Charges have been filed against seven members of Greenpeace who boarded an offshore drilling support ship in a Louisiana port and painted anti-drilling slogans in crude oil on the vessel’s side on Monday afternoon.[…]
The activists were charged with unauthorized entry of “critical infrastructure” and of an inhabited dwelling, according to the Lafourche Parish sheriff’s department. Both counts carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison. The activists were released on bail early Tuesday morning. A Greenpeace representative argued that the charges were disproportionate. “It is outrageous that prosecutors would confront peaceful protesters with such a heavy hand while not a single BP executive has been charged for the devastation they have wrought on the Gulf of Mexico and the people and animals that depend on it,” Phil Radford, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. In an e-mail message to a Dow Jones reporter late Monday, Shell confirmed that its ship had been targeted and said it was “disappointed” by the tactics used by Greenpeace. A spokeswoman for the Lafourche Parish sheriff’s Office, Sgt. Lesley Hill Peters, suggested that the protesters could also face terrorism-related charges. The New Orleans Joint Terrorism Task Force “is looking into the matter,” she said.
Fergawdsake. Good to know the authorities have their priorities straight.
In the face of all the disasters in the Bush administration I used to ask myself, “what are these guys doing all day, jerking off?” But it was metaphorical. I didn’t know they were literally wanking on the job. It turns out that it wasn’t just the SEC lawyers spanking the monkey on the taxpayer’s dime, here comes news that the MMS workers were too. (Plus they were being metaphorically jerked off by the oil industry which was treating them like rock stars.)
What the hell is going on in those government offices? I worked behind a desk for 25 years and I don’t think many of my coworkers were sitting at their desks pleasuring themselves all day. (The office probably would have been a whole lot mellower at times if they were.) When did office wanking become commonplace?
Republican Senator James Inhofe has stepped up to the plate yet again for big oil, pledging a Republican filibuster against legislation offered by New Jersey’s Robert Menendez that would completely lift the $75 million liability cap currently protecting big oil companies from claims of economic damage from oil spills. Sam Stein describes the Menendez proposal:
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) is set to introduce on Tuesday afternoon a bill that would fully eliminate any cap on the amount of economic damages that oil companies would have to pay for spills they’ve caused. The New Jersey Democrat is revising an earlier version of legislation he introduced which would have raised the cap from $75 million dollars in liability to $10 billion. Now, the cap will be effectively unlimited, an aide said.
Inhofe says Republicans oppose unlimited caps because it would limit the ability of oil companies to drill for oil.
Really? Are they down to their last hundred billion?
This vote will be worth watching. It will tell the tale of whether or not the congress is feeling any heat from the people. And if they aren’t, and it goes down, it could have an electrifying effect. It’s hard to believe that the US Government will vote to let a foreign oil company off the hook for this horror show, but would it surprise you? Me neither. I suspect they will come to regret it though.
At the news that Carly Fiorina is soundly beating Tom Campbell and Chuck DeVore for the California GOP Senate nomination in the polls, here are the comments from the Public Policy Polling site:
Anonymous said… Wow! The power of a Palin endorsement! In SC and CA!
Anonymous said…
Did you poll South Carolina’s 2012 GOP contest as well? Christian Liberty said… Any polling on Boxer vs Kaus?
All three tickled my funny bone for completely different reasons. But the last one made me choke on my iced coffee.
Is The Conservative Consensus Finally Being Challenged?
by digby
I could be wrong, but I’m sensing a shift in the narrative that could finally begin to break down the conservatives’ decades-in-the-making consensus against taxation and regulation. With the bipartisan loathing for bailouts, continued economic stress, the arrogance of Wall Street and now the clear professional malpractice of the oil industry, it’s just possible that the people of the United States are getting a clue.
I have no proof that this is happening. It’s purely my instinct. And I don’t know that the malefactors of great wealth will not be able to successfully misdirect once again and declare it all a measure of government failure. But I think the convergence of all these things at the same time may actually be enough to finally make people question their assumptions a little bit.
This is not to say that Democrats have done anything to advance this. In fact, they have been complicit in keeping the current consensus in place. But this confluence of events may have created the new narrative in spite of them. It remains to be seen if they have any interest is using it to persuade the public of the necessity to enact a liberal agenda.
Update: It’s not looking good. Greg Sargent notes the change in tone in the media coverage and suggests that the Obama administration might want to table sending around all the fact sheets outlining his bold, firm actions dealing with the spill and instead use this opportunity to push for a new energy policy. Sadly they seem to be hooked on PR measures:
UPDATE, 3:24 p.m.: The White House has just announced that Obama is headed to the Gulf Coast, and in its statement, reminds us of the aggressiveness of the administration’s response:
On Friday morning, May 28, President Barack Obama will travel from Chicago to the Louisiana Gulf Coast to assess the latest efforts to counter the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Administration has mobilized one of the largest responses to a catastrophic event in history, with more than 1,200 vessels in the region and more than 22,000 people, including many of the brightest scientific minds from both the public and private sector, working around the clock to mitigate the oil’s impact.
Yes, and if Obama seized the moment to rally the public more broadly behind energy reform, it would add to the sense of an aggressive response to this crisis in particular.
The Halter-Lincoln runoff was the big news coming out of the Arkansas primaries, but there was another surprise runoff as well in AR-02. Blue America is happy to endorse one of the participants in that run-off today.
When moderate Democrat Vic Snyder decided to retire from Congress, half a dozen Democrats jumped into a race that was sure to pit one of them against crooked Karl Rove protégé, Tim Griffin, the sleaziest of the corrupt U.S. Attorneys who were appointed by Bush to turn the Justice Department into a punitive arm of the Republican Party. In the end there was a formidable group of Democrats in the race to replace Synder, including his chief of staff, David Boling; the Senate Majority Leader, Joyce Elliott; and the House Speaker, Robbie Wills. Wills, who hails from Conway in Faulkner County north of Little Rock, is way on the right-wing fringes of the Democratic Party, a corporate hack who opposed health care reform, tailor made for the Blue Dog caucus Snyder never joined.
Joyce Elliott has been a tireless and well respected advocate for ordinary working families as a member of the Arkansas House (2000-2006) and then as a member of the state Senate. She came out on top in the primary last week, despite being outspent by both Boling and Wills and despite the never ending din of “convention wisdom” that an African-American woman could never win federal office in Arkansas. In the 5-way race she drew 39.7% of the vote to Wills’ 27.8% and Boling’s 19%, the other candidates in the single digits. Closet racists in central Arkansas currently have a mantra, “She can’t win against Griffin so we have to support Wills” (who will vote like Griffin but at least wears a blue jersey).
There is no amount of “pragmatism” that would allow me to take that position based on race in any election in this country, I don’t care how “conservative” a place it is. This woman is the majority leader in the state Senate, an accomplished politician with years of experience. The idea that Democratic party operatives refuse to back such a person because she is black and therefore “can’t win” is disgraceful. This is the hardcore bigotry of low expectations.
Howie continues:
Boling has endorsed Joyce and Wills is scurrying around to find bit players to counter that devastating blow to his candidacy. Joyce was also enthusiastically endorsed by Blue Arkansas which urges its readers to help her make history:
State Senator Joyce Elliott has been a progressive leader and champion in the state legislature long before Blue Arkansas was ever around to back her up. Now she’s running to represent the people of AR-02 in Congress. No matter what position she has taken or how hard the fight was, Senator Elliott has always lead with courage, intelligence, grace, and character. She is the best choice to succeed Vic Snyder and represent AR-02 in these tough times, and we will stand with her every step of the way, no matter how tough the fight is.
Today Blue America also endorses Joyce, who will join us for a live blog session at Crooks and Liars at 2pm, PT (4pm in Little Rock). I hope you can stop by to meet her and ask her the kinds of questions you think candidates for Congress need to address. Last week when I was on the phone congratulating her for her convincing win in the first round I asked her a tough one– how she would have voted on October 3, 2008 when Bush was pushing his Wall Street bailout. I like the way she approached it:
Though I am an unabashed optimist, I am grounded in reality. The Wall Street debacle forced a clash between my worlds of reality and optimism. The indefensibility of the Wall Street debacle rendered this confluence particularly disturbing when tax payers became “forced” partners to the bail out. While I accept it was better to pull our country back from the brink of economic disaster than to let the entire system crash, I find it wholly unacceptable that transparent, stringent accountability was not a part of the equation. Handing over the Tax Payers of America credit card to “too-big-to-fail” institutions with no strings attached or with strings so loose they were totally uninhibiting was bad policy. The gravity of the economic situation was threatening, I am sure; nevertheless, it is the responsibility of Congress to conduct business in a manner that is accountable to taxpayers who pay this country’s bills, even under great pressure. While I won’t bog myself down in hindsight, I will use hindsight going forward to make sure I never cast a vote such as the “bail out” without holding institutions and/or individuals accountable.
Please consider making a contribution to Joyce’s campaign today. In fact if you do so at the Blue America ActBlue page before midnight tonight, we’ll enter you in a drawing for a rare, numbered, collectible and very beautiful print of Patti Smith, one of only six that were made. This one was signed by both Richard Aaron, the photographer, and by Patti Smith herself, who wrote on it, next to her signature, “People have the power.” Joyce reminds me of Patti, which is why I dug it out and decided to give it away today.
So the big news is that the administration is sending 1200 national guard troops to Arizona and requesting 500 million to fight the drug war on the border. Rick Sanchez just said that this shows that the Obama administration “hears what Arizona is trying to tell them.”
Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town. “We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico,” Bermudez says emphatically. “You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America.”FBI Uniform Crime Reports and statistics provided by police agencies, in fact, show that the crime rates in Nogales, Douglas, Yuma and other Arizona border towns have remained essentially flat for the past decade, even as drug-related violence has spiraled out of control on the other side of the international line. Statewide, rates of violent crime also are down. While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns. In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults dropped by one-third. No one has been murdered in two years. Bermudez said people unfamiliar with the border may be confused because Nogales, Sonora, has become notorious for kidnappings, shootouts and beheadings. With 500 Border Patrol agents and countless other law officers swarming the Arizona side, he said, smugglers pass through as quickly and furtively as possible. “Everywhere you turn, there’s some kind of law enforcement looking at you,” Bermudez said. “Per capita, we probably have the highest amount of any city in the United States.” In Yuma, police spokesman Sgt. Clint Norred said he cannot recall any significant cartel violence in the past several years. Departmental crime records show the amount of bloodshed has remained stable despite a substantial population increase.[…] “The violence is on the increase,” McCain told The Arizona Republic. “The president of Mexico has said that it’s a struggle for the existence of the government of Mexico.” Congressional members, including Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and John Shadegg, R-Ariz., sent President Barack Obama a letter asking that National Guard soldiers be sent to the border because “violence in the vicinity of the U.S. Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate.” And last month, as she signed Arizona’s tough new law cracking down on illegal immigrants, Gov. Jan Brewer also called for National Guard troops. The law makes it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally and requires authorities to check documents of people they reasonably suspect to be illegal. Brewer said she signed it to solve what she said is an Arizona “crisis” caused by “border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration.” Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said there always has been crime associated with smuggling in southern Arizona, but today’s rhetoric does not seem to jibe with reality. “This is a media-created event,” Dupnik said. “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.” Even Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, among the most strident critics of federal enforcement, concedes that notions of cartel mayhem are exaggerated. “We’re not seeing the multiple killings, beheadings and shootouts that are going on on the other side,” he said. In fact, according to the Border Patrol, Krentz is the only American murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant in at least a decade within the agency’s Tucson sector, the busiest smuggling route among the Border Patrol’s nine coverage regions along the U.S.-Mexican border. Still, Dever said, the slaying proved useful to southern Arizonans who are sick of smugglers and immigrants tramping through their lands.[…] While the nation’s illegal-immigrant population doubled from 1994 to 2004, according to federal records, the violent-crime rate declined 35 percent. More recently, Arizona’s violent-crime rate dropped from 512 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 447 incidents in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security last month, Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, noted that Arizona now has more than 6,000 federal law-enforcement agents, with the majority of them employed by the Border Patrol. That represents nearly 10 agents for every mile of international line between Arizona and Sonora. Border Patrol presence has been backed by increases in counter-smuggling technology and intelligence, the establishment of permanent highway checkpoints and a dramatic increase in customs inspectors at U.S. ports. “The border is as secure now as it has ever been,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate panel last week. Given that level of security, Bermudez and others say, it is no wonder that cartel operatives pass through border communities as quickly as possible, avoiding conflicts and attention. In fact, violent-crime data suggest that violence from Mexico leapfrogs the border to smuggling hubs and destinations, where cartel members do take part in murders, home invasions and kidnappings. In Phoenix and Tucson, cartel-related violence is hardly new. In 1996, for example, Valley law-enforcement agents estimated that 40 percent of all homicides in Maricopa County were a result of conflicts involving Mexican narcotics organizations, mostly from Sinaloa state. A decade later, the Attorney General’s Office exposed a $2 billion human-smuggling business based in metro Phoenix, where criminals often assaulted illegal aliens while holding them for payment of smuggling fees. More recently, cartel-related home invasions and abductions put Phoenix among the world leaders in kidnappings.During a national border security expo in Phoenix last week, David Aguilar, acting deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection, said policy makers and the public need to understand that the border is not a fence or a line in the dirt but a broad and complex corridor. “It is,” Aguilar explained, “a third country that joins Mexico and the United States.” He emphasized that the cartels operate throughout Mexico and the United States, and he noted that those who think of border security in terms of a “juridical line” really don’t understand the dynamics. Aguilar said that Juarez, Mexico, is widely regarded as the “deadliest city in the world” because of an estimated 5,000 murders in recent years. Yet right across the border, El Paso, Texas, is listed among the safest towns in America. A review of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports suggests that Arizona’s border towns share El Paso’s good fortune. Douglas and Nogales are about the same size as Florence but have significantly lower violent-crime rates. Likewise, Yuma has a population greater than Avondale’s but a lower rate of violent offenses. In Nogales, Ariz., residents seem bemused and annoyed by their town’s perilous reputation. Yes, they sometimes hear the gunfire across the border. No, they don’t feel safe visiting the sister city across the line. But with cops and federal agents everywhere, they see no danger on their streets. “There’s no violence here,” said Francisco Hernandez, 31, who works in a sign shop and lives on a ranch along the border. “It doesn’t drain over, like people are saying.” Leo Federico, 61, a retired teacher, said he has been amazed to hear members of Congress call for National Guard troops in the area. “That’s politics,” he said, shrugging. “It’s all about votes. . . . We have plenty of law enforcement.”
Mean Old Man McCain says we need 6,000 troops on the border, so I’m guessing President Goldilocks will say his “compromise” on this is “just right.” But hey, ratcheting up xenophobia is so good for everyone right now, why not just pretend there’s a huge problem that doesn’t really exist? We don’t have enough real one,s apparently. After all, there are some Democrats who apparently think they need to show how much they hate Mexicans in order to win, so it’s all good.
(Oh, and remember that while there’s a huge “appetite” for expensive, stupid bullshit like this, there’s none for extending unemployment benefits to the lazy bums who want to live like kings on 250 bucks a week from government rather than get a non-existent job.)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted the Obama administration Tuesday over a color brochure promoting the benefits of the new health care law that is being mailed to Medicare recipients. The Kentucky Republican held up a copy of the four-page pamphlet from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services while delivering his morning floor remarks. He referred to the mailer as “nothing short of government propaganda paid for by the taxpayer.” McConnell charged the administration with hypocrisy given that it previously ordered private insurance companies to refrain from sending policyholders information that prompted skepticism of the new health care law. “Just yesterday, I came across a recent flier from the Department Health and Human Services that does the very thing the administration didn’t want private companies to do,” McConnell said, just two hours before President Barack Obama was scheduled to join Senate Republicans for lunch. “So this is a complete outrage, and it’s precisely the kind of thing Americans are so angry about at the moment.”
Sixteen years ago, House Republicans put together the “Contract With America” based on polls and focus groups. This year, House GOP leaders are launching the “America Speaking Out” project, in the hopes of crafting a new “contract” based on public feedback and interactive social media. The biggest difference, however, is that this time, American taxpayers are being asked to finance the partisan initiative. Republican officials will kick off the project with an event in D.C. this morning, and it’s been described, accurately, as an initiative intended to help the GOP craft “a set of policy items that Republicans would pursue if they won back control of the House in November.” When asked about this yesterday, GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.) was vague about financing. “‘America Speaking Out’ is not a project of the political” campaign arm, Pence said, reluctant to go into further detail. Now we know why. Republicans are claiming that the project will be kept separate from their campaign committees, and can therefore be financed by taxpayers.
Sen. Scott Brown will vote against repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ when it comes up for a vote Thursday in the Senate Armed Services Committee, dealing a blow to gay rights advocates who were hoping the freshman Republican would support efforts to permit gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, The Globe’s Political Intelligence blog has learned. Brown’s highly anticipated decision, relayed minutes ago by his office, comes after President Obama and Democratic leaders struck a deal Monday night to overcome Pentagon resistance to changing the law before a top level review of how to implement a new policy is completed by Dec. 1. The deal, outlined in a letter to Congress from the White House Office of Management and Budget, stipulates that any congressional repeal would not go into effect until the Pentagon review is completed.
So, you know, it makes no sense. But whatever. Scott Brown has to show his teabag bonafides (something with which he has some very special professional experience) so he’s going to vote against the compromise. What a putz.
This compromise is welcome but it is far from settled and nobody should be sanguine until it’s done. You can get information here about how to get .involved Brown may be out but he isn’t the whole story.
Webster Hall, NYC.