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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4214)	8/24/2003 3:04:24 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

Message 19238459

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4214)	8/24/2003 5:10:30 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

Dean Promotes Himself Like a Rock Star story.news.yahoo.com

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4214)	8/24/2003 9:40:13 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

Republican supporting energy firms set to escape controls on emissions _____________________________________ Bush's pollution charter By Julian Borger in Washington Saturday August 23, 2003 The Guardian guardian.co.uk The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America's air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity. Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation. The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations. The regulations are being challenged by 13 states including New York. If adopted, they would represent a multi-million dollar victory for energy corporations, most of whom are significant Republican contributors, and who were consulted in the drafting of the administration's energy plan by vice-president Dick Cheney in 2001. The US accounts for a quarter of the world's carbon emissions, 10% more than all of western Europe combined. Environmentalists fear that, by relaxing its controls even further, America could undermine attempts to persuade other countries to stick to the targets laid out by Kyoto. Under the current rules set in 1977, industrial sites built before the Clean Air Act are exempt from its controls until they are upgraded in any way, beyond "routine maintenance", that increases emissions. At that point companies have to install filters and other controls or face penalties. Under the draft rules, seen by the Guardian, corporations can do far more than "routine maintenance" - investing in old plant up to 20% of its total value at a time - without having to spend money on anti-pollution equipment. The figure of 20% is highly controversial, and in some places in the document has been replaced by an "X". Elsewhere the figure has been left, apparently as an oversight. The rules do not impose a time limit for the investment, allowing a firm to make successive upgrades to an old power station, oil refinery or factory - replacing it piece by piece, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars - as long as each upgrade costs less than a fifth of the plant's total value. "The companies could completely rebuild their plants by gaming a gimmick that is designed to be gamed," said John Walke, of the Natural Resources Defence Council, a pressure group which leaked the draft."This is a massive giveaway," Mr Walke said. "The Bush administration, using an arbitrary, Enron-like accounting gimmick, is authorising massive pollution increases to benefit Bush campaign contributors at the expense of public health." An agency spokesman said yesterday that the draft was being worked on and he could not comment on its contents. Frank Maisano, spokesman for an industry group, the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said he was not familiar with the new rules. However, he said: "If it were to be set at 20%, that would be reasonable for a routine maintenance provision. The reality is you need to maintain your plants efficiently and reliably. The only thing the environmentalists here are interested in is getting rid of the coal plants," Mr Maisano said. The change comes in the wake of victories for US justice department lawyers in cases against six big polluters in the electric power industry, forcing them to reduce emissions by more than half a million tons a year. However, analysts said that, under the new rules, the six would have won. The trade group representing the companies, Edison Electric Institute, contributed nearly $600,000 to the Republican party from 1999 to 2002, and had at least 14 contacts with the Cheney energy task force in 2001. Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York, one state challenging the policy as being damaging to the health of residents, said he would mount a legal challenge as soon as the regulations were signed. guardian.co.uk/usa 11

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (4214)	8/24/2003 9:52:03 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

Eight Lies _____________________________________________________ The president's prevarications on Iraq -- and their consequences. _____________________________________________________ By Michael Tomasky Web Exclusive: 8.21.03 prospect.org Imagine that, after the failure of the health-care bill in 1994, Bill Clinton had come right back in 1995 and proposed the measure again. No, not only proposed it again but proposed a more radical version, arguing that it failed only because it was too watered down, and tried to bully its critics with reckless gunslinger talk about how they didn't care about the future of America. Virtually all of Washington would have thought Clinton ready for the loony bin under such circumstances. And yet this is exactly the m.o. of the current White House. Like one of those M.C. Escher prints in which water tumbles through an endlessly circulating sluiceway but ends up back where it began, Bush administration policy -- in Iraq and on other fronts -- operates on a logic that permits neither facts nor criticism nor other opinions to disrupt its precious flow of water to nowhere. The logic goes something like this: The White House lies and propagandizes. An ever-pliant media gobble up the lies and propaganda. At some point, the lies and propaganda are laid bare and result in failure or crisis. And then -- this is where Escher comes in -- the administration uses its own failure to argue that the crisis just proves that the public must support Bush all the more! Iraq and the blackout, the leading international and domestic crises of the week, are both examples of this. With regard to Iraq, there are at least eight major lies the administration has told that put us where we are today: 1. It said Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States. He was not. 2. It said he sat on massive caches of weapons of mass destruction, which he was ready to employ at a moment's notice. He apparently did not and he obviously was not (or he would surely have used them when the infidels hit his soil). 3.It said regime change would be a cakewalk. It was for two weeks -- during which time the administration naturally showed the tastelessness to gloat about it -- but it sure isn't now. 4. It said our soldiers would be greeted as liberators. They were for about two days; now they're "greeted" as occupiers. 5. It said it had a solid postwar plan. It didn't. 6. It said toppling Hussein would hem in terrorism. Instead, for now at least, terrorism has spread, as extremists of all stripes swarm into Iraq, where our soldiers are paying the price (four more were injured Wednesday morning, after the United Nations bombing). 7. It said the death of Hussein's sons would slow the bloodletting. Violence has increased (and the same will surely happen if Hussein himself turns up dead or captured). 8. It said we don't need more troops on the ground. A pipeline bombing and a hotel bombing later, it's pretty obvious that, as depressing as it is to contemplate, we need more troops on the ground. Only one thing ever said by the White House is true, which is that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. That he was. And so now, eight lies later, the administration falls back on this rhetoric, which is obviously the Republican National Committee's No. 1 talking point: Would you rather (as I heard a few testy wing nuts say on television yesterday) that Saddam Hussein still be in power butchering his people? This is the question of a demagogue, a shill or an idiot (not groups in short supply these days, unfortunately). But it's scarcely as if supporting this administration to the hilt or being soft on Hussein are the only two alternatives here. A third alternative -- consisting of three or four more months for the UN inspectors (does the administration's timetable really seem that urgent in retrospect?), a second UN resolution, the backing of the Security Council, an honest rather than a dishonest casus belli from the administration and then, if necessary, a war (and yes, I would have supported war under those circumstances) -- is looking better every day. On the blackout, no, it's not the administration's fault, and there is no equivalent catalogue of lies that contributed to it. But what the administration and its allies in Congress are doing now is shocking. There's fairly broad bipartisan agreement on the portions of the administration's energy bill that have to do with updating transmission lines. There are differences in the House and Senate versions, but they're not so great that a deal can't be cut. If that came up by itself, it could pass both houses in a matter of days. It would at least begin to address a problem that has obviously hit the crisis point. But the White House and its Republican allies don't want that. What they want is to take a situation, which they and their ideological soul mates in the various states helped create through hurried deregulation, and use it to force oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) -- which the administration, for now, is insisting be attached to the bill that would update the transmission lines. They'd rather keep the ANWR provisions in the bill and have it fail, so they can then blame Democrats next year, than do something about the problem. Fine, let them do it. And then let's see how it plays in Michigan and Ohio. Iraq or the energy grid, it's always the same with these people: They put ideology ahead of facts and use their own failures as evidence that they should be given more license. It's time someone took their license away. __________________________________________________ Michael Tomasky will become executive editor of the Prospect in September. His columns appear on Wednesdays at TAP Online.