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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (79965)	5/6/2010 9:23:55 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Radio Ecoshock has a new one hour special on the Gulf gusher... It features interviews with: Richard Heinberg (of Post Carbon Institute), Anita Burke (former Shell International VP), Dr. Riki Ott (Valdez oil spill expert, reporting from New Orleans), and Antonia Juhasz, oil researcher for Global Currents. Plus a new song written about the spill by Dana Pearson "Corporate Catastrophe". Download or listen at ecoshock.net Find more details, with many links at ecoshock.org Please pass on word about this program through your web sites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. It looks at the big picture, not given by most mainstream media, from experts long active in the field, and well published at the Oil Drum. It also includes the Peak Oil perspective, as motivation for such risky deep water drilling. Alex Smith host Radio Ecoshock ecoshock.org

To: coug who wrote (79965)	5/6/2010 9:51:23 PM
From: Broken_Clock	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

From what i read on a drilling site, it sounds like BP and Hal really screwed the pooch on this one. Malfeasance at the very least.

To: coug who wrote (79965)	5/6/2010 9:52:32 PM
From: arno	Respond to of 89467

due to a LOUSY cementing job and just how do you KNOW is was a lousy job. based upon my drilling experience as being a project manager on numerous drilling projects as a "project manager" you should know that cementing casing is a moment in time known as being on the 'edge of a knife'. not as a engineer, but above that, Aaaah...I see...a "finger pointer"

To: coug who wrote (79965)	5/7/2010 12:17:19 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

EXCLUSIVE: BP Worked With FreedomWorks And The Chamber To Build ‘Grassroots’ Support For More Drilling thinkprogress.org

To: coug who wrote (79965)	5/7/2010 4:36:47 AM
From: stockman_scott	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Why the Oil Spill May Be the Greatest Test of Obama's Presidency alternet.org By Bill McKibben AlterNet Posted on May 5, 2010 The river of Gulf oil welling up from BP's hole in the bottom of the sea will be the great test of the Obama presidency--but not for the reasons people are starting to suggest. For one thing, it's not his fault, even if he did agree a month ago to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling. That bad judgment hasn't had time to do any damage yet. And even if the administration was slow off the mark in responding, they're clearly pouring every asset they've got into the fight to save the coastline of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. That fight will be played out over many months, and in the end there may be simply nothing anyone can do to turn the tide. So the real test will simply be this: can the president seize this moment to move boldly on the biggest question facing the world: our endless addiction to fossil fuel. Not foreign fossil fuel, but fossil fuel period. Between last month's coal-mine disaster and this month's ongoing oil catastrophe, he's got the ultimate in teachable moments. If he wanted to launch a real offensive, here's how it would look: a series of urgent speeches in which he explained that the damage visible on the beaches of the Gulf is only the most dramatic of the problems we face from fossil fuel. Just as bad is what happens when oil makes it safely out of the drilling platform or coal out of the mine: its combustion is producing the carbon dioxide now raising the temperature of the earth. And not just the temperature--that same flow of carbon dioxide is now quickly acidifying the planet's oceans. If you're worried about oysters in the Gulf, you should be worried about oysters in general, not to mention coral reefs, plankton, and pretty much the rest of the marine food chain. In every cubic meter of the planet's vast seas. Those speeches would need to come with a plan--a plan far bolder than the watered down piece of legislation due to be released sometime in the near future by Senator Kerry, apparently with the White House's blessing. That bill (which, ironically, was originally going to dramatically increase offshore drilling) offers no compelling vision of the world beyond fossil fuel, and pays scant attention to the warnings scientists have given in recent years. A real plan would set a truly stiff price on carbon so that we would change our habits; that would sting, as it must. A real plan would also rebate the money raised by those fees to consumers, so the sting would be economically bearable. There's an embryonic, though also too-weak, version of this plan offered by the bipartisan duo of Washington's Maria Cantwell and Maine's Susan Collins--an engaged president could use it as the starting point for a crusade. My guess is he won't, because it would mean confronting the electric utilities and big oil. Instead of letting them write the plan, he'd have to dictate the terms. And he doesn't need to do it politically--because he followed such an anti-environmental administration, the small gestures he's made so far on green issues (and his inspired cabinet picks) are enough to preserve his ecological credentials. But make no mistake--nothing he's done so far represents a real shift in our use of fossil fuel. Better than his predecessors? Sure. But I can win a footrace with my grandma and it doesn't make me speedy. So we're going to find out if Obama really wants to take on the most crucial complex of issues the world faces. This is his moment, and it's the only possible silver lining to that very black cloud spreading out from the Deepwater drillhole. *Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is the author of the new book Earth and founder of the climate campaign 350.org. © 2010 Independent Media Institute.

To: coug who wrote (79965)	5/10/2010 10:30:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Kagan in Context: Shafting Progressive Values by Norman Solomon Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by CommonDreams.org If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens -- and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it's part of a pattern. The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA. "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf. "They are technologically very advanced." On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a centrist baseline has smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction. Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles. "During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration's bogus category of ‘enemy combatant,' whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right," University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle noted last month. "Now, in her current job as U.S. Solicitor General, Kagan is quarterbacking the continuation of the Bush administration's illegal and unconstitutional positions in U.S. federal court litigation around the country, including in the U.S. Supreme Court." Boyle added: "Kagan has said ‘I love the Federalist Society.' This is a right-wing group; almost all of the Bush administration lawyers responsible for its war and torture memos are members of the Federalist Society." The departing Justice Stevens was a defender of civil liberties. Unless the Senate refuses to approve Kagan for the Supreme Court, the nation's top court is very likely to become more hostile to civil liberties and less inclined to put limits on presidential power. Here is yet another clear indication that progressives must mobilize to challenge the White House on matters of principle. Otherwise, history will judge us harshly -- and it should. For more than 15 months, evidence has mounted that President Obama routinely combines progressive rhetoric with contrary actions. As one bad decision after another has emanated from the Oval Office, some progressives have favored denial -- even though, if the name "Bush" or "McCain" had been attached to the same presidential policies, the same progressives would have been screaming bloody murder. But enabling bad policies, with silent acquiescence or anemic dissent, encourages more of them. At this point, progressive groups and individuals who pretend that Obama's policies merely need a few tweaks, or just suffer from a few anomalous deficiencies, are whistling past a political graveyard. At the same time, with less than six months to go before Election Day, there are very real prospects of a big Republican victory that could shift majority control of Congress. Progressives have a huge stake in averting a GOP takeover on Capitol Hill. The corporate-military centrism of the Obama administration has demoralized and demobilized the Democratic Party's largely progressive base -- the same base that swept Nancy Pelosi into the House Speaker's office and then Barack Obama into the White House. National polls now show Democrats to be much less enthusiastic about voting in November than their Republican counterparts. The conventional political wisdom (about as accurate as the claim that "oil rigs today generally don't cause spills") is that when a Democratic president moves rightward, his party gains strength against Republicans. But Democrats reaped the whirlwind of that pseudo-logic in 1994 -- after President Clinton shafted much of the Democratic base by pushing through the corporate NAFTA trade pact against the wishes of labor, environmental and human-rights constituencies. That's how Newt Gingrich and other right-wing zealots got to run Congress starting in January 1995. For progressives, giving the Obama administration one benefit of the doubt after another has not prevented matters from getting worse. At the moment, U.S. troop levels are nearing 100,000 in Afghanistan. Massive quantities of oil are belching into the Gulf of Mexico. The White House has signaled de facto acceptance of a high unemployment rate for several more years, while offering weak GOP-lite countermeasures like tax breaks for businesses. Nuclear power subsidies are getting powerful support from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, while meaningful action against global warming is nowhere in sight. The Justice Department continues to backtrack on civil liberties. And now, if the president's nomination of Elena Kagan is successful, the result will move the Supreme Court to the right. Progressives should fight the Kagan nomination. *Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death [1]" has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is "Made Love, Got War. [2]" He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare [3] campaign. In California, he is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay; www.GreenNewDeal.info [4].