In 2006, Ernie Fletcher was the Republican, scandal-plagued governor of Kentucky, fighting off charges that he concocted “a scheme to illegally award state jobs to political supporters.” After a two-year probe by the state attorney general into his hiring practices, Fletcher was indicted by a “special state grand jury on three counts of criminal conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination.” Fletcher later signed an agreement with the attorney general conceding that there was “wrongdoing by his administration” in exchange for dropping all charges. But in August 2006, Rand Paul — now the GOP Senate candidate — penned an op-ed in the Kentucky Post offering a different solution. Paul said that if he were Fletcher, he’d simply pardon himself...To help Jack Conway, click here.
Update 9/16/10: I guess Paul isn't staying away far enough from that pesky media (here).
Murphy Breaks Ground on Yardley Flood Prevention Project
The Bucks County Congressman secured funding for the installation of a new system to help prevent flooding of roads and homes
(Yardley, PA) – Next time the Delaware River rises over its banks, Yardley’s storm water system will be better prepared to handle the floodwaters. Thanks to funding secured by Pennsylvania Congressman Patrick Murphy (D-8th District), construction workers broke ground Tuesday on a project to install more than a dozen much needed backflow preventers in Yardley, which will help keep water from backing up onto roads and into people’s homes.To reward our congressman’s good behavior, click here.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Murphy said. “This project creates jobs and helps prevent the costly damage we’ve had after previous floods.” He added that the project will generate construction jobs, as workers will be needed to install and maintain the backflow preventers.
“Thanks to Murphy’s efforts, Yardley will be in better shape and families will avoid a lot of the heartache that comes with seeing your home underwater,” said Bill Winslade, Yardley Borough manager.
The Congressman secured $280,000 for the project, though the National Flooding Insurance Program (NFIP) estimates that the cost of the project would be offset by the savings it incurs after a single flooding event, in terms of damage done to roads and homes. The backflow preventers will eliminate water backing up in Yardley’s storm water pipes and up through the inlets on the street.
When Murphy first entered office, he said he wanted to stop talking about flooding and start doing something about it. Since then, he has brought together Democrats and Republicans together to make flood prevention a priority.
To help residents and municipalities recover from previous floods and prepare for future ones, Murphy brought home over $3 million in FEMA grants and federal flood prevention funds, including funding for high-powered pumps that can quickly displace water from a flooded area. These projects save millions of dollars that would otherwise be spent on insurance claims and flooding repairs.
Also, in the matter of Bucks County, PA politics, kudos to our PA-31 House rep Steve Santarsiero for fighting the proposed tolling of the new bridge planned to alleviate the traffic of the existing Scudder Falls Bridge (here – to contact Steve and learn more, click here).
Update 9/16/10: More good work by Steve is noted here.
Last night politicians came to a reality that the public has known about for a long time as the Tea Party and non-establishment candidates won major "surprise" victories. The takeaway from these results is that Americans are mad and they will be heard as they cast their votes.Not sure why Schoen has upset in quotes, but there you are.
The most headline grabbing "upset" on Tuesday night was Christine O'Donnell's victory over Congressman Michael Castle in Delaware's Republican primary for Senate. Castle seemed all but assured of his place in the Senate as he drew an unknown Democratic opponent and paid little attention to an even more unknown primary challenge. Yet, with the backing of the Tea Party O'Donnell finished strong and ousted Castle, a Delaware political staple for decades.
And in the matter of last night’s Republican Delaware primary win for O’Donnell, I thought Fred Barnes of The Weakly Standard unintentionally made some good points here…
(Castle) voted against ObamaCare and is a co-sponsor of repeal legislation. He voted against the stimulus. He’s for extending all the Bush tax cuts.And the teabaggers kicked him to the curb anyway.
Too funny.
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – Rep. Maurice Hinchey told a federal hearing Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate hydraulic fracturing, the natural gas extraction process that he said has contaminated water near drilling sites around the country.Oh, that’s a good one.
"There are numerous reports of water contamination related to hydraulic fracturing in states across the country," said Hinchey, D-N.Y. "Despite the fact that EPA is, in many ways, precluded from taking regulatory action in response to these reports, I believe EPA must investigate to understand what is being done — to keep water supplies safe and secure."
The process, also known as fracking, blasts millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals, some of them carcinogens, deep into the earth to free gas from dense shale deposits. As a gas rush sweeps parts of the vast and lucrative Marcellus Shale region that underlies New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, environmentalists are concerned for the watershed that provides drinking water for 17 million people from Philadelphia to New York City.
Environmentalists fear the process, which leaves as much as 90 percent of the post-fracking water known as "produced water" deep underground, will irreversibly taint aquifers.
…
(Brad Gill of the Independent Oil and Gas Association) said "strict state regulations" for decades have governed fracking and the industry has "a stellar environmental record" to show for it.
In New York, he said, there are about 14,000 producing natural gas wells, thousands of which were begun by the fracking process. New York has not seen one case of groundwater contamination by fracking fluids, he said.
"A Hollywood actor holding a glass of cloudy water proves nothing except that fear-mongering and emotion will always trump science and logic," he said, taking aim at the recent critical TV documentary "Gasland," by Josh Fox.
Read this, you parasite, particularly the following…
In parts of Pennsylvania, shale gas drilling has been going full steam ahead for a few years now. The town of Dimock, Penn. is the example most journalists have been pointing to, and Fox goes there as well, interviewing families whose water has turned brown, but who have been told by the gas guys that it’s safe to drink. In one segment, Fox shows family after family saying, “We told them, if it’s safe to drink, then let me get you a glass and see you drink it, and they wouldn’t drink it!”And make sure you remember to find a “Hollywood actor” to blame for the brain damage, Gill (and by the way, there are no actors in “Gasland,” Hollywood or otherwise).
Then he finds the people whose water is so full of natural gas, they can light it on fire, straight from the tap. As one man nearly singes his eyebrows off with a fireball from his faucet, Fox looks at the camera in disbelief. He and the man had been almost excited about the fire–Fox had been hoping to catch it on camera and his interview subject wanted it documented as well–but that excitement soon turns to sober reality. “That’s actually sort of scary,” Fox says. “Really scary. Disgusting.”
From Pennsylvania Fox makes his way through Texas and the Barnett Shale region, stopping to interview the mayor of Dish, Texas (so named in order to get everyone in town free cable--welcome to Texas), who has been at the forefront of the fight against natural gas drilling in Texas. In nearby Fortworth, although the public has long been supportive (and employed by) the oil and gas industries, cases linking natural gas drilling to health concerns have begun to crop up, and scientists are linking off-the-charts benzene levels in the air to shale gas drilling in the region. (Benzene is a known carcinogen.)
Fox travels next to Sublette County, Colorado, which should stand as a cautionary tale to the states currently evaluating shale gas drilling. On land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, hundreds of wells have been sited, compliments of Dick Cheney, who urged the BLM to open up its lands (which are public lands, mind you) to natural gas exploration. There we see streams bubbling with natural gas, farmers complaining of their livelihoods being ruined by contaminated soil and water, and we meet legendary environmentalist and toxicity expert Dr. Theo Colborn, who explains how the combination of natural gas and fracking chemicals in the water and the air is giving people permanent brain damage.
Our intelligence community--acting on information provided by detainees interrogated by the CIA--also disrupted an al-Qaeda cell planning to repeat the destruction of 9/11 in Europe by flying airplanes into Heathrow Airport and downtown London (imagine Big Ben collapsing like the Twin Towers). They captured two terrorists sent by Khalid Sheik Mohammed to blow up high-rise apartment buildings in a major American city--including one, Jose Padilla, as he arrived in Chicago to carry out KSM's orders.I doubt anything whatsoever that I hear or read from Thiessen, but I wanted to call attention to just a few items from that excerpt.
They captured a cell of Southeast Asian terrorists--including trained pilots who had met with Osama bin Laden--recruited by KSM to fly an airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. They disrupted a plot to replicate the destruction of our embassies in East Africa by blowing up the U.S. consulate and Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan; a plot to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti in an attack that could have matched the destruction of the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing; an al-Qaeda cell that was developing anthrax for attacks in the United States; and many other plots whose details remain classified.
As noted here…
The forensic psychiatrist who examined (Padilla) says that he "does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation". José Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.Continuing here, in the matter of the Library Tower plot (with Thiessen arguing that “enhanced interrogation” methods worked in “24”-like fashion)…
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a Supreme Court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.
What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.Think Progress provides more details here on how the “enhanced interrogation” methods of our prior ruling cabal failed (Thiessen isn’t honest enough to tell you straight up that that’s what he’s talking about, but it is…the only thing more repugnant than the actual consequences of the terror attacks themselves is the exploitative, political one-upsmanship of nematodes like Thiessen in response...and more information on this subject is here).
As noted here, though, the DISCLOSE Act (currently stalled in the Senate - no surprise, I know) seeks “to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit foreign influence in Federal elections, to prohibit government contractors from making expenditures with respect to such elections, and to establish additional disclosure requirements with respect to spending in such elections, and for other purposes.”
Basically, the DISCLOSE Act originated as a response to the dreadful Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case.
Oh, and did I mention that David Bossie is president of Citizens United (an organization formerly known by this acronym, by the way)?
…
Yeah, I’d say we’re done here.
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