You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2011.
Our Oregon looks at who’s behind the Astroturf organization “Americans Elect”:
The group describes itself in grassroots terms, but in reality, they’re anything but grassroots. Their “Leadership” team and Board of Directors is largely composed of hedge fund operators and wealth managers, and there’s strong evidence that most of their funding has come from leaders in the financial industry.
Texas Governor and “Presidential” Candidate Rick Perry (R-Idiot) in Iowa: “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source.” Seriously, you just can’t make this shit up.
Though they’ve rammed through voter suppression/photo I.D. measures in the name of vigilance against the evils of voter fraud, Republicans will not require photo I.D.’s in the upcoming Iowa caucus, where only Republicans will be voting.
But wait, it gets better: and they in fact will even allow potential voters with no identification to bring along a buddy to simply attest to their identity, in the name of protecting that most fundamental of Constitutional rights – to vote.
So put down the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on Fox News Kool-Aid and turn off the television, because it is fifty degrees on The Oregon High Desert. Fifty degrees and raining on December the 28th at four thousand feet in elevation just miles as the crow flies from what were once prolific glaciers close enough to the forty-fifth parallel to call it half way to the North Pole.
Cascadia is no stranger to radioactive fallout: Scientists in Alaska are investigating whether local seals are being sickened by radiation from the Fukushima plant:
Scores of ring seals have washed up on Alaska’s Arctic coastline since July, suffering or killed by a mysterious disease marked by bleeding lesions on the hind flippers, irritated skin around the nose and eyes and patchy hair loss on the animals’ fur coats.
Biologists at first thought the seals were suffering from a virus, but they have so far been unable to identify one, and tests are now underway to find out if radiation is a factor.
Chemical Weapons Gone from Oregon Depot
[Seattle Times] It would be hard to exaggerate the peril that was stacked in the weird concrete bunkers south of the Tri-Cities and across the Columbia River in Eastern Oregon.
Inside the sheds rising from the shrub-steppe desert sat roughly a quarter-million leaking rockets, crumbling mines, decaying bombs and aging artillery shells, many filled with high-octane poisons that could kill with a single drop.
When the Army started burning these weapons in 2004, the potential threat was so great it altered the lives of nearby residents. They bought gas masks, and 19,000 of them installed emergency radios. They endured monthly test blasts from 76 outdoor warning sirens. They sent their children to schools that could be pressurized like airplanes at the press of a button. They stored sheets of plastic precut to seal doors and windows quickly in case of a chemical release.
Where are you going to live? Frank Pasquale delves into the ongoing mess in the housing sector created by banksters using predatory loans and unprosecuted fraud, contrasting their lack of accountability with the “draconian treatment” of poor people in public housing who have been evicted for crimes they didn’t commit via a one strike rule.
The critical conceptual issue here is to begin to see the banks as a sector as permanently embedded in a web of state subsidy and support as health care, defense, and energy. Mintzberg convincingly complains about “the energy companies with their cozy tax deals, the defense contractors that live off government budgets, and the pharmaceutical companies that buy their innovations and price what the market will bear, thanks to patents that governments grant, but without policing their holders.” I also worry about all these sectors. But it may well be the finance sector that is the most menacing to economic growth, and the least accountable. We cannot simply accept lawlessness in the sector as the status quo. Creative and forceful responses are possible, and have precedents both historically, in other nations, and in other sectors in our own economy.
The Christian vision, enacted and proclaimed in the Christmas story, is that of a God whose tender affection for humanity led him to enter our history as one of us.
Even if we were to believe in this god, by what reasonable moral foundation could we regard the impregnation of a young girl without consent as an expression of “tender affection for humanity”?
So put down the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on Fox News Kool-Aid and turn off the TV because your denial of science is putting the nation at risk.
It’s why your car runs like shit. Idles rough, no power, stalls out at the light, water running out of your exhaust pipe, ten percent less miles per gallon. And until last week, subsidized by the government:
When the U.S. Congress adjourned for the holidays on Friday, December 23, its departure sealed the fate of subsidized ethanol production.
During its session, the Congress did not renew a tax break for U.S. production of corn-based ethanol that had become increasingly unpopular across a wide area of the political spectrum.
The tax credit amounted to 45 cents per gallon of ethanol that was blended into gasoline. It had been in place since 1980.
As The Detroit News reported the next day, by some estimates, total subsidies to the ethanol industry may have reached $45 billion over that period. That is several times the total loans, grants, and tax credits provided thus far to the U.S. electric-car industry.
In June, the Senate voted 73-27 to end the tax break. That vote, attached to an economic development bill that was stalled, was viewed as symbolic—letting Congressmembers go on record against continuing the subsidies without effectively ending them.
It proved to be a test case that demonstrated the waning support in Congress for the corn-based ethanol industry. Three weeks later, an agreement was reached to end the subsidies for real—and it held for the rest of the year.
Ending the ethanol tax breaks is projected to save about $2 billion over several years. Of that total, two-thirds is to be applied to cutting the national debt, although it represents just one-tenth of 1 percent of the total national debt of $14.3 trillion.
