Ground Zero Islamic Community Center Non-Controversy
(warning lots of rant-y swearing NSFW)
While this young man makes his point using a whole slew of profanity, he is 100% right. I honestly can not believe we are having this debate in 2010, I mean come on! It makes a certain kind of cynical political sense, I mean the gays and abortion doesn’t seem to rile up the voters anymore, so lets see…Muslims!
The people behind this are most likely the same people that blindly parroted W’s famous phrasing “They hate us for our freedoms.” I am here to tell you people the solution for them “hating our freedoms” is not to take away those freedoms.
This is a cut and dry political tempest in a tea pot. I am proud of the mayor of new york, and the president for being clear that this shit wont fly. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, heard of them? It’s what makes America a great place to live. Do these “return America to a christian” nation people realize that dogmatic theocracies are exactly what the terrorists want to impose. The only difference is that they want their book to be the rule book, and these crazy ass Islam-o-phobes want some other magic book.
I have bad news for everyone with a magic book, its not as good at running a nation as our constitution is. Hopefully after November I wont have to read about these morons anymore. I also hope that Americans are smart enough to pull their collective heads out of their collective ass and realize that they are being very un-American by trying to ban people from builing their place of worship where they choose.
Cape Wind Wins Yet Another Legal Battle, Gets Go Ahead For Construction
In a long line of victories Cape Wind has won yet another legal battle. Just build the damn thing already, its been almost ten years and a million hearings and legal battles, all of which have favored Cape Wind, this has got to be the silliest example in history of a couple rich folks fighting what almost EVERYONE agrees is a great project.
———-
A divided Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-2 this morning that the state has the power to overrule community opposition and grant the controversial Cape Wind project a suite of local permits it needs to start construction.
The long-awaited decision comes as the project developers enter the homestretch to build 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound within the year. If the court had sided with opponents of the project, it could have held up the project indefinitely or killed it outright because many permits have to come from communities or agencies that oppose the project.
“We affirm the decision of the siting board and conclude that the challenged regulation is valid,” Justice Margot Botsford wrote for the four-justice majority.
The Politics Of Oil Chemistry
Very nice talk, well worth a watch. The politics and chemistry of oil and why this summer is so important.
The Right Wants Unlimited Anonymous Spending On Campaigns, Or To Put It Another Way Republicans Proudly Proclaim They Are Already Bought And Paid For
If you are on the right or the left, unlimited anonymous spending on campaigns is a bad idea. Every dirty trick you think you might get away with because of this, the other side can do as well. It eventually will destroy our democracy.
Contact your senator now and tell them you are sick of unlimited anonymous spending on campaigns.
Koch Family Build Massive Climate Denial Machine
The new yorker published a great article on how one family of rich industrialists have built an empire of bad science and climate change denial.
a bad bad bad bad man
With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”
They even managed to fund a climate denial exhibit at the Smithsonian!
These people are behind the tea party, they are the ones that claim global warming is good for us, and they don’t care about humanity at all. They just want to make as much money as possible damn the consequences. There is no reason they couldn’t be using their vast wealth to create a cutting edge green and sustainable business, but instead they want to rape and pillage the earth to make a buck.
Business is not the problem, bad science and denial of facts is the problem. These rich robber barons could be sitting on top of a giant corporation that makes billions each year by producing green tech, instead they want to go about things in the dirtiest must underhanded way.
Despicable. The Koch family name should be synonymous with “dirty rotten liar.”
RSS XML Feed
