Bad Deeds for 7-11-2008

Karl Rove’s Contempt for the Constitution and the Public’s Right to Know – Karl Rove defied the subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee to testify on his role in politicizing the Justice Department — and in using the Department to selectively prosecute Democratic officials and failed to show up for his scheduled testimony. By doing so, Rove is thumbing his nose at Congress, legal precedent, the public’s right to know the truth — about, among other things, the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and the blackballing of Justice Department hires — and the Constitution.

In 1776, Thomas Paine — America’s first blogger — wrote in Common Sense: “in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

But throughout its seven-plus years, the Bush administration has demonstrated an unwavering belief that it is above the law and a deep-rooted disdain for checks and balances, and the Constitutional imperative of coequal branches of government

This is no petty partisan squabble; this is a fight about the foundations of our democracy.

Odds are the Committee will move to hold Rove in contempt. The matter will then be turned over to the Justice Department — the same Justice Department Rove is accused of politicizing — which will likely do the same thing it has done with Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton, i.e. nothing. The matter will then be tossed to the courts… and Rove will go on pontificating on Fox and advising John McCain. Pretty sweet set up.

 

Fox News Can’t Locate, Can’t Spell and Can’t Pronounce – Fox News desperately needs a fact checker in its graphics department. MSNBC’s David Shuster caught this gem from a Fox report on the Iranian missile tests. The graphic that Fox used to identify the Strait of Hormuz put the strait in the wrong location, and misspelled “strait.” For good measure, the Fox reporter also mispronounced “Hormuz.” [Is FOX News proof of the failing education system in the US?]

 

EPA Lowers the Value of a Human Life in Order to Allow More Pollution – The “value of a statistical life” is $6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May _ a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago. Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences. When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution. Other, similar calculations by the Bush administration have proved politically explosive. In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed itself.

 

Bush Administration Tries to Play Down Costs of Global Warming – The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now. Several EPA officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that throughout the process, White House officials instructed the agency to change their calculations with the aim of reducing the “social cost of carbon,” a regulatory term that reflects the economic burdens stemming from greenhouse gas emissions.

Career EPA officials argued that the global benefits of reducing carbon are worth at least $40 per ton, but Bush appointees changed the final document to say the figure is just an example, not an official estimate. They prohibited the agency from submitting a 21-page document titled “Technical Support Document on Benefits of Reducing GHG Emissions” as part of today’s announcement.

“The administration didn’t want to show a high-dollar value for reducing carbon,” said one EPA official, adding that the administration cut dozens of pages from a draft that outlined cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Some officials said the administration has also minimized the benefits of tighter fuel-economy standards by assuming that oil will cost $58 a barrel in the future, compared with its current price of $141.65. While the EPA calculated in a May 30 draft that stricter standards would save U.S. society $2 trillion by 2020, officials revised that figure last month — using the $58 estimate — to predict that they would save only between $340 billion and $830 billion.

 

Antarctic Ice Shelf is ‘Hanging by Thread’ According to European Scientists – New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.

Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is “hanging by its last thread” to Charcot Island, one of the plate’s key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

“Since the connection to the island… helps stabilize the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk,” it said.

“Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. The truth is, it is going more quickly than we guessed.”

In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely — Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

 

McCain Lied in His Book About His Divorce and Re-Marriage – John McCain has made several statements about how he divorced Carol and married Hensley that conflict with the public record.

In his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For,” McCain wrote that he had separated from Carol before he began dating [Cindy] Hensley.

“I spent as much time with Cindy in Washington and Arizona as our jobs would allow,” McCain wrote. “I was separated from Carol, but our divorce would not become final until February of 1980.”

An examination of court documents tells a different story. McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had “cohabited” until Jan. 7 of that year — or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.

Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first wife.

 

Black Community Was Denied Water for Decades – Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio were awarded nearly $11 million Thursday by a federal jury that found local authorities denied them public water service for decades out of racial discrimination. Coal Run residents either paid to have wells dug, hauled water for cisterns or collected rain water so they could drink, cook and bathe. Plaintiff Frederick Martin said that he and his nine siblings shared two tubs of water between them on bath nights when he was growing up.

 

McCain Says: ‘Get Those Offshore Reserves Exploited’ – Republican presidential candidate John McCain let his tongue get the best of him at a town hall meeting Friday, revealing what critics would say is the true effect of opening US coastlines to drilling he now supports after years of opposing.

“I’ll do everything in my power to get those offshore reserves exploited … um, er, explored, discovered and um…” McCain said, drawing some knowing chuckles from the largely Republican audience.

He had to stop and collect his thoughts. Thoughts gathered, he continued. The oil reserves around coastal states like Florida would be “explored and exploited and we will send the message … all over the world that the United States is on the road to becoming independent from foreign oil.” (emphasis his)

McCain spoke during a town hall event in Hudson, Wisconsin — nearly 1,500 miles from the coastlines he wanted to hand over to the oil companies.

 

Military Fires Public Affairs Official for Refusing to Limit Press at Funerals – When Gina Gray, a media specialist with a long history of working with the military, became public affairs director at Arlington National Cemetery earlier this year, she found that officials there had started hampering media coverage even in cases where the families gave permission. When she tried to uphold the existing regulations, she was harassed by her supervisor, demoted, and then fired. “It’s up to the families to decide how close or far away they want the media to be,” Gray continued. “It is not up to Arlington Cemetery officials to do that.”

 

How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals – Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. The book also says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position” and was one of several prisoners to be “slammed against the walls,” according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning.

The book is “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” by Jane Mayer.

 

Our Government is Doing the Terrorists’ Work for Them – President Bush has said that the terrorists attack us because they hate our freedoms. Well, not only does the FISA bill legalize the Bush administration’s secret NSA spying program, it also gives the government more power to listen to our phone calls and read our emails. Even more than the Bush administration illegally claimed for itself under its secret program. So who needs terrorists when we can dismantle our own freedoms?
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Regards,

Jim