June 2009 archive

Today they announced the winners of round two of the Democracy For America Netroots Scholarships. The Dog did not make the cut, but it is kind of hard to be upset as one of our own Heather/Chacounne did!

She is a tireless worker for torture accountability and frankly if the Dog had do pick between the two of us, well, it would have been her. She is going to have a great opportunity to go to Pittsburgh and network with other activists and learn. The Dog is really happy she is going!

As for the old hound, well there is still round three! 10 more scholarships are available and being the optimistic guy the Dog is, he is sure he is going to get one!

In any case lets here if for Chacounne! Congrat Doll, you deserve it!  

1. The Washington Post reports Limits on greenhouse gas emissions have wide support. “Three-quarters of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with substantial majority support from Democrats, Republicans and independents.”

   “But fewer Americans — 52 percent — support a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions similar to the one the House may vote on as early as tomorrow.”

   Earlier this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists selected essays and photos from 67 Americans and published them in a new online book, Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. In her introduction, novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes:

   Even the architecture of our planet-climate, oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs-is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world’s nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order.

   Back in Washington the House is scheduled to vote on cap-and-trade legislation said to be aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emission. McClatchy adds Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is confident the Climate bill will pass the House on Friday. Markey believes the legislation will lead to a “green revolution”. “Republicans, with few exceptions, oppose the bill.”

   The Guardian reports Markey as having said, “this legislation is a game changer of historic proportion… The whole world is waiting to see if Barack Obama can arrive in Copenhagen as a leader of attempts to reduce green house gas emissions.”

   “The bill, now swollen to about 1,200 pages, would bind the US to reduce the carbon emissions from burning oil and coal by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80% by 2050.”

Four at Four continues with greenhouse gas emissions slowed by cut in oil use, an update from Iraq, and sharks are in a world of hurt.

Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran.

“Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them,” said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation.

“When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means-such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime-I couldn’t believe they’d ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless.”

Dorsey said he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.

From here.

As I’ve been basking in the drama of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s epic Fail, my curiosity was peaked by some comments on the FDL post, How Stupid Does Erick Erickson Feel Today? As well as posts on TPM, DU, Kos and other sources, all of which make vague connections and toss flimsy innuendo, but none of which actually make the suggested connections overtly.

Having spent a little over 30 years in news/publishing (and having done a bit of investigative journalism in my prime), I found it all just so… fascinating! There are things here that need some firmly supported answers. Disjointed factoids garnered thus far:

Sanford, sans written statement or even notes, appears late to his own press conference, also sans wife (now said to be with kids at beach house) and personal assistant. Sanford began with a rambling extemporaneous exposition on the joys of hiking, as if he intended to defend that story, not realizing that the press corps already knew where he’d been (and who he was with). He didn’t begin apologizing and whimpering until ~4 minutes in. When he asked for that female personal assistant, realized she wasn’t there, knew he was busted.  A pitiful performance.

MSNBC reported that an SC newspaper has been sitting on “the” story (the emails of love) for months. Because The State newspaper is a right-wing rag, it’s not hard to figure why they sat on the info, though it also makes me wonder about who the anonymous person who forwarded them to the newspaper might be. Mrs. Sanford? She managed his campaigns, may have access to his emails. His personal assistant who abandoned him yesterday? These two might also have access to his personal email, at least via forwards he may have sent them and a basic knowledge of his range of rememberable passwords. Someone else in the office?  

(Crossposted from Orange)

Today is Torture Accountabilty Day.  There will be events across the country, American citizens making the case that those who committed the moral crime against humanity of torture be held accountable for their actions.

Holding those in the highest positions of power to the law, what a notion.  We know the politics that prevents this, the powers who want these crimes once again swept under the rug.

We heard on Monday from the Supreme Court that Valerie Plame’s suit against Cheney, et al., will not be allowed to go forward.  Scooter Libby was found guilty of obstruction of justice.  Mister Bush commuted his sentence.  And surprise, surprise, there now is no case, even as we all know what happened.  There is no accountability.

From Kai over at Zuky:

On this day in 1982, Chinese American immigrant Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat, at his own bachelor party, by racist white auto workers in Detroit who blamed Japan for layoffs in the US auto industry. The murderers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were convicted of manslaughter. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said, “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”

On July 14, 2008, Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez was beaten to death by racist white teens shouting anti-Mexican epithets, in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The murderers, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, were convicted of simple assault. Two days ago, they were respectively sentenced to 6 and 7 months in county jail. Piekarsky’s lawyer Frederick Fanelli said, “You would be proud to have any of these kids in your classroom, and any of them as your children.”

And what does all this have to do with holding those in power accountable for torture?  What are these connections I am making?

He apologizes to everyone including the ‘moral people of the nation.’

To Bad

Mark Sanford

Doesn’t Have

Any Of Those

Limits on Emissions Have Wide Support



By Steven Mufson and Jennifer Agiesta

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Three-quarters of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with substantial majority support from Democrats, Republicans and independents.

But fewer Americans — 52 percent — support a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions similar to the one the House may vote on as early as tomorrow. That is slightly less support than cap and trade enjoyed in a late July 2008 poll. Forty-two percent of those surveyed this month oppose such a program.

Tehran ‘like a war zone’ as ayatollah refuses to back down on election

• Reports militia drafted in and paid to beat protesters

• Ministers threaten to cut diplomatic ties with UK

Mark Tran, Robert Tait and agencies in Tehran

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 June 2009 06.02 BST

Bloody clashes broke out in Tehran yesterday as Iran’s supreme leader said he would not yield to pressure over the disputed election. The renewed confrontation took place in Baharestan Square, near parliament, where hundreds of protesters faced off against several thousand riot police and other security personnel.

Witnesses likened the scene to a war zone, with helicopters hovering overhead, many arrests and the police beating demonstrators.

One woman told CNN that hundreds of unidentified men armed with clubs had emerged from a mosque to confront the protesters.

“They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre,” she said.

USA

GOP to press Sotomayor on gun rights

Republicans say they will question the Supreme Court nominee on the divisive issue at her confirmation hearings in hopes of weakening her support among moderate Democrats.

By James Oliphant and David G. Savage

June 25, 2009

Reporting from Washington — Senate Republicans said Wednesday they would press Judge Sonia Sotomayor on gun rights, a politically divisive issue that they hope could weaken Democratic support for the Supreme Court nominee.

Though Republicans are a pronounced minority in both the House and Senate, they have used the gun issue to their advantage to divert the legislative agenda, forcing Democrats from moderate and conservative states to take politically risky votes on gun provisions.

Sotomayor’s judicial record appears to provide the GOP with another opportunity to bring the issue to light. Since the Supreme Court decided in a landmark case last year that restrictive laws in Washington, D.C. — a federal entity — infringed on a constitutionally protected right to own a handgun, the debate has shifted to whether that ruling also affected handgun control laws in individual states.

Utrecht is a lively university town in The Netherlands. The medieval warehouses at canal level have been turned into cafes and above, are shops, street musicians, and a constant swirl of people.

One of Utrecht’s great landmarks is its Dom Tower, a surreal computer-generated-like gothic tower that dominates the landscape and the sky. As I said to my nephew, visiting me from NY, you don’t see this in Poughkeepsie. No, he said, you don’t.

Perhaps just as unlikely, in Poughkeepsie, would be running into a small band of Iranians seeking solidarity in another revolutionary attempt. Yesterday, though, there were 11 Iranians standing in front of St. Martin’s Cathedral in Utrecht, each holding the picture of someone killed in the protests in Iran. One of those faces was Neda, perhaps this century’s Anne Frank. Anne was on my mind, having been at the Secret Annex the day before and still thinking about Primo Levi’s observation . . .

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did… Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

^{Primo Levi}

^{cross posted at Daily Kos}