We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex–but Congress can.
– Cullen Hightower
– Cullen Hightower
And I imagine they’ll be getting right to work on that now that recess is over.
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
goes to BioTown: myway news
and the local Labor Day parade: AP/Yahoo
Hmmmm…apparently AP/Yahoo didn’t get the memo. Joe’s a prominent Connecticut for Lieberman, not a Democrat. Of course, Joe didn’t get it either. 😉
This week’s adventure in misogyny: Guardian Unlimited
Could anyone possibly think that’s good advice?
Link
Stealth repeal of Clean Water Act Protections by invoking “sovereign immunity.”
The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures.
Citing an “unpublished opinion of the [Attorney General’s] Office of Legal Counsel,” the Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board has ruled federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims under the Clean Water Act. The opinion invoked the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity which is based on the old English legal maxim that “The King Can Do No Wrong.” It is an absolute defense to any legal action unless the “sovereign” consents to be sued.
The opinion and the ruling reverse nearly two decades of precedent. Approximately 170,000 federal employees working within environmental agencies are affected by the loss of whistleblower rights. [snip]
At the same time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a more extreme position that absolutely no environmental laws protect its employees from reprisal. EPA’s stance would place the provisions of all major federal environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, beyond the reach of federal employees seeking legal protection for good faith efforts to enforce or implement the anti-pollution provisions contained within those laws.
“The king can do no wrong”???? THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG? What king would that be? I want to curse, but I’ll refrain, because it’s too early in the morning. But I’m thinking it.
You’ve got to be effing kidding me. We have a constitution, not a king. Doesn’t anybody remember that anymore?
Thank you. 🙂
Speaking as someone who was an environmental whistle blower 20+ years ago, this won’t make environmental (or other) whistle blowers go away, it will just make them mad and drive them under cover. And with the internet age, they no longer even are restricted to the MSM to get their truth out.
Having previously regressed the country’s legal tradition to pre-Magna Carta (1215), the administration now has taken us back to the reign of Henry II and his policy towards disagreement as expressed in his (perhaps apocryphal) statement “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” (1170). When I thought America would go the way of the Roman Empire, I had no idea they’d take us there so literally by step-by-step unwriting 2000 years of the history of human rights…
Link
The most influential moderate Shia leader in Iraq has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war.
“I will not be a political leader any more,” he told aides. “I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters.”
It is a devastating blow to the remaining hopes for a peaceful solution in Iraq and spells trouble for British forces, who are based in and around the Shia stronghold of Basra.
Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
Shia have been turning away from moderate Sistani by the thousands and turning to Muqtada al Sadr, who promises retribution and protection. This is a big sign that Iraq is doomed.
IS this another one of those ‘encouraging signs’ George likes to talk about in his Iraq speeches?
A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change narrows the range of projections of climate change that the panel made five years ago. Details of the draft report reveal that scientists now project a 3 degree Celsius rise in the average daily global temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2001, the scientists predicted temperature rises of between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius on current levels of emissions. They say better science has led them to adjust that to a more precise band between 2 degrees Celsius and 4.5 degrees Celsius. The report projects a rise in sea levels by 2100 of between 5.5 inches and 17 inches, with further rises expected in subsequent centuries due to melting polar ice.
Scientists using NASA’s Swift UV-Optical space telescope have detected a new kind of cosmic explosion. The event appears to be a precursor to a supernova, which is expected to reach peak brightness in one week. Scores of satellites and ground-based telescopes from radio to X-ray wavelengths are now trained on the sight in a galaxy 440 million light years away in the constellation Aires, watching and waiting. Amateur astronomers in the northern hemisphere with a good telescope in dark skies can also view it.
Expressing concern over the “pervasiveness of corruption” in the management of water, a coalition of six international non-governmental organizations has created a new global anti-corruption watchdog body: the Water Integrity Network (WIN).
The Israeli blockade on Lebanon is preventing the wide-scale intervention needed to clean a massive oil slick caused by the Jewish state’s bombardment of a power station, Greenpeace said Monday.
Several hundred residents of the Ivory Coast have been taken ill, some seriously, after inhaling toxic fumes from waste dumped two weeks ago, reportedly by a foreign-registered vessel.
A mathematical model of species diversity has provided an estimate of how many different genera of dinosaurs there were. The good news is that at least 70% are still be waiting to be found, the analysis suggests. However, not all the remaining genera will be found. The researchers estimate that 46% are “undiscoverable”, because they’ve left no fossils that can ever be found. Ninety per cent of those that are discoverable will be known within 100-140 years, they say.
Spine injection cuts rheumatoid arthritis inflammation: Rats that received an arthritis drug in their spinal cords had half as much joint damage as rats given the same medication by regular injections that simply pierced the skin. Experts say that modeling arthritis drugs to target the brain and spine – i.e. the central nervous system (CNS) – could help patients with the disease live longer.
Scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author E.O. Wilson is out to save life on Earth — literally — and as a secular humanist has decided to enlist people of religious faith in his mission. The Harvard professor sees science and religion as potential allies for averting the mass extinction of the species being caused by man, as he argues in his latest book, “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth” (W.W. Norton), due out today. Wilson, 77, wrote “The Creation” in the form of a series of letters to an imaginary South Baptist minister, drawing on his former experience as a Southern Baptist (he now calls himself a “provisional deist”) to find common ground. As such he said he gets a “uniformly warm response” from Southern Baptists ministers, and sees mainstream public opinion as getting greener. “The public opinion in the United States has become pastel green, and the green seems to be deepening,” he said. “This could be just foolish optimism, but we could be approaching the turning point.”
Air from the oldest ice core yet collected, from Antarctica, confirms human activity has increased the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere to levels not seen for 800 thousand years. The ice core record showed it used to take about 1,000 years for a CO2 increase of 30 ppm by volume (ppmv). It has risen by that much in the last 17 years alone.
Canadian Liberal leadership candidate Stéphane Dion is making the fight against global warming a central plank in his campaign, unveiling a plan today that could spend up to $10-billion to goad Canada into swiftly curbing emissions.
The Republicans are scared to death of losing the house.
Heh. I also love it when they start on Pelosi. She scares the bewillikers out of them. You can hear their knees shaking in that piece you linked to. Thanks, I needed that!
Couldn’t happen soon enough for me.
The Waxman/Conyers dynamic duo will make mincemeat of these assclowns if Pelosi lets them.
Yesterday, John Laesch (IL-14) posted a diary titled, “Hastert is running against Nancy Pelosi.” Laesch said:
I just love the smell of fear when it’s on a Republican.
Funny how after fear-mongering all these years, the ones now most afraid are the truest believers. Soon every day will be Halloween night for the Kool-Aid crew. Bwahahahahah…
This is currently headlined on Rawstory, but in case you missed it:
CNN, July 30, 1996
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, emerged from the meeting and said, “These are very controversial provisions that the [Clinton] White House wants. Some they’re not going to get.” ….[Hatch] also said he had some problems with the president’s proposals to expand wiretapping.
So Bill Clinton, rather than just breaking the law as Bush did (then again, perhaps this is why Bush broke the law – he knew from history that the Republicans controlling the congress would oppose his efforts to expand wiretapping),decided to go to the Republican congress in 1996 and ask them for increased authority to do more eavesdropping in order to stop the terrorists – stop September 11. Senior Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, one of the GOP’s top picks for the Supreme Court and a GOP committee chair, objected.
The Republicans stopped President Clinton from getting all the tools he needed to stop the next September 11 – well, no, actually they opposed giving President Clinton all the tools he needed to stop the actual September 11. Could September 11 have been stopped if the GOP had given President Clinton the tools he requested to stop Osama and Mohammad Atta from killing 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington?
Hopefully this will put the lie to the GOP fantasy that it was Clinton’s fault for 9/11.