Swiss Back Away From Deal to Give Names of Rich UBS Clients to U.S.


By Lynnley Browning
The New York Times
January 28, 2010


The Swiss government on Wednesday backed off an agreement with the United States that required it to hand over the names of wealthy American clients of the Swiss bank UBS who were suspected of tax evasion.

The announcement, which came after two Swiss courts ruled that the disclosure of client names would be illegal because it would violate the country’s secrecy laws, threatened to open a new front in the investigation into UBS by the Justice Department.

While the Swiss cabinet, known as the Swiss Federal Council, said in a statement that it would continue talks with the United States on the matter, it said there was a risk that the United States would resume civil proceedings filed against UBS in a Florida court last year. That case sought to force UBS to disclose the names of 52,000 wealthy American clients suspected of tax evasion through UBS’s private bank.

That lawsuit was suspended in August when the Swiss government, acting on behalf of UBS during months of intense negotiations, promised to hand over 4,450 UBS client names.

The Swiss cabinet said it might put the disclosure of the names up for approval before the Swiss Parliament — but only if it received detailed information from the Internal Revenue Service on how many UBS clients had come forward under a voluntary disclosure program that ended in November. That program brought in 14,700 clients from many banks, including UBS. That could allow the Swiss to avoid having to identify people who had already come forward.

I.R.S. officials said Wednesday that Switzerland needed to hew to the August deal. “We expect the Swiss government to continue to honor the terms of the agreement,” the agency said in a statement. The Justice Department declined to comment.


“The Swiss right now need to do their Swiss thing — they’re trying to find a creative way to get this thing done,” said a top American government official who was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter.


“Even in the light of the Swiss Administrative Court’s ruling, we will try to comply with the provisions of the treaty,” Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss justice minister, said after a meeting of the Swiss cabinet.

The Swiss cabinet said it was not contesting Switzerland’s disclosure of 250 names to the Justice Department in February. That move was part of a deal that helped UBS avoid indictment and instead pay a $780 million fine and admit to criminal wrongdoing with its offshore private banking services sold to Americans.


“An exchange of information with the U.S. authorities is only possible in about 250 cases,” the cabinet said. Finma, the Swiss regulatory agency, said in February that not turning over the 250 names could have harmed UBS and the global economy.

The Swiss did not explain how the disclosure of the 250 names was not deemed to be a breach of Swiss privacy laws while disclosure of the 4,450 was.

At issue is what Cono Namorato, a partner at the Washington law firm Caplin & Drysdale, said was “a very, very different definition of fraud” by the Swiss — one that distinguishes between tax evasion, or simply not paying taxes, which is not regarded as a crime, and tax fraud, which is regarded as a crime but involves ill-gotten gains from activities like money laundering or the deliberate falsification of documents.

Kevin E. Packman, a tax lawyer at Holland & Knight in Miami, said that the Swiss courts “have put UBS and, to some extent, the Swiss government in an uncomfortable position. I suspect that if the courts don’t cooperate with the government to find a solution, things are going to get really ugly for UBS.”

In a statement, UBS said that it “welcomes the fact that the Swiss Federal Council is pursuing a dialogue with the U.S. authorities.”


“UBS’s new management will fully support the search for a solution,” it added. “As before, we will fulfill all our commitments under the agreement.”

Peter J. Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit and a former Justice Department criminal fraud investigator, said that with the original August deal, “the Swiss tried to pull a fast one on their own country.  They really haven’t changed their underlying bank secrecy laws, and their courts, and now their government, are saying, ‘You can’t just do that.’ The Swiss government is in a really bad situation. They have to confront the issue of bank secrecy — what do they want, what are they willing to live with.”

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/business/global/28ubs.html
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6 Shocking Discoveries About the GOP Senate Candidate Scott Brown


Excerpt
By Max Blumenthal and Laura Clawson
AlterNet
January 18, 2010


We've learned a lot of scary stuff about Massachusetts Senate candidate Scott Brown in the past 10 days.

6 Shocking Discoveries About Scott Brown

By Laura Clawson, Daily Kos

The campaign against Scott Brown has effectively been 10 days long. Ten days is not a long time, but in that time we've learned a lot about Brown.

1. Scott Brown suggested on television that President Obama was born out of wedlock, then tried to claim that Martha Coakley was making things up when her campaign called attention to it.

2. Scott Brown voted against aid to 9/11 recovery workers because it was too expensive, while at the same time he was trying to fund a golf course in his district and give tax subsidies to corporations.

3. Scott Brown tried to deny emergency contraception to rape victims. When he was called on it, he tried to deny the truth, then hid behind his daughters.

4. Scott Brown claimed he didn't know anything about any Tea Parties, even though he'd appeared at their rallies and publicized fundraisers they threw for him.

5. Scott Brown opposes a fee to get back bailout money from the biggest banks.

6. Scott Brown supports a constitutional ban on gay marriage and thinks two women raising a child is "just not normal."

That's a lot to take in in 10 days. Imagine if there had been a longer campaign in which these stories emerged more gradually so voters had time to absorb them fully.

Now imagine what else we'll know about Scott Brown in 10 more days.

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/politics/145239/birthers_defend_conservative_candidate%27s_bizarre_comment_about_obama%27s_birth%3B_6_shocking_discoveries_about_the_gop_senate_candidate/
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A distraction of Himalayan proportions


The Independent UK
January 23, 2010


A claim that the mountain glaciers of the Himalayas will vanish by 2035 has been debunked. Climate-change sceptics are jubilant. They shouldn't be, says Steve Connor. Their disappearance is still only a matter of time.

It was one of the most startling predictions in climate science. By 2035 the great glaciers of the Himalayas were supposed to have largely disappeared, threatening the water supplies of tens of millions of people who rely on the ice to feed the great rivers of Asia, from the Indus and the Ganges in the west to the Brahmaputra and the Yangtze in the east.

But the prediction, made by the Nobel Prize-winning body charged with overseeing global climate science, also managed to astonish the scientists who actually knew about Himalayan glaciers. For them, the 2035 timeframe meant that the great slabs of ice sitting on top of these mountains, some of which are hundreds of metres thick, must be melting about 25 times faster than expected - an extraordinary claim.

In science, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, but in this case the "evidence" turned out to be to be non-existent, which is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to admit this week that, on this occasion, its "well-established standards" of assessing the value of scientific information had failed in relation to the 2035 prediction. The Himalayan glaciers are still melting but not so fast that they are likely to have disappeared by 2035, the panel said.

The error, made by the authors of the IPCC fourth assessment report published in 2007, was to rely on so-called "grey literature" rather than peer-reviewed scientific journals where evidence is double-checked by other experts before publication. But this was only half the story; it is clear the authors made mistakes of their own that compounded the problem.

It began with a news story published in an Indian publication, Down to Earth, in April 1999. It quoted an Indian scientist, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, then vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who said the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than glaciers in any other part of the world, and if the rate continued they would be gone by 2035.

The story also quoted a respected glaciologist called Vladimir Kotlyakov of the Russian Academy of Scientists, who appeared to back up Hasnain's claim with the quote: "The glacier will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates. Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square km by the year 2035." (In fact, Kotlyakov was seriously misquoted, but more of this later.)

These claims may not have gone much further had the story not been read by Fred Pearce, a highly experienced and respected environment journalist. Pearce contacted Hasnain to verify his position and, satisfied that the scientist was not misquoted, wrote a version of the story for New Scientist. Hasnain has since told Pearce the claim was "speculative.

Again, the 2035 timeframe may not have emerged from the magazine's archives had it not been recycled in a 2005 report by the environmental body WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund. It claimed that the 2035 figure came from the semi-official International Commission for Snow and Ice, written by Hasnain, but it turned out that this commission had never included that timeframe in its reports.

It subsequently turned out that the WWF report, and the 2035 claim, had been based on Pearce's story in New Scientist, and, indirectly, the Down to Earth article of the same year. This was grey literature at its secondhand greyest - a non-peer reviewed report based on another non-peer-reviewed report.

Matters became even greyer when the IPCC began writing up its section on Himalayan glaciers for its fourth assessment report published in 2007. The authors were part of IPCC Working Group II, which is involved in assessing the "impacts" of climate change. Interestingly, it is Working Group I, which is responsible for the science of climate change, which actually has the expertise on glaciers and yet its own report included no mention of the 2035 timeframe.

However, the Working Group II report was quite unequivocal in its statement: "Glaciers in the Himalaya [sic] are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square km by the year 2035."

It included a reference to the 2005 WWF report to support the statement, but only after expert reviewers had questioned the claim during the drafting of the report. Nevertheless, the phrasing is almost identical to Down to Earth's, including the reference to Kotlyakov's glacial shrinkage.

In fact, anyone with a knowledge of the total surface area of Himalayan glaciers would have known that Kotlyakov was not referring to the shrinking of Himalayan glaciers, but to the shrinking of all mountain glaciers, outside the polar regions. More importantly his report, seriously misquoted by Down to Earth, said this shrinkage will occur by 2350 - not 2035.

To add insult to injury, the table of Himalayan glaciers used by the IPCC to back up its statement contains a serious mathematical error, first identified by Professor John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M University. One of the Himalayan glaciers is listed as retreating by 2,840 metres between 1845 and 1966, which is 23 metres per year. Yet the IPCC's report lists it as retreating by 135 metres per year. Whoever did the calculation within the IPCC had divided the total glacier retreat by 21 years, not 121.

It would be easy to condemn the IPCC for these lapses but it must be remembered that the organisation is essentially composed of working scientists and it was the science community that identified and exposed the errors. The 2035 claim was not mentioned in the IPCC's "summary for policymakers" so was not presented as one of its central arguments.

However, such an astounding claim was bound to receive wider currency and doubts about it were initially rejected in the higher echelons of the IPCC. Yet it was through the dogged investigation of ordinary climate scientists that the truth emerged. Professor Graham Cogley of Trent University in Ontario traced the 2035 timeframe back to the 1999 news story in New Scientist and had alerted Pearce.

Professor Cogley said that once the IPCC had been presented with the detailed critique of the 2035 claim, it had moved swiftly to admit the error and make the correction. However, the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, when he was confronted over the 2035 claim last year, denounced those questioning his body's research as "voodoo scientists".

Professor Cogley said: "In Working Group I the guidelines are pretty clear about not relying on grey literature unless absolutely necessary. But in Working Group II that rule is more relaxed. As far as the public perception goes, a good question to ask is how many minds will change [ due to this debacle]? The climate sceptics will continue being sceptics. The reality in the Himalayas is bad enough without exaggerating it. The glaciers are losing mass and we are fairly sure they are losing mass faster now than a few years ago. We also know the Himalayan glacier water could become a non-renewable resource," he said.

Professor Jeffrey Kargel, an expert on Himalayan glaciers at the US Geological Survey, who was also involved in exposing the error, said that overall the IPCC's fourth report on climate change impacts was otherwise "very solid and very accurate".

"There is indeed a consensus that the glaciers in the Himalayas, as in other parts of the world, are retreating relatively quickly," Professor Kargel said. While most glaciers in the chain are in retreat, others appear stable and a few seem to be advancing because of heavier snowfall - which is not inconsistent with warmer temperatures. The Karakoram mountains in the east, which accumulate snow in the wetter summer period of the monsoon, are particularly vulnerable to small changes in average temperature, which can quickly turn annual snowfall into annual rain.

The 2035 timeframe may be discredited, but that doesn't mean that there is not a problem. Increasingly, this century, the gradual loss of the Himalayan glaciers are likely to impinge on the reliability of the water supply of people living in the the lower alpine valleys of the mountains.

Professor Kargel said: "When sceptics talk of 'glaciergate', it hurts. That word suggests an elaborate conspiracy when there isn't. This is a self-correcting system, that's what happened, that's what science is."

Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/a-distraction-of-himalayan-proportions-1876420.html
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Phoenix, Arizona: Thousands march to protest immigration legislation


by Collin Sick
Infoshop News
January 20 2010

Thousands of U.S.-born Latinos and undocumented immigrants marched in east Phoenix to Sen. Jon Kyl's office Friday to protest immigration legislation they say is inhumane and punitive.

Construction workers, teachers, students, maids, lawyers and activists said they were fed up with federal and state legislation that aims to make life more difficult for illegal immigrants.


Phoenix police estimated the crowd to be between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Similar demonstrations took place Friday in Tucson, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Milwaukee and elsewhere. 

On 24th Street in Phoenix, marchers were waving American and Mexican flags with signs that said, "We are not criminals," and shouting "Si se puede," (It can be done.) They walked from St. Agnes Catholic Church at 24th Street and McDowell Road north to Camelback Road at 22nd Street to Kyl's Phoenix office.

Kyl, a Republican, is sponsoring a bill along with by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would give illegal immigrants up to five years to leave the country. Those immigrants could apply from their home country to return, either as temporary workers or for permanent residency. The Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Kyl is a member, is set to vote on a bill passed by the House on Monday.

Kyl's press secretary said his office would have no immediate comment on the rally.

Sixteen advocacy organizations helped organize the event and planned for several weeks.

The crowd, led by community activists Elias Bermudez, Alfredo Gutierrrez and Rep. Ben Miranda, gained more protesters with every block. The march began about 11 a.m., after a kickoff rally at the church that started at 9 a.m.

Police shut down 24th Street because of the march, and businesses along the busy street were inaccessible. Drivers reported heavy traffic on other major streets in east Phoenix.

Angeles Maldonado, a marcher, said, "We're (undocumented immigrants) here. We're going to stay. We need laws that recognize that we are not an invisible group. We came out today to prove it.

"I am an immigrant myself. My parents are immigrants. I am tired of people call them criminals. Because we are not."

Phoenix resident Elida Lozano, 50, carried a sign that read, "Humanitarian Aid is not a crime." She said, "It's unfair what they want to do. It's racist. You're not going to find terrorists outside a Home Depot looking for a job."

The rally is the largest in a string of grassroots protests, marches and boycotts by Hispanics since 2004, when Arizona voters passed Proposition 200, a law that prohibits undocumented immigrants from voting or receiving certain public benefits.

Across the country, pro-immigration supporters took to the streets Friday. More than 10,000 people marched in Milwaukee in what was billed as "A Day Without Latinos" to protest efforts in Congress to target undocumented workers.

Hundreds of Los Angeles students walked out of classes Friday morning to call attention to immigration issues.

In Georgia, activists said tens of thousands of workers didn't show up at their jobs on Friday after calls for a work stoppage to protest a bill passed by the Georgia House on Thursday.

That bill, which has yet to gain Senate approval, would deny state services to adults living in the U.S. illegally and impose a 5 percent surcharge on wire transfers from illegal immigrants. Teodoro Maus, one of the organizers of the Georgia protest, estimated as many as 80,000 Hispanics did not show up for work Friday.

About 200 people converged on the steps of the Georgia Capitol, some wrapped in Mexican flags and holding signs reading: "Don't panic, we're Hispanic" and "We have a dream, too."

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0324immigrationmarch24-ON.html

About the federal immigration spill sparking protests:

-- 11 million undocumented immigrants would be declared "aggravated felons" for having come to this country to do back-breaking work at low wages in order to feed their families.

-- Priests, nuns, health care workers and other helpers would be threatened with jail time for assisting the undocumented.

-- Local police would have to enforce federal immigration laws, undermining community policing strategies meant to build confidence between police and immigrant communities.

-- Day labor sites would be shut down by federal law, overruling the hard work of activists and enlightened local communities attempting to solve problems caused in part by Congressional inaction on comprehensive immigration reform.

-- Seven hundred miles of walls would be built between the United States and our friendly neighbors to the south, an act that has touched off a diplomatic crisis with Latin America.

Source:
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20060324143659841
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George W. Obama

After his first year, Obama shows his true face

By Nat Hentoff

The Village Voicd

January 12, 2010

Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the "war on terror" over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush's successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we've signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of "change we can believe in" proclaimed: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency." But four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a claim of presidential "sovereign immunity" that not even Dick Cheney had the arrant chutzpah to propose.

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered—says Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens stripped of their privacy—that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the Wiretap Act."

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, "breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January included the ending of the CIA "renditions"—kidnapping terrorism suspects off the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically.

President Obama also solemnly pledged to have "the most open administration in American history." Nonetheless, his Justice Department lawyers have already invoked "state secrets" to prevent cases brought by victims of the CIA renditions from being heard.

In February, in a lawsuit brought by five graduates of CIA "black sites" before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, one of the judges, visibly surprised at hearing the new "change" president invoking "state secrets," asked the government lawyer, Douglas Letter, "The change in administration has no bearing on this?"

The answer: "No, your honor." This demand for closing this case before it can be heard had, he said, been "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration, [and] these are authorized positions."

Said the torture graduates' ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner: "Much is at stake in this case. If the CIA's overboard secrecy claims prevail, torture victims will be denied their say in court solely on the basis of an affidavit submitted by their torturers."

Barack Obama a torturer? Not exactly. In this particular case, the torture policy had been set by George W. Bush. President Obama is just agreeing with his predecessor. Does that make Obama complicit in these acts of torture? You decide.

What is clear, beyond a doubt—and not only in "rendition" cases, but in other Obama validations of what Dick Cheney called the necessary "dark side" of the previous administration—has been stated by Jameel Jaffer. Head of the ACLU's National Security Project, he is the co-author of the definitive evidence of the Bush-Cheney war crimes that Obama is shielding, Administration of Torture (Columbia University Press).

After the obedient Holder rang the "state secrets" closing bell in the San Francisco case, Jaffer described the link between the Bush and Obama presidencies: "The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, but the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."

It's become an Obama trademark: reversing a vigorous position he had previously taken, as when he signed into law the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act that, as a senator, he had vowed to filibuster as a protest against their destruction of the Fourth Amendment. And now he's done it again. His government is free to spy on us at will.

For another example of the many Obamas, the shifting president had supported the release of photographs of Bush-era soldier abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York had approved the publication of these "intensive interrogations.") But Obama changed his mind, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates flat-out censored the photos. Not surprisingly, the Roberts Supreme Court agreed with Gates and Obama and overruled the Second Circuit.

In a December 5 editorial, The New York Times helped explain why Obama—who doesn't want to "look backward" at Bush cruelties—changed his mind: "The photos are of direct relevance to the ongoing national debate about accountability for the Bush-era abuses. No doubt their release would help drive home the cruelty of stress positions, mock executions, hooding, and other 'enhanced interrogation techniques' used against detainees and make it harder for officials to assert that improper conduct was aberrational than the predictable result of policies set at high levels."

Barack Obama may well go down in history as the President of Impunity for Bush, Cheney, and, in time, himself, for continuing the CIA "renditions."

But he will also be long remembered as the President of Permanent Detention. At the Supreme Court in 1987, in U.S. v. Salerno, Justice Thurgood Marshall, strenuously dissenting, warned: "Throughout the world today there are men, women, and children interned indefinitely, awaiting trials which may never come or which may be a mockery of the word, because their governments believe them to be 'dangerous.' Our Constitution . . . can shelter us forever against the dangers of such unchecked power."

Not forever. The Obama government is working to assure that its purchase of the supermax prison, the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, will be the permanent forced residence of certain Guantánamo terrorism suspects who can't be tried in our regular courtrooms because—gasp—they have been tortured, preventing the admission of "incriminating" statements they have made or—"state secrets" again!—a due process trial "would compromise sensitive sources and methods."

Like torture.

I increasingly wonder whose Constitution Barack Obama was teaching at the University of Chicago. China's? North Korea's? Robert Mugabe's? Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, whose byline I never miss on the Internet, asks: "What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people?"

You may not be surprised to learn that my next book—to be published by Cato Institute, where I'm now a senior fellow—will be titled, Is This America?

I often disagree with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero—though I'm almost always in synch with his lawyers in the field—but Romero is right about Obama creating "Gitmo North": "While the Obama administration inherited the Guantánamo debacle, this current move is its own affirmative adoption of those policies. It is unimaginable that the Obama administration is using the same justification as the Bush administration used to undercut centuries of legal jurisprudence and the principle of innocent until proved guilty and the right to confront one's accusers. . . . The Obama administration's announcement contradicts everything the president has said about the need for America to return to leading with its values. American values do not contemplate disregarding our Constitution and skirting the criminal justice system."

If Dick Cheney were a gentleman, instead of continuing to criticize this president, he would congratulate him on his faithful allegiance to many signature policies of the Bush-Cheney transformation of America.

But never let it be said that President Obama is neglecting the patriotic education of America's young. On December 13, Clint Boulton reported on eweek.com, "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic have sued the Department of Justice and five other government organizations (including the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) for cloaking their policies for using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to investigate citizens in criminal and other matters. [The plaintiffs] want to know exactly how, and what kinds of information, the feds are accessing from users' social networking profiles."

Maybe Dick Cheney can ask Barack to confirm him as a friend on Facebook.

Charlie Savage, the Times ace reporter of constitutional violations, chillingly shows how Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin got to the core of the consequences of our "yes, we can" president by predicting that "Mr. Obama's ratifications of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them," Mr. Balkin said, "Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government."

Do Congressional Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi give a damn about this historic legacy of the Obama administration that they cluelessly help to nurture by providing lockstep Democratic majorities for?

Do you give a damn?

Source:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-12/columns/george-w-obama

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'Doomsday Clock' moves back

 

.

BBC News

Jan. 14, 2010

The Doomsday Clock - a barometer of nuclear danger for the past 55 years - has been moved one minute further away from the "midnight hour".

The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) now stands at six minutes to the hour.

The group said it made the decision to move the clock back because of a more "hopeful state of world affairs".

The clock was first featured by the magazine in 1947, shortly after the US dropped its A-bombs on Japan.

The clock had been adjusted 18 times before today since its initial start at seven minutes to midnight.

Most recently, in January 2007, the clock moved to five minutes to midnight, when climate change was added to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind.

The concerns then included Iran's nuclear ambitions and the inability to halt the international trafficking of nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

Two years later, however, the board of the BAS says that there is now a "growing political will" to tackle both the "terror of nuclear weapons" and "runaway climate change".

At a news conference in New York, the BAS board said: "By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization."

But Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of the BAS board of sponsors, warned scientists that there was still much to be done.

"We urge leaders to fulfill the promise of a nuclear weapon-free world and to act now to slow the pace of climate change," he said.

"We are mindful of the fact that the clock is ticking," he added.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by former Manhattan Project physicists, has campaigned for nuclear disarmament since 1947.

Its board periodically reviews issues of global security and challenges to humanity, not solely those posed by nuclear technology, although most have had a technological component.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8460324.stm

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Earth's Growing Nitrogen Threat


It helps feed a hungry world, but it's worse than CO2


By Mark Clayton
The Christian Science Monitor
January 12, 2010


Dennis Lindsay still recalls the day four decades ago when his father, an Iowa farmer, began using nitrogen fertilizer on the family’s 160 acres.

With nitrogen, the family’s corn crop suddenly grew much higher and stronger, and produced full ears and big harvests. When fed to their cows and pigs, that high-quality corn produced far more milk and meat. As a result, the family bought more livestock – and the farm grew. “I remember Dad bringing the neighbors over to see how much greener and better the quality of the stalk was,” Mr. Lindsay says. “It was a really big deal then.”

It’s an even bigger deal today. Lindsay and his son farm 3,000 acres of corn and soybeans, using about 150 tons of nitrogen fertilizer annually. Farmers from China, Europe, and South America rely on nitrogen, too, to make ends meet and feed a growing world.

Yet it’s also becoming clear that too much of a good thing can have a downside for the environment. The world is awash in man-made “reactive” nitrogen (the chemically active form), researchers say.

While greening farms worldwide, much nitrogen washes into lakes, rivers, and the sea, causing rampant algae growth. More nitrogen billows from power-plant smokestacks, blowing in the wind until it settles as acid rain. Still other nitrogen gases remain in the atmosphere consuming the ozone layer. Nitrous oxide is nearly 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide – considered the leading cause of climate change – and the third most threatening greenhouse gas overall.

Last year, reactive nitrogen was identified as one of nine key global pollution threats and second worst in terms of having already exceeded a maximum “planetary boundary,” according to a study reported in the journal Nature.

“Nitrogen plays a tremendously important role in feeding the world’s peoples, so that’s a very positive benefit for humanity,” says James Galloway, a professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and a leading nitrogen researcher. “The problem is how to maximize nitrogen’s benefits while diminishing its negatives – especially waste.”

Africa is one of a few places in the world where wider use of nitrogen fertilizers makes sense to help feed the population, many researchers agree. In the US, however, as much as 40 percent of reactive nitrogen is wasted – washing off farm fields into rivers, lakes, and the ocean, where oxygen-depleted “dead zones” are growing in number and size worldwide.

The situation is even worse in China, which uses about twice as much nitrogen fertilizer as the US to yield about the same amount of crops. As much as three-quarters of all nitrogen used to grow rice in China may be wasted, says Vaclav Smil, a nitrogen expert at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Vehicle exhaust, power-plant exhaust, and large-animal feeding operations are all sources of nitrogen emissions. Rising energy needs have meant more nitrogen oxides (NOx) – implicated in smog, acid rain, and global warming – emitted from fossil-fueled power plants.

Most nitrogen doesn’t stay in the atmosphere the way carbon dioxide from fossil fuel does, but precipitates out within a few days. Ammonia – a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen – becomes ammonium when mixed with water and acts like fertilizer when it falls to the ground in rain.

Researchers have found major growth in ammonium in air quality data across 15 US National Parks, including Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, and Canyonlands parks, the Associated Press reported last summer. At high altitude, delicate alpine tundra is being 
replaced by nitrogen-loving grasses, which are fed by growing amounts of 
ammonium falling as rain.

“The more nitrogen that we use in 
agriculture or that comes from various combustion processes – cars or power plants – the more ends up in the world’s ecosystem,” says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. “By altering concentrations of this key nutrient in the system, we are altering that ecosystem in many, many ways.”

Other researchers have spotted 
invasive grasses that thrive on nitrogen sprouting up in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. Beside threatening other plant species, such grasses fuel wildfires.

But the most dramatic impacts can be seen in the growth of coastal dead zones where excessive nutrients in the water – fueled by runoff of fertilizers – has suffocated or driven away ocean animals. In the Gulf of Mexico, fish and shrimp have been eliminated in an 8,000-square-mile dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River. More than 400 dead zones with a total area of 245,000 square kilometers were identified worldwide last year.

There is reason for hope, however. If new EPA clean-air standards move ahead, then 90 percent of US NOx emissions from stationary sources could be eliminated. That’s because the two-thirds of US power plants that do not now have 
nitrogen-removal equipment could get it beginning by 2011, says John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

Efforts to boost the efficiency of nitrogen use in farming are on the march, too. In Pennsylvania, for example, more than 100 farmers are using new tools to determine precisely how much to apply.

“Getting nitrogen right is critical for getting climate change right, food security right, and a lot of issues associated with poverty that have to do with nutrition depletion,” says Bill Herz, vice president of scientific programs for the Fertilizer Institute, a Washington trade organization that represent North American fertilizer manufacturers.

This spring, a federal science advisory report is expected to recommend a national goal of improving the efficiency of farm nitrogen fertilizer use by 25 percent, Herz and Galloway say.

That’s just fine with Mick Lane, spokesman for the On-Farm Network of the Iowa Soybean Association. In 2000, about 40 farmers across the state learned how to use nitrogen fertilizer more sparingly. Now the number is 500 and growing.“ We’ve seen an overall decrease in the amount of nitrogen with no negative impact on farm income,” he says.

That’s also true for Lindsay, the Iowa farmer. Using sophisticated digital systems to monitor how much grain is produced on which acres, he’s cut the amount of nitrogen he uses from more than 200 pounds per acre a decade ago to about 160 pounds.


“I’m just one of hundreds of farmers doing this, trying to use less nitrogen,” he says. “I want the environment to be good, too. We drink the water out here, and we want everything to be safe.”

Source:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Living-Green/2010/0113/Earth-s-growing-nitrogen-threat
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Huge propane cavern leaking, neighbors offered relocation

This looks bad for Carbon Capture Storage


October 19, 2009
Barnesville Herald-Gazette

(Georgia) Low levels of propane have been detected in soil and water samples taken on and around the site of a huge underground gas storage cavern near Milner and some residents nearby may be temporarily relocated.

The cavern, owned by Enterprise Propane Terminals & Storage, is located 340 feet underground and holds 220,000 barrels or 9.24 million gallons of propane.

Enterprise is emptying the underground facility in order to further study the situation.

Three above ground tanks at the location contain an additional 90,000 gallons of propane each.

The company detected the leak while testing on its own property.

Subsequent tests on a few neighboring properties have also been positive.

Source:
http://www.barnesville.com/archives/1462-Huge-propane-cavern-may-beleaking;-neighbors-offered-relocation.html

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Fox News: Keeping the Faith


Media Matters

January 05, 2010

Religion is ... tough.
The collected spiritual teachings of the world's various deities, messiahs, prophets, monks, yogis, gurus, and shamans are so deeply ingrained in human culture and consciousness that they essentially tell the history of mankind. Their cosmological and philosophical differences have proved to be stubbornly intractable and provided the impetus for many of humanity's more brutal conflicts. The greatest minds of the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds have devoted entire lifetimes delving into the deepest questions that face mankind.

But for Fox News, religion is easy: Christianity is right and good and must be defended from its relentless persecutors, and other faiths are dangerous, inadequate, or funny.

Viewers of this past weekend's Fox News Sunday were treated to an especially stark example of the network's affection for Christendom when Fox News analyst and putative paragon of "straight news" Brit Hume counseled Tiger Woods to ditch Buddhism in favor of Christianity as his best hope for a "total recovery" from the scandal surrounding his marital infidelities. According to Hume: "I don't think that faith [Buddhism] offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith." Hume appeared on The O'Reilly Factor the next day to deny that he was "proselytizing," explaining that Woods "needs something that Christianity especially provides and gives and offers, and that is redemption and forgiveness." To attempt to explain how that makes sense is way beyond my pay grade.

But proselytizing it was, and it was met with resounding hosannas from Fox News colleagues Fred Barnes and Tucker Carlson, who couldn't quite grasp why it is unseemly for a news personality to declare one religious faith superior to another. People who actually know a thing or two about religion, however, were less enthusiastic about Hume's evangelical turn. Writing on Newsweek's "On Faith" blog, Baptist minister Welton Gaddy commented: "First, a news program should deal with news, not evangelism, whatever religion is involved. ... Second, the implication of Mr. Hume's suggestion to Mr. Woods is utilitarian -- you will get a better deal related to forgiveness in Christianity than you can get in Buddhism. Christianity is not a means to an end; it is a holistic faith to be embraced and lived." USA Today religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman dryly noted that Buddhists across the internet were uniting in forgiveness of Hume.

In a way, Hume's appeal for Woods' salvation was a fitting coda to Fox News' annual winter exercise in manufactured outrage on behalf of the supposedly beleaguered Christian community -- the increasingly ridiculous "War on Christmas." Despite the fact that Christianity is by a long way the world's predominant and, arguably, most influential faith, Fox News continues to insist every year that the entire religion is threatened by an evil coalition of atheists and other militant "secularists" who want to "abolish" Christmas by forcing department store clerks to say "Happy Holidays." And if that weren't stupid enough, Fox stepped on its own ridiculous message by running commercials this year wishing viewers "Happy Holidays."

The "War on Christmas" is part and parcel of Fox News' attitude toward matters of faith -- "religion" equals "Christian." On April 29, 2009, Bill O'Reilly asked Fox & Friends anchor Gretchen Carlson if she thought "the media is anti-religion." Carlson responded: "I do, because it's not cool to be Christian." Fox News' media criticism program, Fox News Watch, devoted an April 12 segment to a Newsweek cover story proclaiming: "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Host Bill Hemmer said of the cover: "The timing doesn't seem to be a coincidence. It's holy week for Christians and Passover for Jews. And it's also not the first time the mainstream media has weighed in with a negative message on God and religion." 

The flip side to Fox News' embrace of Christianity is the distrustful eye it casts toward Islam, which the network treats less as a religion and more as a national security threat. Following the fatal shootings at Fort Hood by Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan, Fox News Watch demanded that the media identify Hassan as a Muslim, and link his faith to the attack. Host Jon Scott introduced a November 14 segment saying: "Details about the suspect were quick to surface, but most in the media were hesitant to link Major Nidal Malik Hasan, his Muslim faith, and the murders as a terrorist act." Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade announced that he wanted to see "special debriefings" of Muslim military officers, and frequent Fox News guest Ralph Peters said of the Ft. Hood shootings on The O'Reilly Factor: "It's clear that the problem is Islam."

On October 14, Special Report host Bret Baier credulously reported the ludicrous allegations of a few conspiracy-minded House Republicans that the Council on American-Islamic Relations was "infiltrating" Congress by "placing interns in key positions." To close out the New Year, Fox twice hosted Ann Coulter to resurrect the long-since debunked lie that President Obama was educated in a madrassa. (This is the same Ann Coulter who wrote of the Muslim world after 9-11: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.")

When not actively denigrating non-Christian faiths on its own, Fox News functions as a home and megaphone for religious bigots of all stripes.

During the 2008 campaign, Sean Hannity played host to Andy Martin, whose outrageous invective against then-candidate Obama was outshined only by his venomous attacks on Jews -- he once called a judge who ruled against him a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." And then there's Jerome Corsi, another Hannity regular during 2008, who laid the foundation for his career of bigoted skullduggery with a series of FreeRepublic.com postings that smeared Muslims as "ragheads" and Catholics for "boy buggering."

Of course, the idea that Fox News would take a clear side on any particular issue isn't exactly new -- they do a better job getting across Republican talking points than the other more official organs of the GOP. But there is something uniquely wrong about what ostensibly is a news organization taking sides on questions of faith, recruiting new members on the air, and proclaiming other faiths to be inadequate and a "problem." 

Source:
http://mediamatters.org/columns/201001050042
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Global Warming: Why Branson Wants to Step In

By Bryan Walsh

Time CNN

Dec. 31, 2009

Perhaps it's a case of big business aiming to bail out government, for a change.

The response by government to the threat of global warming has been underwhelming so far, a fact that remains little changed despite the political agreement negotiated at the U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December. But at least one business leader, the British billionaire and founder of the Virgin Group Richard Branson, says he has heard the alarm from scientists and environmentalists about climate change, and believes that the world must not waste time shifting away from oil and other fossil fuels. (See the Copenhagen climate conference.)

"There are some of us who believe that the problem of warming is as bad as the First and Second World Wars combined," Branson told TIME in a recent interview at the climate summit in Copenhagen. "It's that serious, and you know the key is carbon, [but] there's no war room coordinating the attack on carbon."

So, Branson has taken it upon himself — unsurprisingly — to lead the charge against carbon. In 2010, he will officially launch the Carbon War Room, a corporate think tank of sorts, designed to incubate and spread the best ways to cut carbon in corporate sectors ranging from aviation to shipping to construction. It's a global-warming remedy by business for business, and given the paralysis in the international effort to curb climate change, it could be the right idea for the right time. "I think if the government can't deliver, it's up to industries to themselves," says Branson. "We have to make it a win-win for all concerned." (See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.)

Branson's operation will start by addressing carbon emissions from a significant but little-known source that is not covered by any national or international regulations: global marine shipping. The massive container ships that ply the ocean lanes are the backbone of globalization, but they are also carbon hogs. Each year, about 100,000 ships contribute some 1.3 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, about 3% of global carbon emissions.

In addition, ships spew out huge amounts of traditional air pollutants, like nitrous oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx), and emit black carbon soot, a leading contributor to melting Arctic ice.

"It's an overlooked and important problem, but it's also extraterritorial," says Travis Bradford, the chief operating officer of the Carbon War Room, based in Washington, D.C. "And there's no external force that will cause the shipping industry to change."

But despite the sheer amount of carbon the shipping industry produces, its biggest emitters are relatively few.

Bradford estimates that about 20,000 of the biggest and most polluting ships contribute about half the carbon emitted by the industry as a whole, so any solution to the emissions problem could be implemented much more easily than, say, changing the 800 million or so passenger cars in the world. "Ships could be retrofitted to be cleaner and more efficient quickly," says Bradford. (See the world's most polluted places.)

The Carbon War Room's goal is first to raise awareness about the carbon problem within industries, then to publicize and spread the best solutions. In the case of shipping, the solution may be as simple as installing scrubbers — of the sort already used in planes and cars — that would vastly reduce emissions of SOx, NOx and black carbon. Older and more polluting ships will need to be replaced by models that are more efficient, and eventually carbon-based bunker fuels will need to be swapped out for low-carbon alternative fuels.

The Carbon War Room is looking to start the process by compiling information about which ships and lines are most efficient, and then pressing shipping companies — and the customers who depend on them — to use companies that have adopted the best practices.

Branson's presence in Copenhagen earlier this month was about more than just the U.N. summit. The city is home to the A.P. Moller-Maersk group, the largest container ship operator in the world. Get it on board, and others in the industry might follow.

 "That's the spirit behind the Carbon War Room," says José María Figueres, the former President of Costa Rica and a member of the group's executive board. "We want to be an assembling and rallying point for all those who want to bring market solutions to bear on carbon emissions."

Of course, Branson has no interest in any solution to global warming that would involve cutting back on the growth of business or, ultimately, consumption. In his own industry, air travel, Branson has pushed for research and development on alternative fuels that could reduce carbon emitted by planes, but he has also pushed for adding a new runway to London's overcrowded Heathrow Airport. For Branson, global warming will have to be solved by better technology and better practices, not by changing the way we live our lives. "As we move forward our challenge is to develop and fulfill the aspiration for well-being, but at the same time make decisions that reduce carbon emissions," says Figueres. "Filling that gap is going to make a nice business opportunity."

Given that the world is warming due in large part to business practiced as usual, it might seem unwise to let corporations take the lead on climate. And without at least the threat of government carbon caps and other regulatory action, it is hard to believe that all industries would take the initiative to reduce emissions — especially as the world staggers out of a recession.

But with the current U.N. climate system looking dysfunctional in the wake of Copenhagen, and the prospects of cap-and-trade uncertain in the U.S. Senate, Branson might be playing the only game in town. "Governments have set carbon targets before that haven't been met," he says. "Business will have to do what government has failed to do."

Read "A Wind Shift Coming in the Global-Warming Debate?"
Watch TIME's video "10 Questions for Richard Branson."

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1950662,00.html
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Small-Scale Solar Plan Clashes with Big Energy


by David R. Baker
Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
January 4, 2010


When it comes to renewable power, Californians tend to think big.

Big wind farms sprawl across our hills. Big solar power plants will soon blanket acres of desert. Big new power lines will bring that electricity to our cities.

This, Bill Powers insists, is exactly the wrong approach. He wants us to think small.

Powers, an engineer and energy consultant, argues that California should cover every available rooftop with photovoltaic solar panels, especially commercial buildings. The panels can be installed quickly, unlike large solar power plants that take years to win government permits.

They don't require big new power lines. And their price has dropped about 40 percent in the past year.

Powers is involved in a simmering debate over renewable power development in California and the country.

Even though much of the environmental movement has rallied behind the construction of large wind farms and solar power plants, an undercurrent argues that they aren't necessary, or even desirable. Better to get energy from hundreds of smaller facilities close to home than a giant one far away.

Most industry professionals consider the idea unrealistic, but it keeps resurfacing.

Solar plants 'albatrosses'

"The solar plants in the desert are albatrosses," Powers said. "We've come to a point where (photovoltaic solar) is either going to be in the remote installations or it's going to be in the urban core. It'll be much more beneficial for those solar panels to be sitting in the urban core where they're going to be used."

It's an idea that could upend the traditional way of supplying electricity and weaken the control of utility companies. Supporters of the idea consider that a plus.

Photovoltaic solar "in the urban core is a fundamental threat to the utility business model," Powers said.

Most energy experts argue the small-scale approach won't work.

The hunger for energy, they say, is too huge, and it will keep growing. Solar panels are still a relatively expensive way to generate electricity. They cost more than large solar thermal plants, which use a different technology ill-suited to rooftops.

"It's not feasible, it's not economical, it's not realistic," said Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst who covers solar companies for FBR Capital Markets.

"Because of the economic and operational issues, I think we're going to see large-scale, grid-connected power for a long, long time," said Jonathan Marshall, a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

Many environmentalists reluctantly agree.

Carl Zichella, regional director for the Sierra Club in California, has been deeply involved in a state process to plan for new power lines linked to wind farms and solar plants. He wants as much small-scale generation - often called distributed generation - as possible. But that alone won't meet the state's demand for renewable power, he said.

"We need to do it all," Zichella said. "It's quite possible we can get more distributed generation than we thought, and if we get enough, we can build fewer big plants. But I haven't seen any studies I think are credible that say we won't need any."

Distrust and dislike of California's big utility companies, he says, fuel many supporters of the small-is-beautiful idea.

"A lot of the distributed power advocates really hate utilities," Zichella said. "They don't want utilities to own these facilities."

Renewables fall short

California has been trying to ramp up its use of renewable power as a way to combat global warming. Under state law, 20 percent of the electricity the utilities sell must come from renewable sources by the end of 2010, a deadline they will probably miss.

Progress has been slow.

In 2009, California added 331 megawatts of renewable power to its grid. A megawatt is a snapshot figure, roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by 750 typical homes at any given moment.

Viewed together, California's many wind farms, solar facilities and geothermal plants can generate 8,100 megawatts, according to the California Energy Commission.

That may sound like a lot, but it's still just a fraction of the electricity the state needs. On summer days, electricity demand can top 50,000 megawatts. And remember, the output from solar plants and wind farms isn't constant. It varies from day to day, hour to hour.

Time for permit varies

Developers are racing to build a new generation of large solar thermal power plants in the California desert. Together, the projects seeking approval from state regulators could generate an additional 4,980 megawatts of clean power. But the process of winning government permits can take years.

Rooftop solar, in contrast, doesn't need those permits.

It spreads one building at a time, in small increments that eventually add up. Since the start of 2007, enough panels have been bolted to California homes, office buildings and warehouses to generate 277 megawatts of electricity, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Price has always been photovoltaic solar's big problem. And by some estimates, it still is. Despite the recent drop in panel prices, electricity from new photovoltaic solar projects still costs 17 percent more than electricity from big solar thermal plants, according to the energy commission.

Price a problem?

But other analysts say the price gap has disappeared.

Ryan Pletka, with the Black & Veatch consulting firm, has been working on the same transmission planning project as Zichella. By his estimate, solar thermal and photovoltaic projects now cost roughly the same, watt for watt, so long as the photovoltaic projects are big enough to generate at least 20 megawatts.

That's far too large for a single rooftop. But installations of that size could be built at electricity substations.

Together, they could generate up to 15,000 megawatts in California by 2020, Pletka said.

"The upshot is, if the costs are really this low, then you can have all these 20 megawatt solar PV projects that are going to be neck-and-neck competitive with the central station projects," said Pletka, director of strategic planning for Black & Veatch.

The small-versus-large debate played a key role in the fight over Sunrise Powerlink, a proposed power line between Imperial County and San Diego.

The local utility, San Diego Gas & Electric Co., pitched the power line as a necessary tie to solar and geothermal power plants near the Salton Sea. Opponents rallied around a study that said San Diego wouldn't need Powerlink if the city focused on local generation and energy efficiency instead.

The study, written by Powers, called for cutting the San Diego area's energy use by 20 percent, installing more than 2,000 megawatts of solar panels and adding 700 megawatts of small, local power plants that would generate both electricity and heat for buildings.

The utility considered the study far too optimistic. Powerlink, which will cost $1.88 billion, is still cheaper and more reliable than Powers' proposal, said SDG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Briscoe.

California energy regulators sided with SDG&E and approved the project in 2008. But the project's foes remain unconvinced.

"Why do we need to go way out into the desert for power?" asked Denis Trafecanty, a staunch Powerlink opponent. "We all can be generators in some way."

The price of power

Photovoltaic solar panels have dropped in price, but the technology remains more expensive than many other ways to generate electricity, according to the California Energy Commission. All figures are given in cents per kilowatt hour and include construction and operation costs.

Solar PV - 26.22*
Solar thermal (parabolic trough) - 22.47
Natural gas - 12.61
Geothermal - 8.31
Wind - 7.24

* Solar PV price assumes that the project is at least 25 megawatts in size.

Source: California Energy Commission
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Source:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/04/MNBU1B492N.DTL
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"Bring It On" Dick Cheney and Jim DeMint


Rep. Eric J.J. Massa
U.S. Representative from New York
December 31, 2009


Last night, I was invited to appear on MSNBC's Ed Show to discuss, amongst other things, former Vice President Dick Cheney's dishonest, unpatriotic, hypocritical and highly personal continuing attacks on President Obama. I also discussed South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint's record of putting his personal hatred of Labor Unions and his devotion to ideology above making sure we have all of the tools possible to protect the security of our Nation.

Rep. Eric Massa challenges Vice President Dick Cheney on National Security on the Ed Show


I, for one, am sick and tired of these Bush-era chicken hawk politicians that never served in uniform attacking Democrats on national security when in fact, they are largely to blame for our nation's current national security problems. Apparently, former Vice President Cheney and the likes of Senator Jim DeMint actually believe that they can score political points by forcing America to remember the incredible failures of the previous administration and to that I say: "Bring it on." I have no problem running against their record of global economic failure, avarice, corporate greed run amok, no-bid insider contracts, and disastrous foreign policy decisions that left us isolated on the international stage at the very moment when we needed to count our allies. I welcome the opportunity for the Vice President to relive his glory days. And I welcome the opportunity to call him out and debate him one on one. Personally, I think it's time for Vice President Cheney to either put up or shut up.

I am a military veteran who gladly wore the uniform of the United States Navy for the majority of my adult life. I, and thousands of others, graduated from Annapolis and I witnessed, firsthand, the results of failed political decisions that were thrust upon the military while serving in the Beirut theater of operations in 1983. I survived a diagnosis of terminal cancer, which is largely believed by many to have been caused by the depleted heavy metal uranium shells we were firing during the first Gulf War. I had the honor to serve as the Special Assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Wesley Clark, when he, along with thousands of uniformed personnel and a core team of professional civilian personnel, planned and executed a successful strategy to defeat the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

I, and millions of other veterans, can't even count the number of Christmases, New Year's Eve's, Birthdays, 4th of July's and Thanksgivings that we spent overseas and at home protecting our nation.

We were Americans, not Republican or Democrats. For the likes of the former Vice President to politicize national security in an attempt to score cheap political points is beyond unacceptable and his behavior will no longer be met with polite silence. It's time to hit back, harder, with better aim and with purpose of forethought.
Now, as I complete my first year in the United States Congress, my days continue to be focused on protecting our Nation. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee, I have sat through hundreds of hours of testimony and worked around the clock to try to fix the mess George Bush and Dick Cheney left us. Make no bones about it, we are fixing what they broke. We are working everyday to support the troops, both in the field and when they come home.

We should declare 2010 the year that we stop listening to the empty rhetoric of arm chair chicken hawk quarterbacks like Dick Cheney and Jim DeMint when they try to shift blame for their failure and their incompetence on Democrats. We need to fight back.

Personally, I am glad that President Obama took three days to study the details of the attempted attack on Flight 253. President Bush took six days before weighing in on the case of shoe bomber Richard Reid, and I was glad when he took his time to get the facts straight before addressing the Nation.

Where was Dick Cheney when the two alleged masterminds of the Christmas attack were freed from Guantanamo Bay on November 9th, 2007? I hope Senator Jim DeMint had a lovely Christmas while the permanent office of the TSA Administrator remained vacant because of his deep, personal vendetta against organized labor (heaven forbid we should allow those that work on the front lines to protect us from terrorists from earning a decent living and fair benefits).

Vice President Cheney, Senator DeMint, it's time for both of you to be held accountable for your failures and your poor decisions.

I challenge both of you to stand in the light of day and debate your record with me. Your partisan attacks are nothing but empty rhetoric and it's time to declare that we can no longer stand by while you attack our President for working to protect our Nation and for having an honest dialog about what went wrong.

Let's make a New Year's Resolution to call out hypocrisy in 2010. Stand against it and any time that former Vice President Dick Cheney opens his hypocritical mouth to continue uttering blather, he needs to be challenged in a straight forward factual manner that will demonstrate the emptiness of his rhetoric.

Congressman Eric Massa represents New York's 29th Congressional District.

Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-eric-jj-massa/bring-it-on-dick-cheney-a_b_408294.html
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