It's A Gas Gas Gas

As widely expected, the EPA has moved to classify CO2 and other greenhouse gases as a pollutant in order to smack Congress in the back of the head to get to work on cap-and-trade.

Having received White House backing, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Friday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a significant threat to human health and thus will be listed as pollutants under the Clean Air Act — a policy the Bush administration rejected. "This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations," EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement.

The move could allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, but it's more likely that the Obama administration will use the action to prod Congress to pass regulations around a system to cap and then trade emissions so that they are gradually lowered.

Indeed, the EPA emphasized that the congressional route was preferred to EPA regulation. "Both President (Barack) Obama and Administrator Jackson have repeatedly indicated their preference for comprehensive legislation to address this issue and create the framework for a clean energy economy," the EPA said in its statement.

About time. If Congress won't make laws, then Obama will go with executive orders on global warming.

Still, the point has been made, and it shows Obama is serious about getting legislation crafted and passed ASAP.

Madden-ing

Taking a break from caterpillars, prosecution of war crimes, the next American Civil War and the death of irony, I nearly forgot to post about John Madden retiring from NFL broadcasting. Say what you will about the old man, he got to work 30 years at a job he loved, he got to be in video games, and his ride kicks ass.

Not a whole lot of people in any profession in America can lay claim to all that.

Here's to ya, John.

Be Secedin' Ya, Buddy

Good ol' Rasmussen. You can always count on them for some wacky poll fun, and this one is outright silly. Turns out 18% of Texans want to secede from the United States.

Thirty-one percent (31%) of Texas voters say that their state has the right to secede from the United States and form an independent country.

However, the latest Rasmussen Reports poll in the state finds that if the matter was put to a vote, it wouldn’t even be close. Three-fourths (75%) of Lone Star State voters would opt to remain in the United States. Only 18% would vote to secede, and seven percent (7%) are not sure what they'd choose.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, in response to a reporter’s question about secession at a protest "tea party," said Wednesday, "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot." The comment was widely reported in the media.

Really? Roughly one in five Texans want to form their own country? Nobody else finds this disturbing that a couple million folks want to actively leave the US?

Weren't anti-war protesters told to "love America or leave it" by the Right during the Bush years? Weren't they told that by weakening America, they made it less safe?

And now less than three months, and millions of Texans want to leave it, and the Right now calls them heroes and brave resisters of the Obama tyranny.

But it's not just Republican governors messing about with this "We do not recognize federal authority" thing. Oh no. It's Democrats, too.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer has signed into law a bill that aims to exempt Montana-made guns from federal regulation, adding firepower to a battery of legislative efforts to assert states’ rights across the nation.

“It’s a gun bill, but it’s another way of demonstrating the sovereignty of the state of Montana,” Democrat Schweitzer said.

Since the law applies only to those guns that are made and kept in Montana, its impact is limited. The state is home to just a handful of specialty gun makers, known for recreating rifles used to settle the West, and most of their customers are out-of-state.

But supporters of the new law hope it triggers a court case testing the legal basis for federal rules governing gun sales.

Again, where were these outrages against Bush?

Germ Killer

So, one of those unintended consequences of global warming is that things frozen in glacier ice are thawing out. Things like million-year-old bacteria.

But under the Taylor Glacier on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, near a place called Blood Falls, scientists have discovered a time capsule of bacterial activity.

At chilling temperatures, with no oxygen or sunlight, these newly found microbes have survived for the past 1.5 million years using an "iron-breathing" technique, which may show how life could exist on other planets.

For years the reddish waterfall-like feature on the side of Taylor Glacier captured the attention of explorers and scientists. Earlier research indicates the color of Blood Falls is due to oxidized iron, but how the iron got to the surface of the glacier remained a mystery.

"When I saw iron, I thought, 'Wow -- that's an energy source for microbes. There has got to be microbes associated with that,' " said Jill Mikucki, lead author of a study about the strange bacteria, published this week in the journal Science.

Scientists found these isolated microorganisms use iron leached from the glacial bedrock in a series of energy-producing metabolic reactions. With the help of sulfate, the iron is transformed and eventually deposited on the surface of the glacier. Air oxidizes the iron, giving Blood Falls its redish hue.

"We don't fully understand the extremities of life: What cuts off life? What are the upper and lower temperatures limits? What are the parameters that life can handle?" said Mikucki, a geomicrobiologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

"Microbes really defy those limits and can get into the extreme environments and tell us a little bit about the natural history of our earth."

As cool as this is, there's a plot for Michael Crichton or Dan Brown. Ancient iron-eating microbes thaw out from global warming and start killing people by eating all the iron in their blood!

OK, come to think of it, that would be a pretty damn cool book. And iron-munching microbes may actually be on other "lifeless" planets.

Kickback Backfire

When the Obama administration does the right thing , such as yesterday's memos on torture, I applaud them. But I've found whenever the Obama administration does the right thing, it's almost invariably followed up by breaking news of something maddeningly stupid.

Steven Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration's auto task force, was one of the executives involved with payments under scrutiny in a probe of an alleged kickback scheme at New York state's pension fund, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A Securities and Exchange Commission complaint says a "senior executive" of Mr. Rattner's investment firm met in 2004 with a politically connected consultant about a finder's fee. Later, the complaint says, the firm received an investment from the state pension fund and paid $1.1 million in fees.

The "senior executive," not named in the complaint, is Mr. Rattner, according to the person familiar with the matter. He is co-founder of the investment firm, Quadrangle Group, which he left to join the Treasury Department to oversee the auto task force earlier this year. Neither Mr. Rattner nor Quadrangle has been accused of any wrongdoing. Mr. Rattner did not return calls for comment.

A spokeswoman for the Treasury, which is in charge of the auto task force, said that "during the transition, Mr. Rattner made us aware of the pending investigation."

Honestly. You couldn't find somebody to run the car czar position that wasn't under investigation for something?

Barack And Raul's Excellent Adventure

What a difference 90 days with "smart power" makes. Raul Castro is apparently now open to high-level diplomacy with the US where "everything is on the table".

"We've told the North American government, in private and in public, that we are prepared, wherever they want, to discuss everything -- human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners -- everything, everything, everything that they want to discuss," Cuban President Raúl Castro said Thursday at a summit of leftist Latin American leaders in Venezuela.

The response came days after President Obama lifted all restrictions on the ability of American citizens to visit relatives in Cuba as well as to send them remittances. Travel restrictions for Americans of non-Cuban descent will remain in place.

This week's move represents a significant shift in a U.S. policy that had remained largely unchanged for nearly half a century. The U.S. government instituted the embargo three years after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.

Cuba Libre indeed. Here's hoping to bring the Castros...and the GOP...around to the power of diplomacy with Secretary Clinton.

New tag: Cuba.

Dear America:

"Well, I hope you're happy, Mr. President. Now that the world knows about Operation That's Not A Caterpillar Inside The Box, It's Really The Goddamn Batman, and the fact you refuse to slam people's heads into walls and waterboard the bejeezus out of them, we're less safe now and that's bad enough. But your real sin was making the CIA look bad. And for that, Mr. President Obama man, well you'd better watch your ass from now on."

--Michael Mukasey and Michael Hayden

"Dick Cheney was right. Obama is a complete pussy."

--Jennifer Rubin

Oh, and my favorite piece of winger stupidity? Obama only released these memos to distract the media from the most successful grassroots protest in the history of the world, for in the desperate twilight of the failed Obama Presidency, it's the last gambit of a fascist dictator. After all, no crimes were committed, so the only possible reason for the timing was to try weakly to stop the teabag tsunami.

Le sigh.

StupidiNews!

• A train collision in Germany has injured 24.
• President Obama is already under attack by former Bush administration officials for yesterday's torture memo release.
• US experts fear there's little to stop Pakistan from becoming a nuclear Islamist state.
• The Obama adminstration is expected to give Chrysler and GM another $5.5 billion in aid.
• Time Warner's download caps program is ending after a major public outcry.

Zandar's Thought Of the Day

I humbly submit that George W. Bush is the worst, most incompetent supervillain of all time, because his administration's brilliant plan to get "captured Al-Qaeda operatives" to talk apparently consisted of the following two items:



1) A copy of George Orwell's 1984.




2) A completely harmless and moderately cute caterpillar.

You know, Auric Goldfinger at least had a high powered laser. The laser was in fact aiming for James Bond's nuts. We had a plan to scare a hard-core terrorist, a man willing to die for his beliefs mind you, with a CATERPILLAR.

My god. And this is now a matter of public record.

I weep. Bush did a lot of horrible things, but this...this is just stupid. Honestly, now we have to explain to crapass countries like Togo that "Well, we broke the Geneva Conventions because our Deadly Caterpillar Plan failed."

I have never been more embarassed to be an American than I am right now.

Oh Now Everyone Is Revolting, Sir!

Over at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman details a lovely little Georgia Senate resolution that basically calls for the nullification of the United States of America.

It wasn’t quite the firing on Fort Sumter that launched the Civil War. But on April 1, your Georgia Senate did threaten by a vote of 43-1 to secede from and even disband the United States.

It was not an April Fool’s joke.

In fact, Senate Resolution 632 did a lot more than merely threaten to end this country. It stated that under the Constitution, the only crimes the federal government could prosecute were treason, piracy and slavery.

“Therefore, all acts of Congress which assume to create, define or punish [other] crimes … are altogether void, and of no force,” the Georgia Senate declared.

In other words, in the infinite, almost unanimous wisdom of the Georgia Senate, Michael Vick is being imprisoned illegally, Bernie Madoff should serve no time for stealing $60 billion and the Unabomber must go free. In fact, the federal penitentiary in Atlanta should be emptied of its inmates.

But wait, there’s more.

The resolution goes on to endorse the theory that states have the right to abridge constitutional freedoms of religion, press and speech. According to the resolution, it is up to the states to decide “how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged.”

The resolution even endorses “nullification,” the legal concept that states have the power to “nullify” or ignore federal laws that they believe exceed the powers granted under the Constitution. That concept has a particularly nasty legacy. It helped precipitate the Civil War, and in the 1950s and early ’60s it was cited by Southern states claiming the right to ignore Supreme Court rulings ordering the end of segregation.

Finally, the resolution states that if Congress, the president or federal courts take any action that exceeds their constitutional powers, the Constitution is rendered null and void and the United States of America is officially disbanded. As an example, the resolution specifically states that if the federal government enacts “prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition,” the country is disbanded.

In other words, if Congress votes to restore the ban on sale of assault rifles, the United States is deemed to no longer exist.

This, your Georgia state Senate voted 43-1 to endorse.

There really is no excuse for this kind of thing. None. Zero. Zilch. But there are obnoxious resolutions like this in a number of states (like Texas for example) that not only are passing, but are getting big local publicity. State Republican lawmakers in the South are so fundamentally frightened by Barack Obama, so utterly delusional, that they are actually writing resolutions that state they no longer recognize the legal authority of the United States of America.

I don't see this as harmless posturing. I see this as explicitly feeding the last people left to believe in the supremacy of the Republican Party: the cranks, the crackpots, and the psychos. They so fundamentally, irrationally, delusionally despise Barack Obama so much that they think secession is a good idea. I've been saying this for months now. We're only beginning to see the true depths of the abyss here.

I may have my problems with Obama, but they are based on, you know, reality. Policy issues. Legal opinions. Not crazy fringe conspiracy crap. But that's not stopping these folks. The fire they are playing with is getting out of control, and when America gets burned by these nutbars, remember who gave them the matches and the gasoline.

War Of Words

With the GOP vowing to permanently block Obama appointees over the release of the "Bush torture memos," today is the court-appointed deadline for the memos to be released by the Obama administration. The Double G however sees nothing but another snow job.

Today is the most significant test yet determining the sincerity of Barack Obama's commitment to restore the Constitution, transparency and the rule of law. After seeking and obtaining multiple extensions of the deadline, today is the final deadline for the Obama DOJ to respond to the ACLU's FOIA demand for the release of four key Bush DOJ memos which authorized specific torture techniques that have long been punished (including by the U.S.) as war crimes. Today, Obama will either (a) disclose these documents to the public or (b) continue to suppress them -- either by claiming the right to keep them concealed entirely or, more likely, redacting the most significant parts before releasing them.

It is genuinely unclear what the Obama administration will do today. Several weeks ago, Newsweek reported that Eric Holder had decided to release the memos -- which an Obama official described as "ugly"-- essentially in full. But then, several other sources reported there was a "war" being waged inside the Obama administration, led by former Bush-era CIA official (and top Obama terrorism adviser) John Brennan, to prevent disclosure. Yesterday, The Wall St. Journal reported that Obama is leaning towards the CIA position that only minimal disclosures are warranted, and today the WSJ reports that the memos will be released with substantial redactions to conceal the details of the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- i.e., will suppress information of America's use of torture.

I want to underscore one vital point about this controversy that is continuously overlooked and will be undoubtedly distorted today in the event of non-disclosure: these documents are not intelligence documents. They are legal documents and, more specifically, they constitute what can only be described as secret law under which the U.S. was governed during the Bush era. Thus, the question posed by the release of these OLC memos is not whether Obama will release to the public classified intelligence programs. The question is whether he will release to the public the legal doctrines under which the U.S. Government conducted itself regarding interrogation techniques he claims are no longer being used.

If Greenwald is right, then not only is Obama covering for Bush, but he's covering for himself as well, the logic being that Obama and AG Holder are either still using these techniques, or reserving their ability to be used. We'll see what happens when these memos are released. If they are heavily redacted to the point of being worthless, then we know that Obama implicitly approves of the techniques, or that he feels that keeping the CIA on his side is far more important than keeping the American public or world opinion on his side.

On the other hand, if Obama does release the memos and they show significant criminal activity on the part of Bush officials, then we could see some serious action on the part of seeing real justice served.

Sadly, like Double G, I'm expecting memos so redacted that they will be useless.

[UPDATE] Obama's official statement on the memos this afternoon suggests that not only will they be released, but he may be doing the right thing after all...to an extent.

Obama has just released a statement confirming that he will release the Bush torture memos. The whole thing is worth a read.

The statement is heavy on efforts to preempt attacks on his administration from the right. It contains the obligatory promise that we’re looking forward, not backwards. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” he writes, an effort to preempt, in advance, charges that he’s politicizing the process by dumping on his predecessor.

Indeed, he also confirms that “those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

A nation of laws...for some.

[UPDATE 2] The ACLU has the memos up in PDF form. There are some redactions, but they basically describe a series of "techniques" used to convince suspected terrorists to cooperate. The coercion techniques are described in rather excruciating detail. The Double G weighs in on the memos here in a must read.

The bottom line is that Steven Bradbury, the author of the memos, 1) acknowledges that the techniques authorized could be considered torture by other countries, 2) acknowledges that the US State Department would absolutely protest these same techniques being used on US citizens by other countries, and 3) authorizes them anyway because international opinions on what constitute torture simply are not relevant.

These memos describe the authorization and commission of international war crimes. Period. They are now public knowledge. The US government has in fact committed war crimes here, people. This is deadly serious.

Obama must now act on prosecuting those who are culpable. There is no other conceivable action.

Oklahoma Where The Stupid Comes Winding Down The Plain

Steve Benen discovers helpful Congressional Republicans are trying to tamp down the rhetoric on right-wing extremism and disassociate themselves with fringe groups. Oh, wait.

Richard Poplawski recently gunned down three police officers, in part because he feared the non-existent "Obama gun ban." In the wake of tragedy, I'd hoped some of the less responsible voices on the right might be inclined to lower the temperature a bit, especially since the administration hasn't made any efforts to pursue new gun control measures.

So much for that idea.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said this week that the administration will try "all sorts of things" to chip away at the individual right to own a gun, warning of gun control policies aimed at "disarming us."

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Cushing, Oklahoma, Coburn warned that Attorney General Eric Holder "doesn't believe in the second amendment" and "doesn't even know what an assault weapon is."

"He doesn't believe in our right to own and hold a gun," Coburn said of Holder, whose nomination he vigorously opposed. "He doesn't believe the Second Amendment means it's a right for me to have a gun to protect myself."

Coburn added, "I'm very worried about the Second Amendment, in terms of this administration," adding, "Even though the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Second Amendment means we get the right to own a gun."

First, the Supreme Court's ruling in Heller wasn't "unanimous"; it was a 5-4 split. (Coburn was only off by four justices.)

Second, what possible good could it serve to have a sitting U.S. senator tell a group of voters that the administration is pursuing policies aimed at "disarming us"? A report prepared by the Department of Homeland Security, which was requested and prepared by Bush administration officials, just told us that irrational fears of gun control are stirring political radicals and extremists.

Well gosh, could there be a reason why conservatives are getting all up in arms (literally) over this? If you don't want your party and your policial philosophy to be conflated with fringe wackos who mean to do America harm by harming Americans, then stop publicly stating as fact the same paranoid delusional fantasies these fruitcakes use to recruit with as a sitting US senator!

How difficult is this? When people kill cops because they fear an imaginary gun ban, and you as a sitting United States Senator repeat this same lie, you are an irresponsible, terrible, dangerous person. you do not deserve to represent your state as a Senator. Period.

Retract the statement or resign, Senator Coburn.

Epic Reading The Tea Party Leaves Fail

Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com pegs the Teabagger turnout at a quarter of a million. That's not bad. But as he points out:

One should bear in mind that ours is a large country, and that gatherings of this magnitude (if several hundred individual protests can be thought of as a "gathering") are not especially uncommon. For instance, protests in favor of immigration reform drew several million participants in the spring of 2006, including several individual events of at least 300,000. Likewise, anti-war protests in 2003 involved attendance of at least 300,000 in a single American city (New York) on a single day.

So, despite FOX, the astroturfing, the crazy fringe element and the heavy wingnut push, only a tiny fraction of the people showed up for Teabag 09 than turned out for the national anti-war protests or national immigration reform protests over the last couple years.

Seems like a tempest in a teabag to me. We're supposed to be listening to a tenth of a percent of the population as indicitive of the whole of America?

Approaching EPIC FAIL territory, Captain.

[UPDATE] The Daily Beast's John Avlon completely misses the lessons of Teabaggistock.

But liberals who want to dismiss yesterday’s tea parties do so at their peril. They should remember the Gandhi line their protest leaders often quote: “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” Ignoring these tea parties didn’t work. We are now in the mocking phase—but for all the “Astroturf, not grassroots” asides, these crowds across the country were home-grown. They may have been pumped up by partisan interests but they were not purchased. Never forget that America was founded in part by a tax revolt. Now there is a real and predictable anger brewing at both big government and big business. This is bailout backlash. The 2008 election was not a liberal ideological mandate, and soon Main Street Americans will demand a return to fiscal responsibility.

No matter how large a majority in the country the Democrats have, it'll never be a mandate to the Village Idiots. Obama should completely abandon his agenda and listen to the 0.1% at the Tea Parties yesterday. After all, they're the ones with the mandate, apparently.

But remember, ten million anti-war protesters were dismissed as meaningless background noise and not a movement that would cost the GOP votes. This 250,000 strong movement is instead even more powerful somehow.

We Don't Do House Calls

Here's a depressing story out of CNN. Turns out so many people are trying to get mortgage modifications from banks that their mortgage departments are overwhelmed, and people simply can't get through to even contact the bank.

Banks and lenders say that they have been overwhelmed with calls and that they're doing all they can to help ease the situation for Americans in distress. Some calls get sent to the homeowners' Hope Now hot line of 1-888-995-HOPE, funded by the lending industry as a resource to provide free counseling and foreclosure prevention help.

"Servicers are working hard to triage those calls and help borrowers," said Faith Schwartz, Hope Now's executive director. "We are working hard on that capacity issue. There a millions of people who want help, but there are also millions of people who don't need help but might call in on other issues. So I think servicers are dealing with extraordinary call volume."

Nearly 250,000 homeowners received either mortgage modifications or repayment plans from their lenders in February, according to Hope Now. Schwartz added that 3 million more Americans are 60 days past due on their mortgages and need help.

"I always say it's never enough, but do understand there has been a lot done, and I think [banks] are working hard to do a better job of communicating with their customers -- and we're trying to help people do that," she said.

And of course banks don't want to hire additional people right now when they are under intense pressure to cut costs. But the bottom line is that so many homeowners are drowning in underwater mortgages right now that lenders are swamped.

How many of these folks are going to simply walk away from their mortgages because they can't get help, because they can't even reach their lender? How much damage will this wreak on the housing market over the next year?

This morning I caught a discussion on the CBS Early Show about housing prices. The expert on the show was saying that "we won't see 2006 level prices again for ten years."

That seems painfully optimistic to me.

The Legal Pain Remains In Spain

While the Spanish federal courts are expected to announce indictments against Bush-era torture officials, it turns out that the Spanish Attorney General is now recommending that Spain drop the proceedings entirely.

Spanish prosecutors will recommend against opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, the country's attorney-general said Thursday.

Candido Conde-Pumpido said the case against the high-ranking U.S. officials — including former U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales — was without merit because the men were not present when the alleged torture took place.

"If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out," Conde-Pumpido said in a breakfast meeting with journalists. He said a trial of the men would have turned Spain's National Court "into a plaything" to be used for political ends.

Prosecutors at Spain's National Court have not formally announced their decision in the case, but Conde-Pumpido is the country's top law-enforcement official and has the ultimate say.

Personally, I can't wait until Double G gets a hold of this guy, but the bottom line is because Gonzo and his buddies didn't actually torture the guy, Spain has no case. The Spanish AG wants the US to deal with the issue (where I agree with him totally.)

Naturally, the wingers are calling for the US to take strict diplomatic sanctions against Spain should the investigative procedures continue.

But let's not kid ourselves: It appears the Obama administration has directed Spain to kill this thing dead. Too many secrets, after all. And some of them point back to Obama and the Democrats. This Pandora's Box can't be opened without mutually assured destruction on both sides.

And so, the crusade to bury the torture regime and the involvement of people on both sides of the aisle continues.