Oil has been so cheap for so long that it has become a pervasive presence in health care delivery. This impact is most obvious when one looks at the transport systems required to maintain a health service. Just as suburbia has been subsidised by the endowment of cheap and plentiful oil, modern medical care is predicated on the cheap movement of things and people from one place to another. This cheap transportation is so crucial that the system must fall apart if no alternatives are developed before oil becomes scarce and even more expensive. This article examines these issues from the perspective of large hospitals - they represent one of the most centralised expressions of health care delivery, and will probably become one of the first major casualities of peak oil.

1. Transport
Modern healthcare facilities are open systems that consume inputs and produce wastes. With few exceptions, almost none of the inputs are created on site, and must be brought to the facility (usually by road). Examples include food, medical supplies, linen, and medical gases like oxygen. Outputs include general rubbish as well as clinical (ie contaminated) waste that reqiures special handling and disposal (either landmass or incineration). The other big transport category is people - staff, patients, visitors and students need to travel to and from the site.

2. Direct Content
Many items used in modern medicine contain petrochemical derivatives. Some of the main categories are gloves (synthetic rubber), clinical disposables (like syringes), medications, sterile packaging (mainly plastic), high-tech equipment like CT and MRI scanners, and computers.

3. Embodied
Many items that don’t directly contain petrochemicals do have oil-based products embodied within them. Producing stainless steel or titanium joint-replacement components may require oil at several steps, including mining, refining, manufacturing, transporting, and packaging.

4. Energy Production
There are two main categories - offsite (natural gas-fired power stations) and on-site (oil or gas for heating and steam generation).

5. Processes
Activities within hospitals like laundering (hot water) and equipment sterilisation (steam, plastic packaging, ethylene oxide) might be oil-dependent.

6. Roads and Buildings
Maintaining and constructing buildings and roads may include multiple oil-dependent processes.

7. Emergency Services
Most emergency services in Western society are vehicle-based and run on petrol or diesel. The majority are cars and trucks but also (especially) helicopters.

8. Organisational and Political Systems
Healthcare services exist within a complex system of modern society. They currently reside within a hierarchial structure of local, state and federal government, health insurance companies, vocational colleges, registration boards, and many other political and pseudopolitical entities. All are currently dependent on oil to a greater or lesser extent (especially for transporting people and things).

Outcomes
So what changes could peak oil bring to our health-care system? Like the impacts on the rest of society, it will partly depend on the rapidity of oil scarcity and the amount of preparation. In the short term there will probably be decreased and unequal access to services, rationing, and a reduction in quality of life (we might be sicker, more mentally ill, and not live as long). In the longer term, a successful transition will need to involve more personal responsibility for one’s own health, as well as a more informal and dispersed health care system centred on the small-community/village level.

Drilling in Alaska and/or off U.S. coastlines isn't the answer. We can't afford the damage that the CO2 is doing to the planet. We have to get off oil. Or else it's going to be back to leeches and this:


[Moxibustion]

First Moon Walk Pictures Missing

One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures


"There will only ever be one first moon walk", John Sarkissian at the Parkes telescope:

The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.

Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald.

"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not be found.

"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will locate them.

If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat the world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.

"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be seen," Mr Sarkissian said.

"There will only ever be one first moon walk."

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.

Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial technology used by television networks. So the images received at Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were played on screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.

"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded" in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of people watching around the world.

Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original images received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the public saw. While the technique looks primitive today, Mr Sarkissian said it was the best solution that 1969 technology offered.

Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was David Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.

"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed, the quality was fairly good."

NASA is now an extension of the DoD, militarizing space. If it did any good, I'd remain in a perpetual snit over how this country has gone to hell-in-a-handbasket under the control of Republicans. But anger is only good insofar as it motivates and focuses action, in getting Republicans out of government. And out of all positions of power over people and the planet.


Filed under: NASA, first Moon landing, moonwalk

Japan Caught & Hid $2 Billion Worth of Rare Tuna

Australia's top fisheries manager has revealed Japan illegally took $2 billion worth of southern bluefin tuna, effectively killing the stock commercially.

An investigation into the imperilled fishery found Japanese fishers and suppliers from other countries caught up to three times the Japanese quota each year for the past 20 years, and hid it.

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority's managing director, Richard McLoughlin, said it was an enormous international fraud. "Essentially the Japanese have stolen $2 billion worth of fish from the international community, and have been sitting in meetings for 15 years saying they are as pure as the driven snow. And it's outrageous."

Mr McLoughlin was speaking at an ANU seminar in a speech recorded and posted on the internet. The official findings of the inquiry were presented at an international meeting in Canberra in July, but remained confidential.

Mr McLoughlin's revelations raised the prospect yesterday that other fisheries in the Pacific and Indian oceans were pilfered. There were also renewed calls for southern bluefin to be protected under international wildlife law.

One of the world's most expensive fish, southern bluefin migrate around the temperate waters of Australia and grow to about 200 kilograms. A $280 million industry is based on catching the fish in the Great Australian Bight and cage-fattening at Port Lincoln.

The Japanese overcatch was uncovered by Australian industry figures who scrutinised publicly available market documents.

An independent review was ordered after the Federal Government put its concerns to Japan at a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. The Japanese also sought a review of Australian southern bluefin tuna farming.

Mr McLoughlin detailed the fraud on August 1 during a wide-ranging speech on national fisheries reform at a lunchtime seminar to the Australian National University's Crawford School of Economics and Government.

"It's just been revealed that … on a 6000-tonne national quota, Japan's been catching anything between 12,000 and 20,000 tonnes for the last 20 years, and hiding it. And has probably killed that stock … And that's one of our major fisheries in Australia."

At the end of the seminar he was asked how it happened. "Largely it's [because] the Japanese only ever allowed Japanese observers on Japanese boats. And essentially it was just plain fraud.

"There were many thousands of tonnes of bluefin a year that were coming in unreported, or were being caught in Taiwanese or Thai boats that were coming in through the back door of Japanese business houses; that were going onto the marketplace recorded as big eye tuna, or you know, northern bluefin or something like that. So it has been an enormous international fraud … [discussion of which] has reached all sorts of levels of government at the present time."

Asked what the solution was, Mr McLoughlin said attempts had been made for years to put satellite monitoring systems on the Japanese vessels. "They won't have a bar of it," he said.

Legal catch limits for southern bluefin have been steady at about 14,080 tonnes in recent years, despite indications the fish stock is still in dire straits.

But it is a relatively tiny portion of the Japanese appetite for tuna. The country imports about 650,000 tonnes of tuna annually, much of it from the Pacific and Indian oceans.

"This is a defining case," said Glenn Sant, the Oceania director of the global wildlife trade monitoring organisation, Traffic. "People can no longer believe what they are told. What we now have to have is transparency."

At least until the early 1990s there was substantial under-reporting or non-reporting of catches in the South Pacific, said Sandra Tarte, of the University of the South Pacific.

The findings also raised a red flag over the Japanese whale fishery, said Humane Society International's Nicola Beynon. "Any countries that are contemplating lifting the moratorium and letting Japan go whaling must be concerned about the probability that it will be misreported as well," she said.

The Bureau of Rural Sciences said the most recent estimate by Australian scientists of southern bluefin's parental biomass - the quantity of adult tuna - was that it stood at as little as 4 per cent of its original size.

Ms Beynon said the commission had proved itself inept many times over.

And I thought the world would wake up to how bad a world neighbor the Japanese are after their 'clear-cutting' (sorry, mixing metaphors) of the Sea of Cortez (birthing grounds and nursery for the California grey whale):






Filed under: Japan, environment, ocean, fish

U.S. Air Marshals: "Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota"

Marshals Say They Must File One Surveillance Detection Report, Or SDR, Per Month:

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.



These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.



"Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?" 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.

"Absolutely," a federal air marshal replied.



7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.

"When you see a decision like this, for these reports, who loses here?" Kovaleski asked.

"The people we're supposed to protect -- the American public," an air marshal said.

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?

"That could have serious impact ... They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious," said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.

That's why several air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR requirement.

The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."

"Does that memo read to you that Federal Air Marshal headquarters has set a quota on these reports?" Kovaleski asked.

"Absolutely, no doubt," an air marshal replied.

A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."



Another federal air marshal said that not only is there a quota in Las Vegas for SDRs, but that "it directly reflects on (their) performance evaluations" and on how much money they make.

The director of the Air Marshal Service, Dana Brown, declined 7NEWS' request for an interview on the quota system. But the agency points to a memo from August 2004 that said there is not a quota for submitting SDRs and which goes on to say, "I do not expect reports that are inaccurate or frivolous."

But, Las Vegas-based air marshals say the quota system remains in force, now more than two years after managers sent the original memos, and that it's a mandate from management that impacts annual raises, bonuses, awards and special assignments.

"To meet this quota, to get their raises, do you think federal air marshals in Las Vegas are making some of this stuff up?" Kovaleski asked.

"I know they are. It's a joke," an air marshal replied.

"Have marshals in the Las Vegas office, I don't want to say fabricated, but 'created' reports?" Kovaleski asked.

"Creative writing -- stretching a long ways the truth, yes," an air marshal replied.

One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.

"You're saying that was not an accurate portrayal of a potential terrorist activity?" Kovaleski asked.

"No, it was not," an air marshal said.

"It was a marshal trying to meet a quota ..." Kovaleski said.

"Yes, he was," the air marshal replied.

Strange said he didn't have a quota in the Atlanta office when he was in charge.

"I would never have done that ... You are going to have people reporting every suspicious looking activity they come across, whether they in their heart feel like it's a threat, just to meet the quota," Strange said.

Strange and other air marshals said the quota allows the government to fill a database with bad information.

A Las Vegas air marshal said he didn't write an SDR every month for exactly that reason.

"Well, it's intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out," the air marshal said.

"I would like to see an investigation -- a real investigation conducted into the ways things are done here," the air marshal in Las Vegas said.

Although the agency strongly denies any presence of a quota system, Las Vegas-based air marshals have produced documents that show their performance review is directly linked to producing SDRs.

It's a slippery slope for air marshals once they begin to fudge. What's to stop them from accepting bribes, to keep a business competitor grounded by being placed on the list?

Once you're on a "no-fly"-list, you can't just board an airplane. What's left of the U.S. Constitution to stand between you and this?:



Technorati Tags: Technorati Tag, Technorati Tags, tags, categories, terrorism, air marshals, war on terror, homeland security, Patriot Act, The Constant American, Constant American

Obesity Now An Issue For Babies

A Harvard University study is the first to document the spread of the obesity epidemic in infants. It has reported that in the US state of Massachusetts, children under the age of six have become heavier since 1980, but the risk of being overweight has jumped most for babies under six months.

For pussycats, too. Meet 'Bluto':



Cats like this, they write songs about:



Filed under: Friday Cat Blogging, Bluto, obesity, health

And the Democrats Go Silent

On a day when Ned Lamont's win over Joe Lieberman should have kicked off the final countdown to the election (after all, the day after Ned Lamont's win had the air waves clogged with stories that Joe Lieberman Fights On in Senate Race and interviews with Joe Lieberman), Karl Rove set off the October-surprise - all terror, all the time. Republicans everywhere are hitting their marks in front of the camera, reciting their talking points without any stumbling, as if they'd been rehearsed for weeks.

And not a peep out of the Democrats.

Correction, Chris Matthews is interviewing former senator and former vice-Presidential candidate (and undeclared candidate for the 2008 Presidential race) John Edwards on Hardball, about what he would do if he won the Presidential election in 2008. And what would be different had he won the vice-Presidency in 2004. My favorite response from this interview was: "The American people would be getting the truth about what's going on in Iraq today, and we'd be bringing home at least 30,000 of our military."

No, John, the correct answer is "We wouldn't have gone to Iraq, because we wouldn't have peddled phony intelligence to the Congress of the U.S."

Filed under: Democrats, Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont, John Edwards, Chris Matthews, terrorism

Keeping Kevin Drum Honest

James Baker and his Iraq Group



Over at Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum writes:

A HIGHER POWER....Did you know that Bush family fixer James A. Baker III is busily beavering away on a task force to figure out what to do in Iraq? It's not exactly a secret (the New York Times wrote about it here), but I sure hadn't heard about it until I read "A Higher Power," featured in our current issue:

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in — or, perhaps, to get the hell out of — Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home — that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me.

Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train."

I guess if anyone can talk sense into W, maybe it's Baker. Still, this might be a tougher nut to crack than strongarming a few election monitors in Florida.

My biggest complaint with people who call themselves "centrist" democrats and moderates (Kevin Drum) is that they legitimize the continued raping of the American middle class by promoting a belief that people like James Baker (and everybody in his Iraq group) are noble statesmen, and not what they really are: groomed, well-dressed personality disorders. Yes, you can be twisted and still make it to the top - financial success is not a measure of mental health.

All that Baker wants is for Democrats not to win control over either house in congress. He's not working on a solution to Bush's failed foreign policy for the good of the country, the good of the world, for the good of any people EXCEPT those people who have been prospering mightily from decades of repressing ordinary people. Baker's working on how to prevent Democrats from gaining a majority of seats in Congress with Bush's foreign policy continuing.

The members of the group are political rat-fuckers.

Clifford May? Alan Simpson? What expertise on the Middle East, pray tell, does anybody on that list bring to the table? And Lee Hamilton??????

Lee Hamilton is up to his eyeballs in Bush cover-ups. Or is it covers-up? Just when you think Hamilton couldn't possibly want to be more penitent for his past enabling of Republican crimes that enabled Republicans to do even worse crimes, he enables their cover-ups again! [The 9/11 White Wash Commission - They actually made America worse. "Bipartisan" now means telling lies, so as not to make waves. It's spin that allows the corrupt and the incompetent to escape responsibility, and go on to do it all again, and worse.]

It was the policies of the old establishment that evolved into the smash and burn policies of the neocons - that poor, brown people can be enslaved and exploited to make W.A.S.P.s rich, and if the poor brown people resist, have millions of pounds of radioactive bombs rain down on them.

If the people in the Middle East rose up and overthrew their governments, Americans wouldn't be any worse off than we are now, after fifty years of corporate-crony leadership. It's been the pro-corporate, unrestricted-growth, anything goes capitalist governments, led by Republicans and Democrats alike (the Establishment), that are destroying America. With men like James Baker doing the heavy-lifting. With Democrats, at least we got some regulation. Monitoring, and restrictions that required that corporations couldn't bottle poison and pour it down consumers' throats without financial penalty. With Republicans, all regulations are off.

Baker's law firm (Baker & Botts) represents the Saudi Royal family's interests in the U.S. The Saudi Royal family, with their vast holdings in the U.S., and whom holds most of America's 'paper.'

Baker has masterfully blocked efforts by 9/11 families to hold Saudi Arabia financially liable for the damages that their policies have caused - 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Baker works for the people whose policies continue to turn their young men into jihadists, hellbent on killing their oppressors in the west. The Saudis haven't changed any of their policies. Their schools still teach hatred, intolerance and jihad against Westerners - anybody who doesn't follow Islam.

The Saudis have made Jim Baker a very rich and powerful man. Baker works for a government that savagely and brutally tortures its own citizens after the Bush-Negroponte CIA has kidnapped them from street corners around the world and renditions them back to the House of Saud.

Baker put Bush in the WH with his football strategy, as opposed to the actual baseball strategy that rule of law in the U.S. requires (make sure the recounts stop while Bush has more tallied votes, then run out the clock before the other side can get the law to step in and require counting all of the ballots).

Go back even farther and it was Baker whom the Reagan staff brought in to observe their demented leader after they noted his disordered thinking - Baker was to decide if Reagan was compes mentis. When this story was revealed long after Reagan left office and it was announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, nobody in the media asked "When did Baker get a medical degree?" or "Shouldn't the staff have brought in a physician?" and "Shouldn't there be a protocol in place about regularly testing a President's mental, as well as physical, health?" We are living in the 21st century, after all.

Baker is a power brokering politician. Whatever he is up with his Iraq group, it's not good for the people of Iraq or the people of America, or the people anywhere else in the world. It's about getting it off of the front pages, out of sight, behind closed doors, so that the rich and powerful can continue getting richer and more powerful. Haven't we all had enough of Jim Baker, his friends, their policies, their view of America and their plans for us?

I'm ready for a change.

Filed under: James Baker, Baker & Botts, Iraq, Kevin Drum, Reagan, Bush, Lee Hamilton

The Existential Bush

In honor of today's coup by Messrs. Rove and Bush (with major kudos to their mate-across-the-pond, Tony Blair, for his generous help in hiding the scam behind Britain's official secrets act and Britain's law banning pre-trial publicity), we here at TCA have selected "All Things Cowboy" as today's Coolness!-site.

Who would've thought that they could pull it off again?

Silly us, expecting an "October surprise," when they needed it to change the subject in August!

Just two days after the democrats in Connecticut registered their disdain for Joe Lieberman and nominated Ned Lamont to lead them in ending Bush's war. And less than 24 hours after the loser was the guest on Larry King Live - the winner nowhere in sight. And also just one day after Tony Snow announced that a vote for Ned Lamont is a vote for the terrorists and 9/11, the Bush administration has sucked all of the oxygen out of the air waves, reminding Americans just how irrationally frightened they can be. A "stark reminder" Bush said, "that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom." They even managed to resurrect the colored alert chart, last seen 3 weeks before the Bush-Kerry face-off of November, 2004. Oh, and get this:

With all other news preempted, they got the news channels to cover Bush's break-from-vacation, vacation-break-trip to Wisconsin, beginning with the landing of that all-time chick-magnet, Air Force One:




Will the public never tire of being yanked around by these people?

Filed under: Bush, cowboy, terrorism, October Surprise, August Surprise

"The Top of the World is Melting"

The North Pole has been frozen for 100,000 years. But according to scientists, that won't be true by the end of this century.


This past Sunday's 60 Minutes visited the subject of global warming:

There's been a debate burning for years about the causes of global warming. But the scientists you're about to meet say the debate is over. New evidence shows man is contributing to the warming of the planet, pumping out greenhouse gases that trap solar heat.

Much of this new evidence was compiled by American scientist Bob Corell, who led a study called the "Arctic Climate Impact Assessment." It's an awkward name — but consider the findings: the seas are rising, hurricanes will be more powerful, like Katrina, and polar bears may be headed toward extinction.

What does the melting arctic look like? Correspondent Scott Pelley went north to see what Bob Corell calls a "global warning."

Towers of ice the height of 10-story buildings rise on the coast of Greenland. It's the biggest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, measuring some 700,000 square miles. But temperatures in the arctic are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world, so a lot of Greenland's ice is running to the sea.

"Right now the entire planet is out of balance," says Bob Corell, who is among the world's top authorities on climate change. He led 300 scientists from eight nations in the "Arctic Climate Impact Assessment."

Corell believes he has seen the future. "This is a bellwether, a barometer. Some people call it the canary in the mine. The warning that things are coming," he says. "In 10 years here in the arctic, we see what the rest of the planet will see in 25 or 35 years from now."


The Muir Glacier in Alaska, as it was in 1941 (left) and in 2004

Over the last few decades, the North Pole has been dramatically reduced in size and Corell says the glaciers there have been receding for the last 50 years.

Back in 1987, President Reagan asked Corell to look into climate change. He's been at it ever since.

In Iceland, he showed 60 Minutes glaciers that were growing until the 1990s and are now melting. In fact, 98 percent of the world's mountain glaciers are melting.

Corell says all that water will push sea levels three feet higher all around the world in 100 years.

[ . . . ]

And there may be no stopping it. Arctic warming is accelerating. It's a chain reaction. As snow and ice melt they reveal dark land and water that absorb solar heat. That melts more snow and ice, and around it goes.

There's long been a debate about how much of this is earth's naturally changing climate and how much is man's doing. Paul Mayewski, at the University of Maine, says the answer to that question is frozen inside an ice core from Greenland.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Mayewski has led 35 expeditions collecting deep ice cores from glaciers. The ice captures everything in the air, laying down a record covering half a million years.

"We can go to any section of the ice core, to tell, basically, what the greenhouse gas levels were; we can tell whether or not it was stormy, what the temperatures were like," Mayewski explains.

60 Minutes brought Mayewski back to Greenland, where he says his research has proven that the ice and the atmosphere have man's fingerprints all over them.

Mayewski says we haven't seen a temperature rise to this level going back at least 2,000 years, and arguably several thousand years.

As for carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, Mayewski says, "we haven't seen CO2 levels like this in hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years."

What does that tell him?

"It all points to something that has changed and something that has impacted the system which wasn't doing it more than 100 years ago. And we know exactly what it is. It's human activity," he says.

It's activity like burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. is by far the largest polluter. Corell says there's so much greenhouse gas in the air already that more temperature rise is inevitable.

Even if we stopped using every car, truck, and power plant — stopping all greenhouse gas emissions — Mayewski says the planet would continue to warm anyway. "Would continue to warm for another, about another degree," he says.

That's enough to melt the Arctic — and if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the temperature will rise even more. The ice that's melting already is changing the weather by disrupting ocean currents.

Corell points to floods in the U.S., heat waves in Europe; and 60 Minutes wanted to know about the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season.

"The one thing I think we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence is the severity of the storms, how strong the storms, these cyclonic events like hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific, are going to get — they're gonna be more severe. Now one thing that is in doubt is whether there'll be more of them," Corell explains.

"The oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are the warmest they've been on record. When they get up in that temperature, they spin off hurricanes. Well, if it goes up another degree, it's gonna spawn these with more intensity," Corell says.

[ . . . ]

There are skeptics who question climate change projections like that, saying they’re no more reliable than your local weatherman. But Mayewski says arctic projections done decades ago are proving accurate.

"That said, the skeptics have brought up some very, very interesting issues over the last few years. And they've forced us to think more and more about the data that we collect. We can owe the skeptics a vote of thanks for making our science as precise as it is today," says Mayewski.

One big supporter of climate science research is the Bush administration, spending $5 billion a year. But Mr. Bush refuses to sign a treaty forcing cuts in greenhouse gases.

The White House also declined 60 Minutes' request for an interview. Corell, who first studied the issue for President Reagan, believes the climate change facts are in, even if President Bush does not.

"When you look at the American government, which is saying essentially, 'Wait a minute. We need to study this some more. We can't flip our energy use overnight. It would hurt the economy.' When you hear that, what do you think?" Pelley asked.

"Well, what I do then is, I try to tell them exactly what we know scientifically. The science is, I believe, unassailable," says Corell. "I'm not arguing their policy, that's their business, how they deal with policy. But my job is to say, scientifically, shorten that time scale so that if you don't push out the effects of climate change into the long, long distant future. Because even under the best of circumstances, this natural system of a climate will continue to warm the planet for literally hundreds of years, no matter what we do."

It's a matter of making global warming even worse than it's already going to be. Catastrophically worse, where human civilization may become insupportable. Watch segment and see the evidence.

The U.S., with 5% of the world's population, consumes 25% of the world's resources. We are the worst polluters on the planet. The answer is not to be looking for more sources of gas and oil - We have to get off of oil. Alternative, clean, renewable and sustainable energy sources are the key.

It's not only possible, it's necessary. But it won't happen with Republicans controlling government.


Filed under: global warming, environment, glacier melt

Lamont's First Interviews Right Out of the Gate from a Triumphant Win, Dragged Down by Dems Failure to Denounce Lieberman

We have much more immediate and pressing problems at the moment than the Republican party: The Republicans in our own party, controlling our party. The DLC.

The DLC will be funding a shadow campaign for Lieberman, hedging their bets, and working against us, the liberal base. Their war is against us, not against Republicans.

Every last Democratic politician, including Bill Clinton, has to get on board, publicly deliver uneqivocal messages to Lieberman that he has to leave the race now. Netroots groups are calling for individual Democrats in Congress to release public statements of support for Lamont. Public declarations of support for Lamont isn't enough. If Lieberman doesn't leave the race, and leave now, then he has to be frozen out (of committees, plush office space, money, etc.) immediately.

Democratic pundits and spokesmen have already hit the air waves giving Lieberman cover, stalling for time. "In the next few weeks, if Joe sees the contributions aren't coming in, he'll quit the campaign in September." Why is anybody even waiting to see if Lieberman manages to get financial contributions? Of course he will get them - if not from Democrats then from Republicans who are only too thrilled to sow dissent and confusion within the Democratic party. Why is there any delay at all in pressuring Lieberman? Delays benefit all parties except the democratic people. Delays particularly aid the DLC's efforts in marginalizing the liberal base and ultimately forcing us out.

I'm listening to Ned Lamont on Hardball right now. This Lieberman issue has to get decided before he gives any more interviews. Right out of the gate, on a decisive win, he's handicapped by Lieberman and all Democrats who say "Look, Joe is going to do what Joe is going to do." Talk about Democrats looking spineless!

If Lamont doesn't demand Democratic unity, and for all Democrats to denounce Lieberman's campaign and pressure Lieberman out, the Lamont campaign is doomed, as is the left wing in the Democratic party.


Filed under: Ned Lamont, Joe Lieberman, DLC, DSCC

61 Years Ago Today

The San Francisco Exploratorium's online exhibit in observance of the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the photographs of Japanese Army photographer Yosuke Yamahata - Remembering Nagasaki.

Nagasaki, August 9, 1945:

The next break in the weather over Japan was due to appear just three days after the attack on Hiroshima, to be followed by at least five more days of prohibitive weather. The plutonium bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man," was rushed into readiness to take advantage of this window. No further orders were required for the attack. Truman's order of July 25th had authorized the dropping of additional bombs as soon as they were ready.

To eliminate the need to remove and reinstall complex scientific equipment from The Great Artiste, Sweeney and Capt. Frederick C. Bock had exchanged aircraft. Thus Sweeney and his crew flew Bockscar, while The Great Artiste repeated its role as the observation aircraft, but with Bock and his crew aboard.

At 3:47 a.m. on August 9, 1945, a B-29 named Bock's Car lifted off from Tinian and headed toward the primary target: Kokura Arsenal, a massive collection of war industries adjacent to the city of Kokura.

From this point on, few things went according to plan. The aircraft commander, Major Charles W. Sweeney, ordered the arming of the bomb only ten minutes after take-off so that the aircraft could be pressurized and climb above the lightning and squalls that menaced the flight all the way to Japan. (A journalist, William L. Laurence of the New York Times, on an escorting aircraft saw some "St. Elmo's fire" glowing on the edges of the aircraft and worried that the static electricity might detonate the bomb.) Sweeney then discovered that due to a minor malfunction he would not be able to access his reserve fuel.

The aircraft next had to orbit the city of Yokohama for almost an hour in order to rendezvous with its two escort B-29s, one of which never did arrive. The weather had been reported satisfactory earlier in the day over Kokura Arsenal, but by the time the B-29 finally arrived there, the target was obscured by smoke and haze.

Two more passes over the target still produced no sightings of the aiming point. As an aircraft crewman, Jacob Beser, later recalled, Japanese fighters and bursts of antiaircraft fire were by this time starting to make things "a little hairy." Kokura no longer appeared to be an option, and there was only enough fuel on board to return to the secondary airfield on Okinawa, making one hurried pass as they went over their secondary target, the city of Nagasaki. As Beser later put it, "there was no sense dragging the bomb home or dropping it in the ocean."

As it turned out, cloud cover obscured Nagasaki as well. Sweeney reluctantly approved a much less accurate radar approach on the target. At the last moment the bombardier, Captain Kermit K. Beahan, caught a brief glimpse of the city's stadium through the clouds and dropped the bomb. At 11:02 a.m., at an altitude of 1,650 feet, Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 21 kilotons, 40 percent greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb.

Nagasaki was an industrial center and major port on the western coast of Kyushu. As had happened at Hiroshima, the "all-clear" from an early morning air raid alert had long been given by the time the B-29 had begun its bombing run. A small conventional raid on Nagasaki on August 1st had resulted in a partial evacuation of the city, especially of school children. There were still almost 200,000 people in the city below the bomb when it exploded.

The hurriedly-targeted weapon ended up detonating almost exactly between two of the principal targets in the city, the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works to the south, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works (right) to the north. Had the bomb exploded farther south the residential and commercial heart of the city would have suffered much greater damage.

In general, though Fat Man exploded with greater force than Little Boy, the damage at Nagasaki was not as great as it had been at Hiroshima. The hills of Nagasaki, its geographic layout, and the bomb's detonation over an industrial area all helped shield portions of the city from the weapon's blast, heat, and radiation effects. The explosion affected a total area of approximately 43 square miles. About 8.5 of those square miles were water, and 33 more square miles were only partially settled. Many roads and rail lines escaped major damage. In some areas electricity was not knocked out, and fire breaks created over the last several months helped to prevent the spread of fires to the south.

Although the destruction at Nagasaki has generally received less worldwide attention than that at Hiroshima, it was extensive nonetheless. Almost everything up to half a mile from ground zero was completely destroyed, including even the earthquake-hardened concrete structures that had sometimes survived at comparable distances at Hiroshima.

According to a Nagasaki Prefectural report "men and animals died almost instantly" within 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) of the point of detonation. Almost all homes within a mile and a half were destroyed, and dry, combustible materials such as paper instantly burst into flames as far away as 10,000 feet from ground zero. Of the 52,000 homes in Nagasaki, 14,000 were destroyed and 5,400 more seriously damaged. Only 12 percent of the homes escaped unscathed. The official Manhattan Engineer District report on the attack termed the damage to the two Mitsubishi plants "spectacular."

Despite the absence of a firestorm, numerous secondary fires erupted throughout the city. Fire-fighting efforts were hampered by water line breaks, and six weeks later the city was still suffering from a shortage of water. A U.S. Navy officer who visited the city in mid-September reported that, even over a month after the attack, "a smell of death and corruption pervades the place." As at Hiroshima, the psychological effects of the attack were undoubtedly considerable.

As with the estimates of deaths at Hiroshima, it will never be known for certain how many people died as a result of the atomic attack on Nagasaki. The best estimate is 40,000 people died initially, with 60,000 more injured. By January 1946, the number of deaths probably approached 70,000, with perhaps ultimately twice that number dead total within five years. For those areas of Nagasaki affected by the explosion, the death rate was comparable to that at Hiroshima.

The day after the attack on Nagasaki, the emperor of Japan overruled the military leaders of Japan and forced them to offer to surrender (almost) unconditionally.

In error, The Great Artiste was named in some official reports as the superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb at Nagasaki. This mistake was discovered when preparations were being made to preserve the aircraft for later museum display. When the discrepancy was found, it was Bockscar that was retired in September 1946 to the desert storage facility at Davis-Monthan field near Tucson, Arizona.

Filed under: Japan, nuclear weapons, atomic bomb, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, 61st anniversary

Museum Field Trip

Reverend Jen's Lower East Side (N.Y.) Troll Museum.


Filed under: museum field day, trolls, Reverend Jen, LOE, NY, culture

Joe Lieberman, "The Spoiler!"

We need to stop referring to the DLC (and by extension, the DSCC) as centrist Democrats, and identify them more accurately as the rightwing or Republican branch of the Democratic party.

With Ned Lamont's decisive win over Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, the race for control over the platform of the Democratic party kicked off. This face-off has been a long time in coming, and Ned Lamont's win was not in the DLC's game plan. The DLC had been counting on tacking the Democratic Party farther to the right again this election cycle, hoping to attract moderate Republicans who are disaffected with their party's extremist, fundamentalist, evangelical rightwing bent. The DLCers have been banking on driving the liberal base out of the Democratic party and replacing our numbers with Mark Robinsons.

Ned Lamont's win is causing the DLC to have to backtrack. They will most certainly redouble their efforts to drive the liberal base out, once and for all. Even if it means losing a Democratic seat in the Senate (Lamont) if they think that it will help them achieve their goal of a New Democratic party (Republicans without the fundamentalist evangelicals and leftwing democrats) in the end.

These next few days, weeks and months are crucial to taking back the Democratic party for the real democrats, the people. Our biggest opposition at the moment isn't the Republican party, but the Republican party within our own party, the DLC.

Founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council Al From said:

We can't let those hearts [cultural conservatives] be closed to us again. First and foremost, we need to bridge the trust gap on national security by spelling out our own offense against terrorism and clearly rejecting our anti-war wing, so that Republicans can no longer portray us as the anti-war party in the war on terrorism. We must leave no doubt that Michael Moore neither represents nor defines our party. Blueprint Magazine, Dec. 13, 2004

For years, the DLC has told the liberal base of the Democratic Party that liberals can't get elected in general elections and if they want any seat at the table of government, to sit down, shut up, and support centrist Democratic candidates no matter how much they resemble Republicans. Today, after a last-minute letter and phone call campaign to Democratic leaders in Congress following Ned Lamont's win (urging them to get behind Lamont, denounce Lieberman for running as an Independent, strip Lieberman of his plush office suite, committee assignments, and other perqs of Democratic party affiliation), a handful of Senate Democratic leaders have taken the first step of announcing their support for Lamont.

It's not nearly enough.

Democratic pundits and spokesmen have already begun to hit the air waves, smoothing a way to not force the issue with Lieberman, allowing him to save face, stay in the race while assuring everyone that "he'll drop out in September." The DLCers are trying to hedge their bets, and will run a shadow campaign for Lieberman, because right now Joe Lieberman is a candidate who can be bought. Republicans are already lining up to support him, because if Lieberman wins, he'll be sitting pretty in the catbird's seat. He won't be bound to caucus with Democrats. Lieberman threw over the party to be one in the Gang of 14. If he wins, Lieberman would be a power unto himself - Who in their right mind would give that kind of power to Lieberman?



The Democratic party needs to put the screws to Lieberman NOW, and get him out of this race.


Filed under: Joe Lieberman, 06 election