A Spork in the Drawer

More McSame

Gosh, it's a good thing that St. John hates lobbyists:

Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers.

Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.

[...]

Betts is among a string of donors who have benefited from McCain-engineered land swaps. In 1994, the senator helped a lobbyist for land developer Del Webb Corp. pursue an exchange in the Las Vegas area, according to the Center for Public Integrity. McCain sponsored two bills, in 1991 and 1994, sought by donor Donald R. Diamond that yielded the developer thousands of acres in trade for national parkland.

[...]

As McCain positions himself as a champion of environmental causes, observers of the Yavapai Ranch swap say it shows a paradox in the senator's positions.

"Paradox"? Wouldn't it bee more accurate to just call McCain a fraud?

McCain also has been critical of government's "revolving door," which allows former government officials to position themselves as influential lobbyists. Rogers said that McCain does not recall being lobbied by his former staff members on the land swap and that "no lobbyist influenced Senator McCain on this issue."

Somebody should tell St. John about his top advisor Charlie Black.

Is the Senator involved in fleecing the American taxpayer?

A town official opposed to the swap said other Yavapai Ranch land sold nine years ago for about $2,000 per acre, while some of the prime commercial land near a parcel that the developers will get has brought as much as $120,000 per acre.

Heavens! That's an awful lot of Straight Talk!

Perhaps the corporate media will take notice of this hypocrisy.

When pigs fly.

As a side note, one of the people involved in this ripoff is Carl H. Lindner Jr of Chiquita Banana infamy.

St. John has some nice friends, no?

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Shelf Life

Swell:

A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.

[...]

The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted.

"The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

[...]

Climate scientists around Antarctica were taken by surprise by the new find. "Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula yet to be threatened," Vaughan said.

"I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted."

Ocean-front property in Kentucky, anyone?

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Cui Bono?

They're not even pretending anymore:

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

[...]

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA's past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

[...]

The effort to rewrite the language -- on the day the agency faced a statutory deadline -- forced EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson to postpone at the last moment a scheduled news conference to announce the new rules. It finally took place at 6 p.m., five hours later than planned.

[...]

Lisa Heinzerling, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in the Clean Air Act, said Dudley's letter to the EPA represents "a misunderstanding of the statute, a misunderstanding of Supreme Court precedent and a misunderstanding of the science as the expert agency understands it."

The truly damaging thing is that the next president - even a Democrat - won't seek to hold anyone accountable. We have to move forward and not dwell on the past, don't'cha know. Granted, the number of criminal and civil trials that would be needed to set things right would cause the justice system to collapse under the sheer weight of it all. Nonetheless, by allowing this - and so many other - outrages to stand legitimizes them.

I blame Gerald Ford.

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Heh

This has to make George and Dick very unhappy:

Iraq has formally ratified the UN's Kyoto Protocol on climate change, according to a government statement seen by AFP on Saturday.

"The presidential council ratified in its session on January 23 a law according to which the Republic of Iraq will join the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol," the statement said.

[Via The Lede.]

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Joke Of The Day

Bush declares US will 'lead' efforts on climate

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And On It Goes

George is determined to spend every one of his remaining 612 days in office making sure that the US is a global pariah:

UN-hosted talks on climate change have ended in deadlock.

They were aimed at paving the way for the climate summit taking place in Bali in December which will focus on how to forward the Kyoto Protocol.

However, the US said it was unlikely to take part in negotiations at the end of this year on a global agreement to cut emissions of carbon dioxide.

[...]

However, Dr Harlan Watson, the United States chief negotiator on climate, told the BBC: "I think there's a lot going on but I certainly wouldn't want to raise expectations, however, that there's going to be some sort of a new negotiation under the framework convention itself.

"I just think that it's not going to happen. It's certainly not something we think the time is right for."

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Saturday With Sen. And Mrs. Kerry II

"It's 254 pages written on recycled Attorney General Gonzales e-mails. Actually, we couldn't find 'em. We're still looking."

Who says John Kerry can't tell a joke?

On Saturday, Senator John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry made an appearance at a local Barnes & Noble to promote their new book, This Moment on Earth.

dayvoe of 2 Political Junkies and I we're contacted beforehand and asked if we would like to attend. Along with bloggers from the John Kerry Blog and Democratic Underground we had a few minutes before the event to talk the the Senator and Mrs. Kerry in relative privacy. Sen. Kerry discussed the importance of peer-review saying, "All 928 of peer-reviewed studies find that human beings are contributing to global climate change. Not one study to the contrary is peer-reviewed. Not one." In response to a comment of mine, Kerry said of Sen. James Inhofe, "[He's the] flat-earth caucus leader." The Senator then went on to outline the three things the government can do:

1. Energy efficiency

2. Alternative and renewable fuels

3. Clean coal

The Kerrys addressed an packed house. Summarizing their book, the Senator said: "This book is, really, an optimistic book. It should make you angry for five minutes, ten minutes, we hope, and then transfer that into the inspiration that comes out of the stories of all the people we write about and the great things they've accomplished. Average citizens who've made changes and who fought the government to get the accountability and enforcement that they deserve and the law says they should have."

What separates this book from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is the focus on everyday people who have practical solutions to the environmental problems facing us. "I was involved in the first Earth Day in 1970.
Twenty million people came out and said, 'We're gonna change things.' They created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and even the Environmental Protection Agency was signed into existence by Richard Nixon in 1972 because of that effort. We made the environment a voting issue."

Mrs. Kerry summed it up best: "This book is a reaffirmation of the quality of thinking and conversation that the American people shared with us on the road."

---

ADDED: Global Villiage has her take here.

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Saturday With Sen. And Mrs. Kerry

Just a couple of quick pics from today's book event with Sen. Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry.

I'll have more pics and a write-up tomorrow.

Some of dayvoe's pics are here and his impressions are here.

Anyway, more tomorrow.

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Book Event

For those in the Pittsburgh area: Sen. John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry will be giving a talk at the Waterworks Barnes & Noble tomorrow, Sat. 12 May at 2pm, in support of their new book This Moment on Earth.

See you there!

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Comb Licker Death Watch

Still doing the White House's bidding:

One of Paul Wolfowitz’s two handpicked deputies, Juan José Daboub, tried to water down references to climate change in one of the World Bank’s main environmental strategy papers, the bank’s chief scientist has told the Financial Times.

Mr Daboub, a conservative former finance minister from El Salvador, was brought into the bank by Mr Wolfo­witz. He is already under fire for allegedly trying to take out references to family planning in the bank’s Madagascar country assistance strategy and reduce its prominence in its new health sector strategy.

Once a neocon always a neocon.

The board of the World Bank has just about had enough.

Gone by Friday?

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Corporatocracy

By now this can come as no surprise:

Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, acknowledged that on several occasions she released internal information from the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency into private hands, including the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Pacific Legal Foundation, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney concluded.

The Pacific Legal Foundation was founded by Reaganuts and is about as bad as you can imagine. Besides receiving funding from ExxonMobil, our old pal Dickie Scaife is also financial supporter.

As for Ms. MacDonald, here's what gives the game away:

Twice she sent internal EPA documents to people whose e-mail addresses ended in chevrontexaco.com, the report said.

While the House Natural Resources Committee is going to hold hearings in May, Interior's Inspector General has found no "illegal activity" in any of this. And that's the real scandal.

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Mr. George And Mr. Stallone

Stolen from The Brain Police (T'anks, microdot!):

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Deadly Veggies

NYT editorial on the increasing incidents of contaminated food:

What’s troubling is the recurrence of such outbreaks in recent years. Contaminated meat used to be deemed the big threat, but strict regulation and strong industrial efforts have reduced that risk considerably. Now produce has become a bigger problem than meat or poultry. There have been three multistate outbreaks from produce in the past three months, including an E. coli outbreak linked to spinach and a salmonella outbreak linked to tomatoes. Surely it is time to give government regulators the power and resources they need to ensure the safety of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The New York Times makes a funny! There's no way this Administration is going to increase regulatory power. Hell, they'll probably say that what little regulation already exists is the cause of the disease outbreaks.

Don't laugh. You know it's true.

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I Can't Tell Anymore

Today's Salon (Sub. or ad view) interviews author Michael Pollan about the recent outbreaks of food-bourne illnesses (fecal contamination in spinach - yum!) and the creation of "superbugs" through the overuse of antibiotics.

What caught my attention, though, was this letter in ressponse:

There's Salon, always peddling some new version of command and control. The solution is to get food producers' incentives in line. Create some tradeable contamination credits that careless producers can purchase from safer ones. This much for rodent turds, this much for each percentage of fecal coliforms. Let the marketplace work its magic.

-- EconCCX

Serious? Parody? The thing is, I"ve come to expect the rightists to talk this way. In a sane country there would be no doubt that this is parody. But we're no longer living in a sane country.

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Wow

A tornado struck London:

At least six people were injured when a tornado swept through a residential street in north-west London this morning, tearing the roofs and walls off scores of houses.

[...]

Until recently tornados were extremely rare in Britain. But in the last 18 months a number have arrived, prompting warnings that such freak weather events are likely to increase in frequency because of global warming.

In July 2005 a tornado in Birmingham damaged 1,000 buildings. And in October this year a tornado was reported just off Brighton, on the south coast.

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To Lighten Up The Mood

HuffPo:

Al Gore appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night to promote the DVD of his hit documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Leno asked Gore about special features the DVD might have, and Gore joked that it included an uncensored version called 'Global Warming Gone Wild'...including "hot glacier on glacier action."

Video at link.

Draft Gore 2008.

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Still Raising The Bar

When last we heard from Sen. James Inhofe he was nattering on about "brainwashing." In his never-ending quest to be the stupidest person on the planet Oklahoma's Finest this morning took to FAUXNews:

INHOFE: Now look, God’s still up there. We still have these natural changes, and this is what’s going on right now. New science comes out. I had a news conference yesterday, Brian, and the reason I did is because we were going to go over to Nairobi, take a bunch of scientists to get the true science over there, only to find out that the registration had dropped off. Almost no media was over there. So we had the same news conference yesterday right here in Washington, D.C.

We had all these scientists and all of them came to the conclusion, yes, part of the globe is warming. Let’s keep in mind, now, the southern hemisphere has never been warming and changing in the last 25 years. The last time I checked that’s part of the globe.

But if the northern hemisphere is warming up, it’s not due to manmade gases. And that’s what these people all come to the conclusion. And yet the other side, the far left, the George Soros, the Hollywood elitists, the far left environmentalists on the committee that I chair — all of them want us to believe the science is settled and it’s not.

By the way, there’s all kinds of new things. Gretchen, you’ll enjoy this. Get your violin out and get ready. They came out with a great discovery just a few weeks ago. And this came from the geophysical research letters and you know what they said? Hold on now! They said the warming is due to the sun. Isn’t that remarkable?

GRETCHEN: Wow.

BRIAN: That’s a Fox News alert.

GRETCHEN: That is a Fox News alert.

(Video at link.)

Dumber by the day.

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Profiles In Ignorance

Brainwashed:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate's most vocal global warming skeptic, James Inhofe, on Thursday dismissed a U.N. meeting on climate change as "a brainwashing session."

Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who will step down as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee in January, told a news conference, "The idea that the science (on global warming) is settled is altogether wrong."

Apparently Senator Inhofe forgot to tell the polar bears:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Polar bear cubs in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea are much less likely to survive compared to 20 years ago, probably due to melting sea ice caused by global warming, according to a new federal government study.

[...]

The falling survival rate comes as a warming climate has melted much of the sea ice off Alaska’s northern coast, limiting polar bears from hunting for food at the ice’s edge.

“The things we’re observing are consistent with a population that is undergoing nutritional stress,” said Amstrup. “We can’t say definitively it’s because of changes in the sea ice, but we don’t know what else it would be.”

That Inhofe will no longer chair the Environment and Public Works Committee is one of the best things the recent elections brought us.

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It's Come To This

A tussle over the Norhwest Passage:

A long-standing legal wrangle between the United States and Canada could complicate future shipping through the Arctic as global warming melts the ice in the Northwest Passage.

The United States contends that the Northwest Passage, though owned by Canada, is an international strait with free passage for all, like other straits around the world. U.S. officials say they are following a long-standing position in favor of keeping straits free to all navigation and want unimpeded movement of U.S. ships.

Canada counters that it has sole jurisdiction over the Northwest Passage and wants to enforce its own laws on ships in the Arctic waters. Canadian officials argue that their authority over the myriad channels and straits that make up the legendary route from the Atlantic to the Pacific is the best way to minimize unsafe ships and accidental spills in the pristine North.

The issue has suddenly come alive because climate change is reducing the Arctic ice pack that prevents regular shipping through the passage.

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