This Earth Day, while an oil rig was burning and sinking and spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico, I joined a small band of protesters during my lunch break to tell the government to stop a similar crime against nature, one that is taking place in my home state of Pennsylvania.  There are no offshore oil rigs here, of course, but the new and dangerous method of extracting natural gas through fracking is becoming a larger and larger threat to our water, our land, and our climate.  And Pennsylvania is ground zero.

So I took to the streets at a Green Party-organized protest.  We stood outside the regional Department of Environmental Protection and made our voices heard.

(Go below the fold for more info on the protest, fracking, and what you can do, including upcoming actions.)

If you were mad at all about Bush’s violations of civil liberties when he was president, this will get you fuming:

In a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.

The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here – violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information – be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

This is not just a single instance of outrage.  It is a microcosm of the Obama presidency, the political success of corporate America, and the failure of its opposition.

Don’t have time to post too much now, might post a longer diary about this later, but for now:

Al Gore and his group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, think President Obama’s decision to pursue offshore oil drilling is a bad idea and they’re letting him know.

In a recent tweet, Gore appeared to endorse a statement released by the Alliance’s CEO Maggie L. Fox in which she criticized Obama’s drilling plan, saying that it “continues our reliance on dirty fossil fuels.”

“We cannot simply drill our way to energy security,” Fox wrote. “Americans are demanding a clean energy future that goes beyond drilling and incentivizes the technologies that are critical to building a 21st-century clean energy economy. What we need now is presidential leadership that drives comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation that caps harmful carbon pollution, puts America back to work, ends our reliance on foreign oil and keeps us safe.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

On April 6, Nederland voters decided – by a vote of 259 to 218 – to legalize marijuana and paraphernalia completely for anyone over 21 years old.  Good for them.

The mountain town’s residents went further than Breckenridge, which last year legalized possession of less than one ounce of marijuana, and by a vote of 259 to 218, removed all criminal penalties against buying, selling, possessing, consuming, growing and transporting marijuana for anyone age 21 or older.

H/T to Polizeros.

Just watch the whole thing.  You’ll thank me.

I’ve been reading A People’s History of the United States over the past year or so, in between everything else I’ve been reading.  Since it’s spring break for me, I’ve been getting through a lot of it, and there’s definitely a reason it’s so popular.  It’s one of those books that can seriously change the way you think.  Just read this excerpt (yeah, it’s long – go check out the book from a library if you don’t want to read it online!) to see what I mean.  This passage affected me a lot.

http://www.historyisaweapon.co…

I’d also suggest reading more about the Wobblies (IWW) if you’re interested.  Very interesting organization, and Zinn writes a lot about them in this book.