My Ten Earth Day pledges

1. Go into a field full of methane-emitting cows and/or TeaBaggers and cork them.

2. Turn off my car's ignition after I've parked it in the garage instead of leaving it running in case I need to make a fast getaway.

3. Rent a helicopter (that runs on used cooking oil!) and airdrop thousands of plastic recycle bins over Houston to create awareness of this important issue.

4. Create "teachable moments" throughout the day by pointing at people drinking out of plastic water bottles and yelling into a bullhorn, "Resource-sucking energy whore!!!"

5. Insert Breathe Right nasal strips inside my nostrils so that I actually breathe less.

6. Start a coral reef in the bathtub for eventual relocation to the coast of Australia.

7. Harness solar power by using nothing but the sun and a magnifying glass to light my joint.

8. Combine bicycling and public transportation by attaching a grappling hook to the back of a metro bus and having it tow me and my Schwinn into town.

9. Practice water conservation with two everyday objects: a chamber pot and an open window.

10. Finally,  hit myself repeatedly in the face with a two-by-four while blindfolded so I can get a sense of Earth Day from the perspective of a climate-change denier.

Thanks to Bill in Portland Maine.

Consumer protection as coal mine canary

Officials say it's too soon to pinpoint the exact cause of the tragic explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that took the lives of 29 miners, but we certainly know enough to identify the root cause. It's the same cause that led to the 2007 Crandall Canyon mine disaster in Utah that killed six miners and three rescue workers. It's the same cause that led to the 2006 Sago mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 12 miners. And it's also the same cause that led to the Lehman Brothers disaster, the Citigroup disaster, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the implosion of our financial system: a badly broken regulatory system.

The loss of life at Upper Big Branch happened in one horrific instant. The economic collapse has not killed people, but it has gradually destroyed millions of lives. Both calamities occurred because elected officials who should have been creating a regulatory system that protects working families instead created a system that protects the corporations it was meant to watch over.

...

Regulations are "very difficult to comply with," and "so many of the laws" are "nonsensical." Those are the words of Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, the company that owns the Upper Big Branch mine and has a grotesque history of safety violations.

In the case of the financial industry, the reason it can't be regulated adequately is because, as Alan Greenspan put it last week in testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, "the complexity is awesome," and regulators "are reaching far beyond [their] capacities."

That is, of course, exactly the way Wall Street designed it. To the financial world "awesome complexity" is a feature, not a bug.

Something else the mining and financial industries share: the revolving door between regulators and those they're supposed to be regulating.

Congressmen leave Congress to become lobbyists, they lobby their former associates in Congress to weaken the business oversight regulation which helps their corporate clients make more money. Meanwhile the little guy loses his home, loses his job, loses his retirement.  Oh yeah, people also lose their lives (not only in collapsed mines but also because they can't afford healthcare, either with or without insurance). But profits go up.  Bonuses go up. Stock prices go up.

I'm sure there will be new regulations written in response to this latest mining disaster. Just as we're about to get yet another grab-bag of financial regulations. But by the time these regulations make their way through the Congressional sausage grinder, the lobbyists will have added in the loopholes that ensure that the fix is in -- and that the American people get the short end of the stick. Again.

There is no sense of urgency in Washington about making sure these corporations play by the rules. In 2007, after the Utah mining disaster, we got angry, we held hearings, we supposedly fixed things, then we moved on. Three years later, 29 miners die. And the cycle starts again.

In the same way, in 2003, after the Enron and WorldCom disasters, we got angry, we held hearings, we supposedly fixed things, then we moved on. Five years later, we got AIG, Lehman Brothers, Citi, and an economic crisis that devastated -- and continues to devastate -- the lives of millions. Will we just sit back and let the cycle start again?

Disasters -- both mining and financial -- are going to keep happening until we re-evaluate our priorities, and force our elected officials -- and the regulators they pick -- to put the public interest above the special interests and their lobbyists in Washington.

Glenn Smith at Dog Canyon adds ... 

Capitalism has been the engine of our society and America has been its poster child in the world. The power of the market forces that drive capitalism has brought unprecedented wealth and success to our nation and much of its population. However like a growing fire that starts out useful and productive providing light and warmth and heat to cook by, unrestrained capitalism is quickly consuming all the available fuel and is shifting from being productive to becoming destructive. The root of this lies in raw capitalism’s core; its obligation to the bottom line. As a fire requires fuel, capitalism requires profit. When confined behind a glass shade and fed a slow supply of kerosene an oil lamp can light a room and make its inhabitants more productive, but if not controlled, that same flame can destroy the house and kill its inhabitants. Raw capitalism burns with the same power and we are quickly losing control.

Flames ripped through the mine shafts of the Upper Big Branch mine in a massive explosion. Those flames were fed by the explosive gases that were allowed to collect unventilated deep below the surface of the earth. The destructive force of that explosion bent steel rails, collapsed tunnels and shattered lives. Unregulated capitalism has bent our political system, collapsed our financial system and is shattering lives. It must be contained again within a robust and sturdy regulatory system. We need strong, well staffed agencies with the legal powers to manage the mining, the financial and food agencies among others. Additionally we need to douse the influence of lobbyists and industry insiders to ensure that our capitalism remains a source of light in our society and doesn’t consume us all in the name of greater profits.

And Arianna Huffington closes ...

The lives of hardworking Americans have to take precedence over the bottom line at Massey Energy and on Wall Street.

This isn't a matter of right vs. left. It's a matter of right vs. wrong.

Sachs of Shit

If corporations are people now, then why isn't Goldman Sachs already in jail?

We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.

And Goldman isn’t the only financial firm accused of doing this. According to the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalism Web site ProPublica, several banks helped market designed-to-fail investments on behalf of the hedge fund Magnetar, which was betting on that failure.

So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.

As for the alleged creation of investments designed to fail, these may have magnified losses at the banks that were on the losing side of these deals, deepening the banking crisis that turned the burst housing bubble into an economy-wide catastrophe.

The obvious question is whether financial reform of the kind now being contemplated would have prevented some or all of the fraud that now seems to have flourished over the past decade. And the answer is yes.

And yet the Republican Senate contingent once again lines up in lockstep opposition to reforms that would prevent the banksters from ruining us all over again.

What do you suppose it would take for a Republican to vote against Wall Street?  That's probably as far-fetched a proposition as a Catholic pedophile priest converting to Southern Baptist.

Update: Tom Toles nails it.

If 37% of TeaBaggers have a college or post-graduate degree ...

... how come so many of them spell worse than a fifth-grader?

-- If 22% of TeaBaggers are over the age of 65 -- thus receiving Medicare health benefits and Social Security income from the federal government -- why are they opposed to "government-run healthcare"?

-- If TeaBaggers are paying lower taxes under Obama -- and indeed, 52% say their own taxes are 'fair' -- why do 82% of them think their taxes are going up?

-- Finally, how can it be that 40% of them support their own Congressional representative when only 1% of them approve of the job Congress is doing?

These are among the many imponderables associated with this overexposed, over-hyped, too noisy, too obnoxious faction of the electorate.

This monumental ignorance cannot all be attributable to the FOX News intelligence quotient (even though 47% cite that as their sole or primary source of information -- compared with 19% of the general public).

It's equally imponderable that all of this screaming and whining like babies that's been going for nearly a year now -- since last summer's townhalls on healthcare reform -- continues to attract so much media attention.

Update: RepublicanDirtyTricks.com, via jobsanger, with another good question.

What this country needs is another conservative network

Thanks, Dr. Crane.

Kelsey Grammer, one of Hollywood's most outspoken conservative actors, is now promoting a new television network: RightNetwork, aimed at his political brethren. ...

"On television, through partners including Comcast, RightNetwork delivers programming on demand that enables our audience to watch what they want, when they want," it reads, noting that the lineup will focus on "entertainment with Pro-America, Pro-Business, Pro-Military sensibilities."

Praise the Lawd and pass the ammunition.

There's no question that the new network has taken a confident approach to its own online promotional campaign. "There's wrong, and there's right," Grammer says in a clip featured on the RightNetwork website. "RightNetwork: All that's right with the world."

In addition to the Grammer promo clip, the RightNetwork site features trailers for three programs: "Poker and Politics," where entertainers and pundits talk politics around the table; "Running," a reality show about six congressional candidates; and "Right to Laugh," a comedy show that will probably have no shortage of jokes at President Obama's expense.

One of the six (Republican -- does that even need to be said?) candidates featured on "Running" will be Dr. Donna Campbell, Lloyd Doggett's doomed opponent in Texas' CD-10. Looney-toon Andrew Breitbart will similarly be a bloviator on the "P&P" offering, noting:

"My entire business model is built upon how horrible a president Barack Obama is," he says, chuckling.

First truth to come out of his mouth that I have ever discovered.

Do you think FOX is worried?

"The McVeigh Tapes" airs tonight

Rachel Maddow previewed her 2-hour documentary revealing the tape-recorded interviews of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh on The Daily Show last week:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rachel Maddow
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

On the anniversary of the OKC bombing -- which, you will remember, was instigated because of  McVeigh's objections to how the feds handled the circumstances surrounding Waco and Ruby Ridge -- it is valuable to remember that seditious words and actions are precisely what is motivating the TeaBagger movement. They are protected by the First Amendment and rightly so. But the threat they pose to "Homeland Security" pales in comparison to the damage caused by another Murrican going off the rails because of the venomous bile spewed by the likes of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, et al.

The best advice that can be given is for them to re-leash their tongues. Are they capable of locating some grounds for decency? I will not be interested in hearing any apologies after the fact.

If somebody dies or something is blown up and the perpetrators indicate they got motivation from any of the afore-mentioned subjects, or more generally Fox News, then I will want to see arrests made and trials conducted.

Update: More on the documentary, including some reactions and observations from the Murrah building bombing's survivors, here.

The Weekly Wrangle

April showers and May flowers and all that (though the best of the bluebonnet season is already here; get out for a drive this weekend). The time is also ripe for this week's roundup of blog highlights from the Texas Progressive Alliance.

Something bubbles up from the ground in Bartonville. Could this be why so many dogs nearby have cancer? Since drilling toxins were found in Barnett Shale residents' blood and urine, maybe it's time to test the animals too. TXsharon struggles to keep pace with the latest Barnett Shale news at Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

The Texas Cloverleaf highlights the case of the Christmas goose in Flower Mound.

Off the Kuff writes about the pitch from the gambling industry.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders about the wisdom of building a silly, damaging border fence while allowing foreign companies to control our ports.

It was a wild week for the economy and, surprisingly, for economic history. McBlogger takes a look at one historical revisionist who likes misrepresentation almost as much as Ayn Rand. Then he goes on to explain just what Goldman Sachs did.

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote a comprehensive preview post of the upcoming election in the United Kingdom. Election Day is May 6. The post is being updated daily with new developments and it took some time to write. So please give it a look if you find the topic to be interest.

Bay Area Houston finds another one of Bob Perry's bitches.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson shows that the 2006 Texas tax swap created a $5 billion annual budget hole and the bill is coming due next year: Texas Republicans created a budget shortfall to cut programs that help working Texans.

Over at TexasKaos, Libby Shaw catches up with Johnny Cronyn . He and Mitch McConnell "continue[s] to serve the banksters of Wall Street their breakfast in bed." More to the point, Libby explains the battle lines being drawn between Obama and the Dems and those lap dogs of the privileged, the Republican Pary. Check it out: John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, the GOP Stand by Their Wall Street Man .

The TeaBaggers and the regular GOP nuts fought each other to a stand-off on Election Runoff Day. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has the sordid details.

In Flower Mound, gas drillers have crossed the line into express advocacy in local elections, sending out a letter to mineral owners telling them who to vote for in a town council election. WhosPlayin has the deets.

Nine thousand dollars a month

That's what Texas taxpayers have been fronting for Rick Perry's living accommodations while the Governor's mansion is being renovated (since October 2007).



Rick Perry, the longest serving governor in the history of Texas, has been on the public payroll since 1984. That was when he was first elected a state representative -- before he was agriculture commissioner (1990), long before he was lt. governor (1998).

Rick Perry has essentially never held an honest job, never drawn a paycheck that wasn't paid for with your taxes. Yet he runs for office as an outsider (despite what he claims). He was a Democrat until 1989, and became a TeaBagger earlier this year when that came into vogue.

Texans have been born, raised, gone to college and had children of their own not knowing any other governor besides a moment when Rick Perry was not drawing a paycheck from their tax dollars.

How long is too long to be governor of Texas? How much of Rick Perry is too much?

I've had enough. How about you?

Sunday Evening Funnies

Perry 2010: Shooting blanks

Governor MoFo ducked the Teabaggers yesterday and went to NASCAR instead. The photo below classically demonstrates both his fetish with firearms and his underlying impotence, not to mention his constant overcompensating for it in inappropriate ways (taking conservative bloggers to a shooting range, relishing and savoring the state's execution of an innocent man, forcing poor children into greater poverty and worse health, and on and on and on).

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's caption: Texas Gov. Rick Perry has some fun with a six-shooter filled with blanks at an event in downtown Fort Worth to kickoff a weekend of NASCAR racing at the Texas Motor Speedway, Thursday, April 15, 2010

TeaBaggers, plain ol' GOP nuts battle to a draw

Voters routed state Reps. Delwin Jones and Norma Chavez on Tuesday, turned back former state Rep. Rick Green's bid for a spot on the Texas Supreme Court and handed victories to at least three candidates who appeared to benefit from the Tea Party insurgency in Texas. ... Republican voters in Lubbock and four other counties ousted long-time state Rep. Jones in favor of Charles Perry, a Tea Party organizer who campaigned for change and apparently got voters worked up about his candidacy: The runoff drew 17,501 voters — more than most primaries in March turned out.

Here's an Ode to Delwin Jones. Involuntarily retired from public service again at 86, he first served in the Texas House in 1965 (as a Democrat then), was swept out in the '70's when the Panhandle led the charge of the Reagan Democrats to the GOP, and returned in 1989 as a born-again Republican. So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact the wins for TeaBaggers mostly came in in WTX, and certainly from the rural parts of the state. (Quico Canseco -- who hosted a phone bank for Scott Brown back in January -- won the right to lose to Ciro Rodriguez in CD-25 in the fall.) The best news of the day came in the loss of true lunatic Rick Green in his bid to join the other slightly-less-extreme-wingnuts on the Texas Supreme Court, and another social conservative dispatched from the SBOE. Those are defeats for the Texas Tea-liban faction. Some are still celebrating, of course.

In Harris County, results appear similarly muddled from the starboard perspective:

Depending upon your point of view, Harris County is either the leader of the social conservative movement in Texas or is the millstone around the neck of the Republican Party of Texas, slowly choking off the oxygen and turning the state purple. In the largest runoff turnout in a decade, Harris County voters took a page from Nancy Reagan's playbook and just said no to broadening the base of the party.

That won't slow Dan Patrick down from performing purity tests however, because Republicans are much more scared of the Tea Party phenomenon than Democrats are. Ick-Rot. Gotsta love it. Thanks, Big Jolly.

Here is a fair warning for Texas Democrats: get your shit together. It's going to be uphill and against the wind as it is, and with continuing nonsense from the Right appealing to the lowest common intelligence denominator, you need to get. on. your. game.

Not Elena Kagan

She would move the SCOTUS to the right, especially as it regards executive branch authority.

It is far from clear who Obama will chose to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, but Elena Kagan, his current Solicitor General and former Dean of Harvard Law School, is on every list of the most likely replacements.  Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog has declared her "the prohibitive front-runner" and predicts:  "On October 4, 2010, Elena Kagan Will Ask Her First Question As A Supreme Court Justice."  The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin made the same prediction.

The prospect that Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan) and move it further to the Right.  Joe Lieberman went on Fox News this weekend to celebrate the prospect that "President Obama may nominate someone in fact who makes the Court slightly less liberal," while The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus predicted:  "The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now."  Last Friday, I made the same argument:   that replacing Stevens with Kagan risks moving the Court to the Right, perhaps substantially to the Right (by "the Right," I mean:  closer to the Bush/Cheney vision of Government and the Thomas/Scalia approach to executive power and law).

This is bad news for us progressives. The more I learn, the more Glenn Greenwald is making me nauseous.

Consider how amazing it is that such a prospect is even possible.  Democrats around the country worked extremely hard to elect a Democratic President, a huge majority in the House, and 59 Democratic Senators -- only to watch as the Supreme Court is moved further to the Right?  Even for those who struggle to find good reasons to vote for Democrats, the prospect of a better Supreme Court remains a significant motive (the day after Obama's election, I wrote that everyone who believed in the Constitution and basic civil liberties should be happy at the result due to the numerous Supreme Court appointments Obama would likely make, even if for no other reason).

There will, of course, be some Democrats who will be convinced that any nominee Obama chooses is the right one by virtue of being Obama's choice.  But for those who want to make an informed, rational judgment, it's worthwhile to know her record.  I've tried here to subject that record to as comprehensive and objective an assessment as possible.  And now is the time to do this, because if Kagan is nominated, it's virtually certain that she will be confirmed.  There will be more than enough Republicans joining with the vast majority of Democrats to confirm her; no proposal ever loses in Washington for being insufficiently progressive (when is the last time such a thing happened?).  If a Kagan nomination is to be stopped, it can only happen before her nomination is announced by Obama, not after.

More Greenwald, in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! ...

Elena Kagan actually has very little record to speak of that would enable anybody to know where it is that she falls on the political spectrum.

And I think that issue, the fact that she has so little record, is disturbing in and of itself. I mean, why would progressives or Democrats, with an opportunity to replace somebody like Justice Stevens, possibly want to take a huge risk of appointing somebody to the Court whose judicial philosophy can’t really be discerned, because she’s spoken out almost never on most of the key constitutional and legal questions of the day? And that even includes, over the last decade, when there was an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law by the George Bush administration, and virtually every law professor, academician, anyone of note in the legal community, spoke out against what it was that Bush and Cheney were doing. She was completely silent. You can’t find a single utterance from her, in writing or orally, where she expressed a view one way or the other on the radical executive power claims of the Bush administration.

And what little there is to see comes from her confirmation hearing as Solicitor General and a law review article she wrote in 2001, in which she expressed very robust defenses of executive power, including the power of the president to indefinitely detain anybody around the world as an enemy combatant, based on the Bush-Cheney theory that the entire world is a battlefield and the US is waging a worldwide war.

...

Well, we know that this administration loves the idea of pleasing conservatives, and anybody who is pleasing to conservatives is somebody who is much more attractive as a political appointee than somebody who is perceived as liked by the left. ...

So, Elena Kagan is perceived as someone who is very good at accommodating right-wing perspectives. She did when she was the dean of Harvard Law School. And at her confirmation hearing for Solicitor General, Republicans couldn’t praise her lavishly enough. I mean, she had a colloquy with Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, where they were in complete agreement on virtually every issue involving terrorism and executive power. And even the furthest right-wing polemicist, like Bill Kristol and Ed Whelan, who currently writes for National Review and was a lawyer in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, have praised her quite, quite emphatically as someone whose views on national security and terrorism and civil liberties they find quite palatable.

... And simply politically, it’s easier to get confirmed someone who’s perceived as being, and who is, a moderate, or even a conservative, than it is to get someone confirmed who is a liberal.

Senate Republicans have already set this one up. They'll fight anyone who is perceived by them as 'unacceptable'. Obama has no stomach for another fight in the Senate and neither does Harry Reid. (Although this is welcome news.)

Personally I'm going to steel myself for yet another unpalatable Obama decision.