Wednesday Mashup (4/22/09)

(And I also posted here.)

I thought this was a nice post from Bill in Portland, Maine at The Daily Kos concerning Earth Day, particularly the following (in the category of "things he's never seen" - meant to emphasize that)…

A bison throw a cigarette butt out a car window
A flock of geese rip the top off a mountain
A seal cause an oil spill
A hippo drive a Hummer off a dealer's lot
A lemur leave the faucet dripping
A raccoon go out for the evening and leave all the lights in the house on
A bobcat fight legislation to lower smokestack emissions
A songbird sing "Drill Baby, Drill"
A panda dump raw sewage into a river
A pride of lions so dependent on oil that they're willing to wage war over it
A slug (the real kind, not the George Will kind) claim that our biggest worry is global cooling
A gorilla fail to keep its tires properly inflated
A salmon pollute a stream with mercury
An elephant claim that his God says it's okay to pillage the world's natural resources willy-nilly because pachyderms are the "chosen ones"
A lizard mock public transportation
A penguin claim that the melting polar ice caps are no big deal
A crocodile think up new ways to go overboard on plastic packaging for portable electronics
A Yangtze River dolphin (doesn't) do much of anything lately

I would only add that I’ve never seen a polar bear learn to surf because Repug House Rep Joe Barton of Texas said that humans should “get shade” in response to global warming (here).

I never expected that I would give Dem U.S. House Rep Rob Andrews of New Jersey credit for much of anything given his failed primary challenge to Frank Lautenberg last year, but I have to give him kudos for offering to help Philadelphia Newspapers as they investigate alleged illegal taping of phone calls by institutions lending them money (as E&P tells us here, “Philadelphia Media Holdings Chief Brian Tierney express(ed) his dismay that senior lenders to the company allegedly taped calls to executives without their knowledge.”)

Maybe this is nothing more than craven political opportunism, but for whatever reason, Andrews is doing the right thing, particularly commendable since the paper was hard on him (justly so) for flip-flopping on the question of whether or not Andrews would give up his house seat to “primary” Lautenberg (he claimed he would, but he later reneged and was re-elected).

Also, I really don’t have anything to add here, but I just want to publicize this story of Chinese tire dumping into this country and the subsequent loss of jobs; good for the USW for standing up…

Leo W. Gerard, USW international president, declared: “American workers are struggling to make it through the worst economic crisis in 80 years. Our tire industry is collapsing under the weight of 46 million Chinese tires entering our shrinking market annually.”

He said, “We are aggressively using America’s trade remedy laws to help workers and their employers combat an import surge from a country not playing by the rules. Section 421 is a tool to redress Chinese import surges that gets us through the current economic crisis and preserves a part of America’s industrial base.”

The petition filed by the USW on behalf of its members employed in the U.S. tire industry was made under Section 421 of the Trade Act of 1974. Documents submitted in the case show a huge surge of passenger car and light truck tire imports from China during 2004-08.

The USW represents about 15,000 tire workers employed at 13 plants in nine states, which accounts for nearly half of the industry’s production capacity in 2008. The domestic tire industry consists of ten producers with 27 plants in 15 states.

The consumer tire-producing states include: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Thanks once more to our “friends” in China, where the motto is “be happy – or else we’ll liquidate our debt holdings in your currency and watch your economy tank once and for all” (another testimony to the eternal stupidity of our politicians that allowed this circumstance to evolve over time).

Also (again), concerning this story of Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao complaining about the eventual closure of Guantanamo (another case of somebody being “late to the party” when it comes to fulfilling a promise Obama made during the campaign), the AP account by Andrew O. Selsky provides the point of view of a group called Military Families United, which opposes the closure and also opposed the release of Binyam Mohammed (more here, and a related post is here).

I realize that this group has every right to advocate as it sees fit, but I guess it would have been too much trouble for Selsky to reference a story like this one, which states as follows (from last December)…

Two dozen family members of Sept. 11 victims signed a letter Wednesday saying they don't believe in the fairness of the military trials of five men charged with orchestrating the terrorist attacks, and some suggested their opinions cost them attendance at the proceedings.

While the family members who attended this week's proceedings at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba expressed support for the tribunals, they also said "that many of us do not believe these military commissions to be fair, in accordance with American values, or capable of achieving the justice that 9/11 family members and all Americans deserve," according to the letter released by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Robin Theurkauf, whose husband was killed at the World Trade Center, said she wanted to attend the proceedings but was denied a spot in a lottery for family members.

"I testified for the defense in the (Zacarias) Moussaoui trial," Theurkauf said, referring to the convicted Sept. 11 conspirator. "I think I was skipped over because of that."

This is the only polling data I’ve been able to find on closing Guantanamo, by the way; not too surprising that it is supported by a majority of Dems but opposed by a majority of Repugs, and McConnell wouldn’t be who he is if he didn’t know how to exploit that difference with “oooga booga!” scare tactics, conjuring images of terrorists transferred from GITMO to the mainland where they can wreak alleged untold havoc. It just means that Obama are AG Eric Holder are going to have to work harder making their case for what to do with these people after the facility closes.

I had to admit that I got a kick out of this story…

As (Secretary of State Hillary) Clinton made her first appearance before Congress as the nation's top diplomat, California Republican Dana Rohrbacher asked if the administration planned to heed Cheney's call to release documents showing information gained as a result of the Bush administration's aggressive interrogation techniques.

"Well, it won't surprise you that I don't consider him to be a particularly reliable source of information," Clinton said, to laughter from many in the committee room.

Rohrbacher quickly hit back, saying, "Dick Cheney has asked for specific documents to be unclassified. We are not asking for your opinion of Dick Cheney. … If you want to maintain your credibility with us, what is your opinion on the release of those documents?"

Clinton ultimately did not answer the question, saying, "I believe we ought to get to the bottom of this entire matter. I think it's in the best interest of our country, and that is what the president believes, and that is why he has taken the actions he has."

“If you want to maintain your credibility with us”..???

Screw you, Rohrbacher; I didn’t think much of your act on “Real Time” all those months ago, and I think even less of it now (and by the way, I’ve seen his name spelled “Rohrbacher” and “Rohrabacher” all over the place…nice for some consistency on that).

Yeah, Dana, way to support the Afghan groups that eventually became the Taliban and forces loyal to bin Laden (and of course, you blamed Hillary’s husband for 9/11…creep). Also, like most Repugs, he wouldn’t be a “made man” unless he had ties of a sort to a certain Jack Abramoff, all noted here.

Oh, and on the matter of encouraging Obama to release documents concerning “aggressive interrogation techniques”…well, I guess Holy Joe didn’t get the memo.

Update 4/23/09: Regarding Lieberman (tee hee hee)...

And speaking of the Clintons, I have to admit that I was a bit nonplussed, at the very least, to hear that “The Big Dog” had agreed to appear on the same stage with His Fraudulency, as noted here (h/t Think Progress).

And by the way, get a load of some of the big-time wankery here from a member of the Great White North’s pundit class (didn’t know they had one)…

Although both presidents demonstrated an ability to compromise in the interests of bipartisan consensus — Mr. Clinton toughened welfare rules while Mr. Bush expanded public health care and funding for education — their opponents saw them only as the personifications of the evil of the other side.

So Mr. Clinton was impeached for abasing his office after lying about an affair with an intern.

And the wild-eyed are still trying to get Mr. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity for their handling of the war on terror.

The meter doesn't exist to measure the time and energy that has been wasted on all of this.

Oh really? It might be news to the author, then, that the whole “divide and conquer,” “politics of personal destruction” thing was raised to a fine art by the Repugs (beginning with Dick Nixon and his “southern strategy” in the late ‘60s), to the point where it framed our politics for the last 30 years (with the Democrats getting wise to all of this only fairly recently, maybe for the last 4-5 years only). So if all of this has been “wasted time” (partly true, I’ll admit), the Repugs have wasted more than the Dems.

Also, I think it’s been chronicled pretty thoroughly here and elsewhere that Number 43, if anything, cut funding for health care and education more than anything else (John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail doesn’t cite his source for that claim, and I have no intention of doing his due diligence for him). And I’ll grant you that the poll cited here skews to the left a bit; it claims that 90 percent favored an investigation into the Bushco regime for war crimes, but I can’t determine Air America’s methodology – still, though, that’s a hell of a lot of “wild-eyed” people.

And for good measure, Ibbitson also conjures up some faux equivalency between Drudge and The Huffington Post (and Fix Noise and MSNBC) which tells me that he really doesn’t know a whole hell of a lot about progressive politics in this country.

Still, though, in my naïveté, I have to wonder what it will take for Dubya to be ostracized by his peers as the pariah that he truly is for unsuccessfully waging two wars, allowing our planet to continue boiling, shredding our Constitution and very nearly wrecking our economy.

Did Bill think that, just because his little soiree with President Brainless is due to take place beyond our border, we wouldn’t be paying attention?

Update: It took a little while for me to do the "QA" I usually do to these posts for this one in particular, but I think I fixed the messed up links and the missing transition in the first item.