http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-12-04-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge_N.htm
National monument status urged for Arctic refuge
12-4-10
ANCHORAGE (AP) — President Obama is being urged to bestow national monument status on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for its 50th anniversary in what supporters say would finally put the refuge's coastal plain beyond the reach of oil companies.
They want the country's largest and most untamed refuge to join the likes of the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Giant Sequoia groves of California, the Sonoran Desert in Arizona and George Washington's birthplace in Virginia.
National monument status could put an estimated 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil beyond the grasp of oil companies forever.
That sounds nice, but it's a bad idea, said Wayne Stevens, president and CEO of the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce. He said there is a "huge disconnect" in this country between products people want and the resource development required to provide those products.
"We are shutting this country down," he said.
But other drilling proponents are less alarmed.
"For 30 years Congress has debated this issue," Adrian Herrera, operations manager for Arctic Power, a group promoting Alaska's pro-drilling position on ANWR, the oil-rich coastal plain just east of Prudhoe Bay, North America's largest oil field. "I don't think it will work."
Conservation groups, businesses, religious organizations, Gwich'in Nation representatives, as well as a slew of senators and representatives, disagree. They want Obama to exercise his authority on ANWR's 50th and protect one of America's last remaining spectacular wilderness landscapes.
More than 80 members of Congress, 170 scientists, some 300 businesses and organizations and 22 religious organizations have signed letters to the president.
"Protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a moral issue. As people of faith, we not only have a commitment to care for creation, but our faith also tells us to protect God's sacred spaces," the letter from religious leaders says.
Conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the National Audubon Society, are encouraging Obama to pick up his pen and "strengthen protections for the region's unique wildlife, wilderness, and cultural resources."
Pro-monument forces gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday.
"Now is the time to create a refuge from the fossil fuel policies that have devastated the economy of the Gulf. Now is the time to protect the refuge," said Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, as he rallied the troops.
In 1960, under President Eisenhower, an order was signed setting aside 8.9 million acres (3.6 million hectares) in what was then the Arctic National Wildlife Range. The squabble began 30 years ago when the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act signed under President Carter doubled the size of the refuge but left the door open to oil exploration on the coastal plain.
Supporters of monument status say one of America's greatest treasures has been under attack ever since.
Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, whose father, Morris Udall, was key to getting ANILCA passed, is one of the senators calling for the highest possible protection for the refuge.
"On ANWR's 50th anniversary, there's no more fitting way to celebrate than to grant it the strong, long-term protections it deserves so that our children and grandchildren can continue to enjoy this unspoiled American treasure," Udall said Thursday.
Kara Moriarty, deputy director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, which speaks for the industry, said it is appalling that there is a push to lock up an area so rich in oil when fossil fuels will be needed to meet the nation's energy needs for decades to come.
On top of that, Alaskans overwhelmingly want ANWR opened to drilling, she said.
"I think it is another stunt to stop development in an area that is not even in their own backyards," Moriarty said. "It is our backyard and I find it offensive as an Alaskan."
David Jenkins with Republicans for Environmental Protection said he hopes that the 50th anniversary will allow people to step back from the politically-charged issue and reflect on the issue anew.
"It is a sweeping landscape that is very valuable to wildlife, to America's sense of the untamed lands that we encountered when we first came here," he said. "For people of faith, it is a magnificent example of the spectacular beauty that God has created."
Showing posts with label Alaska. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alaska. Show all posts
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Emperor Hickel: The Man Who Invented Alaska... and Sarah Palin
Greg Palast
Monday, May 10 2010
Wally Hickel invented Alaska and told me he regretted it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was hoping, when I travel to Alaska next month, to ask him whether he also regretted that second creation.
Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well, that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard Nixon.
"That was a mistake," he said, referring to US Statehood. "We should have been our own nation," which, I pointed out, would have made him President instead of Governor.
Hickel grinned and took me over to a globe. As he massaged and caressed the planet's crown, he talked about his long-held dream to create a circumpolar resource cartel linking Siberia, Alaska, sub-polar Scandinavia and northern Japan, tied together by a rail tunnel under the Bering Sea. Alaska was too small; his plan was for a Confederation of the North, an Arctic Empire that circled the top of the planet. Benevolently ruled, he made clear, by Emperor Wally.
Mad, yes, but all of Hickel's plans were nuts, and usually successful. When I met with him in 1997, he had already prodded the Governor of Sakhalin Island, Alaska's twin in population and minerals, to declare its independence from Russia. (That didn't last.)
Walter Hickel, elected Governor of Alaska twice over twenty-five years, was one strange Republican. Nixon expelled him from the Cabinet in 1970 for publicly opposing the invasion of Cambodia. Hickel was a Huey Long-style populist socialist. "Private property," he told me, "is an artifact of the temperate zone; it just won't work for most of the planet."
But for a man averse to private property, he owned lots of it and hungered for more. He was undoubtedly Alaska's richest man and how he got it, and how he maneuvered to get more, with Nixon's help, and later, Palin's, was the reason I have been investigating him.
Indian Giver
I first met Hickel in his office at Hickel Investments atop his Captain Cook Hotel, the tallest building in Anchorage (by a regulation crafted by Hickel).
Thirty years ago, Hickel realized that his arctic dreams lay in Alaska's vast reserves of gas, oil, coal and lumber. But extracting and shipping those resources required removing a large obstacle: the land's ownership by Indians and Natives.
The US Congress recognized Native land rights in the original agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia and, in 1959, again acknowledged those rights, albeit reluctantly, when Alaska became America's 49th state.
Eyak Chief-for-Life Agnes Nichols, one of the Natives who negotiated the land deal with Hickel. Photo©1997 James Macalpine PIFHickel, elected Alaska's second Governor in 1966, was driven crazy by the Natives' ownership of the land. He told me, "You can only claim title to land by conquest or purchase. Just because your granddaddy chased a moose across some property doesn't mean you own it."
However, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall (who served both Kennedy and Johnson) protected Native land from Hickel and the oil companies. But then, in 1969, newly-elected President Richard Nixon gave Hickel Udall's job.
Unless the Natives ceded or sold their territory, billions of barrels of crude oil on Alaska's North Slope could not get to port through a pipeline proposed by a consortium led by British Petroleum and its junior partner, Exxon.
From inside the Nixon Cabinet and outside, Hickel successfully lobbied Congress for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the BP/Exxon pipe required getting those Natives out of the way. And that required passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
ANCSA contained a clause unique in US history: Rather than create reservations in which there would be a sovereign territory held for Natives in perpetuity, Alaskan Natives would be given shares of stock in a dozen or so corporations. The corporations, not the Natives, would own the land.
Most important, Because the land was corporate real estate, not reservation property it could be sold. And guess who was ready to buy it?
I met with Hickel the day Chenega Corporation of the Prince William Sound sold 90% of its land to Exxon and its Oil Spill Trust. I asked Hickel, seeing the Natives give up their land, if he had regrets about the Settlement Act and Chenega's sale.
"Yes," he said, "I made them an offer for that property myself; but I wouldn't pay them anything like what they are getting from the Exxon money."
Today, most of the Native Alaskan corporate land of the Prince William Sound is owned by people who don't live in Alaska. The remaining Natives are now tenants of the land their ancestors have lived on for 3,000 years.
Native leader Gail Evanoff told me, that was the plan from Day One. "They set it up for us to fail. They put it in a form they could take away."
Palin's Pipe
In 1973, the United State Senate authorized the Trans-Alaska Pipeline by a single vote.
To get that controversial law passed, R.O. Andersen, Chairman of ARCO Petroleum, now a part of British Petroleum, testified under oath that North Slope Alaska resources would be shipped exclusively to the US market, not Japan.
He and Governor Hickel also swore the oil pipe would not be followed by a gas pipeline on the same route.
Yet today, Yukon Pacific Corporation has begun work on that gas pipeline designed to ship liquefied fuel to Japan. For Sarah Palin, whose rise to Governor was engineered by Hickel, this was her greatest accomplishment in office: requiring the major oil companies to participate in Yukon Pacific's gas pipe project.
Yukon Pacific's founding investors were R.O. Andersen ...and Walter Hickel.
On Saturday, Governor Walter Hickel passed away. He was 90.
Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez grounding for the Natives' Chugach Alaska Corporation. Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
The not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund is seeking your support for the Palast team's travel to Alaska as part of our investigation of British Petroleum. For your tax-deductible donation, the author would be pleased to sign and send you a gift book or DVD.
Monday, May 10 2010
Wally Hickel invented Alaska and told me he regretted it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was hoping, when I travel to Alaska next month, to ask him whether he also regretted that second creation.
Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well, that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard Nixon.
"That was a mistake," he said, referring to US Statehood. "We should have been our own nation," which, I pointed out, would have made him President instead of Governor.
Hickel grinned and took me over to a globe. As he massaged and caressed the planet's crown, he talked about his long-held dream to create a circumpolar resource cartel linking Siberia, Alaska, sub-polar Scandinavia and northern Japan, tied together by a rail tunnel under the Bering Sea. Alaska was too small; his plan was for a Confederation of the North, an Arctic Empire that circled the top of the planet. Benevolently ruled, he made clear, by Emperor Wally.
Mad, yes, but all of Hickel's plans were nuts, and usually successful. When I met with him in 1997, he had already prodded the Governor of Sakhalin Island, Alaska's twin in population and minerals, to declare its independence from Russia. (That didn't last.)
Walter Hickel, elected Governor of Alaska twice over twenty-five years, was one strange Republican. Nixon expelled him from the Cabinet in 1970 for publicly opposing the invasion of Cambodia. Hickel was a Huey Long-style populist socialist. "Private property," he told me, "is an artifact of the temperate zone; it just won't work for most of the planet."
But for a man averse to private property, he owned lots of it and hungered for more. He was undoubtedly Alaska's richest man and how he got it, and how he maneuvered to get more, with Nixon's help, and later, Palin's, was the reason I have been investigating him.
Indian Giver
I first met Hickel in his office at Hickel Investments atop his Captain Cook Hotel, the tallest building in Anchorage (by a regulation crafted by Hickel).
Thirty years ago, Hickel realized that his arctic dreams lay in Alaska's vast reserves of gas, oil, coal and lumber. But extracting and shipping those resources required removing a large obstacle: the land's ownership by Indians and Natives.
The US Congress recognized Native land rights in the original agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia and, in 1959, again acknowledged those rights, albeit reluctantly, when Alaska became America's 49th state.
Eyak Chief-for-Life Agnes Nichols, one of the Natives who negotiated the land deal with Hickel. Photo©1997 James Macalpine PIFHickel, elected Alaska's second Governor in 1966, was driven crazy by the Natives' ownership of the land. He told me, "You can only claim title to land by conquest or purchase. Just because your granddaddy chased a moose across some property doesn't mean you own it."
However, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall (who served both Kennedy and Johnson) protected Native land from Hickel and the oil companies. But then, in 1969, newly-elected President Richard Nixon gave Hickel Udall's job.
Unless the Natives ceded or sold their territory, billions of barrels of crude oil on Alaska's North Slope could not get to port through a pipeline proposed by a consortium led by British Petroleum and its junior partner, Exxon.
From inside the Nixon Cabinet and outside, Hickel successfully lobbied Congress for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the BP/Exxon pipe required getting those Natives out of the way. And that required passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
ANCSA contained a clause unique in US history: Rather than create reservations in which there would be a sovereign territory held for Natives in perpetuity, Alaskan Natives would be given shares of stock in a dozen or so corporations. The corporations, not the Natives, would own the land.
Most important, Because the land was corporate real estate, not reservation property it could be sold. And guess who was ready to buy it?
I met with Hickel the day Chenega Corporation of the Prince William Sound sold 90% of its land to Exxon and its Oil Spill Trust. I asked Hickel, seeing the Natives give up their land, if he had regrets about the Settlement Act and Chenega's sale.
"Yes," he said, "I made them an offer for that property myself; but I wouldn't pay them anything like what they are getting from the Exxon money."
Today, most of the Native Alaskan corporate land of the Prince William Sound is owned by people who don't live in Alaska. The remaining Natives are now tenants of the land their ancestors have lived on for 3,000 years.
Native leader Gail Evanoff told me, that was the plan from Day One. "They set it up for us to fail. They put it in a form they could take away."
Palin's Pipe
In 1973, the United State Senate authorized the Trans-Alaska Pipeline by a single vote.
To get that controversial law passed, R.O. Andersen, Chairman of ARCO Petroleum, now a part of British Petroleum, testified under oath that North Slope Alaska resources would be shipped exclusively to the US market, not Japan.
He and Governor Hickel also swore the oil pipe would not be followed by a gas pipeline on the same route.
Yet today, Yukon Pacific Corporation has begun work on that gas pipeline designed to ship liquefied fuel to Japan. For Sarah Palin, whose rise to Governor was engineered by Hickel, this was her greatest accomplishment in office: requiring the major oil companies to participate in Yukon Pacific's gas pipe project.
Yukon Pacific's founding investors were R.O. Andersen ...and Walter Hickel.
On Saturday, Governor Walter Hickel passed away. He was 90.
Greg Palast investigated the Exxon Valdez grounding for the Natives' Chugach Alaska Corporation. Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
The not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund is seeking your support for the Palast team's travel to Alaska as part of our investigation of British Petroleum. For your tax-deductible donation, the author would be pleased to sign and send you a gift book or DVD.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Sarah Palin not under FBI investigation
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-palin5-2009jul05,0,7018263.story
Sarah Palin not under FBI investigation, agency spokesman says
The former GOP vice presidential candidate's surprise resignation as Alaska governor had set off speculation, including rumors of a pending federal corruption probe or charges.
By Josh Meyer
July 5, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- A day after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resigned, a federal official in her home state dismissed one potential explanation for her sudden and unexpected resignation: a rumored FBI investigation into the former Wasilla mayor on public corruption charges.
Despite rumors of a looming controversy after the Republican governor's surprise announcement Friday that she would leave office this month, some of them published in the blogosphere, the FBI's Alaska spokesman said the bureau had no investigation into Palin for her activities as governor, as mayor or in any other capacity.
"There is absolutely no truth to those rumors that we're investigating her or getting ready to indict her," Special Agent Eric Gonzalez said in a phone interview Saturday. "It's just not true." He added that there was "no wiggle room" in his comments for any kind of inquiry.
The FBI has been active in mounting corruption investigations in Alaska, some to see whether local, state and federal lawmakers illegally received favors, money or free construction work from businesses or people seeking favors.
The most high-profile case was against former Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, whose conviction last year on charges of lying on Senate ethics forms stemmed from charges that a politically connected developer had done work on his house illegally.
The Obama administration Justice Department threw out the charges in April, saying prosecutors had failed to turn over potentially helpful information to Stevens' defense team. Some bloggers have speculated that such an FBI investigation was underway on Palin, who still had 18 months left in her term.
Also Saturday, the former GOP vice presidential nominee posted a statement on her Facebook page, not offering specifics but indicating that she had broad goals after she leaves the governor's office.
She did not say whether she planned to run for president in 2012, but criticized media coverage of her announcement:
"How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make."
josh.meyer@latimes.com
Sarah Palin not under FBI investigation, agency spokesman says
The former GOP vice presidential candidate's surprise resignation as Alaska governor had set off speculation, including rumors of a pending federal corruption probe or charges.
By Josh Meyer
July 5, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- A day after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resigned, a federal official in her home state dismissed one potential explanation for her sudden and unexpected resignation: a rumored FBI investigation into the former Wasilla mayor on public corruption charges.
Despite rumors of a looming controversy after the Republican governor's surprise announcement Friday that she would leave office this month, some of them published in the blogosphere, the FBI's Alaska spokesman said the bureau had no investigation into Palin for her activities as governor, as mayor or in any other capacity.
"There is absolutely no truth to those rumors that we're investigating her or getting ready to indict her," Special Agent Eric Gonzalez said in a phone interview Saturday. "It's just not true." He added that there was "no wiggle room" in his comments for any kind of inquiry.
The FBI has been active in mounting corruption investigations in Alaska, some to see whether local, state and federal lawmakers illegally received favors, money or free construction work from businesses or people seeking favors.
The most high-profile case was against former Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, whose conviction last year on charges of lying on Senate ethics forms stemmed from charges that a politically connected developer had done work on his house illegally.
The Obama administration Justice Department threw out the charges in April, saying prosecutors had failed to turn over potentially helpful information to Stevens' defense team. Some bloggers have speculated that such an FBI investigation was underway on Palin, who still had 18 months left in her term.
Also Saturday, the former GOP vice presidential nominee posted a statement on her Facebook page, not offering specifics but indicating that she had broad goals after she leaves the governor's office.
She did not say whether she planned to run for president in 2012, but criticized media coverage of her announcement:
"How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make."
josh.meyer@latimes.com
The beginning of Sarah Palin's end
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-carey5-2009jul05,0,6306575.story
The beginning of Sarah Palin's end
She may remain a tabloid celebrity and darling of the Christian right, but her decision to resign as Alaska's governor means she's through as a presidential contender.
By Michael Carey
July 5, 2009
Reporting from Anchorage -- Sarah Palin's career as governor of Alaska is over. So is her barely begun career as a serious presidential candidate. The road map to the White House doesn't include a stop at "I quit."
In a truly Palinesque moment near the end of her speech in Wasilla on Friday, the departing governor quoted a saying she said her parents kept on their refrigerator. "Don't explain: Your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe you anyway."
The governor might have done better to take her cue from another piece of refrigerator wisdom: "Quitters never win, and winners never quit."
Palin's speech was hastily arranged and hastily delivered. This was not Lou Gehrig's farewell to baseball -- simple, clear, humble, brief. Nor was it the work of the poised, fresh-faced Sarah who electrified the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
The governor seemed to have trouble breathing -- was on the verge of panting -- as she took a long, clunky windup to make her pitch. She recited her achievements and chastised the media for not appreciating them. She told us how sorry she feels for herself and her family. She praised our brave troops serving abroad, renewed her commitment to the fight for free enterprise, denounced apathy and explained she would not waste public dollars as a lame duck. And she dipped into metaphor, invoking her experience as a high school point guard.
The point-guard metaphor was supposed to leave Alaskans appreciating her willingness to pass the ball. Instead, it raised an obvious question: "What kind of point guard walks off the court in the fourth quarter, refusing to play any more?"
Palin talked for more than 15 minutes and, keeping faith with her parents' refrigerator, not once did she provide a convincing explanation of why she is leaving office.
We are left to guess. The only thing we can be absolutely sure of is this: Palin did not tell the truth when she said she is leaving for the good of Alaskans. She is leaving for her own good. With Sarah Palin, "me" always comes first. And with Sarah Palin, the personal and the political are never separate but totally intertwined. In fact, they are the same thing.
A former legislator wondered: "Maybe she is leaving because she got a better offer." There's speculation about whether she's gotten herself a contract as a conservative television commentator, for instance.
But the "why" of why she left may be as simple as this: She couldn't take it anymore. The scrutiny, the criticism, the mockery, and yes, the hard work of being governor. Palin's thin skin is legendary. She never ignores a slight. For most of the last year, she has been feuding with the Alaska media and many of the state's political leaders.
She has almost no support among legislators, even Republicans. And she haphazardly applies herself to the labor of government at a distance -- some critics call her the BlackBerry governor.
Palin will continue as an A-list celebrity in the tabloids and gossip magazines. She and her husband, Todd, provide a rich source of family drama, scandal and compelling photographs. She also will remain a celebrity on the Christian right, which adores her.
She will keep my state in the news. But she is finished as a leader. No leader abandons the battle in mid-fight.
How will she be remembered?
If she is remembered at all years from now, my guess is it will be in the same kind of way that we remember the Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who in the '20s and '30s drew massive crowds and vast media coverage until she disappeared for several weeks without ever adequately explaining where she'd been.
After that, she lost her magic and fell out of favor, leaving historians to ponder: "What was everyone so excited about?"
Michael Carey is a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and host of "Anchorage Edition" on Alaska Public Broadcasting. mcarey@adm.com
The beginning of Sarah Palin's end
She may remain a tabloid celebrity and darling of the Christian right, but her decision to resign as Alaska's governor means she's through as a presidential contender.
By Michael Carey
July 5, 2009
Reporting from Anchorage -- Sarah Palin's career as governor of Alaska is over. So is her barely begun career as a serious presidential candidate. The road map to the White House doesn't include a stop at "I quit."
In a truly Palinesque moment near the end of her speech in Wasilla on Friday, the departing governor quoted a saying she said her parents kept on their refrigerator. "Don't explain: Your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe you anyway."
The governor might have done better to take her cue from another piece of refrigerator wisdom: "Quitters never win, and winners never quit."
Palin's speech was hastily arranged and hastily delivered. This was not Lou Gehrig's farewell to baseball -- simple, clear, humble, brief. Nor was it the work of the poised, fresh-faced Sarah who electrified the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
The governor seemed to have trouble breathing -- was on the verge of panting -- as she took a long, clunky windup to make her pitch. She recited her achievements and chastised the media for not appreciating them. She told us how sorry she feels for herself and her family. She praised our brave troops serving abroad, renewed her commitment to the fight for free enterprise, denounced apathy and explained she would not waste public dollars as a lame duck. And she dipped into metaphor, invoking her experience as a high school point guard.
The point-guard metaphor was supposed to leave Alaskans appreciating her willingness to pass the ball. Instead, it raised an obvious question: "What kind of point guard walks off the court in the fourth quarter, refusing to play any more?"
Palin talked for more than 15 minutes and, keeping faith with her parents' refrigerator, not once did she provide a convincing explanation of why she is leaving office.
We are left to guess. The only thing we can be absolutely sure of is this: Palin did not tell the truth when she said she is leaving for the good of Alaskans. She is leaving for her own good. With Sarah Palin, "me" always comes first. And with Sarah Palin, the personal and the political are never separate but totally intertwined. In fact, they are the same thing.
A former legislator wondered: "Maybe she is leaving because she got a better offer." There's speculation about whether she's gotten herself a contract as a conservative television commentator, for instance.
But the "why" of why she left may be as simple as this: She couldn't take it anymore. The scrutiny, the criticism, the mockery, and yes, the hard work of being governor. Palin's thin skin is legendary. She never ignores a slight. For most of the last year, she has been feuding with the Alaska media and many of the state's political leaders.
She has almost no support among legislators, even Republicans. And she haphazardly applies herself to the labor of government at a distance -- some critics call her the BlackBerry governor.
Palin will continue as an A-list celebrity in the tabloids and gossip magazines. She and her husband, Todd, provide a rich source of family drama, scandal and compelling photographs. She also will remain a celebrity on the Christian right, which adores her.
She will keep my state in the news. But she is finished as a leader. No leader abandons the battle in mid-fight.
How will she be remembered?
If she is remembered at all years from now, my guess is it will be in the same kind of way that we remember the Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who in the '20s and '30s drew massive crowds and vast media coverage until she disappeared for several weeks without ever adequately explaining where she'd been.
After that, she lost her magic and fell out of favor, leaving historians to ponder: "What was everyone so excited about?"
Michael Carey is a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and host of "Anchorage Edition" on Alaska Public Broadcasting. mcarey@adm.com
Friday, March 27, 2009
STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT
STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT
20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie
by Greg Palast
March 23, 2009
"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"
The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.
"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT!"
She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.
It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?
So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.
The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke.
And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later, IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.
***
Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.
It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?
***
Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit. Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.
So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching
Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"
Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.
So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" -- was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.
And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.
Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.
Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.
Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."
***
Exxon promised -- promised -- to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.
On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.
The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.
Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."
Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.
Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.
They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.
***
Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.
***
Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.
After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.
Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess were all some kind of Native now."
************
For SuicideGirls.com
Greg Palast investigated fraud and racketeering claims for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Now a journalist whose work appears on BBC Television Newsnight, Palast is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. Visit GregPalast.com for more.
Check out the YouTube clip of Greg Palast on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' with Mike Papantonio on the Exxon Valdez and on the death of investigative reporting in America. Listen in this weekend on your Air America station.
And get ready: This Friday - the launch of GREG PALAST INVESTIGATES - On the Trail with investigative reporter Palast - with three of his latest ass-kicking BBC Television reports.
Palast is looking for co-producers for the film's DVD release. Support the team behind the work that the Chicago Tribune calls, "Stories so relevant, they threaten to alter history." Pre-order the DVD today.
Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.
20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie
by Greg Palast
March 23, 2009
"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"
The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.
"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT!"
She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.
It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?
So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.
The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke.
And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later, IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.
***
Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.
It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?
***
Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit. Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.
So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching
Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"
Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.
So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" -- was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.
And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.
Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.
Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.
Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."
***
Exxon promised -- promised -- to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.
On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.
The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.
Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."
Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.
Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.
They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.
***
Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.
***
Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.
After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.
Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess were all some kind of Native now."
************
For SuicideGirls.com
Greg Palast investigated fraud and racketeering claims for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Now a journalist whose work appears on BBC Television Newsnight, Palast is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. Visit GregPalast.com for more.
Check out the YouTube clip of Greg Palast on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' with Mike Papantonio on the Exxon Valdez and on the death of investigative reporting in America. Listen in this weekend on your Air America station.
And get ready: This Friday - the launch of GREG PALAST INVESTIGATES - On the Trail with investigative reporter Palast - with three of his latest ass-kicking BBC Television reports.
Palast is looking for co-producers for the film's DVD release. Support the team behind the work that the Chicago Tribune calls, "Stories so relevant, they threaten to alter history." Pre-order the DVD today.
Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html
DECEMBER 29, 2008
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
By ANDREW OSBORN
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
DECEMBER 29, 2008
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage; America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
By ANDREW OSBORN
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Giant snowman rises again in Alaska - mysteriously
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jeOivSoRGOBtYf9zD9kG3Lj4IssAD9590HN00
Giant snowman rises again in Alaska - mysteriously
By MARY PEMBERTON
12-24-8
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A giant snowman named Snowzilla has mysteriously appeared again this year — despite the city's cease-and-desist order.
Someone again built the giant snowman in Billy Powers' front yard in an east Anchorage neighborhood. Snowzilla reappeared before dawn Tuesday.
Powers is not taking credit. When questioned Tuesday afternoon, he insisted Snowzilla just somehow happened, again.
For the last three years, Snowzilla — to the delight of some and the chagrin of others — has been a very large feature in Powers' yard. In 2005, Snowzilla rose 16 feet. He had a corncob pipe and a carrot nose and two eyes made out of beer bottles.
This year, Snowzilla is estimated to be 25 feet tall. He's wearing a black stovepipe hat and scarf.
"Have you seen him?" Powers asked when reached by telephone at his home, the sound of excited children in the background. "He's handsome."
Snowzilla has consistently risen outside Powers' modest home. His children — he is the father of seven — collected snow from neighbors' yards to make the snowman big enough. Each year, Snowzilla got a bit bigger.
Not everybody in the neighborhood liked all the cars and visitors who came to see him.
City officials this year deemed Snowzilla a public nuisance and safety hazard. A cease-and-desist order was issued. The city tacked a public notice on Powers' door.
City officials said the structure increased traffic to the point of endangerment and that the snowman itself was unsafe.
The mayor's office on Tuesday issued a statement defending its move against Snowzilla.
"This property owner has repeatedly ignored city attempts to find ways to accommodate his desire to build a giant snowman without affecting the quiet, residential quality of the neighborhood," said the statement from Mayor Mark Begich's office. "This is a neighborhood of small homes on small lots connected by small streets. It can't support the volume of traffic and revelers that are interested in Snowzilla."
The mayor's office says Powers appears to run a large junk and salvage operation from his home. He has violated land use codes for 13 years, the city said. He owes the city more than $100,000 in fines and other assessments.
Powers said it is the city that has been difficult, not him.
"I have tried to jump through every goofy hoop they have sent to me. I have never been confrontational and it goes on and on and on and it is so goofy," he said. "Some of it is unfounded, some is just outrageous."
The city said it did not expect to take any further action until after Christmas.
On the Net:
http://www.snowzilla.org/
Giant snowman rises again in Alaska - mysteriously
By MARY PEMBERTON
12-24-8
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A giant snowman named Snowzilla has mysteriously appeared again this year — despite the city's cease-and-desist order.
Someone again built the giant snowman in Billy Powers' front yard in an east Anchorage neighborhood. Snowzilla reappeared before dawn Tuesday.
Powers is not taking credit. When questioned Tuesday afternoon, he insisted Snowzilla just somehow happened, again.
For the last three years, Snowzilla — to the delight of some and the chagrin of others — has been a very large feature in Powers' yard. In 2005, Snowzilla rose 16 feet. He had a corncob pipe and a carrot nose and two eyes made out of beer bottles.
This year, Snowzilla is estimated to be 25 feet tall. He's wearing a black stovepipe hat and scarf.
"Have you seen him?" Powers asked when reached by telephone at his home, the sound of excited children in the background. "He's handsome."
Snowzilla has consistently risen outside Powers' modest home. His children — he is the father of seven — collected snow from neighbors' yards to make the snowman big enough. Each year, Snowzilla got a bit bigger.
Not everybody in the neighborhood liked all the cars and visitors who came to see him.
City officials this year deemed Snowzilla a public nuisance and safety hazard. A cease-and-desist order was issued. The city tacked a public notice on Powers' door.
City officials said the structure increased traffic to the point of endangerment and that the snowman itself was unsafe.
The mayor's office on Tuesday issued a statement defending its move against Snowzilla.
"This property owner has repeatedly ignored city attempts to find ways to accommodate his desire to build a giant snowman without affecting the quiet, residential quality of the neighborhood," said the statement from Mayor Mark Begich's office. "This is a neighborhood of small homes on small lots connected by small streets. It can't support the volume of traffic and revelers that are interested in Snowzilla."
The mayor's office says Powers appears to run a large junk and salvage operation from his home. He has violated land use codes for 13 years, the city said. He owes the city more than $100,000 in fines and other assessments.
Powers said it is the city that has been difficult, not him.
"I have tried to jump through every goofy hoop they have sent to me. I have never been confrontational and it goes on and on and on and it is so goofy," he said. "Some of it is unfounded, some is just outrageous."
The city said it did not expect to take any further action until after Christmas.
On the Net:
http://www.snowzilla.org/
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Alaska Turnout, Results Raise Questions
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/11/alaska_turnout_results_raise_q.html
Alaska Turnout, Results Raise Questions
11/6/2008
by Derek Kravitz
TAGS: Alaska, Sarah Palin, Ted Stevens, politics, voting
Alaskans are different. Very different.
Elections officials, party leaders and voters are wondering what happened this Tuesday in the Last Frontier, where turnout was surprisingly low and two lawmakers who have been the focus of FBI corruption investigations appear to have been reelected despite polling suggesting they would be ousted.
The final voter turnout numbers won't be available until absentee ballots are counted, which could take at least another week. But this year's total is not expected to eclipse Alaska's 66 percent turnout in 2004 or its 60 percent clip in 2000. (This is especially odd given that Alaska's Board of Elections saw a 12.4 percent hike in turnout for the August primaries, before Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee.)
Alaska returns (without the uncounted absentee and contested ballots) show the McCain-Palin ticket garnering 136,348 votes. In 2004, President Bush got 190,889 votes, a "significant disparity", the Anchorage Press reported. "These numbers only add to the oddity of this election in Alaska; in the run-up to Tuesday, Alaskan voters seemed energized to vote for a ticket with our governor on it, despite the barrage of criticism Palin faced."
Couple the dip in support for McCain-Palin with surprising victories for longtime Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was found guilty Oct. 27 on seven felony charges, and Rep. Don Young, who is under investigation by the FBI, and a lot of pollsters and voters were left stumped.
Pollster Del Ali of the Maryland firm Research 2000, which tracked the House and Senate races in Alaska, said he was "not happy" how the races -- and dead wrong polling numbers -- turned out. Research 2000 had reported in the days before the election that Democratic challenger Mark Begich, an Anchorage attorney, was leading the 84-year-old Stevens by 22 percentage points (Daily Kos apparently paid for the polls).
Other pollsters didn't fare much better. Anchorage pollster and Republican political consultant David Dittman, a Stevens supporter, predicted a "solid Begich win." The national polling firm, Rasmussen Reports, accurately predicted every Senate race in the country within the margin of error in their most recent polls -- except Alaska. Alaska pollsters Ivan Moore, Craciun Research Group and Hays Research Group all also had Stevens and Young trailing in the lead-up to the election.
Some observers pointed to Sen. John McCain's early concession speech as a possible reason for the low turnout -- McCain acknowledged Sen. Barack Obama's win at 7:15 p.m. Alaska time, well before polls closed in the state. An Alaska Republican Party leader told the Fairbanks News-Miner that some voters might have stayed home after hearing Obama had captured the presidency.
But other pundits and political science professors dismissed that theory, saying the high-profile races for Stevens's and Young's seats would not have dissuaded voters from showing up at the polls. Other pollsters thought Palin drew new Republican voters to the polls early on, and that voting largely subsided after Obama claimed victory.
As the head-scratching continues, we'll be watching to see how Stevens's fellow senators decide to deal with his felony conviction conundrum.
Alaska Turnout, Results Raise Questions
11/6/2008
by Derek Kravitz
TAGS: Alaska, Sarah Palin, Ted Stevens, politics, voting
Alaskans are different. Very different.
Elections officials, party leaders and voters are wondering what happened this Tuesday in the Last Frontier, where turnout was surprisingly low and two lawmakers who have been the focus of FBI corruption investigations appear to have been reelected despite polling suggesting they would be ousted.
The final voter turnout numbers won't be available until absentee ballots are counted, which could take at least another week. But this year's total is not expected to eclipse Alaska's 66 percent turnout in 2004 or its 60 percent clip in 2000. (This is especially odd given that Alaska's Board of Elections saw a 12.4 percent hike in turnout for the August primaries, before Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee.)
Alaska returns (without the uncounted absentee and contested ballots) show the McCain-Palin ticket garnering 136,348 votes. In 2004, President Bush got 190,889 votes, a "significant disparity", the Anchorage Press reported. "These numbers only add to the oddity of this election in Alaska; in the run-up to Tuesday, Alaskan voters seemed energized to vote for a ticket with our governor on it, despite the barrage of criticism Palin faced."
Couple the dip in support for McCain-Palin with surprising victories for longtime Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was found guilty Oct. 27 on seven felony charges, and Rep. Don Young, who is under investigation by the FBI, and a lot of pollsters and voters were left stumped.
Pollster Del Ali of the Maryland firm Research 2000, which tracked the House and Senate races in Alaska, said he was "not happy" how the races -- and dead wrong polling numbers -- turned out. Research 2000 had reported in the days before the election that Democratic challenger Mark Begich, an Anchorage attorney, was leading the 84-year-old Stevens by 22 percentage points (Daily Kos apparently paid for the polls).
Other pollsters didn't fare much better. Anchorage pollster and Republican political consultant David Dittman, a Stevens supporter, predicted a "solid Begich win." The national polling firm, Rasmussen Reports, accurately predicted every Senate race in the country within the margin of error in their most recent polls -- except Alaska. Alaska pollsters Ivan Moore, Craciun Research Group and Hays Research Group all also had Stevens and Young trailing in the lead-up to the election.
Some observers pointed to Sen. John McCain's early concession speech as a possible reason for the low turnout -- McCain acknowledged Sen. Barack Obama's win at 7:15 p.m. Alaska time, well before polls closed in the state. An Alaska Republican Party leader told the Fairbanks News-Miner that some voters might have stayed home after hearing Obama had captured the presidency.
But other pundits and political science professors dismissed that theory, saying the high-profile races for Stevens's and Young's seats would not have dissuaded voters from showing up at the polls. Other pollsters thought Palin drew new Republican voters to the polls early on, and that voting largely subsided after Obama claimed victory.
As the head-scratching continues, we'll be watching to see how Stevens's fellow senators decide to deal with his felony conviction conundrum.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Al Franken's Race Counted on Flawed Systems
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6641Al Franken's Razor-Thin MN Senate Race Counted on Flawed Optical-Scan Systems
PLUS: Details on 'What in the Hell Happened in Alaska' and Georgia and Oregon...
Posted By Brad Friedman On 5th November 2008
Diebold/Premier, Oregon, Georgia, Alaska, Election 2008, Minnesota, Al Franken 38 Comments
I'm exhausted, so forgive me if I make this quicker than it deserves. And if I haven't yet been able to jump into a myriad of other elections of serious concern around the country still today.
But just a few quick facts on the Al Franken (D) / Norm Coleman (R) U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, which we noted last night [1] (with some updates today) stands at some 700 votes currently between them. More hopefully after I've figured out how to sneak in some rest.
Here are three quick, bullet-point facts that Franken may want to know, since his was the only show on Air America which never had me on as a guest, as he simply refused to discuss serious issues concerning Election Integrity, now - ironically enough.
(And see below these for some quick skinny on serious concerns about the outstanding Senate races in AK, OR and GA...)
While all of Minnesota [2] votes on paper ballots, thankfully. Though all of those ballots are scanned, rather than counted, on proprietary optical-scan systems made by either ES&S or Diebold. Both companies produce systems that regularly fail to count and/or record ballots correctly.
The majority of counties use the ES&S M-100, precinct-based optical scanner. As we noted on Monday [3], that same scanner was found, according to a letter sent to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) by a county in MI, to have failed pre-election "logic and accuracy testing". The M-100, according to the letter from county officials, “reported inconsistent vote totals", such that “The same ballots run through the same machines, yielded different results each time.” Public Record has more details tonight [4].
Two of Minnesota's three largest counties (Anoka and Dakota) use the Diebold AccuVote OS scanners to "count" their ballots. That system is the same one seen being hacked via its memory card in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy [5]. You can watch the actual hack from the film below (appx 9 mins)
(By the way, the Diebold op-scanner used above, and in MN, was also used in January's New Hampshire primary when pre-election polls and exit polls determined Obama would be the winner, only to see him lose to Hillary Clinton. Obama was found to have won in the 20% of NH which counts their ballots by hand. While Clinton won, by an almost precisely flipped margin, in the 80% of NH that used the Diebold op-scan system seen being hacked in the mock-election seen being manipulated in the clip above.)
In late August of this year, Diebold admitted [6], while being sued because of it by the state of Ohio, that their GEMS central tabulator system routinely drops thousands of votes, without giving notice, while they are being uploaded from memory cards to the main server. That failed GEMS tabulator model was used yesterday, with both Diebold's touch-screen and op-scan systems, in some 34 states across the country.
An automatic recount has been triggered in the Franken/Coleman race, and will take place mid-November. I haven't checked yet as to whether it'll be a machine or hand recount --- hopefully the latter --- but it looks like I have time to find out later (Updated: News accounts say it will be by hand). Either way, hopefully the ballots --- both voted and unvoted --- will be carefully guarded and their chain of custody will be secure, transparent and well-documented between now and then.
If you'd like more details on all of these concerns, Al, feel free to contact me. All is forgiven. Sorta. Just as long as you don't concede before every vote is counted, and counted accurately.
Other U.S. Senate Races of Concern...
While I was writing this, Kim Zetter at WIRED posted a similar story [7] on the failed ES&S scanners used across much of MN. She also tosses in a quick summary of several of the other outstanding Senate races still in question in Alaska, Georgia and Oregon, and the types of voting systems used in each. Given my exhaustion, I'll hope both she and you will forgive if I simply repost those summaries here, along with a couple of my own quick additional points on each...
Alaska
Republican Senator, and convicted felon [8], Ted Stevens is leading Democratic challenger and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 48.2 percent to 46.7 percent. Some 49,000 absentee, early votes and provisional ballots remain to be counted. If Stevens wins, it's unclear if he'll resign or face possible expulsion by his Senate peers. If either happens, there's talk of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin running for his seat. Voting System: Alaska uses optical-scan machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) statewide.
Note: Alaska is one of the few places where the Democratic Party actually went to court to fight for transparency against the Electoral-Industrial Complex, successfully suing the state for the release of Diebold databases detailing how voters voted in the 2004 election. The state fought tooth and nail, including the invocation of "security threat" claims, to avoid releasing the information, even after they'd lost the suit. Alaska is very much a Diebold "company town."
Additional Note: A source of ours in Alaska, has contacted us to let us know about concerns of "shenanigans" in the counting up there. I hope to get more soon, but I'm told that Palin's Lt. Governor is in charge of overseeing the counting and that some are being denied access from observing the counting. So what's happening up there?
We're not the only ones wondering, as Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com asks today [9]: "What in the Hell Happened in Alaska?"...
Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count. According to Roll Call [10], these include "at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots".
Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.
But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens' corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.
...
[T]he polling failures in Alaska weren't unique to Stevens. They also applied to the presidential race, as well as Alaska's at-large House seat. In each case, the Republican outperformed his pre-election polling by margins ranging from 12 to 14 points.
Troubling? Um, yup. Silver offers some more numbers and details.
But back to Zetter's summaries...
Georgia
Incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss seized only 49.9 percent of votes [11] so far, narrowly missing the 50 percent majority that is required in Georgia to avoid a runoff race. Therefore he'll likely face off against Democratic challenger Jim Martin in a December 2 runoff election if some 50,000 absentee and other ballots that are still being counted fail to tip his percentage numbers. Voting System: Georgia uses AccuVote paperless touchscreen machines made by Premier Election Solutions statewide.
Note: Speaking of "company towns", GA was the first, along with MD, to adopt Diebold's wholly unverifiable touch-screen systems across the entire state. MD has since decided to replace the system with paper-based optical-systems, following scientific report after report warning about failure after failure with those Diebold touch-screen systems. MD will be replacing them for the 2010 election. The error-prone, easily-hacked, inaccurate touch-screens were first used in 2002 in GA, when Chambliss defeated incumbent Max Cleland in a surprising and controversial upset which has raised many questions about the machines, and Diebold's now-admitted secret patching of the systems, with uncertified software, just before the election.
Oregon
Incumbent Republican Senator Gordon Smith is currently leading Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley by less than 1 percent. Voting System: Oregon uses mail-in paper ballots statewide [12]. It's the only state that has gone entirely postal.
Note: The move to Vote-by-Mail is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the raised awareness about problems with touch-screen voting machines. It's a bad idea for democracy, as we detailed some months ago here [13]. (Special note for Oregon readers: You needn't send me emails disagreeing with my position. I already realize many of you love your VBM system very much and don't share my concerns with it. Nonetheless, I stand fully by the points made in that referenced article.)
As long promised, The BRAD BLOG [14] has covered your electoral system 2008, fiercely and independently, like no other media outlet in the nation. Please support our work with a donation [15] to help us keep going. If you like, we'll send you some great election integrity documentary films in return. Details on that right here... [16]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URLs in this post:
[1] we noted last night: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6634
[2] all of Minnesota: http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/searched.php?ec=standard&state=MN&equipment_type%5B%5D=All+Types&vendor%5B%5D=All+Vendors&model%5B%5D=All+Models&vvpat=all&submit=Search&rowspp=50&topicText=&county=St.+Louis&stateText=
[3] we noted on Monday: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6613
[4] Public Record has more details tonight: http://pubrecord.org/politics/474-e-voting-machines-used-in-disputed-franken-coleman-race-failed-tests.html
[5] Hacking Democracy: http://HackingDemocracy.com
[6] Diebold admitted: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6309
[7] Kim Zetter at WIRED posted a similar story: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/ess-machines-th.html
[8] convicted felon: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6088781&page=1
[9] Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com asks today: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-in-hell-happened-in-alaska.html
[10] Roll Call: http://www.rollcall.com/news/29893-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS
[11] seized only 49.9 percent of votes: http://www.sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2008_1104/swscroll.htm
[12] mail-in paper ballots statewide: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88074936
[13] detailed some months ago here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6003
[14] The BRAD BLOG: http://www.BradBlog.com
[15] a donation: http://www.bradblog.comhttps://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=Brad@BradBlog.com&item_name=Support+for+The+BRAD+BLOG&item_number=2008
[16] Details on that right here...: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6472
[4] Public Record has more details tonight: http://pubrecord.org/politics/474-e-voting-machines-used-in-disputed-franken-coleman-race-failed-tests.html
[5] Hacking Democracy: http://HackingDemocracy.com
[6] Diebold admitted: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6309
[7] Kim Zetter at WIRED posted a similar story: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/ess-machines-th.html
[8] convicted felon: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6088781&page=1
[9] Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com asks today: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-in-hell-happened-in-alaska.html
[10] Roll Call: http://www.rollcall.com/news/29893-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS
[11] seized only 49.9 percent of votes: http://www.sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2008_1104/swscroll.htm
[12] mail-in paper ballots statewide: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88074936
[13] detailed some months ago here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6003
[14] The BRAD BLOG: http://www.BradBlog.com
[15] a donation: http://www.bradblog.comhttps://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=Brad@BradBlog.com&item_name=Support+for+The+BRAD+BLOG&item_number=2008
[16] Details on that right here...: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6472
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Palin Bags a Bigfoot
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/?p=2605Palin Bags a Bigfoot
Posted on 15 September 2008
Categorized: alaska, Bigfoot, camouflage baby bjorn, chugach national park, conservatives, john adams, johnadams, palin, sarah palin, sarahpalin, sasquatch, sexy librarian, skunk ape, wasilla, white house
WASILLA, AK - Records and eyewitnesses have come to light that prior to announcing her candidacy for the Vice Presidency; Sarah Palin shot a Bigfoot from a helicopter.
A government helicopter was seen flying low over the Chugach National Park with what witnesses described as “a sexy librarian shooting out the side.” Employees at a local bait shop report seeing a similar woman only hours before carrying an infant in a camouflage Baby Bjorn.
The Bigfoot, or Sasquatch as it is known in scientific circles, was found dead on the outskirts of the park, just south of Wasilla, Alaska. Preliminary forensics reports confirm that an adult male Sasquatch was shot in the face with Palin’s trademark 5mm M4 Carbine Assault Rifle.
Environmental groups are in an uproar at the hunting death of a rare and notoriously reclusive species. Efforts to have the Sasquatch placed on the endangered species list have met with repeated opposition from state legislature, since protecting the ‘Missing Link’ could be seen as validating evolution.
Conservatives have immediately rallied to their party’s new star, citing that gun ownership and hunting are indelible parts of American culture. Indeed this point is hard to argue, as John Adams was notorious for having captured what he called a “Skunk Ape” and killing it with his bare hands on the White House lawn in front of a paying audience.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Palin Power
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/palin_power_fresh_face_now_more_popular_than_obama_mccain
Palin Power: Fresh Face Now More Popular Than Obama, McCain
Friday, September 05, 2008
A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 37% hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom.
The figures include 40% with a Very Favorable opinion of Palin and 18% with a Very Unfavorable view (full demographic crosstabs are available for Premium Members). Before her acceptance speech, Palin was viewed favorably by 52%. A week ago, 67% had never heard of her.
The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be President. Generally, John McCain’s choice of Palin earns slightly better reviews than Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden.
Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the Presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57% of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48%.
There is a strong partisan gap when it comes to perceptions of Palin. Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans give her favorable reviews along with 33% of Democrats and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party.
She earns positive reviews from 65% of men and 52% of women. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that Obama continues to lead McCain among women voters while McCain leads among men. The Friday morning update—the first to include interviews conducted after Palin’s speech--showed the beginning of a Republican convention bounce that may match Obama’s bounce from last week.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans believe that most reporters are trying to hurt Palin’s campaign, a fact that may enhance her own ratings.
The Palin pick has also improved perceptions of John McCain. A week ago, just before he introduced his running mate, just 42% of Republicans had a Very Favorable opinion of their party’s nominee. That figure jumped to 54% by this Friday morning. Among unaffiliated voters, favorable opinions of McCain have increased by eleven percentage points in a week—from 54% before the Palin announcement to 65% today.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of all voters now believe that McCain made the right choice when he picked Palin to be his running mate while 32% disagree. By way of comparison, on the night after Biden gave his acceptance speech, 47% said that Obama made the right choice.
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans say that McCain made the right choice while just 69% of Democrats said the same about Obama.
Among unaffiliated voters, 52% said that McCain made the right choice for his running mate and 45% said the same about Obama.
Forty percent (40%) now say that Palin is ready to be President, if necessary. That’s up from 29% last week. Forty-nine percent (49%) say the same about Biden.
However, following the Wednesday night speech, voters are fairly evenly divided as to whether Palin or Obama has the better experience to be President. Forty-four percent (44%) of voters say Palin has the better experience while 48% say Obama has the edge. Among unaffiliated voters, 45% say Obama has better experience while 42% say Palin.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters say that Palin’s speech helped McCain’s chances of becoming President while only 10% believe it hurt those prospects.
While Palin’s numbers are stunning today, it remains to be seen how the Alaska Governor’s numbers will hold up through the next two months. She has made a tremendous first impression, but the country will get to know her a lot better between now and November.
Palin Power: Fresh Face Now More Popular Than Obama, McCain
Friday, September 05, 2008
A week ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 37% hold an unfavorable view of the self-described hockey mom.
The figures include 40% with a Very Favorable opinion of Palin and 18% with a Very Unfavorable view (full demographic crosstabs are available for Premium Members). Before her acceptance speech, Palin was viewed favorably by 52%. A week ago, 67% had never heard of her.
The new data also shows significant increases in the number who say McCain made the right choice and the number who say Palin is ready to be President. Generally, John McCain’s choice of Palin earns slightly better reviews than Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden.
Perhaps most stunning is the fact that Palin’s favorable ratings are now a point higher than either man at the top of the Presidential tickets this year. As of Friday morning, Obama and McCain are each viewed favorably by 57% of voters. Biden is viewed favorably by 48%.
There is a strong partisan gap when it comes to perceptions of Palin. Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans give her favorable reviews along with 33% of Democrats and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party.
She earns positive reviews from 65% of men and 52% of women. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that Obama continues to lead McCain among women voters while McCain leads among men. The Friday morning update—the first to include interviews conducted after Palin’s speech--showed the beginning of a Republican convention bounce that may match Obama’s bounce from last week.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans believe that most reporters are trying to hurt Palin’s campaign, a fact that may enhance her own ratings.
The Palin pick has also improved perceptions of John McCain. A week ago, just before he introduced his running mate, just 42% of Republicans had a Very Favorable opinion of their party’s nominee. That figure jumped to 54% by this Friday morning. Among unaffiliated voters, favorable opinions of McCain have increased by eleven percentage points in a week—from 54% before the Palin announcement to 65% today.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of all voters now believe that McCain made the right choice when he picked Palin to be his running mate while 32% disagree. By way of comparison, on the night after Biden gave his acceptance speech, 47% said that Obama made the right choice.
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans say that McCain made the right choice while just 69% of Democrats said the same about Obama.
Among unaffiliated voters, 52% said that McCain made the right choice for his running mate and 45% said the same about Obama.
Forty percent (40%) now say that Palin is ready to be President, if necessary. That’s up from 29% last week. Forty-nine percent (49%) say the same about Biden.
However, following the Wednesday night speech, voters are fairly evenly divided as to whether Palin or Obama has the better experience to be President. Forty-four percent (44%) of voters say Palin has the better experience while 48% say Obama has the edge. Among unaffiliated voters, 45% say Obama has better experience while 42% say Palin.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters say that Palin’s speech helped McCain’s chances of becoming President while only 10% believe it hurt those prospects.
While Palin’s numbers are stunning today, it remains to be seen how the Alaska Governor’s numbers will hold up through the next two months. She has made a tremendous first impression, but the country will get to know her a lot better between now and November.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
McCain VP Pick Has History of Clashes
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/083008a.html
McCain VP Pick Has History of Clashes
By Jason Leopold
August 30, 2008
The political career of Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential pick, has been marked by conflicts, score-settling and her own claim that she faces “enemies – powerful enemies.”
But the 44-year-old first-term Alaska governor is a favorite of right-wing Christian groups and was hailed Friday by one organization as “a true Christian” who is “pro-life and pro-marriage.” She also has favored the teaching of creationism in Alaska’s schools.
After the surprise announcement Friday, the McCain campaign tried to frame Palin as a reformer who has taken on corruption in Alaska. However, an examination of her career as a small-town mayor and inexperienced governor reveals an official prone to petty squabbles and personal retaliation.
In 1996, after winning the election to be mayor of Wasilla, then a town with a population of 5,000, Palin sought to oust six department heads because they had signed a letter supporting the previous mayor, their old boss.
Palin ultimately fired two of them, the police chief and the museum director, and pushed two others into quitting.
In 1997, some residents considered her actions so high-handed that they tried to initiate a recall election.
“Four months of turmoil have followed in which almost every move by Palin has been questioned,” the Associated Press reported in a Feb. 11, 1997 dispatch. “Critics argue the [Palin] decisions are politically motivated.”
Wasilla’s ousted police chief, Irl Stambaugh, sued Palin that year for alleged contract violation, wrongful termination and gender discrimination The police chief claimed Palin fired him not for cause but for being disloyal and because he was a man whose size – 6 feet and 200 pounds – intimidated her.
However, the recall election never got off the ground, and a federal judge rejected Stambaugh’s lawsuit.
Now, as Alaska’s governor, Palin is under investigation for allegedly ousting Alaska public safety commissioner Walt Monegan because he refused to fire a state trooper entangled in a divorce and custody battle with Palin’s sister.
That probe also is examining whether Palin’s extended family, including her husband, and members of her staff tried to pressure Monegan to fire state trooper Mike Wooten because of the divorce.
Monegan told the Anchorage Daily News that the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, showed him the work of a private investigator, who had been hired by the family to dig into Wooten’s life and who was accusing the trooper of various misdeeds, such as drunk driving and child abuse.
In early August 2008, the state legislature agreed to investigate the circumstances surrounding Gov. Palin’s firing of Monegan. She initially welcomed the probe and denied that she had put pressure on Monegan.
Later, however, Palin acknowledged that there had been more than two dozen inquiries from her staff to the public safety department regarding trooper Wooten, though Palin still insisted she had no role in them.
Gov. Palin also released an audio recording of her director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, pressing police Lt. Rodney Dial in February 2008 about why no action had been taken against Wooten.
Experience
Besides the prospect of more embarrassing disclosures about Palin’s thin government record, McCain’s VP choice also undercuts his campaign’s theme that Barack Obama lacks the foreign-policy experience to be Commander in Chief, since Palin is a virtual unknown on the international stage.
However, as the first woman on a Republican national ticket, she potentially appeals to angry Hillary Clinton supporters and to so-called values voters who pushed McCain to choose a running mate who is against abortion and gay marriage.
"John McCain is to be commended on his choice of Sarah Palin, a true Christian for Vice President," said Dr. Gary Cass, Chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission.
"Palin, an evangelical who is pro-life and pro-marriage, meets all the criterion that CADC set forth for a VP pick. Unfortunately, Obama chose Joe Biden, a liberal Catholic, who is not in compliance with Christian moral teaching on abortion or homosexuality."
Cass was particularly relieved that McCain did not tap former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, or Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Jew.
“Will [McCain] pick a pro-choice Republican or perhaps a moderate Mormon or a liberal Jew?” Cass said in an earlier statement of concern that was echoed by other conservative Christian organizations nationwide.
"Unless McCain picks a true Christian for Vice President, real conservative Christians are being disenfranchised from this presidential election,” Cass warned. “Obama missed a great chance to reach out to Christians. Now we will see if McCain will let conservative Christians have someone we can vote for, not just vote against."
On Friday, other conservative Christian groups also celebrated Palin’s selection.
"The country now has a clear choice," said Darla St. Martin, Co-Executive Director of the National Right to Life Committee, "between an avowed pro-abortion ticket that would continue to push for unrestricted abortion on demand, and a strongly pro-life ticket that will bring us closer to a society that embraces the value and dignity of human life."
Palin is staunchly opposed to both same-sex marriage and granting benefits to same-sex partners. When a state court ruled last year that civil unions are to be permitted for same-sex couples, Palin balked, and called for the state constitution to be amended to in an attempt to upend the ruling.
She also has favored the teaching of creationism in schools along with evolution. "Teach both,” Palin said in 2006. “Healthy debate is so important and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”
Vendettas
Still, many political observers wondered if Palin’s limited – and checkered – career as an official in a lightly populated state like Alaska might prove to be a liability for McCain.
Following her two terms as mayor of Wasilla, Palin made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican lieutenant governor nomination in 2002.
Then, as chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she fell into a public spat with fellow commissioner Randy Ruedrich, the state’s GOP chairman.
In 2003, she reported Ruedrich to Gov. Frank Murkowski’s administration, saying she suspected him of an ethics breach in conducting work for the state GOP on government time.
To obtain evidence of Ruedrich’s alleged malfeasance, Palin hacked into his computer, an ethical lapse in its own right. She resigned from the commission in January 2004.
But Palin’s ethics complaint against Ruedrich gave her a reputation as an anti-establishment reformer at a time when the Alaskan Republican hierarchy was coming under scrutiny for corruption.
For two years, she stayed out of politics, acquiring a business license for a marketing and consulting company named Rogue Cou, “a classy way of saying redneck,” Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in a June 2005 interview.
Palin also faced questions about hypocrisy in the vendetta that she waged against Ruedrich when it turned out that, as mayor of Wasilla, she had used her office computer for political purposes.
“We wondered how her using a city computer to run for lieutenant governor in 2002 was different than Republican Party chief Randy Ruedrich using Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission computers for party business, for which he was fined and resigned under pressure. She said it was different,” the Anchorage Daily News wrote in a July 14, 2006, editorial.
“In a release [Palin] fired off to everyone she could think of after the questions, she huffed about a ‘smear’ campaign organized by her ‘enemies -- powerful enemies.’ Later, there were references on various radio talk shows to whispering campaigns and other craziness, but we wrote that off as the vapors and a touch of paranoia.”
The editorial continued: “She characterized as ‘innocuous’ her political e-mails sent on a city computer to the Alaska Outdoor Council and another complaining about the Right to Life folks not choosing her as their candidate in the 2002 race.
“That was bad enough, indicating she just does not get it, but then she had this to say: ‘We've had lots of people come forward with dirt on (gubernatorial candidate John) Binkley . . . as well as dirt on (Gov. Frank) Murkowski. We've told them to bury it. I'm not running that type of campaign.’
“Apparently, that is exactly the kind of vicious campaign the former two-term Wasilla mayor is running. In our view, that kind of backdoor character assassination is the most scurrilous type of attack.” the Anchorage Daily News wrote. “Oh, I have dirt, Palin says smugly, yes, indeedy; but I'll not give the details because that would be wrong. She is right. It is very wrong. It is very much the hallmark of lightweight politicians in over their heads.”
Now, however, John McCain has proposed putting Palin in a position within a proverbial heartbeat of the presidency.
Jason Leopold has launched a new Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.
McCain VP Pick Has History of Clashes
By Jason Leopold
August 30, 2008
The political career of Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential pick, has been marked by conflicts, score-settling and her own claim that she faces “enemies – powerful enemies.”
But the 44-year-old first-term Alaska governor is a favorite of right-wing Christian groups and was hailed Friday by one organization as “a true Christian” who is “pro-life and pro-marriage.” She also has favored the teaching of creationism in Alaska’s schools.
After the surprise announcement Friday, the McCain campaign tried to frame Palin as a reformer who has taken on corruption in Alaska. However, an examination of her career as a small-town mayor and inexperienced governor reveals an official prone to petty squabbles and personal retaliation.
In 1996, after winning the election to be mayor of Wasilla, then a town with a population of 5,000, Palin sought to oust six department heads because they had signed a letter supporting the previous mayor, their old boss.
Palin ultimately fired two of them, the police chief and the museum director, and pushed two others into quitting.
In 1997, some residents considered her actions so high-handed that they tried to initiate a recall election.
“Four months of turmoil have followed in which almost every move by Palin has been questioned,” the Associated Press reported in a Feb. 11, 1997 dispatch. “Critics argue the [Palin] decisions are politically motivated.”
Wasilla’s ousted police chief, Irl Stambaugh, sued Palin that year for alleged contract violation, wrongful termination and gender discrimination The police chief claimed Palin fired him not for cause but for being disloyal and because he was a man whose size – 6 feet and 200 pounds – intimidated her.
However, the recall election never got off the ground, and a federal judge rejected Stambaugh’s lawsuit.
Now, as Alaska’s governor, Palin is under investigation for allegedly ousting Alaska public safety commissioner Walt Monegan because he refused to fire a state trooper entangled in a divorce and custody battle with Palin’s sister.
That probe also is examining whether Palin’s extended family, including her husband, and members of her staff tried to pressure Monegan to fire state trooper Mike Wooten because of the divorce.
Monegan told the Anchorage Daily News that the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, showed him the work of a private investigator, who had been hired by the family to dig into Wooten’s life and who was accusing the trooper of various misdeeds, such as drunk driving and child abuse.
In early August 2008, the state legislature agreed to investigate the circumstances surrounding Gov. Palin’s firing of Monegan. She initially welcomed the probe and denied that she had put pressure on Monegan.
Later, however, Palin acknowledged that there had been more than two dozen inquiries from her staff to the public safety department regarding trooper Wooten, though Palin still insisted she had no role in them.
Gov. Palin also released an audio recording of her director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, pressing police Lt. Rodney Dial in February 2008 about why no action had been taken against Wooten.
Experience
Besides the prospect of more embarrassing disclosures about Palin’s thin government record, McCain’s VP choice also undercuts his campaign’s theme that Barack Obama lacks the foreign-policy experience to be Commander in Chief, since Palin is a virtual unknown on the international stage.
However, as the first woman on a Republican national ticket, she potentially appeals to angry Hillary Clinton supporters and to so-called values voters who pushed McCain to choose a running mate who is against abortion and gay marriage.
"John McCain is to be commended on his choice of Sarah Palin, a true Christian for Vice President," said Dr. Gary Cass, Chairman and CEO of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission.
"Palin, an evangelical who is pro-life and pro-marriage, meets all the criterion that CADC set forth for a VP pick. Unfortunately, Obama chose Joe Biden, a liberal Catholic, who is not in compliance with Christian moral teaching on abortion or homosexuality."
Cass was particularly relieved that McCain did not tap former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, or Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Jew.
“Will [McCain] pick a pro-choice Republican or perhaps a moderate Mormon or a liberal Jew?” Cass said in an earlier statement of concern that was echoed by other conservative Christian organizations nationwide.
"Unless McCain picks a true Christian for Vice President, real conservative Christians are being disenfranchised from this presidential election,” Cass warned. “Obama missed a great chance to reach out to Christians. Now we will see if McCain will let conservative Christians have someone we can vote for, not just vote against."
On Friday, other conservative Christian groups also celebrated Palin’s selection.
"The country now has a clear choice," said Darla St. Martin, Co-Executive Director of the National Right to Life Committee, "between an avowed pro-abortion ticket that would continue to push for unrestricted abortion on demand, and a strongly pro-life ticket that will bring us closer to a society that embraces the value and dignity of human life."
Palin is staunchly opposed to both same-sex marriage and granting benefits to same-sex partners. When a state court ruled last year that civil unions are to be permitted for same-sex couples, Palin balked, and called for the state constitution to be amended to in an attempt to upend the ruling.
She also has favored the teaching of creationism in schools along with evolution. "Teach both,” Palin said in 2006. “Healthy debate is so important and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”
Vendettas
Still, many political observers wondered if Palin’s limited – and checkered – career as an official in a lightly populated state like Alaska might prove to be a liability for McCain.
Following her two terms as mayor of Wasilla, Palin made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican lieutenant governor nomination in 2002.
Then, as chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she fell into a public spat with fellow commissioner Randy Ruedrich, the state’s GOP chairman.
In 2003, she reported Ruedrich to Gov. Frank Murkowski’s administration, saying she suspected him of an ethics breach in conducting work for the state GOP on government time.
To obtain evidence of Ruedrich’s alleged malfeasance, Palin hacked into his computer, an ethical lapse in its own right. She resigned from the commission in January 2004.
But Palin’s ethics complaint against Ruedrich gave her a reputation as an anti-establishment reformer at a time when the Alaskan Republican hierarchy was coming under scrutiny for corruption.
For two years, she stayed out of politics, acquiring a business license for a marketing and consulting company named Rogue Cou, “a classy way of saying redneck,” Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in a June 2005 interview.
Palin also faced questions about hypocrisy in the vendetta that she waged against Ruedrich when it turned out that, as mayor of Wasilla, she had used her office computer for political purposes.
“We wondered how her using a city computer to run for lieutenant governor in 2002 was different than Republican Party chief Randy Ruedrich using Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission computers for party business, for which he was fined and resigned under pressure. She said it was different,” the Anchorage Daily News wrote in a July 14, 2006, editorial.
“In a release [Palin] fired off to everyone she could think of after the questions, she huffed about a ‘smear’ campaign organized by her ‘enemies -- powerful enemies.’ Later, there were references on various radio talk shows to whispering campaigns and other craziness, but we wrote that off as the vapors and a touch of paranoia.”
The editorial continued: “She characterized as ‘innocuous’ her political e-mails sent on a city computer to the Alaska Outdoor Council and another complaining about the Right to Life folks not choosing her as their candidate in the 2002 race.
“That was bad enough, indicating she just does not get it, but then she had this to say: ‘We've had lots of people come forward with dirt on (gubernatorial candidate John) Binkley . . . as well as dirt on (Gov. Frank) Murkowski. We've told them to bury it. I'm not running that type of campaign.’
“Apparently, that is exactly the kind of vicious campaign the former two-term Wasilla mayor is running. In our view, that kind of backdoor character assassination is the most scurrilous type of attack.” the Anchorage Daily News wrote. “Oh, I have dirt, Palin says smugly, yes, indeedy; but I'll not give the details because that would be wrong. She is right. It is very wrong. It is very much the hallmark of lightweight politicians in over their heads.”
Now, however, John McCain has proposed putting Palin in a position within a proverbial heartbeat of the presidency.
Jason Leopold has launched a new Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
'Seven Wonders of America'
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20080519/ap_tr_ge/travel_brief_gma7_wonders
'Good Morning America' names 'Seven Wonders of America'
Mon May 19, 2008
New York City, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and South Dakota's Badlands were named to a list of seven U.S. wonders featured on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Also on the list were the Grand Canyon, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, Washington D.C.'s National Mall, and the Saturn V moon rocket at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration in Huntsville, Ala. Huntsville is nicknamed Rocket City because the U.S. space exploration program began there in the late 1940s.
The show assembled a panel of experts to choose the seven destinations, which included manmade as well as natural wonders. The places were announced one at a time over seven shows, with the final one airing May 14.
The experts who chose the wonders were Annie Griffith Belt, a photographer for the National Geographic Society; Brent D. Glass, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History; Michael Roberts, executive editor of Outside Magazine; Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; Patricia Schultz, author of "1,000 Places to See Before You Die," and the travel guidebook writer and editor Pauline Frommer.
Viewers chose Yellowstone National Park as an eighth wonder in an online vote.
Details at http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/7WondersofAmerica/.
'Good Morning America' names 'Seven Wonders of America'
Mon May 19, 2008
New York City, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and South Dakota's Badlands were named to a list of seven U.S. wonders featured on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Also on the list were the Grand Canyon, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, Washington D.C.'s National Mall, and the Saturn V moon rocket at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration in Huntsville, Ala. Huntsville is nicknamed Rocket City because the U.S. space exploration program began there in the late 1940s.
The show assembled a panel of experts to choose the seven destinations, which included manmade as well as natural wonders. The places were announced one at a time over seven shows, with the final one airing May 14.
The experts who chose the wonders were Annie Griffith Belt, a photographer for the National Geographic Society; Brent D. Glass, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History; Michael Roberts, executive editor of Outside Magazine; Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; Patricia Schultz, author of "1,000 Places to See Before You Die," and the travel guidebook writer and editor Pauline Frommer.
Viewers chose Yellowstone National Park as an eighth wonder in an online vote.
Details at http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/7WondersofAmerica/.
Friday, March 28, 2008
GOD DAMN AMERICA
GOD DAMN AMERICA – ESPECIALLY PENNSYLVANIA
By Greg Palast
Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]
The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.
I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.
At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.
God damn America.
I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.
But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.
And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.
The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.
That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.
Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)
Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,
“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”
Whatever.
It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.
There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.
Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”
And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”
(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)
Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it."
I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.
So Happy Easter.
George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.
Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”
So, why hasn’t He?
Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?
***************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
By Greg Palast
Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]
The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.
I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.
At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank.
One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.
God damn America.
I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.
But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.
And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.
The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.
That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.
Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)
Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,
“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”
Whatever.
It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.
There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.
Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”
And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”
(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)
Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it."
I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.
So Happy Easter.
George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.
Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”
So, why hasn’t He?
Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?
***************
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
White killer whale spotted off Alaska
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080307/ap_on_sc/white_killer_whale
White killer whale spotted off Alaska
By MARY PEMBERTON, Associated Press Writer
3-7-8
The white killer whale spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands sent researchers and the ship's crew scrambling for their cameras. The nearly mythic creature was real after all. "I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."
The whale was spotted last month while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship, were conducting an acoustic survey of pollock near Steller sea lion haulout sites.
It had been spotted once in the Aleutians years ago but had eluded researchers since, even though they had seen many of the more classic black and white whales over the years.
Fearnbach said the white whale stood out.
"When you first looked at it, it was very white," she said Thursday.
Further observation showed that while the whale's saddle area was white, other parts of its body had a subtle yellowish or brownish color.
It likely is not a true albino given the coloration, said John Durban, a research biologist at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. That's probably a good thing — true albinos usually don't live long and can have health problems.
Durban said white killer whales have been spotted elsewhere in the area twice before: in 1993 in the northern Bering Sea around St. Lawrence Island and in 2001 near Adak in the central Aleutians. There have also been sightings along the Russian coast.
While Alaska researchers have documented thousands of black and white killer whales in the Bering Sea and the Aleutians during summer surveys, this was something new and exciting, Durban said.
"This is the first time we came across a white killer whale," he said.
The scientists observed several pods over a two-week period. The white whale was in a family group of 12 on a day when the seas were fairly rough. It was spotted about 2 miles off Kanaga Volcano on Feb. 23.
The ship stayed with the whale for about 30 minutes.
"Everybody actually came out and was taking pictures," Fearnbach said. "It was a neat sighting for everybody."
The whale appeared to be a healthy, adult male about 25 to 30 feet long and weighing upward of 10,000 pounds.
White killer whale spotted off Alaska
By MARY PEMBERTON, Associated Press Writer
3-7-8
The white killer whale spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands sent researchers and the ship's crew scrambling for their cameras. The nearly mythic creature was real after all. "I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."
The whale was spotted last month while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship, were conducting an acoustic survey of pollock near Steller sea lion haulout sites.
It had been spotted once in the Aleutians years ago but had eluded researchers since, even though they had seen many of the more classic black and white whales over the years.
Fearnbach said the white whale stood out.
"When you first looked at it, it was very white," she said Thursday.
Further observation showed that while the whale's saddle area was white, other parts of its body had a subtle yellowish or brownish color.
It likely is not a true albino given the coloration, said John Durban, a research biologist at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. That's probably a good thing — true albinos usually don't live long and can have health problems.
Durban said white killer whales have been spotted elsewhere in the area twice before: in 1993 in the northern Bering Sea around St. Lawrence Island and in 2001 near Adak in the central Aleutians. There have also been sightings along the Russian coast.
While Alaska researchers have documented thousands of black and white killer whales in the Bering Sea and the Aleutians during summer surveys, this was something new and exciting, Durban said.
"This is the first time we came across a white killer whale," he said.
The scientists observed several pods over a two-week period. The white whale was in a family group of 12 on a day when the seas were fairly rough. It was spotted about 2 miles off Kanaga Volcano on Feb. 23.
The ship stayed with the whale for about 30 minutes.
"Everybody actually came out and was taking pictures," Fearnbach said. "It was a neat sighting for everybody."
The whale appeared to be a healthy, adult male about 25 to 30 feet long and weighing upward of 10,000 pounds.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Exxon suxx. McCain duxx.
http://www.gregpalast.com/exxon-suxx-mccain-duxx
Exxon suxx. McCain duxx.
by Greg Palast
For TomPaine.com and OurFuture.org
Thursday, 28 February 2008
Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.
Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.
While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.
They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.
That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead.”
Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren’t they?
But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the second largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career. Enron was firstr. They were a team, Exxon and Enron.
To protect their corporate backsides, Enron’s Chairman Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent consumers, defrauded stockholders and devastated Natives from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.
When Dubya went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. On Wednesday, as the court heard Exxon’s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon’s behavior in Alaska, “What more can a corporation do?”
The answer, Your Honor, is plenty.
For starters, Mr. Roberts, Exxon could have turned on the radar. What? On the night the Exxon Valdez smacked into Bligh Reef, the Raycas radar system was turned off. Exxon shipping honchos decided it was too expensive to maintain it and train their navigators to use it. So, the inexperienced third mate at the wheel was driving the supertanker by eyeball, Christopher Columbus style. I kid you not.
Here’s what else this poor ‘widdle corporation could do: stop lying.
On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not even supposed to leave harbor. Here’s why. Tankers are not allowed to sail unless unless a spill containment barge is operating nearby. That night, the barge was in dry-dock, locked under ice. Exxon kept that fact hidden, concealing the truth even after the tanker grounded. An Exxon official radioed the emergency crew, “Barge is on its way.” It wasn’t.
Had the barge been in operation, it would have surrounded the leaking ship with rubber skirts - and Paul’s home, and Alaska’s coast, would have been saved. But Exxon couldn’t wait for its oil.
Paul’s gone – buried with Exxon’s promises. But the oil’s still there. Go out to Chenega lands today. At Sleepy Bay, kick over some gravel and it will smell like a gas station.
Tort Tart
What the heck does this have to do with John McCain?
The Senator is what I’d call a ‘Tort Tart.’ Ken Lay’s “Law Suit Reform” posse was one of the fronts used by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists waging war on your day in court. Their rallying cry is ‘Tort Reform,’ by which they mean they want to take away the God-given right of any American, rich or poor, to sue the bastards who crush your child’s skull through product negligence, make your heart explode with a faulty medical device, siphon off your pension funds, or poison your food supply with spilled oil.
All of the Democratic candidates have seen through this ‘tort reform’ con – and so did a Senator named McCain who, in 2001, for example, voted for the Patients Bill of Rights allowing claims against butchers with scalpels. Then something happened to Senator McCain: the guy who stuck his neck out for litigants got his head chopped off when he ran for President in the Republican Party. One lobbyists’ website blasted McCain’s “go-it-alone moralism.”
So the Senator did what I call, The McCain Hunch. Again and again he grabbed his ankles and apologized to the K Street lobbyists, reversing his positions on, well, you name it. In 2001, he said of Bush’s tax cuts, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans.” Now, in bad conscience, the Senator vows to make these tax cuts permanent.
On “Tort Reform,” the about-face was dizzying. McCain voted to undermine his own 2001 Patients Bill of Rights with votes in 2005 to limit suits to enforce it. He then added his name to a bill that would have thrown sealhunter Kompkoff’s suit out of federal court.
In 2003, McCain voted against Bush’s Energy Plan, an industry oil-gasm. This week, following Exxon’s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings, the largest profit haul in planetary history, Senators Clinton, Obama and several others in both parties sponsored a bill to require a teeny sliver of oil industry super-profits go to alternative energy sources. Technically, it involved ending a $14 billion tax giveaway granted oil companies by the Bush Administration in 2004. Senator McCain wouldn’t support George and his oil patch buddies then. But now, Candidate McCain won’t back the repeal of this gawdawful tax break.
In this showdown with Big Oil, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.
Well, Paul, at least you were spared this.
I remember when I was on the investigation in Alaska, bankrupted fishermen, utterly ruined – Kompkoff’s co-plaintiffs in the suit before the Supreme Court – floated their soon-to-be repossessed boats into the tanker lanes with banners reading, “EXXON SUXX.”
To which they could now add, about a one-time stand-up Senator: “McCain duxx.”
***
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his investigative reports at http://www.gregpalast.com/
Exxon suxx. McCain duxx.
by Greg Palast
For TomPaine.com and OurFuture.org
Thursday, 28 February 2008
Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.
Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.
While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.
They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.
That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead.”
Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren’t they?
But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the second largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career. Enron was firstr. They were a team, Exxon and Enron.
To protect their corporate backsides, Enron’s Chairman Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent consumers, defrauded stockholders and devastated Natives from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.
When Dubya went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. On Wednesday, as the court heard Exxon’s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon’s behavior in Alaska, “What more can a corporation do?”
The answer, Your Honor, is plenty.
For starters, Mr. Roberts, Exxon could have turned on the radar. What? On the night the Exxon Valdez smacked into Bligh Reef, the Raycas radar system was turned off. Exxon shipping honchos decided it was too expensive to maintain it and train their navigators to use it. So, the inexperienced third mate at the wheel was driving the supertanker by eyeball, Christopher Columbus style. I kid you not.
Here’s what else this poor ‘widdle corporation could do: stop lying.
On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not even supposed to leave harbor. Here’s why. Tankers are not allowed to sail unless unless a spill containment barge is operating nearby. That night, the barge was in dry-dock, locked under ice. Exxon kept that fact hidden, concealing the truth even after the tanker grounded. An Exxon official radioed the emergency crew, “Barge is on its way.” It wasn’t.
Had the barge been in operation, it would have surrounded the leaking ship with rubber skirts - and Paul’s home, and Alaska’s coast, would have been saved. But Exxon couldn’t wait for its oil.
Paul’s gone – buried with Exxon’s promises. But the oil’s still there. Go out to Chenega lands today. At Sleepy Bay, kick over some gravel and it will smell like a gas station.
Tort Tart
What the heck does this have to do with John McCain?
The Senator is what I’d call a ‘Tort Tart.’ Ken Lay’s “Law Suit Reform” posse was one of the fronts used by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists waging war on your day in court. Their rallying cry is ‘Tort Reform,’ by which they mean they want to take away the God-given right of any American, rich or poor, to sue the bastards who crush your child’s skull through product negligence, make your heart explode with a faulty medical device, siphon off your pension funds, or poison your food supply with spilled oil.
All of the Democratic candidates have seen through this ‘tort reform’ con – and so did a Senator named McCain who, in 2001, for example, voted for the Patients Bill of Rights allowing claims against butchers with scalpels. Then something happened to Senator McCain: the guy who stuck his neck out for litigants got his head chopped off when he ran for President in the Republican Party. One lobbyists’ website blasted McCain’s “go-it-alone moralism.”
So the Senator did what I call, The McCain Hunch. Again and again he grabbed his ankles and apologized to the K Street lobbyists, reversing his positions on, well, you name it. In 2001, he said of Bush’s tax cuts, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans.” Now, in bad conscience, the Senator vows to make these tax cuts permanent.
On “Tort Reform,” the about-face was dizzying. McCain voted to undermine his own 2001 Patients Bill of Rights with votes in 2005 to limit suits to enforce it. He then added his name to a bill that would have thrown sealhunter Kompkoff’s suit out of federal court.
In 2003, McCain voted against Bush’s Energy Plan, an industry oil-gasm. This week, following Exxon’s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings, the largest profit haul in planetary history, Senators Clinton, Obama and several others in both parties sponsored a bill to require a teeny sliver of oil industry super-profits go to alternative energy sources. Technically, it involved ending a $14 billion tax giveaway granted oil companies by the Bush Administration in 2004. Senator McCain wouldn’t support George and his oil patch buddies then. But now, Candidate McCain won’t back the repeal of this gawdawful tax break.
In this showdown with Big Oil, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.
Well, Paul, at least you were spared this.
I remember when I was on the investigation in Alaska, bankrupted fishermen, utterly ruined – Kompkoff’s co-plaintiffs in the suit before the Supreme Court – floated their soon-to-be repossessed boats into the tanker lanes with banners reading, “EXXON SUXX.”
To which they could now add, about a one-time stand-up Senator: “McCain duxx.”
***
Greg Palast is author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to his investigative reports at http://www.gregpalast.com/
Flooded Village Files Suit
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/us/27alaska.html
February 27, 2008
Flooded Village Files Suit, Citing Corporate Link to Climate Change
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Correction Appended
SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers for the Alaska Native coastal village of Kivalina, which is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate, filed suit in federal court here Tuesday arguing that 5 oil companies, 14 electric utilities and the country’s largest coal company were responsible for the village’s woes.
The suit is the latest effort to hold companies like BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, Duke Energy and the Southern Company responsible for the impact of global warming because they emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases, or, in the case of Peabody, mine and market carbon-laden coal that is burned by others. It accused the companies of creating a public nuisance.
In an unusual move, those five companies and three other defendants — the Exxon Mobil Corporation, American Electric Power and the Conoco Phillips Company — are also accused of conspiracy. “There has been a long campaign by power, coal and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming,” the suit says. The campaign, it says, contributed “to the public nuisance of global warming by convincing the public at large and the victims of global warming that the process is not man-made when in fact it is.”
Kivalina, an Inupiat village of 400 people on a barrier reef between the Chukchi Sea and two rivers, is being buffeted by waves that, in colder times, were blocked by sea ice, the suit says. “The result of the increased storm damage is a massive erosion problem,” it says. “Houses and buildings are in imminent danger of falling into the sea.”
The estimated cost of relocating the village is up to $400 million, the suit says.
Some lawyers in the case participated in the long-running litigation against American tobacco companies in the 1990s, and some of the same legal theories echo through the complaint. But the hurdles may be greater than those in the tobacco wars. Global warming is a diffuse worldwide phenomenon; a successful public nuisance case requires that defendants’ behavior be directly linked to the harm.
“Public nuisance law has been used from time immemorial to address issues that have not been addressed by the political branches,” said Kirsten H. Engel, a law professor at the University of Arizona. But Professor Engel added, “It’s very difficult to get a court to jump in here and say that what these companies are doing, and have been doing for years, is unreasonable and creating a public nuisance.”
Two similar lawsuits, one brought by California against six automakers and another by a coalition of Eastern states against utility companies, have been dismissed by federal judges. Both judges said the issues involved were political and did not belong in the courts. Those decisions have been appealed.
Matt Pawa, a lawyer for Kivalina, said this case was different because it sought monetary damages for an injured party. “The kind of harms to property and public welfare caused by global warming are classic public nuisance injuries,” Mr. Pawa said.
He added that the other cases had no conspiracy claims, which he said courts routinely addressed.
Reached late Tuesday, spokesmen for three defendants — Jason Cuevas of Southern, Vic Svec of Peabody and Gantt Walton of Exxon Mobil — said they would not comment on the substance of the lawsuit.
But Mr. Svec said, “Rather than unreasonably suing companies for the weather, we would encourage everyone to join Peabody in supporting aggressive development of carbon capture and storage projects and other technologies that help us provide both energy security and carbon solutions.”
Of the accusation that Exxon Mobil participated in a disinformation campaign, Mr. Walton said, “The recycling of this type of discredited conspiracy theory only diverts attention from the real challenge at hand — how to provide the energy to improve living standards while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 28, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about a lawsuit filed against energy companies by an Alaska Native coastal village that is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate misstated the estimated cost of moving the village. It could cost up to $400 million, not up to $400,000.
February 27, 2008
Flooded Village Files Suit, Citing Corporate Link to Climate Change
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Correction Appended
SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers for the Alaska Native coastal village of Kivalina, which is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate, filed suit in federal court here Tuesday arguing that 5 oil companies, 14 electric utilities and the country’s largest coal company were responsible for the village’s woes.
The suit is the latest effort to hold companies like BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, Duke Energy and the Southern Company responsible for the impact of global warming because they emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases, or, in the case of Peabody, mine and market carbon-laden coal that is burned by others. It accused the companies of creating a public nuisance.
In an unusual move, those five companies and three other defendants — the Exxon Mobil Corporation, American Electric Power and the Conoco Phillips Company — are also accused of conspiracy. “There has been a long campaign by power, coal and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming,” the suit says. The campaign, it says, contributed “to the public nuisance of global warming by convincing the public at large and the victims of global warming that the process is not man-made when in fact it is.”
Kivalina, an Inupiat village of 400 people on a barrier reef between the Chukchi Sea and two rivers, is being buffeted by waves that, in colder times, were blocked by sea ice, the suit says. “The result of the increased storm damage is a massive erosion problem,” it says. “Houses and buildings are in imminent danger of falling into the sea.”
The estimated cost of relocating the village is up to $400 million, the suit says.
Some lawyers in the case participated in the long-running litigation against American tobacco companies in the 1990s, and some of the same legal theories echo through the complaint. But the hurdles may be greater than those in the tobacco wars. Global warming is a diffuse worldwide phenomenon; a successful public nuisance case requires that defendants’ behavior be directly linked to the harm.
“Public nuisance law has been used from time immemorial to address issues that have not been addressed by the political branches,” said Kirsten H. Engel, a law professor at the University of Arizona. But Professor Engel added, “It’s very difficult to get a court to jump in here and say that what these companies are doing, and have been doing for years, is unreasonable and creating a public nuisance.”
Two similar lawsuits, one brought by California against six automakers and another by a coalition of Eastern states against utility companies, have been dismissed by federal judges. Both judges said the issues involved were political and did not belong in the courts. Those decisions have been appealed.
Matt Pawa, a lawyer for Kivalina, said this case was different because it sought monetary damages for an injured party. “The kind of harms to property and public welfare caused by global warming are classic public nuisance injuries,” Mr. Pawa said.
He added that the other cases had no conspiracy claims, which he said courts routinely addressed.
Reached late Tuesday, spokesmen for three defendants — Jason Cuevas of Southern, Vic Svec of Peabody and Gantt Walton of Exxon Mobil — said they would not comment on the substance of the lawsuit.
But Mr. Svec said, “Rather than unreasonably suing companies for the weather, we would encourage everyone to join Peabody in supporting aggressive development of carbon capture and storage projects and other technologies that help us provide both energy security and carbon solutions.”
Of the accusation that Exxon Mobil participated in a disinformation campaign, Mr. Walton said, “The recycling of this type of discredited conspiracy theory only diverts attention from the real challenge at hand — how to provide the energy to improve living standards while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 28, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about a lawsuit filed against energy companies by an Alaska Native coastal village that is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate misstated the estimated cost of moving the village. It could cost up to $400 million, not up to $400,000.
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