Blogs

The Noyo News Is Back!

by Dan Bacher

The Noyo News, published by independent journalist David Gurney, is again publishing news and commentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger's corrupt Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, ocean industrialization and other environmental issues.

"We are happy to report that after some effort by web hosters, Google, and yours truly, the malware hack attack on Noyo News is now cleaned up and gone," said Gurney. "You may now once again visit the site with no worries."

"The incident is being reported to proper authorities, who may be able to track the perpetrators by their inevitable electronic trail," emphasized Gurney.

The MLPA "Initiative" creates a "network" of suspect "marine protected areas" that fail to protect the ocean from oil spills and drilling, water pollution, military testing, wave and wind energy projects, corporate aquaculture and all other uses of the ocean other than fishing and gathering. A big oil lobbyist, agribusiness hack, marina developer, real estate executive and other corporate operatives with numerous conflicts of interest oversaw the creation of these so-called "marine protected areas."

Department of Fish and Game (DFG) officials announced on July 20 that young Delta smelt abundance this year roughly doubles that of last year, but noted that this is "but a small fraction of their historical abundance."

"The improvement is likely due in large part to higher than usual flows from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers this year that resulted in better habitat conditions and water quality," according to a DFG news release.

The announcement of "improved" Delta smelt numbers was issued as one of the greatest fish kills in California history continues to take place in the state and federal Delta pumps.

A horrific total of 8,942,347 splittail, 35,435 chinook salmon, 385,392 striped bass, 49,812 largemouth bass, 67,383 bluegill, 66,403 white catfish, 20,178 channel catfish, 91,956 threadfin shad, 166,336 American shad, 1,642 steelhead and 51 Delta smelt were “salvaged” in the state and federal water export facilities from January 1 to July 21, 2011, according to DFG data.

The overall loss of fish in and around the State Water Project and Central Valley Project facilities is believed to dwarf the actual salvage counts, according to "A Review of Delta Fish Population Losses from Pumping Operations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta," prepared by Larry Walker Associates in January 2010 for the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District (http://www.srcsd.com/pdf/dd/fishlosses.pdf).

I cribbed the above title from an oped by William Rivers Pitt entitled “So This is Despair.”

“I see a president on his knees, hands outstretched, offering the best ideas and policies liberal governance has ever devised up to the voracious carnivore of GOP opportunism. I see the end of the New Deal, and a far crueler America emerging from the aftermath. I see a Democratic president voiding his bladder on all that he is supposed to uphold.

Mr. Obama got on those knees again Monday night, on national television no less, and once again begged the GOP to devour Social Security and Medicare. He gobbled up the flawed, flayed premise of the far-right's deranged argument, again, and pleaded for the chance to give away the core of what he was elected to defend.

I thought I was done being ashamed of my president.

I was wrong.”

This is what Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report declares about Obama:

... Obama is showing such extraordinary talent for obliterating poor and working class programs across the board, he’s making Republicans look redundant and obsolete.

Related: #fuckyouwashington, and Capt. Obama, USS Titanic, Tosses Older Women Overboard First, and Republican Hypocrisy on the Deficit, and Obama and Social Security: NewDealDemocrat Tees Off

The crumbling U.S. economy is putting an extraordinary amount of financial stress on American families. For many Americans, "flat broke" has become a permanent condition. Today, over half of all American families live paycheck to paycheck. Unemployment is rampant and those that do actually have jobs are finding that their wages are rising much more slowly than prices are. The financial condition of average American families continues to decline and this is showing up in all of the recent surveys. For example, according to a new Gallup poll, "lack of money/low wages" is the number one financial concern for American families.

>>> Trendsmap <<<

Tweeters rage against the D.C. machine

Spurred by a blogger to vent about gridlock and political posturing in Washington over the debt ceiling crisis, the Twittersphere was burning this morning with citizens' grievances against their government, announced with an expletive-filled hashtag - vulgarity mixed with insight and a lot of common sense.

Jeff Jarvis (of Buzzmachine.com) promoted the flood of Twitter messages with the hashtag #F---YouWashington. A sample is presented below, spelling and punctuation uncorrected.

[This is a re-post from 10-26-10]

Raising the retirement age to a whopping 70 is more than a twinkle in the eyes of Obama and his Gucci-loafered-Austerian-Commission-sadists from both sides of the aisle. They are about to stick it once again to all of us, but particularly to struggling low-income older women in physical jobs!

It just keeps on getting uglier and uglier. Sharon Johnson in this article in womensenews spells out how exceptionally cruel it is to the plight of women.

Nice reward working so hard all your life to have these sociopathic millionaire bastards steal your taxpaying money to reward fraudsters and then add insult to injury by moving your retirement goal post to 70 and making your hard-earned benefits (to some the ONLY benefits for a life of struggle) belated and unlivable.

According to Ellen Bruce, past president of OWL (Older Women’s League) 1 in 4 older women depends on Social Security for 90 percent of her income. Women have overwhelmingly far fewer assets than men when they retire.

Sharon Johnson writes:

As far as I am concerned, it is a time for celebration.

Cenk Uygur escaped this week with his soul and his scalp from MSNBC. One way of celebrating may be to take a sledge hammer to your television. Just a thought.

I so wanted to dig into an angry blog about MSNBC, its false-left propagandizing of the Trojan Horse for oligarchs, Obama, its demonizing of only half of the Congressional rabid rat bastard criminal political class in Washington, and its attempt to neuter Cenk of his search for and assertion of truth to power.

But, alas, I had totally stopped watching MSNBC when Rachel Maddow so heartbreakingly jumped the shark a serious while ago by becoming head cheerleader, part time sycophant, for Obama.

I don’t watch much tv any more. Even the Newshour. The jump the shark moment there, one of many, was when Carol Browner, who served as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001 (which you would think would assure some reliability) just after the BP disaster (as if there has been a serious “after”) assured Judy Woodruff that Mother Nature had miraculously cleaned up oh maybe was it 80% of that toilet bowl of a Gulf of Mexico and it was only a matter of time before she (M. Nature, that is) finished the job.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Fault system draws questions about Diablo Canyon nuclear plant’s safety

Manitoba dig unearths 80-million-year old "T-Rex of the sea" skeletons, squid

According to financial economist and historian Dr. Michael Hudson:

It’s a good cop-bad cop charade. The Republicans are playing the role of the bad cop. Their script says: “You cannot raise taxes on anybody. No progressive income tax, no closing of tax loopholes for special interests, not even prosecutions for tax fraud. And we can get a lot of money back into the economy if we give a tax holiday to the companies and individuals that have been keeping their money offshore. Let’s free the wealthy from taxes to help us recover.’

Mr. Obama can turn around and pretend to be the good cop. “Hey, boys, let me at least do something. I’m willing to cut back Social Security. I’m willing to take over what was George Bush’s program. I share your worries about the budget deficit. We have to balance it, and I’ve already appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission to prepare public opinion for my cutbacks in the most popular programs. But you have to let me get a little bit of revenue somewhere.”

In the end the Republicans will make some small token concessions, but they’ll get their basic program. Mr. Obama will have sold out his constituency.

Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

Afghanistan experts Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald talk to Peter B. Collins. They are the authors of the book "Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire" This broadcast was made before the murder of Bin Laden and is one part of the Peter B. Collins podcast.
Source: Afghanistan Experts Gould & Fitzgerald; The Nation’s Blog on WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning by Peter B. Collins on April 1, 2011

Michael Schwartz

Weapons of Mass Disruption

Michael Schwartz, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University and author of 'War Without End: The Iraq War in Context' talks about the Egyptian revolution and the power of nonviolent disruption.
Source: Weapons of Mass Disruption, TomCast from TomDispatch.com

Music includes Earth Anthem, We'll Met Again, Taste of Honey, wasted life - stiff little fingers, filled with love, Young - Hollywood Undead, wright johnnie - hello vietnam, pete seeger - Talking Atom, Wings, Jeff Foxworthy- Married and Single, excerpt from grapes of wrath movie

Play Program or Download(below the fold)

by Dan Bacher

On June 29, the California Fish and Game Commission voted 4 to 1 at its meeting in Stockton to approve a "preferred alternative," an amended version of the "unified proposal" developed by fishing, environmental and tribal stakeholders to create a network of marine protected areas on the North Coast.

Commissioners Richard Rogers, Michael Sutton, Jack Baylis and Jim Kellogg voted for the alternative, while Commissioner Daniel Richards voted against it.

Natural Resources Agency Secretary John Laird, a strong supporter of Arnold Schwarzenegger's privately-funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative, claimed that the Commission decision was "a major victory in the effort to establish Marine Protected Areas on the north coast of California." He applauded the Commission for voting for an exception for area tribes to "continue hundreds of years of subsistence fishing."

I have got to herald Marc Rubin’s (“tom in paine”’s) so deserved, delicious and yet depressing diatribe against the colossal impotence of collective doormat TEAM DEM as Obama continues to amiably and relentlessly dismantle democracy . Un-friggin'-believable.

Rubin launches :

I received an email not too long ago from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee asking me to sign a petition that threatened Obama by telling him that if he sold out on social security and Medicare, they would, in no uncertain terms vote for him anyway.

I'm not kidding. That's what it said. If there has ever been a weaker more pathetic more useless political threat ever made I haven't seen it.

This, it seems, is what it is to be a "progressive". And they really wonder why they didn't get a public option, a decent financial reform law and an end to the Bush tax cuts and why Obama is ready to sell out anything to get a deal on the debt ceiling.

Rubin explains that the Progressive Campaign Change Committee a/k/a (oxymoronically) “Bold Progressives” managed to get 200,000 signatures to challenge the White House about its threats to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. 200,000 signatures. GREAT! EXCEPT .... their threat was TO REFUSE TO DONATE OR VOLUNTEER FOR OBAMA’S RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN if he cuts entitlements. At the same time, they make it crystal clear they still intend to vote for him whatever he does.

Republican Secrets of the Debt

On the same day that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Wall Street rating agencies joined the ever-louder chorus of voices warning Republicans that failure to raise the U.S. debt ceiling would result in "calamity," Speaker John Boehner announced that at least 60 GOP Congressmen "won't vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances." At the same time, his GOP colleagues Michele Bachmann, Steve King and Louie Gohmert accused the Obama administration of lying about the urgent need to raise the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell worried that his party's tough-talk and myth-making could "destroy" the GOP brand.

Sadly for McConnell, that is the Republican brand. His lieutenant Jon Kyl (R-AZ) admitted as much in April, when he declared remarks he delivered on the Senate floor were "not intended to be a factual statement." And so it is with the debt ceiling crisis. When they aren't peddling outright lies, Republicans suffer from selective amnesia regarding the inconvenient truths about the GOP record on debt, taxes and the economy.

Here, then, are the ten Republican Secrets of the Debt:

1. Republican Leaders Agree U.S. Default Would Be a "Financial Disaster"
2. Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt
3. George W. Bush Doubled the National Debt
4. Republicans Voted Seven Times to Raise Debt Ceiling for President Bush

The video is Olbermann's Special Comment from last week -- I think it's appropriate here. The press release below is by Dean Baker

Statement on the Gang of Six Plan

Tax cuts for the wealthy, and Social Security cuts for ordinary workers