September 2007 archive

here we are… ready? set? go live??? holy moly.

this is the palette of pre-natal docudharma
… the way your auras look to me

What?  Does this have to be about something?

Hat tip Sydney Indymedia

MakePovertyHistory Australia carted ice sculptures of George Bush and John Howard around Sydney to melt today to highlight their alternative vision for APEC: Building a Sustainable Future Free from Extreme Poverty: Priorities for APEC (40-page pdf)

Make Poverty History co-chair, Andrew Hewett, makes the connection:

It is a moral challenge, because those least responsible for causing the problem – the poorest people in the poorest countries of the world – will overwhelmingly pay the highest price as climate change begins to bite. If Australia is serious about being a global leader as chair of APEC, we must do three things. First, join the rest of the international community in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. Second, commit to deep cuts in greenhouse pollution. And third, support the efforts of our neighbours and developing country partners in APEC to adapt to climate change and reduce poverty in an environmentally sustainable way.

It is clear that climate change is affecting the lives of the poorest people in our world. The monsoon season in our region and in South Asia has become shorter and more intense over the last decade, and so we can expect to see more people displaced by the kind of flooding we see right now in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Crops are failing in the face of increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns. Millions of the poorest people in sub-Saharan Africa
face water shortages. And sea level rise could potentially displace millions of people from small island nations in the Pacific, and low-lying coastal countries, over the next few decades.

If we don’t get serious about tackling climate change, we won’t be talking about making poverty history, we’ll be making it permanent.

In other news from Sydney, surprise! W doesn’t even know where he is. In front of business leaders on Friday:

Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit . . . .

His recovery was lamer still, if that is possible.

As I type this, Radio Australia is playing Pink’s Dear Mr. President, something I have never heard them play before.

Not sure if there’s really a “Foghorn Leghorn” coral, but the other two appear to have just paved a path for the few remaining penguins and the polar bears.  The Christian Science Monitor reports: New tool to fight global warming: Endangered Species Act?  A recent deal to protect the habitat of endangered coral may offer US environmentalists new leverage.

The elkhorn and staghorn coral won protected status under the ESA in May 2006. But it took a second legal battle to win a preservation of the corals’ “critical habitat,” part of last week’s settlement between environmentalists and the US fisheries service.

The act’s leverage will grow, environmentalists say, as climate change becomes recognized as a factor in species’ decline. The number of species-recovery plans that cite global warming as a damaging factor has gone from zero as recently as 1990 to 141 today – with most of the growth since 2000.

While that’s still just 9 percent of the 1,494 species listed at one time or another, the increase suggests that a large group of species still awaiting listing will have global warming cited as a major cause in their decline. The polar bear, 12 species of penguins, and the Kittlitz’s Murrelet, an Alaskan bird that nests on the edges of glaciers, are all candidates, Mr. Suckling says.

Note: You may recall Mr. Suckling’s work from melvin’s writing recently about a mother of a lawsuit v. Interior ahead.  Rest up Mr. Suckling! 

A tip has appeared in my inbox that’s just to durned good to pass up.  Remember bad ol’ Richard Pombo?  Well, it seems his pals at the American Land Rights Association are OUTRAGED!!!

The Battle Ground (Washington) based association says airport police who arrested the senator [Larry Craig] in a men’s room sex sting are responsible for weakening private property rights in the West. Craig is a Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

They’re calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis airport. Could be an interesting sidebar for next year’s Republican Presidential Convention in the Twin Cities, eh?

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

Four stories in the news at 4 o’clock. Simple, huh?

1. The ACLU has struck another blow against Bush-style fascism on behalf of Joe Does everywhere. Dan Eggen of the Washington Post reports, Judge Rules Provisions of Patriot Act Unconstitutional:

   A federal judge today struck down portions of the USA Patriot Act as unconstitutional, ordering the FBI to stop issuing ‘national security letters’ that secretly demand customer information from Internet service providers and other businesses.

   U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York ruled that the landmark antiterrorism law violates the First Amendment and the separation of powers because it effectively prohibits recipients of the FBI letters from revealing their existence and does not provide adequate judicial oversight of the process.

   Marrero wrote in his 106-page ruling that Patriot Act provisions related to NSLs are “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

2. More court battles may be on the horizon for the Bush administration. According to The Guardian, the National Security Archives has sued the White House over their mishandling of email. “A private firm today filed a lawsuit claiming the White House illegally abandoned an automatic archiving system for its email in 2002. ¶ The legal move, taken by National Security Archive (NSA), a group advocating the public disclosure of government secrets, is the latest attempt to find out whether the Bush administration lost millions of electronic messages. ¶ Email problems at the White House first came to light during a special investigation into the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent in 2003, and the issue was raised again this year during inquiries into the role of presidential aides in firing US attorneys.”

3. Not much news from the APEC meeting in Sydney, but The Hill makes mention of this bit of Aussie humor. “The White House was not amused Thursday by the antics of an Australian comedy group that breached President Bush’s security in Sydney… The group staged a faux motorcade, pretending to be the delegation of Canada with one of the comedians dressed as Osama bin Laden, and made it past two police checkpoints before being stopped.” The Sydney Morning Herald has more.

4. Scientists now have a theory to explain how an asteroid was set on a collision course with the Earth — a cataclysmic event that is a leading theory to why many dinosaurs went extinct. Space.com has the low down, Dino-Killing Asteroid Traced to Cosmic Collision. “Scientists think the celestial smash-up took place some 160 million years ago in the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The collision would have hurled numerous large chunks of debris into space. And the scientists think one of those fragments crashed into Earth 65 million years ago to form the Chicxulub crater near Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Another likely carved the Tycho crater on the moon, they said. ¶ The results, published in the Sept. 6 issue of the journal Nature, rely on a series of computer models and do not represent a firm conclusion, though they are supported by information collected from the Chicxulub crater by past researchers.”

(I’m posting this as a thread, as I will be in and out, today only).
Luciano, Buona Notte.

Nessun dorma, nessun dorma … Tu pure, o Principessa, Nella tua fredda stanza, Guardi le stelle Che tremano d’amore   E di speranza.	No one sleeps, no one sleeps… Even you, o Princess, In your cold room, Watch the stars, That tremble with love   And with hope.

I don’t write diaries much these days but I wanted to write this one this morning.  I don’t watch Fox News Republican debates,  I don’t even watch Fox News Democratic debates….heh! Sun Tzu is not impressed with my avoidance of knowing my enemy but did he get saddled with my gag reflex?  CNN was kind though this morning and while I was trimming my husband’s hair they put this clip up……Huckabee vs. Paul on the idea of an unsurge and leaving Iraq.  Mike Huckabee seems to know something about honor that I don’t.