10 Environmental Disasters to Remember on Earth Day

10 Environmental Disasters to Remember on Earth Day
Ten tragic lessons in our nation's environmental history that should never be forgotten. And one climate destabilization tragedy in the making that needs our urgent help.

1. Extinction: Three Species Per Hour

According to a United Nations report released in 2007, our planet is at risk of losing three species per hour. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, declared: "We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct."

For John J. Audubon, the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, the great American wild pigeon, would have ranked high: "The multitudes of Wild Pigeons in our woods are astonishing," Audubon wrote. "Indeed, after having viewed them so often, and under so many circumstances, I even now feel inclined to pause, and assure myself that what I am going to relate is fact. Yet I have seen it all, and that too in the company of persons who, like myself, were struck with amazement." A victim of hunting and industrial abuses, the last Passenger Pigeon died in an Ohio zoo in 1914.

2. Everything in Its Path: Mountaintop Removal

Imagine a quarter-mile strip of land stretching from Washington, DC until San Francisco: An estimated 800-1000 square miles of mountains and valleys have been eliminated from the American landscape since the launch of mountaintop removal strip mining operations in central Appalachia in 1970. Using explosives and heavy machinery, over 500 mountains in the oldest and one of the most diverse ranges on earth, have been clear cut, blown to bits and then toppled into valleys and streams with their waste since President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, which shamefully recognized mountaintop removal as an approved mining technique.

Mountaintop removal has not only destroyed the natural heritage; it has ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.

It continues today as one of the most egregious human rights and environmental violations in the nation.

more at link...

Brit Hume ignored evidence that torture by U.S. is "recruiting tool" for terrorists

Brit Hume ignored evidence that torture by U.S. is "recruiting tool" for terrorists
Brit Hume falsely suggested there is no evidence that the United States' use of torture has served as a "recruiting tool" for terrorist groups. In fact, military and FBI interrogators have stated that terrorists have employed the United States' use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques as a recruiting device.

During the April 19 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume falsely suggested there is no evidence that the United States' use of torture has served as a "recruiting tool" for terrorist groups. Responding to the suggestion from NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson that terrorist groups will no longer be able to point to U.S. interrogation techniques to boost recruitment, Hume stated: "Oh, as a recruiting tool? Where's the evidence of that?" In fact, military and FBI interrogators have stated that terrorists have employed the United States' use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques as a recruiting device. For instance, using the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, an Air Force senior interrogator who was in Iraq in 2006 wrote: "I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Alexander further wrote in his November 30, 2008, Washington Post op-ed that "[i]t's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse."

Paranoid Right-Wingers See Obama's Volunteer Service Project as Sinister Plot

Paranoid Right-Wingers See Obama's Volunteer Service Project as Sinister Plot
The far right has seen the fresh face of fascism, and it looks like the civic-minded legislative love child of Sens. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

Most Americans applauded last month when the Senate voted across party lines to expand national-service opportunities. How could you not? The Serve America Act, which passed easily 78-20, invests $5 billion in volunteer corps focused on education, clean energy, health care and veteran issues. In a symbolic but meaningful gesture, the bill also designates Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, thus expanding a post-9/11 concept of patriotism previously limited to dying in Iraq and shopping at JC Penny.

The Service Act will help millions of people learn to read, go to college, stay warm and connect with their fellow citizens. Upon passage, it was immediately hailed by 9/11 survivor organizations, literacy advocates, veterans groups and the AARP.

But not everyone feels warm and fuzzy about the bill whose House version was dubbed the GIVE Act. Among readers of WorldNetDaily and other sites that bridge mainstream conservatism and the lunatic fringe, the biggest question was whether President Barack Obama had shape-shifted from Stalin into Hitler, or had morphed into some grotesque dictatorial hybrid unique to history.

Whatever the genus of the beast, it was agreed in these corners that the Service Act heralded the end of the Republic, the end of Liberty, and the end of Boy Scouts helping little old ladies across the street.

The far right had actually been rehearsing for this moment since July. It was then that Obama told a rally in Colorado Springs, Colo., that he intended to create a volunteer "civilian national security force as powerful, as strong and as well-funded" as the military. For months, rhetoric on the far right concerning Obama's service agenda has ranged from mildly panicked to paranoid delusional.

The patriots at Resistnet.com warn that brown shirts lurked under every red windbreaker worn by AmeriCorps volunteers, whose ranks the Service Act will swell by 175,000. Judi McLoud of Newsmax speaks of "forced labor" and evokes the sign that greeted arrivals at Auschwitz.

Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin agree that the bill is proof we are becoming "slaves" to the federal government. In this the duo echo the Citizen's dubbing of the Service Act as the "National Enslavement Bill." The same Citizen editorial estimates that the Service Act's goal of seven million volunteers roughly equates to the number of East Germans who collaborated with the Stasi.

Not wanting to regurgitate Third Reich and USSR analogies, popular conservative blogger C.J. Graham has taken the globo-government tack and connected the legislation to the United Nations' volunteer development program, and asks, "Will American kids trade baseball caps for mandatory white helmets?"

Michelle Bachmann arrived a little late to the competition, but surprised judges when she executed a flawless triple-backflip allusion to Communist Vietnam, telling a Minnesota radio station last week that the Act would establish "re-education camps for young people" in which they would "get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

It should surprise no one that the right's convulsive fits have been based on misreadings and distortions of the actual bill. While it's true the AmeriCorps Web site has an unfortunate red, black and white color scheme reminiscent of the Nazi flag, the Service Act's fascist overtones stop there.

Most right-wing bleating focuses on early drafts of the House version, H.R. 1388, which included a section instructing Congress to investigate the feasibility of a mandatory national-service requirement. But the clause died in the Senate. The final bill sent to the president merely expands existing programs (some of which were founded under Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush), such as AmeriCorps, SeniorCorps and Learn and Serve America. The Act also increases funding for service-earned college scholarships and programs for youth with disabilities and foster children.

The closest thing in the bill to the fascist dystopia of conservative nightmares is a clause in Section 120 that sets as a condition for some programs the integration of "service learning" into the curricula of secondary schools receiving Service Act funds. This "mandatory service learning" clause is what Bachmann has in mind when she warns of leftist "re-education camps."

And what, exactly, will America's future volunteers be learning in these "camps" before doing the devil's work of retrofitting energy-inefficient homes, providing emotional support to homeless veterans and tutoring poor children in math and English?

According to the bill, educational programs funded under the bill will be designed to: "promote a better understanding of (A) the principles of the Constitution, the heroes of American history (including military heroes), and the meaning of the oath of allegiance; (B) how the nation's government functions; (C) the importance of service in the nation's character."

America's quick recovery from its torture program suggests it wasn't a torture program in the first place

America's quick recovery from its torture program suggests it wasn't a torture program in the first place
Having all-but granted immunity to those who actually carried out the torture because they believed they were merely following legal advice, and with the widespread understanding among experts that it's nearly impossible to criminally prosecute lawyers who were merely offering legal advice, the Catch-22 of nonaccountability is almost complete.

But is President Obama right that America has survived its injuries, having had a while to sleep it off? Can we simply put behind us the obscene picture of violence and cruelty painted by the new OLC memos and the 43-page report by the International Committee of the Red Cross publicized last month by Mark Danner? Was the decision to brutalize our prisoners some form of temporary insanity that is, as Obama's Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair put it yesterday, justifiable if looked at within the "context of these past events" and the "horror of 9/11"? Are we OK about government lawyers and medical personnel and the highest-level government officials collaborating to legalize and implement water-boarding next time the "context" and the "horrors" lead us to lose our collective minds?

What we have learned from the new memos and the ICRC report dwarfs the hoodings and humiliations that took place at Abu Ghraib. Yet when we learned of the prisoner abuse there in 2004, it wasn't just vengeful, lefty, America-hating crackpots who were horrified. We all were. What happened in the intervening five years to make feeling sick to your stomach a partisan issue?

President Obama makes forgiving and forgetting sound awfully appealing. The country is in deep economic trouble. The days and weeks after 9/11 were really, really scary. We need our intelligence officials to be able to keep us safe without having to look over their shoulders. Good people shouldn't be punished for the bad legal advice they received. Bygones. But is the short-term comfort of saying we're over it worth the long-term cost of having become torturers and then cavalierly gotten over it? Because the real risk of getting over it is the possibility that it happens all over again.

Obama Hints At Torture Investigation

Obama Hints At Torture Investigation
Earlier this month, a Spanish court said it would consider opening a criminal case against six Bush administration officials “over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo.” The Spanish attorney general said today that he would not recommend a case, but Judge Baltazar Garzon “will decide whether to press ahead with a criminal investigation.”

Thus far, Obama administration officials have tried to skirt questions on the matter. On Tuesday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded, “We may have some reaction based on what ultimately happens.” Today, CNN’s Juan Carlos Lopez asked Obama about the investigation ahead of his trip to Mexico. Obama repeated his desire to look forward:

OBAMA: I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there. So I have not had direct conversations with the Spanish government about these issues. My team has been in communications with them.

Obama did, however, say he was aware of a “process” moving forward in the U.S. to “understand” what happened under Bush. Notably, he did not endorse or rule out an investigation or commission:

I think that we are moving a process forward here in the United States to understand what happened, but also to focus on how we make sure that the manner in which we operate currently is consistent with our values and our traditions.

Obama concluded: “And so my sense is, is that this will be worked out over time.”

Michelle Malkin and Newt Gingrich Take Report on Rightwing Violence To Heart

Michelle Malkin and Newt Gingrich Take Report on Rightwing Violence To Heart
Michelle Malkin is completely bent out of shape over the release of a Department of Homeland Security report analyzing the risk of violence in the coming years from radical right wing extremist groups. One of the reports rather obvious conclusions is that the combination of the current economic climate (record unemployment) and the current political climate (Democrats in control the government, black man with Muslim-sounding name as President) is a recipe for increased violence among fringe right wing groups.

Malkin seems to think this report represents some sort of plot by leftists in the Obama administration to target people like herself and her merry band of teabaggers. Implicit in her rant is the notion that there couldn't possibly be any legitimate concerns underlying this report. The reality, though, is that this report was almost surely written by a career analyst at DHS, not a partisan operative, and its conclusions are as obvious as they are non-controversial.

I wonder if Malkin happens to remember what the single deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil was prior to 9/11. That's right, it was the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people (many of them children) and wounded over 800. And it was carried out by right wing extremists. Moreover, in the years directly preceding the bombing, the country had been in recession and the Democrats had taken control of Congress and the White House. Indeed, the entire Clinton presidency was marked by increasing radicalism among fringe right wingers that eventually led to the creation of armed militia groups all over the country.
.....the rest at the link

More here, The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition
Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity." The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps. The Right's leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: "Here we go Again," protesting that "this seems so nakedly ideological." Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it's "Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!" Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS -- as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) -- now considers the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto." Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin's Hot Air stomps its feet about all "the smears listed in the new DHS warning about 'right-wing extremism.'"

The Corporate Lobbyists Behind the Tea Parties by Jane Hamsher

The Corporate Lobbyists Behind the Tea Parties by Jane Hamsher
Anyone who has watched Fox News of late has seen them talking about the April 15 "tea party" demonstrations, which they take pains to characterize as a spontaneous grassroots uprising against government spending that they are simply "covering."

Neil Cavuto said:

We are are going to be in the middle of these protests because at Fox, we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men.

The Million Man March happened in 1995. Fox News didn't go on the air until 1996.

Why all the effort to distance themselves from the teabaggers? It's obvious they are integrally involved -- Fox has given them millions in free publicity, despite the fact that there's no evidence of "ratings gold" here. Four of their biggest stars will be appearing at the rallies, Fox Nation will be hosting a "virtual tea party," Glenn Beck is holding a $500 a plate fundraiser for them and Fox has been officially promoting the entire affair as the FNC Tax Day Tea Parties:

cavuto-20090409-beck.jpg

Maybe they're afraid that if people knew that those behind the demonstrations were the very same lobbyists and influence peddlers the teabaggers claim to decry, the whole thing would be revealed to be what it is -- a hollow excercise in extremist right-wing hypocrisy.

A report by Lee Fang at Think Progress documents the involvement of corporate lobbyists FreedomWorks in organizing the teabaggers. FreedomWorks is run by ladies' man (and registered lobbyist) Dick Armey, and if they're not "organizing" the Tea parties, it's news to him. From a letter he wrote on March 10:

FreedomWorks has been organizing many of these "tea parties" and we are listing the details on our website IamWithRick.com

If you visit the website, you can rsvp for an event near you, and you can download guidelines to organizing a tea party in your home town if there isn't one being planned already.

On the Freedomworks website, it says: "If you are not able to organize or attend a Taxpayer Tea Party, you can still help the cause by donating or buying a t-shirt.

The "donation" for the Tea Parties page goes to -- you guessed it -- the FreedomWorks Foundation. The "thank you" letter is signed by Matt Kibbe, President & CEO, who cut his teeth working for Lee Atwater. He was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

FreedomWorks was launched a GOP version of MoveOn. "We believe that hard work beats daddy's money," said Dick Armey at the time. Armey seems to be a bit irony challenged -- Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Krugman notes, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

This fact that none of this would be possible without the open checkbooks of right wing billionaires and the lobbyists who love them is beyond the grasp of Glenn Reynolds:

These aren't the usual semiprofessional protesters who attend antiwar and pro-union marches. These are people with real jobs; most have never attended a protest march before. They represent a kind of energy that our politics hasn't seen lately, and an influx of new activists.

In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a "single mother" in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

Before any media covering these events accept the idea that this is just a grass roots outpouring of populist sentiment, they ought to take a look behind the curtain -- where Dick Armey is laughing and counting his cash.

© 2009 FireDogLake