Month: March 2014

What about the teen sex cults?

by digby

Ian Millhiser has the depressing rundown on the anti-birth controlSupreme Court arguments from this morning:

Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks gay people are fabulous. All three of the Supreme Court’s most important gay rights decisions were written by Justice Kennedy. So advocates for birth control had a simple task today: convince Kennedy that allowing religious employers to exempt themselves from a federal law expanding birth control access would lead to all kinds of horrible consequences in future cases — including potentially allowing religious business owners to discriminate against gay people.

Kennedy, however, also hates abortion. Although Kennedy cast the key vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey upholding what he called the “essential holding of Roe v. Wade,” he’s left no doubt that he cast that vote very grudgingly. Casey significantly rolled back the constitutional right to choose an abortion. And Kennedy hasn’t cast a single pro-choice vote in an abortion case in the last 22 years.

So Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the two companies claiming that they should be exempt from the birth control rules had an ace in their pocket as well. Their path to victory involved convincing Kennedy that their cases are really about abortion — and it looks like Kennedy convinced himself of that point on his own.

I sure hope that Justice Kennedy doesn’t masturbate. If he does, he’s a mass murderer. Of his own potential children.

And apparently,   gay rights are more mainstream now than women’s rights. I guess because men can be gay? Anyway, click over and read the whole analysis at Think Progress. 

I remember when I first started writing about the assault on birth control years ago and it seemed nuts to think it could ever get this far.  But these people have been laying the ground work for a long time with ever more lurid warnings about women turning into sluts if they have access to birth control. And that is what this is really all about.

The following post was about the morning after pill, which even I thought would have to be the end of it.  But they took the first opportunity they had to go after regular monthly birth control under this bogus religious exemption. Believe me, they will not stop with that:

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Teen Sex Cults


by digby

We’ve discussed the strange phenomenon of wingnut fascination with bestiality, specifically sex with dogs. And recently we’ve been treated to the ick inducing sight of seven year old girls dressing up in ball gowns and pledging to their fathers to remain “sexually pure” until daddy turns them over to their husbands. 


Via  Kos, here’s another peek into the strange, disturbed world of rightwing moralist sexual imagination: teen sex cults. It has even infiltrated the hallowed halls of science at the FDA:

Attorneys for a New York women’s group plan to grill Food and Drug Administration officials this week about their failure to decide whether an emergency contraceptive pill called Plan B may be sold without a prescription.

Former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy operations commissioner, and Dr. Steven Galson, director of the FDA’s drug evaluation center, are to testify in court-ordered depositions to be taken by attorneys for the Manhattan-based Center for Reproductive Rights Wednesday through Friday in Washington, D.C., and Rockville, Md.

The women’s group seeks to force approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.

Simon Heller, one of the attorneys, plans to quiz Woodcock on a March 23, 2004, staff memo suggesting she was concerned Plan B might lead to teenage promiscuity.

The FDA is only supposed to consider the safety and efficacy of drugs.

In the memo released by the FDA, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: “As an example, she [Woodcock] stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”

Rosebraugh indicated he found no reason to bar nonprescription sales of Plan B.

“This was the level of scientific discourse,” Heller said in an interview, referring to concerns attributed to Woodcock. “I find it very odd that these people who are supposed to be responsible scientists and doctors are making up wacky reasons.”

Where do they come up with this stuff? I have to assume that Woodcock’s dark fantasies came from her own twisted imagination because I haven’t been able to find any other references to Plan B and teen-age sex cults. However, that’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of ludicrous paranoia out there about Plan B. The biggest purveyor of lies on this subject appears to be the Concerned Women For America (a cult if I’ve ever seen one) that writes volumes of misinformation and misleading blather about everything, but particularly sex. 


Here are just a few of their lurid Plan B “talking points”:

Rather than reducing the core problem of young people engaging in sexual activity (which carries life-long consequences), it encourages sexual activity. An official survey revealed that MAP use among teenage girls in the United Kingdom more than doubled since it became available in pharmacies, increasing from one in 12 teen-agers to one in five. Among them were girls as young as 12. A girl who said she was 10 years old told the pharmacist “she had already used it four times.”
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Even morning-after pill proponents agree that sexually active girls are likely victims of sexual abuse, and interaction with medical professionals is an important defense.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reported: “The younger women are when they first have intercourse the more likely they are to have had unwanted or nonvoluntary first sex, seven in 10 of those who had sex before age 13, for example.”

…The rush to choose “pregnancy outcome options” may preempt efforts to rule out sexual abuse. “Sexual abuse is a common antecedent of adolescent pregnancy, with up to 66% of pregnant teens reporting histories of abuse…. Pregnancy may also be a sign of ongoing sexual abuse…. Boyer and Fine found that of 535 young women who were pregnant, 44% had been raped, of whom 11% became pregnant as a result of the rape. One half of these young women with rape histories were raped more than once.”

It should be noted that this same group enthusiastically endorsed the South Dakota abortion law that offers no exemption for rape or incest. 
[…]
This is more of that “taking away women’s autonomy is really giving them “freedom” gibberish. They might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense it makes.


They believe that the morning after pill is an abortion. But they would be against it even if it weren’t because it encourages promiscuity. Or it allows men to exploit women. Or it’s unsafe. Or it will give women emotional problems. Or physical problems because women who have abortions are more likely to die than women who don’t. Except they aren’t. But no matter, even if that isn’t true, there are always a thousand reasons why women should not be allowed to fuck. Pick one and run with it. 

“The morning-after pill is a pedophile’s best friend,” Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a public policy organization, said in a statement after learning of Galson’s decision. “Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines.”Pedophiles and sex-machines. Hoo baby. But hey, if it’s fantasies of teen sex cults that rev these gruesome, obsessive imaginations, have at it. It would be nice if the scientists at the FDA got their jollies elsewhere, however. This is important. 

Oh, and how’s all that “common ground” stuff working out for us?

“[T]hese foreign policy Titans put their heads together and produced . . . a mouse.”

by digby

Someone sent this Friedman column from 1998 in an email and it seems like something I should share with all of you.

May 2, 1998

His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn’t matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn’t see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.

But there is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990’s. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992 — the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. Thanks to Western resolve and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet Empire collapsed without a shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics and leading to unprecedented arms control agreements with the U.S.

And what was America’s response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia’s borders.

Yes, tell your children, and your children’s children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman, and you too were present at the creation of the post-cold-war order, when these foreign policy Titans put their heads together and produced . . . a mouse.

We are in the age of midgets. The only good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age — one of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage.

As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ”This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

Oh what did he know?

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“It’s about people”

by digby

The new AFP ad gets the fact checking treatment and comes up short as they always do. You can see why:

“People don’t like political ads. I don’t like them either. But health care isn’t about politics. It’s about people. And millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less.”

Click the link if you need to know why that’s total BS.

Here’s the thing: most people aren’t dealing with Obamacare so they don’t have a clue if this is true or not. They either have insurance through their employer or the government. And while I’m sure that political junkies will be reading the fact-checker columns religiously, I seriously doubt that most people will know that this ad is lying.

I just wonder when somebody on the left is going to counter these things with some stories of their own. You know they’re out there — people who were denied coverage or couldn’t afford insurance. Even the millions of boring ones like mine, which just say “I’m saving money and got a better plan.” Somebody needs to tell those stories.

I have a little moustache of understanding story to tell about being in the grocery store chatting amiably about the price of vegetables with some guy who then launched into a tirade about Obamacare and how it makes no sense to cover pre-existing conditions because then nobody will ever buy insurance until they get sick. I didn’t want to get into it with him there in the store so I just said that he’s mistaken about how the law works and that the vast majority of people will now have insurance so that when they get sick they’ll already be covered. He claimed that people can’t afford to buy insurance anymore because it’s so expensive. And that people he knows had their insurance cancelled and they can’t get anything to replace it. And on, and on. He had an answer for everything, all of from listening to hate radio, hearing these commercials and watching Fox News.

Granted, he was obviously a right wing fanatic and one could never expect to convince him that the plan which he was determined to hate was actually good. But I think there are a lot of people out there who may be less inclined to assume the worst but who aren’t hearing anything different. (Remember, most people aren’t insured by the private market.) Unless someone tells them the stories of those who have had their lives improved, many of our fellow Americans are only going to hear the lies and distortions the Kochs are spending millions to disseminate all over the country.

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Land of the free

by digby

In case you were wondering, this man was committing a terrible crime:

Outrage has ignited over a helmet-cam video of officers fatally confronting a homeless man at his primitive campsite in the foothills. Video shows the man standing by his meager possessions, surrounded by rifle-toting officers who were citing him for illegally camping without government permission. Officers ultimately tossed a concussion grenade in his face, sicced an attack dog on him, and shot him to death with a flurry of gunfire.

Evidently, at one point he waved around a couple of knives as he stood up there on the hillside so the officers felt their lives were in danger:

Police Chief Gorden Eden released video of the incident during a Friday afternoon news conference. Much of it comes from an officer’s helmet camera. The shooting was justified, Eden said, because Boyd, holding knives, threatened an officer and the use of “less-than-lethal” devices hadn’t worked, he said.

“Do I believe it was a justified shooting? Yes,” Eden told reporters. “If you follow case law … there was a directed threat to an officer.” Boyd had a criminal history going back almost 20 years, Eden said. He had spent time in both the Doña Ana and Bernalillo county jails, the chief said. In one incident, Eden said, Boyd punched and broke an officer’s nose as she talked to him in an Albuquerque library.

“All of his charges have been violent,” Eden told reporters. Officers arriving on scene were told that Boyd had an “extensive history” of violence against police officers, that he was possibly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and that he was a transient.

What choice did they have, really? This mentally ill man was sleeping on public land, an obvious emergency and threat to public safety. Killing him was obviously the only way they could have handled it. Plus, they have better things to do.

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Coupla Huskies talking it out

by digby

I don’t know exactly what they’re saying but they’re definitely saying something:

h/t to @Chicago_Todd

On the public voices of women

by digby

Word to the wise fellas, don’t ever talk to a woman you like and respect this way unless you want her to become really, really angry:

Mike just kept going and good for her.  The childish behavior of her co-host however, betrays the attitude one sees far too often among certain men who “don’t want to hear it.”

This little contretemps reminded me of this wonderfully illuminating talk on the public voice of women by Mary Beard, transcribed by the LRB:

I want to start very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public. I’m thinking of a moment immortalised at the start of the Odyssey. We tend now to think of the Odyssey as the story of Odysseus and the adventures and scrapes he had returning home after the Trojan War – while for decades Penelope loyally waited for him, fending off the suitors who were pressing for her hand.​1 But the Odyssey is just as much the story of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope; the story of his growing up; how over the course of the poem he matures from boy to man. The process starts in the first book with Penelope coming down from her private quarters into the great hall, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he’s singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young Telemachus intervenes: ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.’ And off she goes, back upstairs.​

There is something faintly ridiculous about this wet-behind-the-ears lad shutting up the savvy, middle-aged Penelope. But it’s a nice demonstration that right where written evidence for Western culture starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere; more than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species.

I commented recently to someone on twitter that the one thing that stood out to me in the days when people did not know that I was a woman, was the fact that I was automatically granted authority. I had never experienced that in my life and it was quite glorious while it lasted.

Perhaps many of you men are rolling your eyes about now. But it’s really worth reading the whole piece (or listening to the talk if that’s easier) to understand just how disempowering this sort of interchange really is — and how depressingly fundamental to Western culture.

There was one part of her that particularly stood out to me as I watch the current discourse on social media and women’s place in it. It is wrong to say that we are not allowed to speak at all.  We have, in fact, been graciously granted authority in one particular area.:

Looking at modern traditions of oratory more generally, we also find that same single area of licence for women to talk publicly, in support of their own sectional interests, or to parade their victimhood. If you search out the women’s contributions included in those curious compendia, called ‘one hundred great speeches of history’ and the like, you’ll find that most of the female highlights from Emmeline Pankhurst to Hillary Clinton’s address to the UN conference on women in Beijing are about the lot of women. So too is probably the most popularly anthologised example of female oratory of all, the 1851 ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech of Sojourner Truth, ex-slave, abolitionist and American campaigner for women’s rights. ‘And ain’t I a woman?’ she is supposed to have said. ‘I have borne 13 chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman …’​12 I should say that influential as these words have been, they are only slightly less mythical than Elizabeth’s at Tilbury. The authorised version was written up a decade or so after Sojourner Truth said whatever she said – and that is when the now famous refrain, which she certainly did not say, was inserted, while at the same time her words as a whole were translated into a Southern drawl, to match the abolitionist message, even though she came from the North and had been brought up speaking Dutch. I’m not saying that women’s voices raised in support of women’s causes weren’t important, but it remains the case that women’s public speech has for centuries been ‘niched’ into that area.

Plus ça change …


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Why are we as taxpayers paying to teach creationism to our kids?

by David Atkins

This is infuriating:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies.

Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can — and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many of these faith-based schools go beyond teaching the biblical story of the six days of creation as literal fact. Their course materials nurture disdain of the secular world, distrust of momentous discoveries and hostility toward mainstream scientists. They often distort basic facts about the scientific method — teaching, for instance, that theories such as evolution are by definition highly speculative because they haven’t been elevated to the status of “scientific law.”

And this approach isn’t confined to high school biology class; it is typically threaded through all grades and all subjects.

One set of books popular in Christian schools calls evolution “a wicked and vain philosophy.” Another derides “modern math theorists” who fail to view mathematics as absolute laws ordained by God. The publisher notes that its textbooks shun “modern” breakthroughs — even those, like set theory, developed back in the 19th century. Math teachers often set aside time each week — even in geometry and algebra — to explore numbers in the Bible. Students learn vocabulary with sentences like, “Many scientists today are Creationists.”

Yes, it’s an attack on education and the public sector. It’s an insult to science. It’s an insult to the taxpaying public.

But most of all, it’s a form of child abuse. Both the neoliberal left and the entire right side of the political aisle seem either resigned or eager to transition to a world where anyone who doesn’t work for Silicon Valley or Wall Street is doomed to a life of penury. If millions of kids are being taught that real science is an evil vanity, the very conservatives who are pushing this sort of instruction are also condemning these kids to a life of poverty.

But maybe that’s also the point. A weak labor market and high unemployment rates are bad for business generally, but good for Wall Street.

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Inherit the superstition

by digby

When I was a kid I thought this was all settled.  They even made movies about it:

But I guess the controversy will never completely go away:

Sunday’s episode of Cosmos was all about evolution. It closely followed the rhetorical strategy of Charles Darwin’s world-changing 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, beginning with an example of “artificial selection” by breeders (Darwin used pigeons, Cosmos used domestic dogs) to get us ready to appreciate the far vaster power of natural selection. It employed Darwin’s favorite metaphor: the “tree of life,” an analogy that helps us see how all organisms are living on different branches of the same hereditary tree. In the episode, Tyson also refuted one of the creationist’s favorite canards: the idea that complex organs, like the eye, could not have been produced through evolution.

Over at the pro-“intelligent design” Discovery Institute, they’re not happy. Senior fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode “[extrapolated] shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear’s fur to the development of the human eye.” In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the institute’s Casey Luskin accuses Tyson and Cosmos of engaging in “attempts to persuade people of both evolutionary scientific views and larger materialistic evolutionary beliefs, not just by the force of the evidence, but by rhetoric and emotion, and especially by leaving out important contrary arguments and evidence.” Luskin goes on to contend that there is something wrong with the idea of the “tree of life.” 

Tell that to the scientists involved in the Open Tree of Life project, which plans to produce “the first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 1.8 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities.” Precisely how to reconstruct every last evolutionary relationship may still be an open scientific question, but the idea of common ancestry, the core of evolution (represented conceptually by a tree of life), is not.

Sigh … They are more sophisticated in their sophistry these days.  But it’s the same old same old.

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“Who is going to love and take care of Alaska?”

by digby

Check out this beautiful piece by Shanny Moore about the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the formerly pristine Prince William sound. It’s heartbreaking. And the conclusion is just maddening:

Our delegation to Washington DC could have introduced a law over the last 20 years to force Exxon to pick up their bar tab and pay for their crime. They were woefully silent. Instead, they debated things like gay marriage, vaginal rights, Bill Clinton’s impeachment over extra-presidential activities, steroids in baseball, and Terry Schiavo. Meanwhile, dozens of Alaskans, displaced from their identity, committed suicide while waiting for justice.

You know why? Oil rules. It’s bigger than governments. For all the nut-jobs hoarding Mormon food and bullets talking about the “New World Order”? It’s here. It’s called Big Oil. It’s why countries are invaded, wars are waged and media pretends it isn’t happening.

When Sarah Palin was asked by Katie Couric what Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v Wade she disagreed with, she couldn’t think of one. NOT ONE! She was a moose caught in the headlights. That didn’t work out too well for the moose or the vehicle. The Alaska fisherman lost their voice once again. Thanks, but no thanks, Sarah. Her siding with Pebble Mine was enough…the icing on the cake was the wasted chance….a chance to tell America our story…an Alaskan story…thousands sick from clean up…tens of thousands bankrupt from a dead fishery. Sarah Palin is to Alaska what Velveeta is to cheese; sadly unsatisfying and empty of nutrition. She had the national stage to plead Alaska’s case to citizens who had long forgotten the images of a once pristine Prince William Sound turned into a thick, black, rolling sea; the oiled sea otters and birds, unrecognizable seals and whales; an initially deformed and diseased herring run that became extinct-costing Cordova $100 million a year. Exxon exploited Alaska and turned our pain into their profit.

After the BP spill I was hired by the BBC to go back to Prince William Sound to report on the shape it was in. There were no birds. We skiffed for hours to an outer beach, one pounded by waves for more than two decades. I walked across the salt marsh, shovel in hand. I didn’t need a shovel. My boot prints had already filled with oil slick.

It was so close to the surface, and so was all my pain. The lies. The memories of dead birds, otters, seals, deer, bears, fish, and water. Dead Water. Dead Friends.

Alaska isn’t a sovereign state any longer. Once we were the Last Frontier and independent. Hell, you have to drive through a foreign country for days to get here. Right?

We are oil colony. It wasn’t that long ago that 10% of our legislature was indicted for taking bribes from oil companies.

A few weeks ago our governor appointed an oil man from California to serve on a board that accesses the tax burden for the Trans Alaska Pipeline. It’s a big deal to the municipalities the pipeline runs through. When things got hot the appointee pulled his own name out of the running.

Three days before the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez running aground, Governor Parnell has appointed an executive of said company from Houston, Texas to the board that decides the value of the pipeline for tax purposes. Mr. Richard Rabinow has worked for Exxon for 24 years, doesn’t live here, but is sure to give Alaska the best bang for their buck.

Is the governor fresh out of “*#^@ YOU!” cards?

The state’s willingness to do business with Exxon was like having your parents rent the basement to the guy who date raped you on prom night. Am I clear? The fact Governor Parnell wants to give them positions of power is like having said rapist adopt you. I suppose there should be no surprise. The governor was lobbyist and lawyer for big oil…I use the term “was” lightly.

Twenty Five years after the fact, Exxon has yet to pay Alaska the $92 million owed for damages. They privatized their profits and socialized the risk.

Last time I went to Prince William Sound I met a deckhand. She was asking me about how many birds there used to be. I looked at her puzzled. She was born after the Spill. Alaska is divided generationally by epic disasters. Fifty years ago was the 1964 Earthquake – a 9.2 – the largest recorded for North America. Twenty five years ago a new defining moment for our state. For those of us who had our lives changed forever, we have to remember what we lost, and tell the next gen. We say things like “Never Again”, then see drilling in our Arctic permitted. In 1989 I had a Mac Plus computer – it weighed 15 pounds and had a screen the size of a greeting card. Now I have an iPad that works wonders. The technology for computers has changed, but not for oil spill clean up. Same diapers, booms and chemical sprays. The truth is, they don’t clean up oil spills. They pay fines that have already been calculated in as the cost of doing business.

No. Exxon doesn’t do business right. They don’t make you whole. Exxon loves and takes care of Exxon, as does our governor. Who is going to love and take care of Alaska?

I wouldn’t count on politicians to do it, that’s for sure. (The Republicans not only want to end all funding for national parks, they want to drill in them. In fact, I’d guess we’re going to see an attempt to make the whole country an oil colony:

U.S. crude-oil production rose to the highest level in almost 26 years last week as imports declined, the Energy Information Administration reported.

Output increased 33,000 barrels a day in the week ended March 14, or 0.4 percent, to 8.215 million, the most since May 1988, said the EIA, the Energy Department’s statistical arm. Production has jumped 15 percent from a year earlier as a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, unlocked supplies trapped in shale formations in North America.

And I don’t know who is going to love and take care of America either …

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How the right works together to ruin everything

by digby

I had no idea how this sort of thing worked but it’s fascinating. I think I would have expected the right wing organizations to coordinate on lawsuits, but the fact that they coordinate with state government officials is a surprise. (Like I said, I know nothing of how this works so perhaps my surprise is silly and it happens all the time on all sides.)

In any case, if you thought the Hobby Lobby “religious freedom” case is just about religious freedom think again. The various participants include corporate interests whose only concern is profits:

In the world of big lawsuits, they call it “air traffic control”: One person, or organization, becomes the point person for recruiting plaintiffs, coordinating multiple legal briefs, and ensuring that everyone submits their filings on time.

And in the landmark case going before the U.S. Supreme Court this Tuesday, challenging the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act—the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases, which are being heard together—the role of air traffic controller was played by some of the nation’s most radical anti-choice and free-market groups on the political right, according to emails obtained by RH Reality Check through public records requests.

The documents consist of emails between dozens of anti-choice and free-market groups, and high-level state employees in Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, and West Virginia. They reveal that the role of air traffic control in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga litigation was played by the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based nonprofit with just over $40 million in assets, according to its most recent auditor’s report.

“My name is Anna Hayes, and I’m a legal assistant at Alliance Defending Freedom working with Matt Bowman and Greg Baylor on the HHS Mandate cases,” read one email dated August 16, 2013. The “mandate” refers to the health law’s requirement that insurance policies cover a range of primary preventive care, including contraception, without a copay. The inclusion of contraception in policies—irrespective of who pays the premiums—is at the center of the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Supreme Court cases. “Greg asked me to contact you letting you know that he will be coordinating the amicus efforts for the Conestoga Wood case.”

They are coordinating with federal officials like Ted Cruz as well.

Read the whole thing. I don’t know for a fact that the left doesn’t coordinate this efficiently across the non-profit, corporate and government sectors … but I doubt it.

Read the whole story at RH reality check

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