Cheap Blogging Crutch 01.11

Why Is the Whistleblower Who Exposed the Massive UBS Tax Evasion Scheme the Only One Heading to Prison?
When a massive international bank helps thousands upon thousands of people evade taxes and hide money to flagrantly that it has to pay almost a billion dollars in fines, who goes to jail? If you answered "One guy, the one who blew the life off the scandal in the first place" then you... must have read the headline above. Democracy Now conducts and extensive interview with the executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center to show just exactly how banks, the US justice system, and the US government endeared themselves to you again.

Chinese Coal Formed During Earth’s Greatest Extinction Is Still Deadly
You have to hand it to the Chinese. Not only are the set to drag ass on climate change in such an epic manner that it would make the US stand back in awe, they've apparently found and are burning the deadliest and most polluting coal known to man. Not only does this coal, formed 250 million years ago during a massive extinction (I wonder...), pollute just as effectively as the regular stuff, but it come with a cancer chaser that's 20 times greater than normal. See, the Chinese even pollute and poison their populace more effectively than us. We just can't win.

ABC News embraces the nonsense
Let's say you were a TV news director and you were doing a piece on the fact that 28 doctors who have spent their lives studying autism, conducted an exhaustive study that found no correlation between GI disorders, diets and causing autism or diets in improving autism cases. Who is the first person you'd rush to interview for the story? If you said "a Playboy model/vaccine denier", you get to run ABC's news division for the next month. The Bad Astronomy blog takes a look at autism, ABC, Jenny McCarthy, vaccine gainsayers, and the difference between news and "news" and science and "science".

Abortion Foe Defies Party on Health Care Bill
Question. What do you call someone who would kill an attempt to make sure that 45,000 people a year don't die due to lack of access to health care as well as better the lives of millions, because he doesn't think he's getting enough control over women's bodies? That's a serious question, because I don't think "pro-life" quite covers it. The NYT covers Bob Stupak's bitching and moaning over the fact that people don't agree with him.

Google Earth helps find El Dorado
According to some wags on the internet, they've used Google Earth to find the fabled "lost city of gold." Sounds all well and good, but this better not be like the time some jagoffs said the found the lost city of Atlantis on Google Earth or those people who said they found the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This time their treasure better not be knowledge. The lost city of gold better contain some gold. This time I better see some archeologist in a fedora hauling 24 karat bricks of of the Bolivian brush and whipping some fascists in the face.

Vatican takes aim at 'Avatar'
id you ever want to see movie criticism from a leading religious body that not only accurately described the flaws in a movie but also unknowingly provided a meta criticism about itself and the way it runs said religion? Well, God bless the Catholic Church. It's the pot shooting the kettle in the kneecap.

The new disappointment

With the health care debate largely over and only the scope and size of the public option left to get to get blindingly angry about, the choice of whether to allow people access to it was successfully fobbed off onto states (states rights, bitches! eat it Lincoln!), and the spectacle of largely conservative, right wing states enacting a hilarious process of screwing their own citizens on health care with the tacit tea bagging approval of those citizens, Congress now moves on to a new debate for us all to get immensely worked up over inevitably leading to anger and disillusionment in government as intelligent plans based on science and research are diluted and made terrible by the dumbest and most politically craven members of the Democratic Senate caucus: the environmental debate! The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee starts public hearings on climate change bills! Whooo!

With a clearer picture on health care, the Obama administration and Congress today are pivoting toward climate change legislation.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee began hearings this hour on Chairman Barbara Boxer's bill, with President Obama's Green Cabinet expected to testify.
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With just over a month before climate change negotiations begin in Copenhagen, environmental advocacy groups have been pressuring the White House and Congress to take action so world leaders have a framework to build upon.

Administration officials have stressed for weeks they are comfortable with negotiators using the House-passed bill as a starting point, but the activists closest to the issue say that's not enough.

Sorry activists, hope you like getting less than what's in the House bill you think is inadequate. Hell, I hope you like getting less than what's in the Kerry/Boxer Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S.1733) that the hearings are going to be about. Because the lesson around here, and we try to impart it on a daily basis, is that the Senate is a stupid place and legislation only goes there to be made worse. The climate bill has been ordered to pass through the land of wind and ghosts and we can only hope that it emerges from the other side in a manner that doesn't worsen climate change, only fails to inadequately and effectively address it and fails to help set up the American economy to grow and expand into green technologies.

It matters not that people support cap-and-trade measures by a 60% to 37% measure and that the numbers are even higher for people under the age of 50. They felt the same way about a robust public option and we all saw the bruised, battered, and dismembered body that is still trying to drag itself out of the US Senate's shame basement. No, the future of America is clearly coal, so coal state Democrats (and God there are more of them than the ones who opposed a strong public option) will make sure that climate change legislation reflects the wishes of the coal industry that will fuel our economy into the 22nd century. Get ready, we've found the next Country Polarizing Thing To Hate that everyone on both sides can get angry about: climate change legislation! Get your teabags and haikus about Mother Earth ready.

Quote of the day

There is industry shilling and then there is INDUSTRY SHILLING. Joe Lucas, vice president of communications for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an organization that advocates for something that is an utter myth, decided to take the latter form of industry shilling and add a few exclamation points, a siren, and took it to Blingee to add in some glitter graphics.

I can take you to places in eastern Kentucky where community services were hampered because of a lack of flat space — to build factories, to build hospitals, even to build schools. In many places, mountain-top mining, if done responsibly, allows for land to be developed for community space.

Ah yes, mountain-top mining isn't an ultra destructive form of mining where they just detonate the tops of mines and push the rubble into the valleys below, completely obliterating the surrounding environment. It certainly isn't referred to as the Rape of Appalachia. No, it's just a nice way to get a little extra flat space after that asshole God decided to put a mountain range on top of all that delicious coal.

And really we've all heard about those thriving communities and cities built on top of a flattened mountain. Well actually we haven't, but we have heard about environmental and economic devastation, deformed fish, and people suffering from selenium poisoning, though. Who doesn't enjoy a massive dose of selenium every now and then? Keep up the good work Joe. First you can't admit coal pollutes, now this. Soon you'll be advocating the consumption of coal for breakfast. I await your greed obsessed justification.

Sounds scientific

via ThinkProgress comes this little look into the House GOP group the Republican American Energy Solutions Group, aka oiloiloildrilldrilldrill, presenting its American Energy Act as a counter to Obama's poorly titled Un-American Energy Act, what with it's belief in climate change, clean energy, and pollution eating/gumdrop crapping unicorns. The House GOP is having none of that hippie shit.


Not only does it try to officially codify climate change as nonexistent (take that Al Gore), it attempts to prevent any regulation of any greenhouse gas, rolls back environmental protections, and give billions in tax breaks to the oil and coal industries. I guess "nothing to see here" and "let's do the same thing we always do" when combined together are...kind of a new solution. I guess this is a step forward, because at least they are recognizing the simple existence of greenhouse gases, if only to then quickly make it illegal to even consider doing something about it.

We're just lucky it didn't read something like this:

(b) IMPACT OF GREENHOUSE GASES...WHICH DO NOT EXIST.--We recognize that CO2 is something that humans breathe out and plants need to grow and stuff, and therefore a totally natural process gifted to us by the Baby Jesus. We hereby reclassify factory smokestacks as "industrial breathing" and make it illegal to regulate them in any way. Besides, how can Congress regulate God?

We dodged a bullet. This counts as scientific progress for the House GOP.

It even sounds dirty

The West Virginia Coal Association has really buckled down and focused on what's important about the future of energy in the US: coal marketing. But unlike those Lama-level assholes who just want to lie about clean coal, the WVCA wants to prove it's "hip", "with it", and is "down with the kids". No, they're not going to market coal as "uncompressed diamonds", that's next years campaign. So now if you like the dirtiest form of energy and pledging fealty to an energy industry through annoying music, you're in luck: Coal ringtones!

Coal is West Virginia - Male Voice Choir
Coal is West Virginia - Male Voice Choir (Up Tempo Mix)
Coal is West Virginia - New Orleans Mix
Coal is West Virginia - Mountain Mix
Coal is West Virginia - Gospel Mix
Coal is West Virginia - Bluegrass Mix

A sampling of the lyrics:
Coal is West Virginia,
Coal is me and you.
Coal is West Virginia,
We’ve got a job to do.
Coal is energy,
Coal is energy,
We need energy!

I'm partial to the New Orleans mix.

The Independent shits on your soy burger

The Independent today has come out with what it says is a list of some of the inconsistencies, misrepresentations, wrong ideas, and hard choices one has to make within the 'green' movement and the move towards greener living. Among the things discussed are the relatively lower yield of growing organic and higher carbon footprints of farming, genetically modified fruits and vegetables holding the key to dropping that footprint, the fact that when the building of a Prius and the materials used is taken into account it isn't very green, or that a diesel can out-mileage a Prius in real world conditions, the need for nuclear power, that it might be better to cut down older trees to replace them with newer trees with a higher C02 absorption, and the need to kill cute animals.

You may not have come across the Bewick's swan. The smallest swan found in Britain, it reaches our shores from its Siberian breeding grounds in October and, along with 65,000 other water birds, it splashes down in the wetlands of the Severn Estuary. It is, without doubt, very cute.

But soon, it will have to find somewhere else to feed. In a few years' time, hundreds of lorries and cranes are set to sling 10 miles of steel and concrete across the most beautiful and ecologically diverse of estuaries, flooding the swans' habitat. Could anything be more of an affront to the eco-minded? The call would seem to be as clear as they come: save the swans, say no to construction.

But it isn't that simple. All that steel and concrete will become the Severn Barrage which, by harnessing the tides, would provide 5 per cent of Britain's electricity, with no nasty carbon emissions. So, which to choose: clean electricity, or the protection of birds and beasts?

Fuck the swan, it's just a more radicalized version of it's Islamofowlist, plane crashing brethren: the goose. But the Independent does correctly identify some of the juxtapositions and choice that have to be made. Of course they also lean on bullshit like clean coal, which still involves pumping CO2 down into the ground and hoping for the best or compressing it into containers and burying them, and the paper doesn't see the benefit of carbon offsets funding green research and technology. They also say that when the Nazi's come for us at the train station we're going to have to choose whether to let them take Al Gore or Bono.......and I don't think I'm ready to make that choice.

But all in all a fine way to make you feel bad about trying to do good.

The dance begins

The other night the President gave a lengthy set of policy proposals and laws to enact his insane vision of such things as health care, environmental policy, and banking regulation. Well surprise of all surprises, like the rats returning to Capistrano to eat the dead swallows, the lobbyists and bag men for these industries have flocked to Washington lest our crazy black President actually make our lives better.

The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.

"What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed," former CEO Richard Scott said Wednesday, after announcing the creation of Conservatives for Patients Rights.

Mr. Obama's ambitious agenda...threatens to disrupt the business models of a broad swath of America's biggest companies.
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The agriculture lobby quickly recoiled Wednesday against President Obama's vow to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," though industry leaders and farm-state legislators weren't sure which government payments they'll have to defend.
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Meanwhile, an alliance of electric utilities, coal and mining companies said it will spend as much as $40 million to make sure Congress approves a global-warming plan with funding for technology to reduce emissions that includes carbon capture and storage at coal-fired plants. In his speech, Mr. Obama called for a $15 billion-a-year investment in clean-energy sources, including clean coal.

Conservative for Patients Rights? Those poor patients. In any event it's money spent lobbying they probably don't have to spend. If it goes like any other health reform, it'll be fucked up and a failure long before voting happens. You have the right to get fucked on a schedule of the health insurance industry's making. Good to see the farm industry is at least a little worried, seeing as they're the biggest welfare queens on the block and a whole raft of terrible environmental, economic, and health polices stems from the fact that we pay agribusiness to produce more than we need and artificially drive prices down on a litany of products with needless subsidies. But don't listen to me on that, listen to Michael Pollan.

Nice to see we're still going to fall for the clean coal bullshit. Millions and potentially billions on a plan that not only doesn't exist, won't exist for 2 decades at least, but is based around the idea that instead of pumping carbon into the air, let's just pump it into the ground. It's funny that the free market people all go quiet when some mentions regulating carbon emissions with a cap and trade system. Just build the smokestack facing down and pump that shit, it's the mole people's problem now.

At least we have a front line of stalwart heroes in Congress ready to stand against such incursions. LOLlerskates! No, most of this stuff is coming out of any budget because it's too esoteric for our betters to understand, while campaign donations, free plane rides, and high pitched whining from men in expensive suits isn't. Hopefully Barry is willing to fight to keep it in. We'll see...a man can dream...about decent food policy. Alright, it's a lame dream, but it's still worthwhile.

Gore goes after "clean" coal

Next time you hear someone pontificating on the notion of clean coal, know that they are talking fanciful shit on par with moon bases and flying cars. It does not exist and would take an investment of tens of billions of dollars to even start trying to make it feasible. At best, even if all the laws, regulations, and funding that haven't been passed are passed, it's something that will happen by 2030 at the earliest. That doesn't even take into account that it'll take massive amounts of energy to clean the coal, raise prices, and it all relies on putting CO2 underground and hoping it doesn't fuck anything up down there or leak out and negate all that cleanness. Not to mention the environmental problems mining coal presents.

Thankfully Al Gore and his band of tree hugging do-gooders are trying to spread that message with the Reality Coalition. Hopefully to attempt to combat the coal industry, their ads, and politicians from coal states (like our new President, who incessantly references clean coal) who want to build more coal plants under the auspices of "clean coal is coming". It isn't. Good, now start making ads about the BS industry that is corn ethanol.