Thursday, May 15, 2008

It’s All Wrong; It’s Alright (10:21 am)

Two months ago, Jessica Pupovac wrote a piece for us about the Department of the Interior’s auctioning off of almost 30 million acres of prime polar bear habitat to oil companies in February, as well as the DOI’s decision in January to postpone its ruling on whether polar bears deserve status as an “endangered” species. (Any hint that there might be perhaps some connection between these two events is, of course, vilely slanderous to the good men and women working for the Bush administration.)

Well, yesterday, that long-delayed decision on the polar bear’s status was announced, and the administration made a meaningless, symbolic concession to reality by admitting that the polar bear is “threatened.” Why meaningless?

[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne said it would be “wholly inappropriate” to use the protection of the bear to reduce greenhouse gases, or to broadly address climate change. …
[snip]
The department outlined a set of administrative actions and limits to how it planned to protect the bear with its new status so that it would not have wide-ranging adverse impact on economic activities from building power plants to oil and gas exploration. …
[snip]
But when asked how the bear will be afforded greater protection, Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had difficulty coming up with examples.

I hate to drone on about this repeatedly like some drunk in a bar, but admitting you have a problem (and then doing absolutely nothing to resolve it) cannot even be considered the first step on the road to recovery. All it really means is that you’re an addict with some degree of self-consciousness.

posted by Brian Cook | 1 comment

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Two wheels vs. four (11:03 am)

Leave it to the United States to buck another progressive global trend: urban bicycle riding. While worldwide bicycle production has been steadily increasing since 1970 - last year, 130 million bikes were built, versus 52 million cars - U.S. bike ridership has dropped 32 percent since 1990. Biking accounts for only .4 percent of Americans’ trips to work, and .9 percent of all trips.

That’s according to a new Earth Policy Institute report, which, after reminding us that Europeans like to bike, notes:

Governments elsewhere are following Europe’s lead. Bogotá, Colombia, boasts more than 300 kilometers of bikeways, the most for a city in the developing world. In Australia, the state of Victoria has amended planning laws to require all new large buildings to provide bike parking and other facilities such as showers and lockers. And in November 2007, South Korea’s Home Affairs Ministry announced a new pro-bike campaign to alleviate increasing traffic and air pollution and to cope with soaring oil prices. As it expands bicycle infrastructure, the government aims to substantially increase bike ownership by 2015, from one bike for every seven citizens to one for every four.

Some notoriously polluted and congested cities are working to reap the benefits of cycling as well. Mexico City plans to have 5 percent of all trips be by bike in 2012, up from less than 2 percent today, using traffic calming methods, promotional campaigns, and bike-transit connectivity. In India, Delhi’s newest Master Plan requires fully segregated bicycle tracks on all... read more

posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion

Corruption crusader stuck in Iraq (8:25 am)

The negligence of the Bush Administration with regards to the Iraqi refugee crisis is mind-boggling. Check out this story from Paul Kiel at TPM:

You’d think that an Iraqi anti-corruption crusader who testified before Congress about his travails would find no great difficulty in obtaining asylum in the United States. You’d think the U.S. would be grateful for the news that $18 billion worth of corruption had virtually “stopped” reconstruction in Iraq. But not so much.

Former State Department officials told Congress earlier this week that, though Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, was able to get access into the U.S., he is not allowed to work and is living hand to mouth. Why has he fallen through the cracks?

In more encouraging news, military men and women are doing some admirable organizing around the issue, even as the administration twiddles it’s thumbs. The Times reports:

It took two years for Jack to get a visa. He is one of the very few to succeed among thousands who have worked as interpreters for the United States military.

To many veterans that is not an acceptable rate, given the risks the interpreters took, and Colonel Zacchea and others are taking up the cause.

They have created a growing network of aid groups, spending countless hours navigating a byzantine immigration system that they feel unnecessarily keeps their allies in harm’s way. There is, they say, a debt that must be repaid to the Iraqis who helped the most. To them it is an obligation both moral and pragmatic.

“It’s like this disjointed underground railroad that exists,” said Paul Rieckhoff, who served with the Army in Iraq as a first lieutenant in 2003 and 2004. Mr. Rieckhoff is now executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which has more than 85,000 members and a Web site at http://www.iava.org.

posted by Adam Doster | start the discussion

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Just in case you ever doubted that Bill O’Reilly’s got bats in his bellfry (12:13 pm)

Must watch YouTube clip of Bill O’Reilly losing his shit while hosting Inside Edition. I can’t even type I’m laughing so hard.

Thank you to TPM for the catch.

UPDATE:

YouTube’s been tearing this one down due to “copyright issues,” but go to http://www.youtube.com and search for “Bill O’reilly anger” and you’ll find lots of options to view this one. Some of them are inactive, some are still up. Find it. Too good to be missed.

LATER UPDATE:

Catch Colbert’s parody of the O’Reilly meltdown. Includes most of the original footage.

posted by Jarrett | 1 comment

Monday, May 12, 2008

Facebook enemies (2:51 pm)

Apparently, Facebook and general strikes don’t mix well. At least not in Egypt.

Three days after Ahmed Maher Ibrahim used a Facebook group to gain support for a May 4 strike in Cairo, four unmarked vans surrounded his car and 12 men handcuffed and blindfolded him. He was brought to a police station and beaten, insulted and interrogated, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.

According to Maher, the officers did not accuse him of anything, but asked for the password of the May 4 Facebook group that news reports said he had started. They also asked him about members of the group he had never met. The SSI officers released him before dawn on May 8 with the warning that he would be beaten more severely the next time State Security detained him.

Never again will I snidely refer to Facebook as a mostly pointless waste of time. Great line from Maher, which he was quoted as saying before the strike:

“If we allow ourselves to fear them, we won’t do anything,” he told the BBC. “Then I would consider myself a partner in the crimes taking place in Egypt.”

posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Sunday link dump (8:38 am)

1) The death of school vouchers.

2) Private equity firms eat up affordable housing units.

3) Krugman on transit.

posted by Adam Doster | 1 comment

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

We know which way you’ll have it (1:39 pm)

If you thought this was bad, get a load of the scoop Eric Schlosser delivers in this New York Times op-ed today.

In an interview, a Burger King executive told me that the company had worked with Diplomatic Tactical Services for years on “security-related matters” and had used it to obtain information about the Student/Farmworker Alliance’s plans — in order to prevent acts of violence. “It is both the corporation’s right and duty,” a company spokesman later wrote in an e-mail message to me, “to protect its employees and assets from potential harm.”

But the Student/Farmworker Alliance and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are not dangerous, extremist groups. Both are pacifist, mainstream nonprofits inspired by the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The coalition is supported by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement.

To be clear: Burger King hired a private security company to spy on student activists, all to avoid paying immigrant workers one additional penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Words just can’t describe it.

posted by Adam Doster | start the discussion

The election echo chamber (12:16 pm)

Although it might be the most tedious and unnecessary thing I’ve ever read, this NY Times article does ably prove two things:

1) America has too many pundits, who too often say the same thing with barely different inflections.

2) There’s something very narcissistic about a major news organization writing major news organizations into the news script. It’s hard to imagine anyone reading every line of this article - this paragraph can put a speed addict to sleep:

Even as Mrs. Clinton’s real-vote lead over Mr. Obama in the state dwindled to just 16,000 as later returns came in, the CBS News Web site held on to its headline, “Clinton Wins Ind., Obama Takes N.C.”

But at least halfway in, a small dose of wry perspective on the punditocracy appears:

Of course, the political news media have not exactly showered themselves in glory this year. They have frequently made predictions that have been upended by actual votes from actual people.

Good to be reminded that actual people still figure into this election’s equation.