Report Faults Interior Appointee

Another CRAP Bush appointee. Is it a surprise?
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By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 30, 2007; Page A05


A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded.

The investigator's report on Julie A. MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks -- which was triggered by an anonymous complaint from a Fish and Wildlife Service employee and expanded in October after a Washington Post article about MacDonald -- said she frequently sought to reshape the agency's scientific reports in an effort to ease the impact of agency decisions on private landowners

Choc Christ exhibition scrapped over outrage

Ok, so the Christian right are saying when people have "come to their senses." You have got to be kidding me!!
Who gets to eat the chocolate. It's got to taste better than those communion wafers which, after all, represent "the corpse of Christ."
Kudos to you Mr. Cavallero for making it and Mr Semler for displaying it and resigning in protest of having to take it down. This is art and weather you like it or not it should be un-censored and displayed for those who wish to see it.
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A Manhattan art gallery has cancelled its Easter-season exhibit of a life-size chocolate sculpture of a naked Jesus after an outcry by Catholics.

The gallery's artistic director has tendered his resignation to protest the cancellation.

International artist Cosimo Cavallaro's sculpture, My Sweet Lord, was to be exhibited for two hours each day next week in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan.

The 300,000-strong Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights had written to 500 religious and secular organisations, calling for a boycott of the affiliated Roger Smith Hotel.

A spokeswoman for the right-wing group, Kiera McCaffrey, says it is delighted with the outcome.

"We're glad that they came to their senses," she said.

Ms McCaffrey has called the display, which was due to open tomorrow, "an assault on Christians during Holy Week".

"They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the prophet Mohammad naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan," she said.

The Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Edward Egan, has called the sculpture "scandalous" and a "sickening display".

A Look Back at Electric Cars

In Brief: Did Detroit kill the electric car? Bill Curtiss explains.

03/21/07



A note from Buck: Back in the 90's, Earthjustice investigated the Big Three automakers to see if they unlawfully avoided producing electric cars. Deputy Director Bill Curtiss explains.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about Chris Paine's film, "Who Killed the Electric Car?", which highlighted the role that Earthjustice played in the story that is the film's subject. As its title suggests, the documentary is about the fate of the all-electric (not hybrid) car, which was thought by many in the 1990s to represent the future of the automobile. In those days, the concern centered around the damage to public health from air pollution; today, the concerns also include the need to reduce the largest single source of the greenhouse gas emissions that are slowly cooking our planet.

In 1995, Earthjustice was approached to help analyze and present evidence suggesting that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler had colluded to avoid producing electric cars as required by a 1990 California Air Resources Board regulation. The regulation was adopted to reduce tailpipe air pollution, and it required that auto manufacturers would have to offer "zero emissions" (which in practical terms meant electric) cars starting in the 1998 model year. Two percent of the fleet sold in California in 1998 would have to be electric, with the fraction rising to ten percent by 2003. CARB understood that the regulation would require car makers to develop and implement new technology. But with the production requirement eight long years off, Detroit was willing to play along -- GM had just introduced the electric Impact concept vehicle at the Los Angeles auto show with much hoopla and was suggesting the car could be on sale as early as 1995.

Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act

Yet another example of how the President is a puppet of corporations. Stand up in arms and tell everyone you know to write/call/tell their representatives to stop this.
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Proposed regulatory changes, obtained by Salon, would destroy the "safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction," say environmentalists.

By Rebecca Clarren

March 27, 2007 | The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. "This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of America's most popular environmental protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction."

Noteworthy Comments

This is a comment I pulled of my SAIC article (scroll down). I liked what he had to say and encourage you to check out his blog.
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RoseCovered Glasses said...
Politicians make no difference.

We have bought into the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) ever since we took on Russia in the Cold WAR.

Through a combination of public apathy and threats by the MIC we have let the SYSTEM get too large. It is now a SYSTEMIC problem and the SYSTEM is out of control.

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.

There is no conspiracy. The SYSTEM has gotten so big that those who make it up and run it day to day in industry and government simply are perpetuating their existance.

The politicians rely on them for details and recommendations because they cannot possibly grasp the nuances of the environment and the BIG SYSTEM.

So, the system has to go bust and then be re-scaled, fixed and re-designed to run efficiently and prudently, just like any other big machine that runs poorly or becomes obsolete or dangerous.

This situation will right itself through trauma. I see a government ENRON on the horizon, with an associated house cleaning.

The next president will come and go along with his appointees and politicos. The event to watch is the collapse of the MIC.

For more details see:

http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com

Halliburton's Dubai move sparks US political ire

So let's see if I have this right...Be GIVEN a multi-billion dollar contract, Still overcharge for the services that I have been paid for, screw over the country that gave the contract, and then change headquarters so you don't have to pay taxes on any of the aggregious profits. Yep, that about covers it.
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Mon Mar 12, 11:15 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A weekend announcement by Halliburton, the US oil services giant, that it is shifting its corporate headquarters to Dubai from Texas triggered an angry response from some US lawmakers Monday.

Halliburton, which was once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, said Sunday it was relocating to the United Arab Emirates to capitalize on the region's booming energy market.

The Army is ordering injured troops to go to Iraq

At Fort Benning, soldiers who were classified as medically unfit to fight are now being sent to war. Is this an isolated incident or a trend?

By Mark Benjamin

Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed
George W. Bush greets troops and their families on the tarmac before his departure from Fort Benning, Ga., on Jan. 11, 2007.
March 11, 2007 | COLUMBUS, Ga. -- "This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."