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OLBERMANN: How the oil spill has turned hard-core, right-wing Republicans into socialist, soft-on-crime, anti-military, pro-environmentalist, pro-regulation, anti-small business, pro-big government, pro-big spending party.
And while research shows that the nearly impossible to kill vine has medicinal properties — it is being tested for efficacy in treating migraine headaches, vertigo, cancer prevention, various allergies, gastrointestinal upsets and even potentially helping alcohol abuse — a new report suggests that kudzu emits a toxic gas:
It’s hard to overstate the case against farm-raised seafood, so we applaud Target’s recent decision to stop selling factory-fished salmon in its stores. The mass merchandiser has already, “eliminated all farmed salmon from its fresh, frozen and smoked seafood sections at stores nationwide,” replacing it with wild-caught Alaskan fish. By the end of the year, all Target-sold sushi will follow suit.
If you’re wondering what’s wrong with “aquaculture,” here’s a short list, courtesy of the Pure Salmon Campaign. Almost all these problems apply to farm-raised trout, catfish, tilapia, shrimp, etc. as well.
And as with other types of factory farming, fish are crammed into unnaturally small spaces.
…farmed fish are kept in concentrations never seen in the wild (e.g. 50,000 fish in a 2-acre (8,100 m2) area) with each fish occupying less room than the average bathtub. This can cause several forms of pollution. Packed tightly, fish rub against each other and the sides of their cages, damaging their fins and tails and becoming sickened with various diseases and infections. This also causes stress.
What to do to protect the “crop” and rush them to market sooner? Dowse them with massive quantities of antibiotics and hormones, of course! Even so, about 30 percent won’t survive all this misery.
Hey, anybody hungry? Let’s be sure to not have some farm-raised seafood for dinner.
An Environmental Protection Agency declaration and a Supreme Court ruling were two major stories about asbestos that made headlines this week — neither of them good news.
Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency declared a public health emergency in and near Libby, Mont., where decades of asbestos contamination from a vermiculite mine has left hundreds of people dead or sickened from asbestos-related lung diseases.
They are just two more stories about American corporations’ greed and irresponsibility, and — only tangentially — the people they harm
It was the first health emergency ever declared under the Superfund law, the 1980 statute that governs sites contaminated or threatened by hazardous substances. The Libby site, formerly owned by W.R. Grace & Co., was designated a Superfund priority in 2002.
In the case of the Supreme Court ruling, the court decided for Travelers Companies Inc., one of the largest U.S. property and casualty insurers, saying a lower court erred in overturning the approval of the company’s nearly $500 million settlement of asbestos-related litigation.
The settlement also barred new lawsuits against Travelers stemming from its relationship with Johns Manville Corp.., which had been the country’s largest miner of asbestos and a major manufacturer of asbestos-containing products. The 7-2 vote basically indemnifies Travelers against any future claims for injury or illness caused by Johns Manville asbestos products.
To gain some insight into these stories, Pensito Review interviewed Richard Moyle, national awareness coordinator for the Mesothelioma Cancer Center at Asbestos.com about the significance of these two asbestos-related stories. The Mesothelioma Cancer Center at Asbestos.com is a one-stop resource on all asbestos issues ranging from occupational exposure to mesothelioma doctor locations and treatment options. The center also provides legal information.
Pensito Review: Asbestos has suddenly gotten a lot of media attention because of the Supreme Court’s finding and the EPA’s declaration. Is the mainstream media getting it right about the potential dangers and health effects of asbestos?
Richard Moyle: I obviously haven’t seen all of the stories from the news media, but yes, the articles I have read on the situation seem to be pretty accurate. Basically, all you need to know about asbestos products is that they are generally not harmful unless disturbed or deteriorated in any way.
For example, if you have asbestos insulation in your home, it doesn’t pose a serious danger so long as it stays in good condition and remains behind the walls. If a hole is punched through a wall of a home containing asbestos insulation it could damage the asbestos and send the microscopic fibers into the air where they can then be inhaled or ingested.
I occasionally sign one of those form letters battling some big issue. I rarely edit the form letter and usually forget about it about a nanosecond after I hit the “send” button. But recently the recipients of these form letters have been responding. Here’s an e-mail I received out of the blue today from a guy named Vic Svec shilling for Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest producer of coal:
We appreciate the concern expressed by your recent form letter, and we wish to clear up some obvious misinformation. Peabody strongly supports new clean coal electricity generation to ease energy prices, improve energy security and provide affordable electricity to help people live better and longer. Coal use for electricity generation has more than tripled since 1970, even as emissions have been reduced by more than one-third and this trend will continue. Approximately 135 new coal-fueled plants have been announced around the United States to bring about needed energy. New, clean coal-fueled generating plants will continue to provide environmental improvements, toward an ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal. That’s the vision of projects like FutureGen, which enjoys enormous public support and represents a coal-fueled power plant that would capture carbon dioxide emissions and produce hydrogen. Coal use will also grow through Btu Conversion technologies that turn coal into natural gas and transportation fuels.
Business will solve our environmental problems because it’ll be profitable and government should be smaller and less intrusive and we can’t expect it to fix every little problem and the president knows what he’s doing.
Then Vic invited me to learn more at http://CoalCanDoThat.com. So I did. Here’s what I learned:
Peabody Energy is the world’s largest provider of coal to fuel 21st Century energy solutions. St. Louis-based Peabody Energy fuels more than 10 percent of U.S. electricity and 3 percent of the world’s electricity. Peabody ships 7 tons of coal every second of every day — more than 250 million tons per year — to customers in 16 countries on six continents.
Peabody Energy’s mission is to be a world-wide supplier of low-cost energy, which contributes to economic prosperity and a better quality of life. A Fortune 500 company, Peabody is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the appropriate ticker symbol Btu.
In addition to leading the world in safe, low-cost, environmentally friendly coal mining and marketing, Peabody is a forceful advocate of greater coal use to provide 21st Century energy solutions. Here at CoalCanDoThat.com, you will see that current technologies can transform coal into clean electricity, natural gas, transportation fuels and hydrogen. We call it “Btu Conversionâ€.
In addition to providing leadership in advancing the dialogue and public support for this project, Peabody has 9.6 billion tons of coal reserves to apply to existing and emerging markets. Our coal reserves alone are equivalent of more than 240 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — or more than 10 years worth of current U.S. natural gas demand.
The main problem with the proponents of “clean coal” technology is that they focus almost solely on the conversion of coal into energy part of the equation, which, through technological innovation is not quite as nasty as it used to be. They ignore (because they really have to) the coal extraction process. Peabody is able to extract that seven tons of coal per second because the Bush administration has lifted, undermined (as it were) or blocked any environmental regulation that would have slowed the demountainification of Ohio, West Virginia and parts of Appalachia (see photo above), while “enshrining” the practice of mountaintop mining.
In 2006, Peabody, which has been shucking coal in America since 1926, had sales in excess of $5.2 billion over net income of $600 million — a 13 percent increase for the year. That’s a lot of mountaintops.
But the big coal growth market is China, and U.S. firms are rushing to get in on the coal rush. Firms like Fidelity Investments, OppenheimerFunds, Merrill Lynch, even the Teachers Retirement System of Texas.
The Big Energy machine gins up support for its politics and practices through pseudo-policy groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that pooh-pooh the idea that we’re facing catastrophic climate change — NOW.
They would have you believe that Al Gore is a quack and coal means jobs (it doesn’t as it’s largely automated) and we’ve got plenty of mountains anyway and business will solve our environmental problems because it’ll be profitable and government should be smaller and less intrusive and we can’t expect it to fix every little problem and the president knows what he’s doing and that’s why government scientists rewrite and redact scientific reports that don’t jibe with the Bush admin’s version of reality.
Yep, we’re all screwed.
Local news here in Southern California is reporting that upwards of 1 million people have been evacuated because of the fire storms. Last night, when the number was about half that, Keith Olbermann suggested that this could be the largest forced migration of Americans since the Civil War.
“I am very confident in our ability to do just about anything. You said not on to get overconfident but, I’ll tell you what, the Republican Party is more, gosh, we’re stronger than God Almighty himself.”
— Dittohead caller on Limbaugh’s show yesterday
But yesterday Rush Limbaugh told his easily deluded listeners that the mainstream media is “hyping” the wildfires — and the poor semi-retarded Dittoheads are believing it:
RUSH: No, I’ve been wondering about this, having not been out there. I know how media works. They love this kind of stuff. The worse they can make it sound, the better. The more crisis-prone, the more disaster-certain it is, the more excited by it they are — and I’ve been e-mailing people in Los Angeles. I’ve been e-mailing friends in Southern California. “Are you in trouble from the fires?”
“No, not really. It’s not anywhere near us.”
In fact, a couple people I e-mailed on Sunday didn’t even know about it ’til they got back home Sunday night, even though the fire has been raging through the weekend. You’re right. A lot of people are losing a lot of property here, but the idea that it may not be quite as bad as it is, is an interesting media study.
This is standard Limbaugh. “Global warming can’t real because it’s chilly in my living room. And if I can’t feel it, it is not happening.”
And who’s to blame for the fires — that, as Big Dan pointed out — he says are not happening? Take a guess:
RUSH: [And] these environmental groups, they are to blame for this … They are the ones that are making these fires.
Gotta love this from a caller — a Dittohead who is a Christian but apparently hasn’t gotten the word from church central that you’re not supposed to put mankind above the Almighty:
DITTOHEAD: I am very confident in our ability to do just about anything. You said not on to get overconfident but, I’ll tell you what, the Republican Party is more, gosh, we’re stronger than God Almighty himself.
I’ll bet God is pissed and She will smite this sinner very soon.
The lush, meandering lower leg of the Rio Grande is one of the most biologically diverse places in North America. More than 300 varieties of butterflies and half the bird species in the United States can be spotted here. So can two endangered species of wild cats: the ocelot, which resembles a miniature leopard, and the jaguarundi, an otter-faced relative of the puma.
Over the last 30 years, ranchers, conservationists, and state and federal officials have strung together a delicate necklace of nature sanctuaries along the river’s final 275 miles. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alone has invested more than $100 million to buy land and restore it to its native state, creating a riverside corridor called the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
Now the new federal directive to build 21 fence segments here threatens to trample the lands the government and private groups spent decades nurturing. A Fish and Wildlife analysis found that up to 75% of the nature corridor could be harmed, for just 70 miles of fence.
“In this little area, you will find more species in four counties than in all but three entire states,” said Martin Hagne, executive director of the Valley Nature Center in Weslaco, a vacant lot that was transformed into an educational park filled with malachite and pixie butterflies, Texas tortoises and cottontail rabbits.
“Now they’re going to spend billions of dollars to undo the work that cost millions of dollars. These are your tax dollars at work,” he said.
We like to bring you ideas on how to tread a little more lightly upon the earth. The web site, catalogchoice.org, can help by keeping catalogs you don’t want out of your mailbox, recycle bin, or — yikes! — trash.
You register your name and primary mailing address (which are only used to match up your catalog solicitations), then identify which catalogs you don’t want from a searchable list.
After about 10 weeks, viola: no more catalogs. If any do come through after that, catalogchoice will follow up with the merchant for you.
The service is free — and quite reputable.
Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.
And in case you’re feeling sorry for the nice folks who keep thoughtfully sending you these gifts in the mail, rest assured that they would prefer their catalogs go to people who actually want them. You’re doing them a favor by getting off their mailing list.
Nobel Laureate Al GoreAl Gore becomes a frickin’ Nobel laureate and all the mainstream media can talk about is whether he will now run for president. Like Gore’s been waiting until he could build his resume enough, say by winning a Nobel prize, to launch a campaign. ABC alone has devoted three web pages to the topic, while CNN is covering the story in its “Politics” section where it quotes an anonymous source on Gore’s prospects.
But he will not run, because he won’t take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.
Enough already. At least Reuters took a better angle on the “prize as presidency potential” coverage of the award. They are looking at the honor through the lens of Gore’s last run, not any future ones.
While Gore has grown in international stature since his narrow election loss, Bush has seen his credibility damaged at home and abroad by the Iraq war and other foreign policy woes.
Like Gore’s been waiting until he could build his resume enough — say by winning a Nobel prize — to launch a campaignHe is struggling to stave off lame-duck status and stay relevant while increasingly hemmed in by a hostile Democratic majority in Congress. His inner circle is steadily eroding with almost weekly departures of key aides and advisers.
And the president’s public approval rating, which soared to 90 percent after the September 11 attacks in 2001, has sunk close to historic lows, with some polls putting it below 30 percent.
Around the world, Bush has won few friends with his stance on Gore’s signature issue — climate change.
At a White House-convened summit last month, some of the world’s biggest greenhouse polluters called Bush “isolated” and questioned his leadership on the problem of global warming.
I’m glad Gore won the Nobel prize but, selfishly perhaps, I would have preferred he won the White House back in 2000. What a different — and better — world it would be if he had.
No, it has nothing to do with heart-rate monitors. Your walk score is determined by analyzing your proximity to stores and services.
We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.
In my case, the results were a bit disappointing.
Despite the fact that I am about midway between a full-service grocery store and the main branch of the public library, my walk score was a weak 43 on a scale of 1 to 100. But when I clicked around the results screen a little, I noticed the grocery had disappeared, and a movie theater that is actually several miles from my side of town was shown on the next block. The popular sushi restaurant on the corner was listed as a catering service, while Arnold’s, the diviest dive bar I know, was featured prominently.
Maybe your results will be more accurate. Check it out and see how your address rates. If nothing else, you will see all the great reasons you have to walk instead of driving. Unless you’re trying to catch a movie. In that case, you’ll definitely want to crank up the roadster.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
