America’s Great Outdoors
Posted by Richard Warnick in American History, American People, Barack Obama, National Parks, National Politics, Public Lands, This Blog, Utah Politics, Wilderness on July 29, 2010
During the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, a series of commissions proposed policy reforms for public lands, waterways, and conservation. These efforts laid the groundwork for the National Park System, National Forest System, national monuments and wildlife refuges.
A half-century later, one of the most important chapters in the history of conservation in America began in 1958, when Congress decided that an intensive nationwide study should be made of outdoor recreation. The bipartisan Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) involved all levels of government and the private sector. The final report of the ORRRC in 1962 led directly to the establishment of the National Wilderness Preservation System and an array of other government programs and policies that we take for granted today.
There have been a number of outdoor commissions since, on a smaller scale. The results of these commissions have been far less influential. Last April the Obama administration started the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative (AGO) “to develop a conservation agenda worthy of the 21st century and to reconnect Americans with our great outdoors.”
AGO is coming to Salt Lake City on Tuesday for a “listening session.” Will they listen? Will they renew the federal commitment to maintaining and improving wilderness, national parks and public lands? Or will they follow a corporatist agenda?
When: Tuesday, August 3rd 10:00 AM- 1:15 PM
Where: Salt Lake City, UT: Radisson Hotel Salt Lake City Downtown, 215 West South Temple, 84101. Map.
Details: Senior leadership from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies will be present to hear your thoughts and participate in a conversation about America’s Great Outdoors.
Note: The deadline for requesting a speaking slot at this meeting has passed, but everyone is invited to submit ideas on the America’s Great Outdoors website.
Rodeo Queens and Stranger Things
Posted by Glenden Brown in American History, American People, This Blog on July 29, 2010
Ideological, economic, and social functions permeate contemporary American rodeo. The symbolic content of rodeo is embedded in an agrarian ideology rooted deeply in American culture. The dissemination and mobilization of the agrarian value system in America is credited to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s articulation of the agrarian creed nourished a belief system advocating that there is a morally virtuous quality attached to agriculture, and that the rural life is the natural and good life (see Dalecki and Coughenour 1992). Although the United States has become increasingly urbanized throughout the twentieth century, the American public continues to identi@ with and endorse fundamental agrarian principles. Several studies (e.g., Butte1 and Flinn 1975; Dalecki and Coughenour 1992; Flinn and Johnson 1974; Molnar and Wu 1989) have found that an agrarian ideology continues to be widespread among the American public.
Find the whole article here.
Rodeo is fasinating. Without a doubt, it is a subculture which plays enormous part in the American psyche. My niece is a successful rodeo queen as a result I’ve had the opportunity to watch Rodeo from the edge, from the side but also to have at least a glimpse of its inner workings. Read the rest of this entry »
A Special Message to The Utah Patrick Henry Caucus
Posted by Cliff Lyon in Carl Wimmer, Chris Buttars, Immigration, Republicans, Salt Lake City, Utah Legislature, Utah Politics, utah on July 28, 2010
So I’m driving through the Aves, when I spied this sweaty Mexican gardener wearing a dirty a Patrick Henry Caucus t-shirt. When I slammed on my brakes and backed up to check it out, he started to slunk away. It took some time to explain to him why I wanted to take his picture.
You can tell be the look on his face, he had no idea why I thought his t-shirt was so special. His English sucked. But eventually, he figured out I was a friendly, and he kindly posed for this picture.
Patrick Henry Caucus T-Shirt
I asked him why he was here. He said, “I just want to work.” I asked him if he knew Carl Wimmer. That’s when he gave me the Patrick Henry Caucus salute.
I asked him where he got the shirt. It looks pretty new. Finally, he said he found it in a trash can. I figure somebody’s wife isn’t totally in line with the hubby.
Randall Amster: From the Heart of Arizona, We Still Have a Dream
As a matter of principle Charlie Rangel Should Resign
Posted by Glenden Brown in This Blog on July 28, 2010
Rep. Charlie Rangel is facing some serious allegations of wrong-doing. My instincts tell me that at a minimum some of the allegations are true.
I don’t expect my elected representatives to be angels. We all make mistakes and some mistakes are easily forgiveable. In the case of Representative Rangel, I think he’s corrupt. It looks to me as if he’s used his office to enrich himself. That is not only an abuse of power, it is the most corrosive kind of corruption.
He should resign. If he’s exonerated, I’ll be the first person to say he deserves his seat back.
Rep. Chaffetz: Time to Bring the Troops Home
Posted by Richard Warnick in This Blog on July 27, 2010
Although the Afghanistan war supplemental passed the House on a vote of 308-114, Rep. Jason Chaffetz joined 11 other Republicans in opposing more money for escalating America’s longest war. Chaffetz told the Salt Lake Tribune, “If the reason we should stay in Afghanistan is because we are in Afghanistan then it is time to re-evaluate your position.”
Chaffetz was interviewed tonight by Chris Hayes on MSNBC.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
HAYES: There are 11 other Republicans who joined you, and that is more than in the past. Do you feel that position is gaining traction among your colleagues in the Republican caucus? What do you hear from them, and how do they respond to you when you make the argument to them?
CHAFFETZ: Well, I make the argument that this is a good conservative position, and I think a lot of them are very hesitant to be perceived as being anything but tough on the War On Terror and I’ve tried to argue, look, we have been very successful over the last nine years and it’s hardly a cut and run strategy to say, hey, it’s time to bring our troops home from Afghanistan. It’s the longest war in the history of the United States for goodness’ sake, so we’re making that argument and people like George Will and other notable conservatives are taking this viewpoint. I hope it gains traction. You can still be the tough guy but want to bring your troops home. I think they are still consistent and that is the right way to go.
The Washington Post reports:
On the eve of the vote, Chaffetz called families of the three men from his district who have died in Afghanistan since he was elected and told them he was considering opposing the funding.
“This was one of the toughest votes I’ve had in Congress,” Chaffetz said. “So I asked their opinion. And to a T, they all agreed with me.”
Utah Reps. Jim Matheson and Rob Bishop voted for the bill.
On Daily Kos, David Waldman opines:
The war continues. It gets more money than ever. And despite the promises made by everybody running everywhere for every seat in every branch of the federal government not to fund the wars through supplemental appropriations ever again, this is the second year in a row we’ve done just that. Last year perhaps didn’t “count,” since it was a supplemental for fiscal year 2009, for which the planning was done in 2008 (i.e., under the Bush administration), but there’s no doubting who’s responsible for fiscal year 2010. It is what it is.
Jobs funding in the supplemental was rejected by the Senate – with White House approval. Also, there was no timetable for military withdrawal in the legislation – not even the July 2011 beginning of a drawdown that President Obama promised last year.
UPDATE: Partisan politics at its finest: Karen Hyer, the Democrat who is challenging Rep. Chaffetz this November. tries to use the tired Karl Rove “support the troops by sending them into harm’s way for no good reason” meme.
Hyer believes the funding is necessary to continue and conclude ongoing missions.
“We should support our men in uniform who are currently in harm’s way,” she said.
More info:
The Salt Lake Tribune: Chaffetz bucks GOP, opposes Afghan war funding
The Washington Post: Freshman lawmaker Jason Chaffetz goes against Republican grain on Afghan war
FDL: Some Democrats Breaking with President on War Supplemental, But Not Enough
Ryan Jaroncyk: President Obama breaks emergency war spending pledge
Bush’s ‘Ownership Society’ – Wiping Out the Middle Class
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bailout, Bush Administration, Capitalism, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, Poverty, This Blog, Unemployment on July 27, 2010
Yesterday I got my annual property tax assessment in the mail. When President Bush’s so-called “ownership society” collapsed, the value of the house I live in plunged 40 percent in one year. Now it has come back up a few thousand dollars to the market price from eight years ago.
The “ownership society” was a right-wing article of faith, but the hard reality is most Americans got owned. By the politicians, by the banks, by the corporations. I’m actually one of the lucky ones, because I don’t owe more on my house than it’s worth– and I still have a job.
From Michael Snyder, Business Insider:
22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
- 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.
- 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
- 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
- 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
- A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
- 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
- Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.
- Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
- For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to 1.
- As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
- The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
- Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
- In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
- The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
- In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
- More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
- For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
- This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
- Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.
- Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
- The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.
What are the Republicans proposing now that the “ownership society” has been exposed as a fraud? They want to raise taxes on what’s left of the middle class to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, and more corporate tax cuts.
UPDATE: On Walking Away: Is Strategic Default All That’s Left to Stressed Homeowners?
Shamanistic Nation: Biblical Literalism and Constitutional Originalism
Posted by Glenden Brown in American History, This Blog on July 27, 2010
Constitutional originalism is the political variation of biblical literalism, it is an attempt to argue that there is one meaning and only meaning to the constitution. It applies a fundamentalist thought process to the Constitution, it treats the US Constitution as a religious document and responds to it in the manner of religion, offering devotion and reverence rather than dialog and interpretation.
In his book Love’s Body (1966), American scholar and classicist Norman O. Brown offers a fascinating insight on biblical literalism:
Literalism does not get rid of the magical element in scriptural or historical interpretation. The Holy Spirit, instead of a living spirit in the present, becomes the Holy Ghost, a voice from the past enshrined in the book. The restriction of meaning to conscious meaning makes historical understanding a personal relation between the personality of the reader and the personality of the author, now dead. Spiritual understanding (geistiges Verstehen) becomes a ghostly operation, an operating with ghosts (Geisteswissenschaft). The document starts speaking for itself; the reader starts hearing voices. The subjective dimension in historical understanding is to animate the dead letter with the living reader’s blood, his “experience”; and simultaneously let the ghost of the dead author slide into, become one with, the reader’s soul. It is necromancy, or shamanism; magical identification with ancestors; instead of living spirit, to be possessed by the dead.
Literalism combines fetishism of the book with shamanism of the interpreter; science and subjectivity . . . . (page 199)
Krugman: ‘If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money’
Posted by Richard Warnick in Climate Change, Corruption, Democracy, Disaster, Energy, Environment, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, National Politics, This Blog, congress on July 26, 2010
The climate bill’s dead. Senate Democrats pulled the plug last Thursday on a bill that wasn’t even as good as the woefully inadequate House bill passed a over a year ago.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trotted out the well-worn “60 votes” excuse. Funny how we never heard about the so-called “60-vote rule” during the Bush administration, when it could have helped the country avoid a series of catastrophes and record deficits. Democrats have a big problem, because it seems inevitable that any bill capable of crossing the 60-vote threshold could be worse than doing nothing.
So we lost, and the special interests won. NYT columnist and Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman wrote the epitaph for climate legislation:
If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.
Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.
Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.
What’s next? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Several regulatory initiatives are underway, and the Obama administration has pledged to veto any legislation that attempts to suspend the EPA’s rulemaking authority.
It’s possible the United Nations could go ahead and do climate change mitigation without us.
As a way to salvage the 12-year-old Kyoto protocol, the United Nations has suggested amending its rules to require only four fifths of the countries to agree to a climate deal, effectively forcing the opposed nations to accept a cleaner earth. “It reflects a degree of desperation — and justifiable desperation — on the part of the UN,” says Mark Lynas, who advised the Maldives at the international climate summit in Copenhagen last winter.
If the amendment passes this August when countries meet in Bonn, Germany, it could prohibit rogue anti-climate-treaty states — such as the oil giant, Saudi Arabia, or major energy-using nations, such as the U.S. — from holding the treaty hostage. “We saw at Copenhagen how some countries blocked progress and we can’t allow that to happen again,” said Britain’s shadow secretary for energy and climate change Ed Miliband, according to The Guardian.
UPDATE: The Big Green Buy. The Nation’s Christian Parenti covers the need for government to step up and use its buying power to create economies of scale for energy conservation and renewable energy. The federal government is the world’s largest consumer of energy and vehicles, and the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. President Obama can make the switch by executive order, without congressional approval. For example, why isn’t the U.S. Postal Service relying on electric vehicles?
A Rare Example of Tough Reporting
Posted by Larry Bergan in 4th Estate (Media), Civil liberties Infringement, Lying, Prisons on July 25, 2010
It’s always good to see a news organization doing their jobs rather then parroting the local government’s construct of reality. In this case CBS 5 News in Arizona lives up to it’s motto, “Telling It Like It Is” in a big way by going after the governor of the state with some astounding inquiries into the nature of the high profile bill, (SB 1070), that has put Arizona and it’s governor in the national spotlight for weeks now; stepping on the constitutional rights of citizens with brown skin.
Gov. Jan Brewer has been drumming up the fear to the point that the tourism industry is getting very worried about tourist cancellations. According to CBS 5:
[Brewer] has made several statements to the national media, the validity of which CBS 5 Investigates could not confirm. The governor told one media outlet that almost all illegal immigrants are bringing drugs across the border. U.S. Border Patrol officials said that statement is false.
Brewer also said law enforcement officials have found decapitated bodies in the desert. Calls to all of Arizona’s border county medical examiners revealed no decapitated bodies have been reported to them.
It’s obvious from the video connected with this report that Gov. Brewer is not at all interested in answering questions about her statements.
Why?
There may be a very good reason to believe the law Gov. Brewer is pushing so hard for is designed to enrich a certain industry which operates in her state:
Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, holds the federal contract to house detainees in Arizona. The company bills $11 million per month. CBS 5 Investigates learned that two of Brewer’s top advisers have connections to CCA.
The prison industry has been one of the largest public works industries in the United States for decades now and as it grows, so does the prison population. A move to privatize the industry is encouraged to save money for the taxpayers, but what does it actually encourage?
Two judges in the south were recently found to have been making millions, flippantly sending young people to private corrections facilities without spending any time to review their cases and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in this insane trend which has given America the largest prison population in the world, even surpassing China.
What we are willing to do for the love of money is beyond disturbing. Do we make our society safer by creating criminals?
CBS 5 News report:
The Afghan War Diaries
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Afghanistan, American History, Military, National Politics, Taliban, This Blog, Transparency, War, War Crimes, the Internet on July 25, 2010
It is one of the biggest leaks in intelligence history, and certainly the most voluminous. The Afghanistan War’s equivalent of the Pentagon Papers has arrived, after months of anticipation. WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret military after-action reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. These are now available on WikiLeaks as “The Afghan War Diary.” Release of another 15,000 reports is pending.
According to WikiLeaks:
The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when made about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down play criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reports tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, bad behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army and Afghan authorities are also frequently described.
…This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.
WikiLeaks has also given the files to three news organizations: The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. All three are in the midst of publishing their own analyses.
UPDATE: The Guardian has a spreadsheet and map of key incidents. The White House spin can be found here.
UPDATE: House to Vote on $33 Billion War Supplemental as World Reads WikiLeaks.
UPDATE: On Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman reports that the WikiLeaks after-action reports recount 144 incidents in which coalition forces killed civilians over six years.
Other reports, stretching back to 2004, offer chilling, granular detail about the Taliban’s return to potency after the U.S. and Afghan militias routed the religious-based movement in 2001. Some of them, as the Times notes, cast serious doubt on official U.S. and NATO accounts of how insurgents prosecute the war. Apparently, the insurgents have used “heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft,” eerily reminiscent of the famous Stinger missiles that the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan provided to the mujahedeen to down Soviet helicopters. One such missile downed a Chinook over Helmand in May 2007.
UPDATE: WikiLeaks Docs Show Pakistan-Taliban Cooperation Against U.S.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald:
Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world. Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret. But that’s what our National Security State does reflexively: it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing. WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall…
UPDATE: At least 45 civilians, many women and children, were killed in a rocket attack by the NATO-led foreign force in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province last week, a spokesman for the Afghan government said on Monday.
UPDATE: Report Finds Link Between Civilian Deaths And Recruitment For Insurgency In Afghanistan
UPDATE: White House Attempts to Downplay Fallout from Wikileaks Afghan Logs. “Nothing to see here, it’s old news.” But it’s new news to most Americans, who’ve been kept in the dark about Afghanistan.
UPDATE: HuffPo headline: “WAKE THEM WHEN IT’S OVER: Major News Outlets Bored By Afghan War Leaks, ‘Not News’ That War Is Going Badly”
UPDATE: WikiLeaks Iraq Cache More Than Three Times As Big
Related One Utah posts:
‘We Were Fighting To Make It Home Alive’ (April 9, 2010)
Wikileaks Obtains Video of 2007 War Crime (April 5, 2010)
Leaked: US Rules of Engagement for Iraq (February 4, 2008)
Ed Schultz: White House Has A ‘Sissy Room’
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Activist groups, Barack Obama, Liars (politics), Liberal, National Politics on July 23, 2010
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
MSNBC’s Ed Schultz delivered a keynote speech at Netroots Nation in Las Vegas. He ripped President Obama’s White House for being afraid of Faux News and the conservative movement.
“They must have a war room at the White House… I think they’ve got a sissy room, too. We’ve got a White House that reacted to a blog story that was reported, promoted and sold on Fox News. They’re not a news organization. They’re a propaganda organization. They’re about one thing: Destroy the progressive movement, win at all costs, trash people, don’t worry about the consequences, and just hammer it home. It don’t gotta be the truth. We’ve just got to make sure we say it over and over and over again.”
More from Christina Bellantoni of TPM.
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