By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent David Espo, Ap Special Correspondent – WASHINGTON –
Veteran Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania disclosed plans Tuesday to switch parties, a move intended to boost his chances of winning re-election next year that also will push Democrats within one seat of a 60-vote filibuster-resistant majority. (Or make damn sure they don't get it.)
"I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," Specter said in a statement posted on a Web site devoted to Pennsylvania politics and confirmed by his office. Several Senate officials said a formal announcement was expected later in the day or Wednesday.
President Barack Obama called Specter almost immediately after he was informed of the decision to say the Democratic Party was "thrilled to have you," according to a White House official. Spurned Republicans said his defection was motivated by ambition, not principle.
Specter, 79 and in his fifth term, is one of a handful of Republican moderates remaining in Congress in a party now dominated by conservatives. Several officials said secret talks that preceded his decision reached into the White House, involving both Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden, a longtime colleague in the Senate. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell as well as Democratic leaders in Congress also were involved, added the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details.
With Specter, Democrats would have 59 Senate seats. Democrat Al Franken is ahead in a marathon recount in Minnesota, and if he ultimately wins his race against Republican Norm Coleman, he would become the party's 60th vote. That is the number needed to overcome a filibuster.
Specter faced an extraordinarily difficult re-election challenge in his home state in 2010, having first to confront a challenge from his right in the Republican primary before pivoting to a general election campaign against a Democrat in a state that has trended increasingly Democratic in recent elections. Former Rep. Pat Toomey, whom Specter defeated in a close primary race in 2004, is expected to run again.
______
That's the AP story but, methinks the real story lies in the motivation.
He seems to vote out of both sides of his mouth:
Voted NO on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP. (Mar 2008)
Voted YES on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime. (Mar 2004)
Rated 21% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record. (Dec 2003)
Rated 0% by the NRLC, indicating a pro-choice stance. (Dec 2006)
On this issue it appears that he either saw the light or discovered that someone very close to him was gay:
Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. (1996)
Oppose gay marriage but support civil union. (Oct 2004)
Voted NO on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. (Jun 2006)
Voted NO on increasing penalties for drug offenses. (Nov 1999)
Voted YES on spending international development funds on drug control. (Jul 1996)
Voted NO on raising the minimum wage to $7.25 (Mar 2005)
Voted YES on increasing minimum wage to $7.25. (Feb 2007)
But here's where he marches lock step with conservative Republican ideology:
Voted NO on repealing tax subsidy for companies which move US jobs offshore. (Mar 2005)
Voted YES on reforming bankruptcy to include means-testing & restrictions. (Mar 2005)
Voted YES on restricting rules on personal bankruptcy. (Jul 2001)
Rated 87% by the US COC, indicating a pro-business voting record. (Dec 2003
What astounds me is the public out cry on the right for term limits for life long politicians when we already have them. They're called elections. If the citizens of a state wish to change their representation they only need vote he or she out of office and Voila! Their term has been limited. It seems to me that those who cry loudest about term limits just can't get enough voters to vote for the candidate of their choosing and are pissed about it. So they want the government to pass a law! Hmmmm, that's funny. I thought the conservatives didn't like the government sticking it's nose into the affairs of state. Free market/free choice and all that.
(The AP report continues) Specter has publicly acknowledged in recent months that in order to win a sixth term, he would need the support of thousands of Pennsylvania Republicans who sided with Obama in last fall's presidential election.
"I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate," he said in the statement.
Asked by a reporter what he had to say to his constituents, Specter replied with a smile, "I don't have to say anything to them. They said it to me."
Specter has long been an independent Republican, and he proved it most recently when he became one of only three members of the GOP in Congress to vote for Obama's economic stimulus legislation. Then, he proved it once more, pivoting not long afterwards to say he did not support legislation making it easier to form unions, a bill that is organized labor's top priority in the current Congress.
In Pennsylvania, the chairman of the state Republican Party, Rob Gleason, said that Specter should offer a refund to Republicans who have helped fatten his war chest, which totaled $5.8 million at the end of 2008. "He should give them the option," Gleason said.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement: "Some in the Republican Party are happy about this. I am not. Let's be honest: Senator Specter didn't leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record. Republicans look forward to beating Sen. Specter in 2010, assuming the Democrats don't do it first."
As one of the most senior Republicans in the Senate, Specter held powerful positions on the Judiciary and Appropriations committees. It was not clear how Democrats would calculate his seniority in assigning committee perches.
As recently as late winter, he was asked by a reporter why he had not taken Democrats up on past offers to switch parties.
"Because I am a Republican," he said at the time.
"I welcome Sen. Specter and his moderate voice to our diverse caucus," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement.
A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no announcement has yet been made, said at 10:25 a.m. EDT Tuesday President Barack Obama was handed a note while in the Oval Office during his daily economic briefing. The note said: "Specter is announcing he is changing parties." At 10:32, Obama reached Specter by phone and told him "you have my full support" and that the Democratic Party is "thrilled to have you."
____
Well, maybe I'm being a little too judgemental. Maybe he's not such a wolf in sheep's clothing after all. He did think the Repubs were being stupid for going after the impeachment of Clinton. He did vote against the "Surge", and introduced legislation that flew directly in the face of presidential signing statements. The bill would allow Congress to bring lawsuits to test the constitutionality of Bush's signing statements. So for now, I guess I'll join OB14me in welcoming the Senator to the Democratic party even though I don't consider myself a Democrat. I just like parties.
DaG Out
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
It's probably just coincidence
At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota [Monday] legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”
The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises. And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out.
Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?” Replied Hersh: “Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen."Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ..."Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths."
Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized."In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people."I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’" But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.) ( “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extraordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")
So let's do a little review of 6 questionable deaths over the past 10 years:
1. Missouri's former governor Mel Carnahan, who was killed in a plane crash 3 weeks before the 2000 elections for the Senate. He was running against John Ashcroft and was leading in all the poles when his plane went down. When the election was over John Ashcroft still lost to a now deceased Mel Carnahan. His wife wife was appointed to hold the senate seat, but since it was only an appointment she could only hold it for 2 years instead of 4. Bush in an unprecedented act of sympathy for Ashcroft chose him for his Attorney General. ( Laugh Now)
2. Senator Paul Wellstone: Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration. In 2003, in a senate that is one heartbeat away from Republican control, Wellstone was more than just another Democrat. He was often the lone voice standing firm against the status-quo policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans. As such, he earned the special ire of the Bush administration and the Republican Party, who made Wellstone's defeat that party's number one priority this year. Despite being outspent and outgunned, however, polls show that Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing George Bush to wage war in Iraq. He was pulling ahead of Norm Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race and moving towards a victory that would have been an embarrassment to the Bush Administration. (Norm Coleman, most recently in the news as the guy Al Franken defeated in the past election. The same guy who has flip flopped on counting votes. . . When the first tally showed he had won the election by the narrowest of margins, he publicly stated that Franken should concede for the good of the country and cease any petition for a recount. Failing to prevent the recount, Coleman has done just the opposite of what he asked Franken to do. Funded by deep pockets in the GOP, Coleman is holding up Franken's confirmation with law suits and appeals. His despicable tactics are transparent and an obvious way to prevent the senate from having another pro Obama vote. )
One of the oddest events that transpired after the death of Wellstone and Coleman's subsequent election victory was that Coleman was placed in charge of the Senate Investigations Committee. That is an extraordinarily sensitive responsibility to be placed upon a freshman senator with no previous experience. My guess would be that it has never happened before, but the reasoning behind it may not be that difficult to fathom: Would anyone be less inclined to pursue the Wellstone death?
The balance in the Senate for years 2002 to 2004 was 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and one independent. If both Wellstone and Carnahan had not been killed, and Wellstone had gone on as projected to win his race, the balance would have been 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and one independent. This would have significantly changed what happened in Congress and in the US, where the presidency and both houses of Congress were Republican controlled over those two years.
3. Ken Lay: Enron CEO Lay, 64, faced the prospect of the rest of his life in prison after his conviction May 25, 2006 of fraud and conspiracy in one of the biggest debacles in American corporate history. Lay was very much tied in with Texas energy companies, Dick Cheney, and the Bushes, was a key player in the demise of Cal. Gov Gray Davis. California's electricity costs had skyrocketed and Gov. Davis begged the Bush Administration for some kind of cap on what Energy companies could charge their customers. He was told "no." . . . That regulation caused the rate hike and that he (Davis) needed more deregulation in order to to fix the problem.
2 years prior in a Beverly hills hotel, Ken Lay met with Gubernatorial prospect Arnold Schwarzenegger along with L.A. mayor Richard Riordan, and Junk Bond King Michael Milken. In May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier and later along with several other energy company executives literally wrote our energy policies. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California. Of course Cheney said there was no cartel and that Gov. Davis' lack of deregulation led to the crisis. Ken Lay while vacationing in Aspen supposedly dies of heart failure, according to Dr. Robert Kurtzman, Mesa County Coroner. (The only person to have reportedly seen Ken Lay's dead body . . .I can find no verification of those officers on the scene.) 2 problems I have with this,
Number 1. The guy was convicted of fraud to the tune of 60 billion and just about to be sentenced to do some serious prison time yet, he's allowed to leave the state to vacation in Aspen Colo.?
Number 2. Where's the body? There was not one photograph of his corpse. Not one. The coroner said he performed the autopsy and the body was cremated. This guy is a billionaire and you want me to believe that he didn't just make a few calls, pay off a few people in authority, and jet out of the country to some tropical paradise with no extradition laws? Yeah right.
4. Dr. Bruce Ivins : After the government spent 4 years wrongly accusing an Army scientist in a costly false trial that ended up being settled out of court for more than $5 million. The FBI turned their attention to a new suspected mastermind. A Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, a Red Cross volunteer and amateur juggler who had won the Defense Department’s highest civilian award in 2003, was a dramatic turn in one of the largest criminal investigations in the nation’s history. After learning that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him on murder charges, Dr. Ivins, a 62-year-old father of two, took an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. He died in a Frederick hospital on Tuesday, leaving behind a grieving family and uncertainty about whether the anthrax mystery had finally been solved.
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."But bentonite was never found in the anthrax, and Greenwald says ABC News didn't acknowledged this until 2007, and only after Greenwald's "badgering them about this issue."
Dr. Ivins and his law team professed his innocence til the day he died and the trial would have entered into the record a lot of testimony that may or may not have cleared his name but, we will never know. That's the beauty of conspiracy theories . . .they can rarely if ever be dis-proven.
5. A small plane, carrying the co-founder of Venezuelan voting machine company Smartmatic,crashed earlier this week shortly after take-off from the Caracas airport, killing two employees of the company, and several others on board and on the ground. The initial reports from a foreign paper indicated that the cause of the crash may have been the unusual failure of both engines on the small plane.
6. Mike Connell, Karl Roves IT Guru , dies in a plane crash days before he was due to testify before a Senate committee on election machine fraud. Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.
Now, let me take off this aluminum foil hat, it's making my head sweat. No police authority, FBI spokesman, or government agency has deemed any of these deaths anything but, mechanical failure, heart failure or suicide. All investigations seem to rule out foul play of any kind, but the timing of each unexpected death it is at the very least . . . curious.
DaG Out
The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises. And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out.
Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?” Replied Hersh: “Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen."Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ..."Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths."
Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized."In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people."I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’" But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.) ( “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extraordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")
So let's do a little review of 6 questionable deaths over the past 10 years:
1. Missouri's former governor Mel Carnahan, who was killed in a plane crash 3 weeks before the 2000 elections for the Senate. He was running against John Ashcroft and was leading in all the poles when his plane went down. When the election was over John Ashcroft still lost to a now deceased Mel Carnahan. His wife wife was appointed to hold the senate seat, but since it was only an appointment she could only hold it for 2 years instead of 4. Bush in an unprecedented act of sympathy for Ashcroft chose him for his Attorney General. ( Laugh Now)
2. Senator Paul Wellstone: Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration. In 2003, in a senate that is one heartbeat away from Republican control, Wellstone was more than just another Democrat. He was often the lone voice standing firm against the status-quo policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans. As such, he earned the special ire of the Bush administration and the Republican Party, who made Wellstone's defeat that party's number one priority this year. Despite being outspent and outgunned, however, polls show that Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing George Bush to wage war in Iraq. He was pulling ahead of Norm Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race and moving towards a victory that would have been an embarrassment to the Bush Administration. (Norm Coleman, most recently in the news as the guy Al Franken defeated in the past election. The same guy who has flip flopped on counting votes. . . When the first tally showed he had won the election by the narrowest of margins, he publicly stated that Franken should concede for the good of the country and cease any petition for a recount. Failing to prevent the recount, Coleman has done just the opposite of what he asked Franken to do. Funded by deep pockets in the GOP, Coleman is holding up Franken's confirmation with law suits and appeals. His despicable tactics are transparent and an obvious way to prevent the senate from having another pro Obama vote. )
One of the oddest events that transpired after the death of Wellstone and Coleman's subsequent election victory was that Coleman was placed in charge of the Senate Investigations Committee. That is an extraordinarily sensitive responsibility to be placed upon a freshman senator with no previous experience. My guess would be that it has never happened before, but the reasoning behind it may not be that difficult to fathom: Would anyone be less inclined to pursue the Wellstone death?
The balance in the Senate for years 2002 to 2004 was 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and one independent. If both Wellstone and Carnahan had not been killed, and Wellstone had gone on as projected to win his race, the balance would have been 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and one independent. This would have significantly changed what happened in Congress and in the US, where the presidency and both houses of Congress were Republican controlled over those two years.
3. Ken Lay: Enron CEO Lay, 64, faced the prospect of the rest of his life in prison after his conviction May 25, 2006 of fraud and conspiracy in one of the biggest debacles in American corporate history. Lay was very much tied in with Texas energy companies, Dick Cheney, and the Bushes, was a key player in the demise of Cal. Gov Gray Davis. California's electricity costs had skyrocketed and Gov. Davis begged the Bush Administration for some kind of cap on what Energy companies could charge their customers. He was told "no." . . . That regulation caused the rate hike and that he (Davis) needed more deregulation in order to to fix the problem.
2 years prior in a Beverly hills hotel, Ken Lay met with Gubernatorial prospect Arnold Schwarzenegger along with L.A. mayor Richard Riordan, and Junk Bond King Michael Milken. In May 2001, the PBS news program “Frontline” interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Lay met with privately a month earlier and later along with several other energy company executives literally wrote our energy policies. Cheney was asked by a correspondent from Frontline whether energy companies were acting like a cartel and using manipulative tactics to cause electricity prices to spike in California. Of course Cheney said there was no cartel and that Gov. Davis' lack of deregulation led to the crisis. Ken Lay while vacationing in Aspen supposedly dies of heart failure, according to Dr. Robert Kurtzman, Mesa County Coroner. (The only person to have reportedly seen Ken Lay's dead body . . .I can find no verification of those officers on the scene.) 2 problems I have with this,
Number 1. The guy was convicted of fraud to the tune of 60 billion and just about to be sentenced to do some serious prison time yet, he's allowed to leave the state to vacation in Aspen Colo.?
Number 2. Where's the body? There was not one photograph of his corpse. Not one. The coroner said he performed the autopsy and the body was cremated. This guy is a billionaire and you want me to believe that he didn't just make a few calls, pay off a few people in authority, and jet out of the country to some tropical paradise with no extradition laws? Yeah right.
4. Dr. Bruce Ivins : After the government spent 4 years wrongly accusing an Army scientist in a costly false trial that ended up being settled out of court for more than $5 million. The FBI turned their attention to a new suspected mastermind. A Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, a Red Cross volunteer and amateur juggler who had won the Defense Department’s highest civilian award in 2003, was a dramatic turn in one of the largest criminal investigations in the nation’s history. After learning that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him on murder charges, Dr. Ivins, a 62-year-old father of two, took an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. He died in a Frederick hospital on Tuesday, leaving behind a grieving family and uncertainty about whether the anthrax mystery had finally been solved.
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."But bentonite was never found in the anthrax, and Greenwald says ABC News didn't acknowledged this until 2007, and only after Greenwald's "badgering them about this issue."
Dr. Ivins and his law team professed his innocence til the day he died and the trial would have entered into the record a lot of testimony that may or may not have cleared his name but, we will never know. That's the beauty of conspiracy theories . . .they can rarely if ever be dis-proven.
5. A small plane, carrying the co-founder of Venezuelan voting machine company Smartmatic,crashed earlier this week shortly after take-off from the Caracas airport, killing two employees of the company, and several others on board and on the ground. The initial reports from a foreign paper indicated that the cause of the crash may have been the unusual failure of both engines on the small plane.
6. Mike Connell, Karl Roves IT Guru , dies in a plane crash days before he was due to testify before a Senate committee on election machine fraud. Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.
Now, let me take off this aluminum foil hat, it's making my head sweat. No police authority, FBI spokesman, or government agency has deemed any of these deaths anything but, mechanical failure, heart failure or suicide. All investigations seem to rule out foul play of any kind, but the timing of each unexpected death it is at the very least . . . curious.
DaG Out
Friday, April 17, 2009
You go Keith!
From Countdown's special comment april 16th 2009 Addressing president Obama's take on former president Bush's torture memos.
Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke."
"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.
"But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed. You continued:
"Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."
Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering -- with pervasive stench -- from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.
One, President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President's commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never "moved forward with confidence".without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We "moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War.
After that war's ending, we "moved forward" without the social restructuring -- and protection of the rights of minorities -- in the south. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in our southern cities.
We "moved forward" with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We "moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.And we "moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We "moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must "come together on behalf of our common future" you are entirely correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
And he will see precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong -- that this construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It worked. It saved the country.
The end. This must not be. "It is our intention," you said today, "to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution." Mr. President, you are making history's easiest, most often made, most dangerous mistake -- you are accepting the defense that somebody was "just following orders." At the end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. "The struggle of today," Lincoln wrote, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also."
Mr. President, you have now been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again -- by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say "we won't do it again." It is not, however...enough.
I am in complete agreement especially after reading the following:
A set of memos recently released by the Obama administration provide some support for allegations that the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) were tortured to reveal their father’s whereabouts. A detainee’s relative said that they had been tortured with insects in 2007, and the newly released memos approve the use of insects as a part of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
KSM’s two children were arrested in Pakistan on September 11, 2002, during a raid on an al-Qaeda safe house. However, their father slipped the net and was not captured until early the next year, reportedly on March 1, 2003.
Allegations
The first indications the children may have been tortured were reported in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine. When KSM was being held at a secret CIA facility in Thailand, apparently the revamped Vietnam War-era base at Udorn, according to Suskind, a message was passed to interrogators: “do whatever’s necessary.”
The interrogators then told KSM “his children would be hurt if he didn’t cooperate.” However, his response was, “so, fine, they’ll join Allah in a better place.”
More detailed allegations were made at a combatant status review tribunal in Guantanamo in the spring of 2007. According to a statement made by Ali Khan, the father of high value detainee Majid Khan, KSM’s children were “denied food and water by … guards.” In addition, “They were mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.” Accounts of the children’s ages at this time vary, although they are generally said to have been under ten.
Ali Khan said that he was told about the children by his son Mohammed, who was kept in the same detention center and obtained the information from Pakistani guards there. He also claimed that his son Majid was tortured, for example using stress positions, face slaps, hooding and cramped confinement.
Just as those who were just following orders should not be excused, ( but given light sentences if found guilty) it is imperative that those who authorised and gave the orders must be held to account. If we do not seek prosecution, how are we any different from Hitler's Germany? Is it because the number of tortured and killed pale in comparison? Is it fear of the CIA and the military industrial complex's long reaching tentacles? I mean I can understand your apprehension, those two entities involvement with JFK's assassination has never been made clear in my opinion. It can't be the belief that investigations into these crimes will divide the country at a time when we need to come together. Read the papers! We're about as divided as we've ever been. The political fall out from seeking prosecution of war crimes against those in the Bush administration would be a mere drop in the ocean. The Repubs in congress are already in opposition to everything you say and do. The media gives the lion's share of their coverage to the conservative right that distrust of you. You're never going to have a greater approval rating than you do right now. Strike while the iron is hot. Please, please, please . . . for God's sake . . . for the sake of justice . . . for the sake of American pride . . . for the sake of the children . . . for the sake of the parents that want to tell their children that when you break the law, when you commit crimes, when you are complicit in violent immoral acts . . . you will have to face the music. Executive branch sanctioned torture must not go unpunished, not here, not in this country.
Then after that fire Geithner and Summers and hire Paul Krugman and Robert Reich as Secretary of the treasury and your chief economic adviser. Then take over the Federal Reserve and keep Bernake on as the janitor. He needs to clean up this mess.
DaG Out
PS sorry readers for rehashing an old argument
Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke."
"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.
"But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed. You continued:
"Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."
Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering -- with pervasive stench -- from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.
One, President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President's commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never "moved forward with confidence".without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We "moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War.
After that war's ending, we "moved forward" without the social restructuring -- and protection of the rights of minorities -- in the south. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in our southern cities.
We "moved forward" with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We "moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.And we "moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We "moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must "come together on behalf of our common future" you are entirely correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
And he will see precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong -- that this construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It worked. It saved the country.
The end. This must not be. "It is our intention," you said today, "to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution." Mr. President, you are making history's easiest, most often made, most dangerous mistake -- you are accepting the defense that somebody was "just following orders." At the end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. "The struggle of today," Lincoln wrote, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also."
Mr. President, you have now been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again -- by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say "we won't do it again." It is not, however...enough.
I am in complete agreement especially after reading the following:
A set of memos recently released by the Obama administration provide some support for allegations that the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) were tortured to reveal their father’s whereabouts. A detainee’s relative said that they had been tortured with insects in 2007, and the newly released memos approve the use of insects as a part of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
KSM’s two children were arrested in Pakistan on September 11, 2002, during a raid on an al-Qaeda safe house. However, their father slipped the net and was not captured until early the next year, reportedly on March 1, 2003.
Allegations
The first indications the children may have been tortured were reported in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine. When KSM was being held at a secret CIA facility in Thailand, apparently the revamped Vietnam War-era base at Udorn, according to Suskind, a message was passed to interrogators: “do whatever’s necessary.”
The interrogators then told KSM “his children would be hurt if he didn’t cooperate.” However, his response was, “so, fine, they’ll join Allah in a better place.”
More detailed allegations were made at a combatant status review tribunal in Guantanamo in the spring of 2007. According to a statement made by Ali Khan, the father of high value detainee Majid Khan, KSM’s children were “denied food and water by … guards.” In addition, “They were mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.” Accounts of the children’s ages at this time vary, although they are generally said to have been under ten.
Ali Khan said that he was told about the children by his son Mohammed, who was kept in the same detention center and obtained the information from Pakistani guards there. He also claimed that his son Majid was tortured, for example using stress positions, face slaps, hooding and cramped confinement.
Just as those who were just following orders should not be excused, ( but given light sentences if found guilty) it is imperative that those who authorised and gave the orders must be held to account. If we do not seek prosecution, how are we any different from Hitler's Germany? Is it because the number of tortured and killed pale in comparison? Is it fear of the CIA and the military industrial complex's long reaching tentacles? I mean I can understand your apprehension, those two entities involvement with JFK's assassination has never been made clear in my opinion. It can't be the belief that investigations into these crimes will divide the country at a time when we need to come together. Read the papers! We're about as divided as we've ever been. The political fall out from seeking prosecution of war crimes against those in the Bush administration would be a mere drop in the ocean. The Repubs in congress are already in opposition to everything you say and do. The media gives the lion's share of their coverage to the conservative right that distrust of you. You're never going to have a greater approval rating than you do right now. Strike while the iron is hot. Please, please, please . . . for God's sake . . . for the sake of justice . . . for the sake of American pride . . . for the sake of the children . . . for the sake of the parents that want to tell their children that when you break the law, when you commit crimes, when you are complicit in violent immoral acts . . . you will have to face the music. Executive branch sanctioned torture must not go unpunished, not here, not in this country.
Then after that fire Geithner and Summers and hire Paul Krugman and Robert Reich as Secretary of the treasury and your chief economic adviser. Then take over the Federal Reserve and keep Bernake on as the janitor. He needs to clean up this mess.
DaG Out
PS sorry readers for rehashing an old argument
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Careful What You Wish For
I really didn't see it coming. I didn't fully buy into the hype because like my dad always said, " You don't judge a politician by what they say, rather by what they do." What has been said by my man Obama is such a refreshing change from the past 8 years. At his ignauguration, while re-inforcing the secular nature of this country he even gave a shout out to "non believers". That has never happened in my lifetime. I doubt that Thomas Jefferson ever gave a shout out to the agnostics or the atheists of his time. More recently, the new president candidly spoke of our country's less than perfect score card proving that humility and not huberous is back in fashion. He's opened the lines of communication to all countries of the world and reminded them that the United States will lead by example and reason and not excess and religous zealotry. All these spoken words are music to my ears but, some of his actions taken are a sour note. Namely his choices of economic advisors, Summers and Geithner. Two insiders of the Wall Street financial meltdown largest bank heist in history.
I don't understand why he is taking these guy's advise. I also failed to understand that money and greed have no political affiliation. I used to think that the Republicans much like money, were the root of all evil. I was mistaken. It just so happened that they were the party in power when I was paying attention. Wall Street and global corporations grease the palms of those who can pass legislation that benefits them regardless of the "R" or the "D" that proceeds their name. Money flows to those who are in power, period. When the country began to lose faith in Republican politicians so did those with deep pockets. Bill Clinton was president and signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999, is an Act of the 106th United States Congress which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, opening up competition among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. And L. Summers just happened to be Secretary of the Treasury for the last year and a half of the Bill Clinton administration. As far as the catastrophic economic situation we find ourselves in, we need to look no further than this.
A door that had been shut and locked since the depression had just had it's lock picked. Once "W" took office it was kicked wide open. Summers, Obama's top economic recovery advisor was in on the whole thing and consequently made a fortune as a result. Timothy Geithner was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.[5] Summers was his mentor, now Geithner is Secretary Treasurer. Hmmmm.With Geithner and Summer's help the Obama administration, rather than chart a new course, seems to be intent on re-inflating the bubble that will burst and then what?????????
Here's a guy that sees what I see . . .Chris Hedges Truthdig April 6, 2009 : America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.
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OB14me has disappointed me in other ways as well, apparently he isn't going to reverse the Executive powers that Bush wrote into existence during his "reign". Obama spoke out against them during the campaign but, has taken measures not to reverse them as president. WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court today vacated a lower court decision giving the president the extraordinary power to seize and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or residents without charge or trial. The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who, after being held for almost six years in military detention, was indicted last week in federal court and charged with two counts of material support for terrorism.In July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a fractured decision that the president had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government's claim of extraordinary detention power would have "disastrous consequences for the Constitution—and the country." The Supreme Court vacated that decision and dismissed the case as moot.
The practice of Rendition (the kidnapping of someone thought to be a terrorists and transporting them to some secret place with no charges or trial, for an undetermined amount of time) Obama has kept this option in his administration. The right of Habeus Corpus is still being waved, which flies directly in the face of our constitution.
DaG Out
I don't understand why he is taking these guy's advise. I also failed to understand that money and greed have no political affiliation. I used to think that the Republicans much like money, were the root of all evil. I was mistaken. It just so happened that they were the party in power when I was paying attention. Wall Street and global corporations grease the palms of those who can pass legislation that benefits them regardless of the "R" or the "D" that proceeds their name. Money flows to those who are in power, period. When the country began to lose faith in Republican politicians so did those with deep pockets. Bill Clinton was president and signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999, is an Act of the 106th United States Congress which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, opening up competition among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. And L. Summers just happened to be Secretary of the Treasury for the last year and a half of the Bill Clinton administration. As far as the catastrophic economic situation we find ourselves in, we need to look no further than this.
A door that had been shut and locked since the depression had just had it's lock picked. Once "W" took office it was kicked wide open. Summers, Obama's top economic recovery advisor was in on the whole thing and consequently made a fortune as a result. Timothy Geithner was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.[5] Summers was his mentor, now Geithner is Secretary Treasurer. Hmmmm.With Geithner and Summer's help the Obama administration, rather than chart a new course, seems to be intent on re-inflating the bubble that will burst and then what?????????
Here's a guy that sees what I see . . .Chris Hedges Truthdig April 6, 2009 : America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -= - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
OB14me has disappointed me in other ways as well, apparently he isn't going to reverse the Executive powers that Bush wrote into existence during his "reign". Obama spoke out against them during the campaign but, has taken measures not to reverse them as president. WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court today vacated a lower court decision giving the president the extraordinary power to seize and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens or residents without charge or trial. The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who, after being held for almost six years in military detention, was indicted last week in federal court and charged with two counts of material support for terrorism.In July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a fractured decision that the president had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government's claim of extraordinary detention power would have "disastrous consequences for the Constitution—and the country." The Supreme Court vacated that decision and dismissed the case as moot.
The practice of Rendition (the kidnapping of someone thought to be a terrorists and transporting them to some secret place with no charges or trial, for an undetermined amount of time) Obama has kept this option in his administration. The right of Habeus Corpus is still being waved, which flies directly in the face of our constitution.
DaG Out
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Tea Party Propaganda
Just another day and just another conservative scandal. I thought the organization around Rick Santelli's rant was a little too smooth, a little too perfectly orchestrated for something not to be very, very wrong about it. The right wing moneychangers tried once again to control the message and lie to the American people to push their agenda that only hurts America. The right wing elite hated FDR because he turned on his own class of people and put the average American worker ahead of them. They were shocked that he would care about the state of our nation over the vested interests in a very small few. I did write that Rick's behavior was indicative of most talking heads that appear on the Wall Street shows because they are slaves to the very wealthy. These same people are terrified that Barack Obama may indeed reach America in the same way that FDR reached into the hearts of a depressed and hopeless American population that was beat down by the the depression back in 1929.
What a great job of reporting by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of Playboy:
Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.
All I can say is thankfully we have blogs to help expose this massive corrosion that has seeped into the bowels of our nation and uses our national media on all levels to mainline their corruption. Shame on them all.
As whenwego at DKos writes:
It appears that this is the brain child of the shadowy Sam Adams project:
The Sam Adams Alliance, a nonprofit conservative organization, has started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.
And the coordination is now expanding to business interests that are opposed to Obama's programs:
Industries from health care to agribusiness to mining that stand to lose under President Barack Obama's policy agenda are ramping up lobbying campaigns to derail or modify his plans.
The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.
And don't bother to ask who is behind the Sam Adams Alliance, because all that is scrubbed:
But it’s the Alliance’s scrubbing of their link to Koch that is most telling. A cached page, erased on February 16, just three days before Santelli’s rant, shows that the Alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the Koch family.
Note the amount of coverage (advertisement) this movement has received from Fox and conservative talk radio. The Newt Gingrich Repubs are jumping all over this and several of the up and comers are attending these rallies and giving speeches. It amazes me how gullible and easily swayed we the people have become. The people that attend these things are literally supporting ideas that benefit them the least.
The East India Company long held a privileged position in relation to the English, and later the British, government. As a result, it was frequently granted special rights and privileges, including trade monopolies and exemptions. In 1773 the East India Company was one of the strongholds of British economy. Suddenly it found itself at odds with the American non-importation restrictions on tea and with a huge inventory it could not move. The company was not able to meet its payment on dividends and loans and was moving towards bankruptcy. Of course the British government was reluctant to let it happen from fear that this may disrupt financial markets. As an alternative to a direct loan the Ministry decided to allow the company to send tea to America without paying an export duty.
Only a few of the history books note this underlying reason for the uprising. Most merely say it was due to England imposing the "Stamp Act" and other taxation without representation. It's also left out of most history books that the so called uprising was very peaceful and orderly. The participants actually swept the decks of the boats clean after tossing East India company's tea into the harbor. The original Boston Tea Party was a million dollar act of vandalism against one of the largest global corporations in the world. The East India company. The colonists were protesting the lowering of taxes on the East India company. (the Walmart of the 1700's) The lowered tax on the tea enabled the company to repay their debt to England and made it all but impossible for American businesses to compete. (sound familiar?) The Boston Tea party has been co opted by the Right much like the Evangelicals co opted Christianity, convincing their followers believe that Jesus wants you to be rich.
Another incident of the right co opting progressive or democratic socialist ideals is Glen Beck's latest fascination with Thomas Paine. He's had an actor dressing up like Paine ranting against this administration. The actor rants from the writings of Paine and uses selective quotations completely misrepresenting Paine's beliefs. Thomas Paine would be today's right wing conservatives nightmare. He was for labor, taxing the rich and giving it to the youth of America so they could have free college education. He believed in setting up social safety nets like social security and unemployment insurance. on. It would do Glen Beck good to read Prof. Harvey Kaye's "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America". Since Beck is going to cherry pick some of Paine's quotes, I thought
I'd give you some that I will just bet don't get mentioned.
1. "Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true."
2. "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
3. (this one is for the past administration) "He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."
4. "Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities."
5. (Attention Repubs and Blue dog Dems!) "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
6. "My mind is my own church."
7. "One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."
8. "Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society."
9. "The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy."
10. "To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches. "
11. "War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."
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While I agree that our government is spending way too much it must be noted that trillions of dollars in spending were purposefully left out of the budget during the past 8 years. None of the cost of the Iraq war was included in the Bush administration's budgets. This omission artificially lowered the budgets expenditures. Obama's budget includes this cost and naturally increases hid budget. Military spending under Obama's budget actually went up contrary to what the right wing pundits have been saying. They report cuts in antiquated war planes and ships that have little effectiveness in modern guerrilla type warfare. Obama increased spending for supplies that the soldiers can actually use as well as medical benefits when they return home. Even though the budget is the largest spending bill ever it at least attempts to address things that have been neglected for years and years. Infrastructure, education, and health care.
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In closing note to those who thought that Obama is secretly a Muslim. He gave the orders to the Navy snipers to "shoot to kill" those Muslim pirates. I guess for the unwavering haters that means that he's blood thirsty and a loose cannon.
DaG Out
What a great job of reporting by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of Playboy:
Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.
All I can say is thankfully we have blogs to help expose this massive corrosion that has seeped into the bowels of our nation and uses our national media on all levels to mainline their corruption. Shame on them all.
As whenwego at DKos writes:
It appears that this is the brain child of the shadowy Sam Adams project:
The Sam Adams Alliance, a nonprofit conservative organization, has started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.
And the coordination is now expanding to business interests that are opposed to Obama's programs:
Industries from health care to agribusiness to mining that stand to lose under President Barack Obama's policy agenda are ramping up lobbying campaigns to derail or modify his plans.
The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.
And don't bother to ask who is behind the Sam Adams Alliance, because all that is scrubbed:
But it’s the Alliance’s scrubbing of their link to Koch that is most telling. A cached page, erased on February 16, just three days before Santelli’s rant, shows that the Alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the Koch family.
Note the amount of coverage (advertisement) this movement has received from Fox and conservative talk radio. The Newt Gingrich Repubs are jumping all over this and several of the up and comers are attending these rallies and giving speeches. It amazes me how gullible and easily swayed we the people have become. The people that attend these things are literally supporting ideas that benefit them the least.
The East India Company long held a privileged position in relation to the English, and later the British, government. As a result, it was frequently granted special rights and privileges, including trade monopolies and exemptions. In 1773 the East India Company was one of the strongholds of British economy. Suddenly it found itself at odds with the American non-importation restrictions on tea and with a huge inventory it could not move. The company was not able to meet its payment on dividends and loans and was moving towards bankruptcy. Of course the British government was reluctant to let it happen from fear that this may disrupt financial markets. As an alternative to a direct loan the Ministry decided to allow the company to send tea to America without paying an export duty.
Only a few of the history books note this underlying reason for the uprising. Most merely say it was due to England imposing the "Stamp Act" and other taxation without representation. It's also left out of most history books that the so called uprising was very peaceful and orderly. The participants actually swept the decks of the boats clean after tossing East India company's tea into the harbor. The original Boston Tea Party was a million dollar act of vandalism against one of the largest global corporations in the world. The East India company. The colonists were protesting the lowering of taxes on the East India company. (the Walmart of the 1700's) The lowered tax on the tea enabled the company to repay their debt to England and made it all but impossible for American businesses to compete. (sound familiar?) The Boston Tea party has been co opted by the Right much like the Evangelicals co opted Christianity, convincing their followers believe that Jesus wants you to be rich.
Another incident of the right co opting progressive or democratic socialist ideals is Glen Beck's latest fascination with Thomas Paine. He's had an actor dressing up like Paine ranting against this administration. The actor rants from the writings of Paine and uses selective quotations completely misrepresenting Paine's beliefs. Thomas Paine would be today's right wing conservatives nightmare. He was for labor, taxing the rich and giving it to the youth of America so they could have free college education. He believed in setting up social safety nets like social security and unemployment insurance. on. It would do Glen Beck good to read Prof. Harvey Kaye's "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America". Since Beck is going to cherry pick some of Paine's quotes, I thought
I'd give you some that I will just bet don't get mentioned.
1. "Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true."
2. "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
3. (this one is for the past administration) "He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."
4. "Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities."
5. (Attention Repubs and Blue dog Dems!) "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
6. "My mind is my own church."
7. "One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."
8. "Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society."
9. "The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy."
10. "To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches. "
11. "War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."
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While I agree that our government is spending way too much it must be noted that trillions of dollars in spending were purposefully left out of the budget during the past 8 years. None of the cost of the Iraq war was included in the Bush administration's budgets. This omission artificially lowered the budgets expenditures. Obama's budget includes this cost and naturally increases hid budget. Military spending under Obama's budget actually went up contrary to what the right wing pundits have been saying. They report cuts in antiquated war planes and ships that have little effectiveness in modern guerrilla type warfare. Obama increased spending for supplies that the soldiers can actually use as well as medical benefits when they return home. Even though the budget is the largest spending bill ever it at least attempts to address things that have been neglected for years and years. Infrastructure, education, and health care.
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In closing note to those who thought that Obama is secretly a Muslim. He gave the orders to the Navy snipers to "shoot to kill" those Muslim pirates. I guess for the unwavering haters that means that he's blood thirsty and a loose cannon.
DaG Out
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Too little too late
PARIS (AFP) – The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said the breakway of a Jamaica-sized ice shelf from the Antarctic peninsula could accelerate global warming in this already vulnerable region.
Satellite pictures show a 40-kilometre (25-mile) ice bridge that was the Wilkins Ice Shelf's last link to the coast had now shattered at its narrowest point, about 500 metres (yards) wide, UNEP said.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf once covered around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles) before it began to retreat in the 1990s, and by last May the ice bridge was all that connected it to Charcot and Latady islands.
The loss of the bridge "may now allow ocean currents to wash away far more of the shelf," UNEP said.
Christian Lambrechts, a policy and programme officer with UNEP's Division of Early Warning and Assessment, said this would expose more of the sea's surface to sunlight, rather than reflect it, in turn "contributing to continued and accelerated warming."
The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts up towards South America -- has been hit by greater warming than almost any other region on Earth.
In the past 50 years, temperatures have risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), around six times the global average.
Ice shelves are ledges of thick ice that float on the sea and are attached to the land. They are formed when ice is exuded from ice sheet on land.
The Antarctic ice shelves do not add to sea levels when they melt. Like the Arctic ice cap, they float on the sea and thus displace their own volume.
But the loss of an ice shelf means that the glaciers that feed it may flow out straight to the sea, as if from an uncorked bottle.
"Although the Wilkins ice bridge collapse will have no direct consequence on sea level rise, it might have an indirect impact, as the decay of the ice shelf will reduce the stability of the glaciers that are feeding it," said Lambrechts.
In the past 20 years, Antarctica has lost seven ice shelves.
The process is marked by shrinkage and the breakaway of increasingly bigger chunks before the remainder of the shelf snaps away from the coast.
It then disintegrates into debris or into icebergs that eventually melt as they drift northwards.
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Also today:
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON – Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming — a radical idea once dismissed out of hand — is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said Wednesday.
That's because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month.
The concept of using technology to purposely cool the climate is called geoengineering. One option raised by Holdren and proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays.
Using such an experimental measure is only being thought of as a last resort, Holdren said.
"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury ... of ruling any approach off the table."
His concern is that the United States and other nations won't slow global warming fast enough and that several "tipping points" could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
He and many experts believe that warming of a few degrees more would lead to disastrous drought conditions and food shortages in some regions, rising seas and more powerful coastal storms in others.
At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.
"We're talking about all these issues in the White House," Holdren said. "There's a very vigorous process going on of discussing all the options for addressing the energy climate challenge."
Holdren said discussions include Cabinet officials and heads of sub-Cabinet level agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The 65-year-old physicist is far from alone in taking geoengineering seriously. The National Academy of Sciences is making it the subject of the first workshop in its new climate challenges program for policymakers, scientists and the public. The British Parliament has also discussed the idea. At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering.
The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement that says "it is prudent to consider geoengineering's potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment."
Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.
Holdren, a 1981 winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, outlined these possible geoengineering options:
• Shooting sulfur particles (like those produced by power plants and volcanoes, for example) into the upper atmosphere, an idea that gained steam when it was proposed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2006. It would be "basically mimicking the effect of volcanoes in screening out the incoming sunlight," Holdren said.
• Creating artificial "trees" — giant towers that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it.
The first approach would "try to produce a cooling effect to offset the heating effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases," Holdren said.
But he said there could be grave side effects. Studies suggest that might include eating away a large chunk of the ozone layer above the poles and causing the Mediterranean and the Mideast to be much drier.
And those are just the predicted problems. Scientists say they worry about side effects that they don't anticipate.
While the idea could strike some people as too risky, the Obama administration could get unusual support on the idea from groups that have often denied the harm of global warming in the past.
The conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute has its own geoengineering project, saying it could be "feasible and cost-effective." And Cato Institute scholar Jerry Taylor said Wednesday: "Very few people would rule out geoengineering on its face."
Holdren didn't spell out under what circumstances such extreme measures might ever be called for. And he emphasized they are not something to rely on.
"It would be preferable by far," he said, "to solve this problem by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases."
Yet there is already significant opposition building to the House Democratic leaders' bill aimed at achieving President Barack Obama's goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.
Holdren said temperatures should be kept from rising more than 3.6 degrees. To get there, he said the U.S. and other industrial nations have to begin permanent dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide pollution by 2015, with developing countries following suit within a decade.
Those efforts are racing against three tipping points he cited: Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, he said, and that has the potential of altering the climate in unforeseen ways. Other elements that could dramatically speed up climate change include the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide.
The trouble is that no one knows when these things are coming, he said.
Holdren also addressed other topics during the interview:
• The U.S. anti-ballistic missile program is not ready to work and shouldn't be used unless it is 100 percent effective. The system, which would be used to shoot down missiles from countries like North Korea or Iran "needs to be essentially perfect ... that's going to be hard to achieve."
• Holdren said NASA needs some changes. He said the Bush administration's plan to return astronauts to the moon was underfunded so money was taken from science and aeronautics. Those areas, including climate change research, were "decimated," he said.
The administration will "rebalance NASA's programs so that we have in space exploration, a suitable mix of manned activities and robotic activities," Holdren said. Doing that "will only get under way in earnest when a new administrator is in place."
Holdren, who advises the president on such decisions, said he hopes Obama will pick a new NASA boss soon.
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Well, since a conservative think tank acknowledges global warming as a problem, will Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest continue to say that it is a myth and a left wing scare tactic? I guess the good news is the multi trillion dollar debt we're in isn't going to matter in the least.
DaG out
Satellite pictures show a 40-kilometre (25-mile) ice bridge that was the Wilkins Ice Shelf's last link to the coast had now shattered at its narrowest point, about 500 metres (yards) wide, UNEP said.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf once covered around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles) before it began to retreat in the 1990s, and by last May the ice bridge was all that connected it to Charcot and Latady islands.
The loss of the bridge "may now allow ocean currents to wash away far more of the shelf," UNEP said.
Christian Lambrechts, a policy and programme officer with UNEP's Division of Early Warning and Assessment, said this would expose more of the sea's surface to sunlight, rather than reflect it, in turn "contributing to continued and accelerated warming."
The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts up towards South America -- has been hit by greater warming than almost any other region on Earth.
In the past 50 years, temperatures have risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), around six times the global average.
Ice shelves are ledges of thick ice that float on the sea and are attached to the land. They are formed when ice is exuded from ice sheet on land.
The Antarctic ice shelves do not add to sea levels when they melt. Like the Arctic ice cap, they float on the sea and thus displace their own volume.
But the loss of an ice shelf means that the glaciers that feed it may flow out straight to the sea, as if from an uncorked bottle.
"Although the Wilkins ice bridge collapse will have no direct consequence on sea level rise, it might have an indirect impact, as the decay of the ice shelf will reduce the stability of the glaciers that are feeding it," said Lambrechts.
In the past 20 years, Antarctica has lost seven ice shelves.
The process is marked by shrinkage and the breakaway of increasingly bigger chunks before the remainder of the shelf snaps away from the coast.
It then disintegrates into debris or into icebergs that eventually melt as they drift northwards.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - -
Also today:
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON – Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming — a radical idea once dismissed out of hand — is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said Wednesday.
That's because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month.
The concept of using technology to purposely cool the climate is called geoengineering. One option raised by Holdren and proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays.
Using such an experimental measure is only being thought of as a last resort, Holdren said.
"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury ... of ruling any approach off the table."
His concern is that the United States and other nations won't slow global warming fast enough and that several "tipping points" could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
He and many experts believe that warming of a few degrees more would lead to disastrous drought conditions and food shortages in some regions, rising seas and more powerful coastal storms in others.
At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.
"We're talking about all these issues in the White House," Holdren said. "There's a very vigorous process going on of discussing all the options for addressing the energy climate challenge."
Holdren said discussions include Cabinet officials and heads of sub-Cabinet level agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The 65-year-old physicist is far from alone in taking geoengineering seriously. The National Academy of Sciences is making it the subject of the first workshop in its new climate challenges program for policymakers, scientists and the public. The British Parliament has also discussed the idea. At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering.
The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement that says "it is prudent to consider geoengineering's potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment."
Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.
Holdren, a 1981 winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, outlined these possible geoengineering options:
• Shooting sulfur particles (like those produced by power plants and volcanoes, for example) into the upper atmosphere, an idea that gained steam when it was proposed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2006. It would be "basically mimicking the effect of volcanoes in screening out the incoming sunlight," Holdren said.
• Creating artificial "trees" — giant towers that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it.
The first approach would "try to produce a cooling effect to offset the heating effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases," Holdren said.
But he said there could be grave side effects. Studies suggest that might include eating away a large chunk of the ozone layer above the poles and causing the Mediterranean and the Mideast to be much drier.
And those are just the predicted problems. Scientists say they worry about side effects that they don't anticipate.
While the idea could strike some people as too risky, the Obama administration could get unusual support on the idea from groups that have often denied the harm of global warming in the past.
The conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute has its own geoengineering project, saying it could be "feasible and cost-effective." And Cato Institute scholar Jerry Taylor said Wednesday: "Very few people would rule out geoengineering on its face."
Holdren didn't spell out under what circumstances such extreme measures might ever be called for. And he emphasized they are not something to rely on.
"It would be preferable by far," he said, "to solve this problem by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases."
Yet there is already significant opposition building to the House Democratic leaders' bill aimed at achieving President Barack Obama's goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.
Holdren said temperatures should be kept from rising more than 3.6 degrees. To get there, he said the U.S. and other industrial nations have to begin permanent dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide pollution by 2015, with developing countries following suit within a decade.
Those efforts are racing against three tipping points he cited: Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, he said, and that has the potential of altering the climate in unforeseen ways. Other elements that could dramatically speed up climate change include the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide.
The trouble is that no one knows when these things are coming, he said.
Holdren also addressed other topics during the interview:
• The U.S. anti-ballistic missile program is not ready to work and shouldn't be used unless it is 100 percent effective. The system, which would be used to shoot down missiles from countries like North Korea or Iran "needs to be essentially perfect ... that's going to be hard to achieve."
• Holdren said NASA needs some changes. He said the Bush administration's plan to return astronauts to the moon was underfunded so money was taken from science and aeronautics. Those areas, including climate change research, were "decimated," he said.
The administration will "rebalance NASA's programs so that we have in space exploration, a suitable mix of manned activities and robotic activities," Holdren said. Doing that "will only get under way in earnest when a new administrator is in place."
Holdren, who advises the president on such decisions, said he hopes Obama will pick a new NASA boss soon.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Well, since a conservative think tank acknowledges global warming as a problem, will Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest continue to say that it is a myth and a left wing scare tactic? I guess the good news is the multi trillion dollar debt we're in isn't going to matter in the least.
DaG out
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