There is a climate bill in Congress, one that is too weak. There is an online petition asking Senators to strength the bill. However, even if it were strong, other things would still need to be done to resist climate change. Some of these things follow.

1) Support More Funding for Public Transportation:
In the long term, expanding public transportation is the most important thing we can do do fight Global Warming. Improving mileage is good because it reduces CO2 production, but cars will never be able to compete on an emissions basis with public transport. The National Alliance of Public Transportation Advocates has an Action Alert on efforts in Congress to increase public transportation funding. You can tell that the Action Alert is written by a DC lobbying group, but the cause is just. Here's the most important part.

The STAA recommends a five-year investment of almost $100 billion for public transportation programs - a more than 90% increase over the levels provided in the last surface transportation authorization bill. These funds would help create and maintain thousands of jobs, help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save energy and provide for new mobility choices for millions of Americans. In addition, the legislation would authorize $50 billion to help support President Obama's vision for the creation of a new high speed rail network in the United States.

Take Action!

2) Oppose Clear Cutting in Alaska:
Fighting Global Warming isn't just about reducing CO2 emissions, though that is incredibly important. It's also about opposing deforestation. Forests are important for storing carbon which otherwise would end up in the atmosphere as CO2. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration doesn't care. From Care2's petition:

In a stunning blow to the environment, the Obama Administration just approved a clearcut of 382 acres of timber in a roadless area of Alaska's Tongass National Forest.

The clearcut in the Tongass will involve building 6.9 miles of roads and rebuilding another 1.9 miles of old roads. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack put a temporary halt to timber sales in roadless areas of national forests -- but he approved this timber sale despite the concerns of people who care about this important temperate rainforest, home to numerous endangered species.

Vilsack argues it'll provide much-needed jobs for the region -- but even in troubled economic times, we cannot sacrifice the future of our planet! Urge President Obama to reverse this decision and ensure no more clearcutting and roadbuilding occurs in the Tongass.

This illustrates another problem. Forest management should not be in the Dept. of Agriculture. Agriculture involves using living things to make products. Forests have a lot of critical functions that fit completely outside this mindset.

Please Sign the Petition!

3) Don't Drill, Baby!
Defenders of Wildlife has a Care2 petition calling on the Secretary of Interior to reconsider shocking plans to allow drilling in Alaska. The focus of the alert is on the wildlife, but increased oil drilling anywhere contributes to Global Warming. We need more public transportation, not more oil drilling. Here is the text of their petition.

Just because Sarah Palin is stepping down as governor, doesn't mean Alaska's wildlife is safe. Bristol Bay -- home to sea otters, whales, sea lions and the world's largest run of sockeye salmon -- could soon be open to oil and gas drilling.

Bristol Bay is not only one of the most biologically productive places on the planet, providing vital habitat for hundreds of fish species and dozens of marine mammals, but it is also an economic powerhouse. Bristol Bay and the northern Bering Sea supply more than 40% of all U.S. fish catch and bring in more than $2 billion a year.

If action is not taken, Bristol Bay could soon be open to oil and gas drilling exponentially increasing the chances for a disastrous oil spill. Help stop the drilling and urge U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to reconsider plans to allow drilling in one of the world's most sensitive places.

Please Sign the Petition!

To say that David Paterson has been a disappointing governor for this state is an understatement. He has abandoned most of his liberal values on becoming governor in order to pander to wealthy donors. The worst example of this so far has been when he appointed Kirsten Gillibrand to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate. Gillibrand's involvement in the same corrupt, Republican political machine as indicted, former Sen. Joe Bruno should have automatically disqualified her for the seat. Gillibrand's opposition to gun control and her extremely irresponsible gun ownership should have made her appointment unthinkable.

Gun control opponents share in personal responsibility for all crimes committed with guns, including but not limited to, robberies, gay bashings, rapes, and murders. There are absolutely no legitimate reasons for private gun ownership. Any honest person who takes the trouble to actually read the Second Amendment is perfectly aware of the fact that it only applies to government sponsored militias defending the country from foreign threats. All claims to the contrary are NRA terrorist propaganda with no basis in fact.

Guns kill roughly 30,000 Americans every year. That's ten 911s every year. Gillibrand's opposition to gun control makes her as bad as ten Osama bin Laden's every year, no ifs, no ands, no buts, and no excuses.

As someone who has been held up at gunpoint three times, at least one of which was in a homophobic hate crime, I have an inalienable right to a gun free society. I also have a right to punish the responsible, including the pro gay bashing, robbery, rape, and murder politicians who oppose gun control.

I will punish Kirstin Gilllibrand for what she has done to me by voting against her and giving money to her opponents for the rest of her political career.

I also object to her homophobia. She tried to pull a time honored GOP trick and temporarily stop enforcing the military ban during a time of war. GOP politicians have been happy to use queers in the military as cannon fodder, only to kick them out of the armed forces when the war is over.

Gillibrand's delaying tactics on lifting the ban also are offensive. There is no need for any hearings. The military ban has been publicly debated for over 30 years. All that is necessary is legislation to end it to pass already. Gillibrand's efforts to fillibuster lifting the ban into perpetuity are offensive and absolutely unacceptable.

 

A version of the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA) which includes sexual orientation and gender identity is being considered by Congress. It's time to keep up the pressure to get the bill passed so lgbt people in every state have employment discrimination protections. The Transgender Law Center and the National Center for Transgender Equality have an online petition urging passage of ENDA. Here is the concise text of the petition.

We believe in workplace fairness and the rights of Americans to be judged on the quality of our work, not on our gender identity and expression or sexual orientation. We recognize the need to extend non-discrimination protections to all LGBT Americans so that we can keep our jobs, support our families and contribute to our society.

Twelve states and over one hundred localities currently include gender identity and sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws; however, this patchwork of protection is not enough to cover the majority of American workers. Federal legislation is needed to consistently address and end workplace discrimination. Intolerance is bad for business and bad for America.

We, the undersigned, urge the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

Please Sign the Petition!

Learn more about ENDA from the National Center for Transgender Equality.

 

From a Democracy Now! Exclusive 7/28/09:

Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as “John Jacob” was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States. The Fort Lewis military base denied our request for an interview. But in a statement to Democracy Now, the base’s Public Affairs office publicly acknowledged for the first time that Towery is a military operative. “This could be one of the key revelations of this era,” said Eileen Clancy, who has closely tracked government spying on activist organizations. [includes rush transcript]

We shouldn't kid ourselves. We are slowly becoming a military/police state on behalf of wealthy and corporate interests. President Obama and the Democrats have not done nearly enough to reverse this trend.

Here's more:

ANJALI KAMAT: We begin with a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive. Peace activists in Washington state have revealed an informant posing as an anarchist has spied on them while working under the US military. The activists are members of the group Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance, which protests military shipments bound for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Before his true identity was revealed, the informant was known as “John Jacob,” an active member of antiwar groups in the towns of Olympia and Tacoma. But using documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, the activists learned that “John Jacob” is in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at the nearby Fort Lewis military base.

The activists claim Towery has admitted to them he shared information with an intelligence network that stretches from local and state police to several federal agencies, to the US military. They also say he confirmed the existence of other government spies but wouldn’t reveal their identity.

The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States.

When you have an occupation and war in Iraq that violates US law, international law, American values, and common decency, it makes it difficult to avoid violating the rights of people here at home in order to continue it. Violations of our rights as Americans are an important part of the war on Iraq, a war that is continuing under President Obama.

 

Single payer healthcare, which in this Congress means the Medicare for all approach of HR 676, is the only healthcare proposal at the moment which provides universal healthcare for two reasons.

1) The other current proposals don't provide coverage for the poor and near poor, they just fine people who can't afford it.

2) Insurance companies and HMOs don't provide universal care for people who have "coverage." They routinely deny needed medical care to amp up their profits.

Single payer is the cheapest system. Not only is it cheaper than what the Congressional leadership and Obama support, it also is cheaper than the current system. Why?

Single payer eliminates the byzantine insurance company/HMO bureaucracies, enormous executive pay, and obscene profits that currently eat up so much of our healthcare dollars. Insurance companies and their HMO counterparts have managed what would seem to be impossible: creating bureaucracies even larger and less efficient than those created by the Soviet Union.

It's past time for President Obama to stop paying footsie with the lobbyists and big money donors and support real healthcare reform. Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has an open letter asking him to do just that.

Please sign that letter!

You can also sign and contribute to PNHP if you wish.

The open letter also has some words of warning about the "public option" being pushed by center right Democrats instead of single payer.

Moreover, a “public plan option” would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers’ dominant role. Even a robust public option would forego 90% of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public option would quickly fail in a health care marketplace where competition involves a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by NOT paying for care. But HHS Secretary Sebelius has made clear that any public option will be far worse than that, specifically crafted to prevent it from evolving to a single payer. This kind of public option would amount to a government-run clone of private insurance, reproducing the worst features of private plans.

 

As you are aware by now, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was taken from his own home by the Cambridge, MA police despite the fact that he had broken no laws when the police received the initial call by a racist and the fact that he broke no laws once the police arrived. Let's not play games and call this an "arrest." That implies that there was some kind of legal basis for what the police did. That is absolute nonsense.

The sickening level of support these racist cops are getting says two terrible things about our society. First, white supremacy is still rampant. If police did something like this to a white, heterosexual, male Harvard professor, there would be universal outrage. Pretending otherwise is as dishonest as it is racist. When many people actually think it's perfectly OK to harass and snatch someone for Being At Home While Black (BAHWB), you know that white supremacy is at batshit crazy levels.

Another aspect of this is the fascist, yes literally fascist, mentality of so many of the defenders of the police. There is a significant segment of the population that believes that police should be able to do anything they want, and that it is always the victims' fault no matter what. This kind of blind support of authority, even putting it above the rule of law, is the mentality of fascists globally.

I think it is sad that President Obama wimped out and said that he made a mistake by even tepidly criticizing the Cambridge Police Department. He should have condemned this outrage and demanded criminal investigations against the police officers involved. How can I even hope that Barack Obama will ever even start supporting the queer community when he is too afraid to strongly speak out against the most blatantly obvious racist misconduct imaginable?

 

Healthcare Now has cited a poll showing majority support for single payer healthcare, when it is called by its other name, national health insurance. On the other hand, the support for President Obama's approach to healthcare has slipped below 50%.

This certainly contradicts the corporate media's narrative, but reality often contradicts corporate propaganda. Let's explore some of the differences between single payer and Obama's approach, which explain the difference in support.

1) Single payer is a proven success. Single payer is working quite well in Canada and other countries. Medicare works well here. (The financial problems it currently is experiencing are due to a prescription drug plan pushed through by the GOP which was designed to make Big Pharma richer in the short term and to bankrupt Medicare in the long term.)

2) Single payer is cheaper. President Obama and the Goppers both talk about costs as an issue, and well informed people know that single payer is much cheaper than what we have now, much less the corporate lobbyist pandering Obama plan.

3) Obama's approach is confusing. His plan is based on juggling various corporate interests rather than a policy based approach. Congressional Democrats are still joining Obama in figuring out how to pander to corporate lobbyists, making them unsure of most of the details of the plan that would have such a huge effect on all of our lives.

4) The main reason people with health insurance want reform is to get the HMOs and insurance companies out of their healthcare. The health insurers and HMOs corporate mottoes mights as well be "Lie, Cheat, and Steal." They constantly refuse to provide necessary care while using up enormous amounts of money on byzantine bureaucracies, outrageously high executive pay, and windfall profits. Every day, Americans die because their "healthcare coverage" didn't cover life saving healthcare. Single payer puts a stop to all of that. Any "reform" proposal that doesn't get rid of these murderous corporations is not real reform.

Regardless of how President Obama's current proposal does, we need to keep fighting for single payer. In the long term, it's the only reasonable option.

 

The corporate media are reporting that President Obama's polling numbers are starting to soften, and they are spinning it as people thinking Obama is too far to the left. Pollsters are citing government spending by the Obama administration as part of it. Let's think about it.

Our troops are still in Iraq. Nothing much has been done on queer issues. The Obama administration has pretty much ignored passing the Employee Free Choice Act. Obama supports involving insurance companies and HMOs in "healthcare reform" instead of single payer healthcare. Even the biggest area of government spending is going towards the banksters and the brokesters instead of the middle class and the poor. Obama's and the congressional Democrats' efforts on Global Warming have been weak at best.

Who should be angry?

My suspicion is that President Obama is losing support from the left, not the center. But, the corporate media want to pretend that Obama's center right policies are the farthest left that can even be considered by significant numbers of Americans. Corporate interests have led to censorship of real news that makes their news outlets sillier by the day.

 

President Obama is once again legitimizing a fanatical religious bigot. This time, it the leader of the Mormon church/hate group. From UPI 7/20/09:

U.S. President Barack Obama will meet the head of the Mormon Church in the Oval Office Monday, the White House announced.

The announcement said Obama would meet Thomas Monson, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in a private session.

Presidents of the United States of America should respect state/church separation and not meet with any religious leaders. However, giving a high profile meeting to the fanatical leader of a hateful, heterosexist cult based on plagiarized science fiction is even worse as it serves to help Monson pursue his agenda of promoting discrimination and violence.



 

Islam, Christianity, Scientology, Mormonism, and Hinduism certainly don't have a monopoly on religious extremism. Judaism has its nutjobs too.

I find it amusing that militant, Jewish fundamentalists have been rioting in Israel. From the BBC 7/16/09.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem have clashed with police in protest at what they see as interference by the Israeli authorities in their community.

Police said at least 28 people were arrested after protesters threw stones at officers and burned rubbish bins.

Hundreds of police have been deployed - 10 were reported to have been injured.

The incidents followed the arrest of an ultra-orthodox woman for allegedly starving her three-year-old son deliberately. The child is in hospital.

The revolt over "interference" by the Jewish religious nutjobs reminds me of how Muslim religious extremists want to have Sharia based communities, free of "interference" by secular authorities.

The similarities between Jewish and Muslim religious nuts doesn't stop there. From the BBC 12/9/08:

Lipa Schmeltzer looks and sounds every inch the popular ultra-orthodox Jewish singer that he is.

He sings in Yiddish. He dresses in the clothes of a Haredi Jew and all of his song lyrics come from the scriptures.

You would think this would be just peachy for the militant, Jewish fundamentalists. You would be mistaken.

"They are leading the public astray and are causing a great negative influence on the young generation," says Rabbi Efraim Luft, head of an ultra-orthodox organisation in Israel called the Committee for Jewish Music.

Supported by leading Haredi rabbis, Rabbi Luft has drawn up a black-list of musicians and bands - music that he says that is not kosher and cannot be played at ultra-orthodox weddings or public events because of its decadent nature.

What has made this Jewish religious music not kosher? Get ready to giggle at Rabbi Luft.

"The main part of the music should be the melody. Percussion should be secondary. They should not bend notes electronically and should not use instruments like electric guitars, bass guitars or saxophones in Jewish music," he says.

The BBC also included comments with the article, one of which was from an Islamic religious extremist.

As a Muslim, I support the Rabbi's decision, finally they are thinking like conservative Muslims; after all Muslims and Jews are very much alike. Majority of modern music is immoral and degrading the faith.
Zuber Iraqi, Louisville, KY

The attitude of the nutty rabbis reminds me of the Taliban's attitude about music. The banned all music except for the stuff they produced and distributed.

If scriptures played to a rock beat scandalize poor Rabbi Luft, just think what my blog would do to the poor guy. It would probably make his head explode.

 

Pat Buchanan made the most outrageous comments on tonight's Rachel Maddow Show regarding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. One thing that really struck me, aside from Buchanan's typically bigoted fanaticism, was the desperate nature of his rhetoric.

In trying to claim that Sotomayor did not have the intellectual capacity to serve on the court, Buchanan actually picked Justice Scalia, yes Justice Scalia, as an example of the kind of intellectual that should populate the court. Buchanan is absolutely flailing on this one.

Justice Scalia is the Ted Baxter of the Supreme Court. He is by far the least intelligent Supreme Court Justice of my adult life, while Judge Sotomayor certainly is well above average in intelligence. Few things are more embarrassing as an American than having to watch Scalia make a fool out of himself while trying to represent our nation's highest court of law.

Scalia's approach to being a Supreme Court Justice is to repeatedly lie about the Constitution with little or no skill and throw temper tantrums when people don't go along with his nonsense. Facts tend to be missing or distorted in Scalia's argumentation; logic is rare; and even coherency often is lacking from that joke of a Supreme Court Justice. Roberts, Alito, and Thomas are as dishonest as Scalia, but at least they are reasonably articulate.

If anything, Buchanan's choice of Scalia shows that he sees intelligence as a trait of being white rather than something that involves reasoning ability or knowledge. Pat's rant also is an example of how many US rightists are unable to distinguish bluster and elitism from intellectual acumen. Hardcore white supremacists are usually the dimmest of white people. Buchanan certainly fits this description.

At least Pat isn't on the Supreme Court.