Ninety-two percent of the 278 known chemicals used to produce natural gas have adverse health effects including endocrine disruption, neurological disorders and cancer. Chemical information is limited because the industry claims formulas are trade secrets. If, like most Americans, you believe your water, air and soil are protected from these chemicals by federal environmental statutes, you are dead wrong. Loopholes in our federal environmental laws allow the oil and gas industry to endanger public health and safety and risk vital natural resources.
Fueled by technological advances, a frenzied expansion in natural gas drilling has exploded into 34 American states. Once the burden of rural areas, it now encroaches into heavily populated cities turning neighborhoods into industrial zones.
They're calling natural gas a bridge fuel, an alternative fuel, the "clean" energy. Enough PR money burnishes a dirty fossil fuel into an environmentally friendly magic bridge to lead us far from our energy crisis. In truth, the production process that endangers public health and safety, depletes scarce water supplies, and generates colossal amounts of toxic waste cancels out the slightly cleaner burn.
It's a heavy toll to cross this bridge. The question becomes: who pays?
Who needs to worry about foreign terrorists when we have domestic ones right here at home who are encouraged to spew hate and wish us dead on national cable TV.
According to Michael Scheuer who appeared on FOX's Glenn Beck show today:
The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.
This is absolutely outrageous and unacceptable.
Scheuer is the former CIA chief of the Osama bin Laden unit from 1996-1999. He obviously did a brilliant job of keeping tabs on OBL during his tenure on the unit.
According to an article written in the Houston Chronicle this morning, John Cornyn, John McCain and Mitch McConnell met with a group of doctors at the Texas Medical Center in Houston. John Cornyn is apparently on a mission to destroy health care reform by misleading and scaring doctors and patients, alike.
According to Cornyn, the evil doer is a non-existent single payer option.
"This is where the government option is a competitor but the government's not exactly a fair competitor," said Cornyn, of Texas, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which is considering health care reform proposals. "It's an 800-pound gorilla that has the capacity to undermine other competitors. We want to make sure we don't do anything to crush the kind of innovation that has led to cures and happier and healthier lives in Texas and around the world."
Dude, the only thing destroying innovation and cures are the crippling costs imposed by for-profit driven health care insurance companies.
The federal government agencies (i.e. the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health etc.) and private foundations provide grants that fuel much of the innovation and cures. Is John Cornyn suggesting the public option will automatically become single-payer and federal grants will no longer be awarded to research faculty and doctors? The public option means no more federal funding for research?
If he is suggesting this he is both a fool and a liar.
Former Astronaut Charles Bolden will probably be the new head of NASA. But a committee holds much of the fate of NASA in its own expert hands. This New York Times Augustine article is very useful for painting the big picture. The Committee held a public meeting on June 17. The "Agenda Released for U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Meeting," is from NASA Breaking News (6/16/09). To quote the press release:
The first public meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17, at the Carnegie Institute, located at 1530 P Street NW in Washington. The meeting will take place in the auditorium and is open to the public. No pre-registration is required.
By this time, most of you probably know about the exchange between Pres. Obama and Lt Col Fehrenbach. I want to focus on this part of the AP Story:
Fehrenbach said after talking with Obama, he felt confident "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," would eventually be repealed. But he said he was not sure it would happen before he is discharged. His case is before the Personnel Review Board, which is considering whether to recommend discharging him. After that, it will go to the Air Force secretary for review.
He said Obama told him that while 75 percent of the public supports repealing the policy, senior leaders in the military still need to be convinced.
"I said to him, 'The people I serve with don't care,' " Fehrenbach said. "This is a nonissue."
I understand that rank has its privileges, especially in the military. However, those privileges should never extend to the point of endangering national security to indulge their own homophobic prejudices.
a statistically significant increase since last year in the percentage of Americans who describe the Democratic Party's views as being "too liberal," from 39% to 46%. This is the largest percentage saying so since November 1994, after the party's losses in that year's midterm elections.
The problem with Gallup in this regard is the problem with all such services. They hate to change their ways, since they have tons of data and analysis premised on certain presumptions. When the presumptions change, they take their sweet time changing their tactics.
In this case, the poll results are less than meets the eye. The brand "liberal" , thanks to the feckless defense of it by the Dems over the past 20 years and the aggressive framing of it by the Republicans, it is almost devoid of meaning. It is like asking the average person about Ronald Reagan. All they know is what they have been told over the last 20 years.
Some work done by the Pew Center explodes the lameness of any analysis of American ideology using Gallup's old fashioned 3 point scale:
The rise of progressivism in America is reflected more starkly in direct ratings of various ideological approaches. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans rate a "progressive" approach to politics favorably, a 25-point increase in favorability over the last five years, with
gains coming primarily from those who were previously unaware of the term. "Progressive" now equals "conservative" in terms of overall public favorability (67 percent, respectively).
The continuing strength of the conservative brand-if not all of its constitutive ideas-
reflects the long-term success of the conservative movement over decades.
Texas has decided to steer clear of a national effort - involving 46 states - to develop uniform standards for English and math instruction in public schools.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott, with the backing of Gov. Rick Perry, has turned down an invitation to work with the other states in drafting "common core" standards for English and math classes, spelling out what students at all grade levels should be taught in those subjects.
Although the standards will be voluntary.....[snip]
Texas officials are wary of getting involved, largely because of the cost to the state of implementing new standards.
[snip]
"Texas historically has never been supportive of the idea of national standards for our schools," said Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the commissioner and the Texas Education Agency. "We believe most Texans want to see our standards developed in Texas."
State Board of Education member Don McLeroy, the former chairman of the panel, noted that the education board now has responsibility to approve curriculum standards and there is no reason to surrender that authority to a national panel. [snip]
The MSM could not or chose not , to comment on the irony of the defense mounted by Texas officials in rejecting this voluntary initiative and the potential funds it could bring to the state. Frist, we rank at the bottom of any and all educational performance ratings and have for years. Thanks heavens for Louisiana and Mississippi , without them we would rank at the very bottom.
Important news that is fit to print, some of which one will rarely, if ever, see printed in the mainstream press.
A blast from the past: The 2008 Presidential Campaign
Apparently there was a big rift between John McCain and Sarah Palin. His staff knew Palin was not up to the task for which she had been chosen but alas, the campaign staff worked 24/7 for a successful outcome for the Republican Party.
Let the country be damned. So much for putting one's country first.
Had John McCain won and subsequently passed away, we'd be stuck with a President 20 times worse, even more incurious, dumber and consequently more dangerous than W. We'd likely be at war with the rest of the planet and they'd be drill, baby drilling in all of our backyards in Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and anywhere else where oil might be found. There would also be monthly book burnings and political Rovian witch hunts 24/7/365.
One McCain staffer and friend apparently called Palin a
I definitely have to stop sipping coffee when reading the Houston Chronicle in the morning. Too many times my freshly brewed favorite morning beverage is spat out because I am appalled and/or disgusted by something I read.
This morning happened to be one of those days when my morning joe ended up on the front page of the Houston Chronicle.
The headline that captured my attention:
A case of mistaken identity?
Environmentalists surprised that A&M scientist named to board has sided with industry
By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE
Apparently a Texas A&M educated scientist who holds two advanced degrees and a doctorate in agricultural engineering to boot, is skeptical of the proven science supporting the fact that human activity is largely responsible for pollution.
The evils of unfettered, unbridled, for-profit health care providers.
In a story posted on Raw Story.com, a retired health insurance executive, with twenty years experience with Cigna, testified in a U.S. Senate hearing that insurance companies willfully confuse customers and get rid of those who are sick.
"[T]hey confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors," former Cigna senior executive Wendell Potter told senators at a hearing on health insurance Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Dr. Steve B over at Daily Kos also has a posting on this issue.
Once again Trudy Lieberman has a great story, not only about how the health insurance industry really works, but also how its PR campaigns work and how they count on lazy journalists.
The pieces posted above give us the industry's working formula to maximize its profits by ditching some customers and denying coverage to others.
The industry's ultimate goal: Money: Pleasing Wall St. investors.
Core ideology: Money: The free market works.
How to achieve the goal:
Confuse clients
Dump the sick
Depend on lazy journalists
Count on Congress members who are aligned with the industry and who believe a voodoo free market economy can work for health care.
The right wing hypocrites who nailed Bill Clinton to a cross for having a consensual cigar sex affair must have been projecting their own long repressed evil doing sinning at the time. S.C. Governor Mark Sanford, as I recall, was right in there with his right wing soul mates, hammering in the nails.
In fact, this is what Mark Sanford said about Bill Clinton's affair.
The issue of lying is probably the biggest harm, if you will, to the system of Democratic government, representatives government, because it undermines trust. And if you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.
In the future, holier-than-thou Republicans might want to be careful before throwing stones.
Somehow, someway, the right wing hypocrites find ways in which to grant themselves forgiveness for their well-meaning, the-devil-made-me-do-it sins.
Oh so now the laughable hypocrites want bygones to be bygones because this is about the "heart." Joe Scarborough is so angry about Sanford's outing that he actually accused one of his own colleagues of having an affair. Joe is one very angry guy who has been having on the air altercations with his more liberal colleagues on MSNBC lately. It must be hell to belong to a Party that no one takes seriously anymore.
Jon Stewart pretty much nailed Sanford last night when he said.
"Oh, marital infidelity, you're just another run of the mill human being whose simple moralizing about the sanctity of marriage is only marred by the complexities of their own life. Well just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis.
I could not believe my eyes this morning when I turned on MSNBC's Morning Joe and saw Chris Matthews tearing into Joe Scarborough on national health care reform. The exchange was music to my ears. In essence Matthews tore off the mask of the right wing. He completely dismantled their rationale for opposing government run health care. He shows us how Joe Scarborough and other right wing Republicans are merely parroting big insurance's talking points.
The exchange is captured on You Tube and posted over at Daily Kos.
Hellllllllllllllllllloooooo out there. Are you listening to the news reports? Are you reading the data from the polls?
Apparently not.
According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, 72% of Americans favor a government run health care program.
Now I know you conservative folks have a problem with the New York Times because it is supposedly "liberal."
God forbid. I guess the New York Times made up the numbers. Indeed, this morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, conservative anchor Joe Scarborough insisted the poll is skewed because many of those polled are Obama supporters.
I have news for Mr. Scarborough and the rest of his conservative colleagues and soul mates including the sell-out "Democrats" on the right. President Barack Obama won the election hands down with a vast majority of the vote. Of course many of those polled are Obama supporters. Whether you Republican folks like it or not, the majority of the American people support President Barack Obama. We like him. We respect him. We trust him.
You dazed and confused conservatives might want to do some personal head examining before you take to the airwaves with your relentless efforts to attack the accomplishments and popularity of Barack Obama.
As you gun for him, bloggers like me are gunning for you conservative whore mongers on the right. Eight years of your unctuous sucking up and cowardly cheer leading for the worst President in recent history pretty much told progressives exactly who you folks support and what you stand for.
House Republicans presented a four-page outline of their health care reform plan Wednesday but said they didn't know yet how much it would cost, how they would pay for it and how many of the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance would be covered by it.
Well, I guess if you don't plan on doing shit about the problem it doesn't take that long to outline a plan with no financing and no sick people in it.
(TK supports the Iranian people. - promoted by boadicea)
In light of the tragic and blatantly fraudulent presidential election in Iran, a group of both Iranian and non-Iranian students and concerned citizens of Austin and San Antonio are coming together to hold a demonstration and march at the Texas Capitol today (Wednesday) at 5:00pm in solidarity with the people of Iran and to show our disappointment with and disapproval of the election results.
Our esteemed 39% self-serving governor Rick Perry showed us just how pathetically out of touch he is with the needs of everyday Texans. The dude very self-righteously turned down evil doing federal bailout money to extend the benefits for the unemployed. But once Perry turned down the bucks our revered governor suddenly realized that our state's unemployment compensation piggy bank was about to go broke.
So, what does Perry do to fix his stupid decision? Alas, he crawled to Washington to beg the big spending "socialist" feds for a loan to cover our piggy bank's shortfall.
Now, I call taking out a loan when one could have gotten the funding for free a really dumb and stupid thing to do. Not only is Perry's decision to turn down bail out funds ridiculous but it is also very calloused and mean-spirited. Essentially, Perry stuck it to us all. Businesses will consequently pay higher taxes and they will pass that burden along to consumers. Folks will have to pay higher prices for goods and services at a time when many are already struggling to make ends meet.
Xanthippas at Three Wise Men blogs about how utterly ridiculous it is for us to pay a tiny South Pacific nation to take Guantanamo Bay detainees because we are a nation of bed-wetting, pearl-clutching morons.
The following video contains a few of the 360 pictures taken on a short flight over small portions of Tarrant, Wise and Denton Counties. These pictures depict the destruction caused by natural gas production.
What is the fuss about drilling a Barnett Shale well? A Barnett well site with a drilling rig operating for three months has the same impact as a city of 4,000 people,- Water use, solid waste generation, air emissions and traffic. The O&G industry has been slow to realize this-that it has too big an impact on the environment. However, if we can reduce our environmental 'footprint,' we can realize better returns on our investments and cause less fuss in the community. That is a win-win for everyone.
~David Burnett, Director, Global Petroleum Research Institute
Former Astronaut Charles Bolden will probably be the new head of NASA. But a committee holds much of the fate of NASA in its own expert hands. This 
