email from Democracy Rising Pennsylvania 6/30/09

Last week’s back-and-forth between Gov. Ed Rendell and legislative leaders somehow walked around Walking Around Money, or WAMs. This was especially curious because Associated Press Capitol reporter Marc Levy’s three-part series ( click here ) put the matter front and center. Yet high-profile interviews never touched on spending that, according to Capitol insiders, amounts to $750 million in the current year’s budget.

A few reporters questioned the $201 million surplus in legislative accounts, but none pressed the case to find out why lawmakers think it’s fair to keep a 67% percent surplus while telling school districts that they should use their capped 8% reserve to balance the budget. Or why the executive and judicial branches must shut down or endure payless paydays while lawmakers and their staff roll merrily along.

Add the surplus and WAMs, and you get close to $1 billion in dubious spending and possible savings that could help to resolve this year’s budget dilemma. Read more »

June 17, 2009, Jane Mayer’s New Yorker blog

In my article on Leon Panetta and the C.I.A. this week, I discussed the damning, still-classified 2004 report on the agency’s interrogation practices, by the former Inspector General John Helgerson. As the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the report is slated for release on Friday.

According to a story in today’s Washington Post, unnamed officials inside the C.I.A. are trying to cover up the most damaging details in the report.

The Post said that Helgerson, who retired in May, declined to comment, but in the course of my reporting he told me he wants the C.I.A. to release the report. In his first interview on the subject, Helgerson said that he thinks it’s time for the C.I.A. to “bite the bullet.” He added, “I think we’re reaching a point where it would be a healthy thing.”

Helgerson’s report is believed to have questioned both the legality and the effectiveness of the cruelest of the agency’s interrogation methods. Among those who read it was Jack Goldsmith, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department, who was so repelled by the brutal details that he withdrew legal authorization for waterboarding and other potentially criminal practices—provoking furious outrage from Vice-President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington, among others who wanted to press on with the “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Read more »

By Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

“I oppose H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The reason is simple. It won’t address the problem. In fact, it might make the problem worse?”

Dateline: June 26, 2009

“It sets targets that are too weak, especially in the short term, and sets about meeting those targets through Enron-style accounting methods. It gives new life to one of the primary sources of the problem that should be on its way out — coal — by giving it record subsidies. And it is rounded out with massive corporate giveaways at taxpayer expense. There is $60 billion for a single technology which may or may not work, but which enables coal power plants to keep warming the planet at least another 20 years.

“Worse, the bill locks us into a framework that will fail. Science tells us that immediately is not soon enough to begin repairing the planet. Waiting another decade or more will virtually guarantee catastrophic levels of warming. But the bill does not require any greenhouse gas reductions beyond current levels until 2030. …

Continue reading at Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)“>Rep. Kucinich’s site

By Grant F. Smith at International Clearing House
Online Journal Guest Writer

June 29, 2009 “Online Journal” — President Barak Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget request for $2.775 billion in military aid to Israel is proceeding smoothly through the Congress.

On June 17, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs held a “mark-up” session on the budget. The subcommittee came under pressure from an antiwar group that sought to suspend or condition foreign aid over Israel’s use of US weapons which left 3000 Palestinians dead during the Bush administration. The subcommittee held its session in a tiny Capitol room denying activists and members of the press access. The budget quickly passed and is now before the full House Appropriations Committee.

Israel enjoys “unusually wide latitude in spending the [military assistance] funds,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Unlike other recipients that must go through the Pentagon, Israel deals directly with US military contractors for almost all of its purchases. Read more »

By Sherwood Ross, from International Clearing House

June 29, 2009 “Global Research” — “The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes. Read more »

from United for Peace of Pierce County
ESSAY:
Written by Hank Berger
Friday, 10 December 2004

[see note at end on "the last tree"]

This article by Glenn Scherer was published at the end of October by Grist, an online environmental magazine. It was the basis of remarks made by Bill Moyers in early December, when he received the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. — Scherer argues that a delusional mix of ideology and theology has moved from from the wacko fringe of American life to some place near the center of power. — By Scherer’s count, before the 2004 election nearly half of the United States Congress — 231 out of 535 legislators, 45 out of 100 senators and 186 out of 435 representatives, scored in the 80-100% approval ratings from three influential advocacy groups of the Christian right, whose political values are not fully consonant with the principles of modern democracy, to say the least. — That these groups and these legislators have the ear of the White House is well-known, and they are are a key factor in the U.S. government’s hostility to international institutions, resistance to multilateral cooperation, and the indifference to the environmental problems that press upon the planet at industrial civilization runs up against the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans….

Main Dish

THE GODLY MUST BE CRAZY
By Glenn Scherer

** Christian-right views are swaying politicians and threatening the environment **

Grist
October 27, 2004

“A kind of secular apocalyptic sensibility pervades much contemporary writing about our current world. Many books about environmental dangers, whether it be the ozone layer, or global warming or pollution of the air or water, or population explosion, are cast in an apocalyptic mold.” –Historian Paul Boyer. Read more »

President Obama’s recent historic trip to the Middle East and Europe, with his inspiring speeches at both Cairo and Normandy, again showed him to be a world class leader with a first rate vision.

As many have noted, these trips probably marked new, more appreciated and productive relations with both the far-flung Muslim world and our long-standing but sometimes questioning European allies.

This is the kind of leadership and vision that a sizeable majority of Americans voted for after a long and intense campaign season this past November 4, 2008, a vote for better things and happier days.

Especially in these very difficult and even distressing times, we surely need to give the new president and admininstration all the possible support and constructive effort we can, and not be distracted or deterred by any lesser leaders or dimmer visions.