Scene from Brooks Range in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Ben Adler at Grist writes
Obama ignores Obama on climate change. An excerpt:
President Obama is once again contradicting himself on climate change. His new push for offshore oil and gas drilling is just the latest instance.
Last week, in his State of the Union address, Obama reiterated at length the urgent threat climate change presents and the importance of taking decisive action to address it. “The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” he said. “We should act like it.”
But Obama himself isn’t acting like it. This week, his administration released a draft of its next five-year plan for offshore drilling. It would open up a previously off-limits area along the Southeastern coast, from Virginia down to Georgia, as well as offer many new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico. And while it would protect some key areas north of Alaska from drilling, it would open other Arctic areas up.
So, after bragging in the State of the Union that “we’ve set aside more public lands and waters than any administration in history,” Obama is inviting fossil fuel companies into previously undisturbed public waters. This was a quick turnaround from just two days before, when environmental groups were singing Obama’s praises after he proposed to permanently protect much of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development by declaring it a wilderness area. Now, those groups are criticizing him for threatening the very same region.
The Alaska Wilderness League expressed relief that Obama is at least protecting the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic, but the group’s executive director, Cindy Shogan, insists that the administration needs to “take all Arctic leasing off the table.” […]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—No conclusive evidence:
Well, even as administration officials hype Powell's "Adlai moment" at the UN next week, there is still some dampening of expectations:
Officials cautioned that no one photo or piece of evidence will conclusively prove the administration's case; instead, they describe what they say will be an accumulation of damning details. ''What we're showing is a pattern of behavior,'' a senior administration official said. ''You're not going to have pictures of warheads. |
I think I am finally resolved to the fact that war is inevitable. It's a shame that Bush is so hell-bent on going to war that he will risk the lives of thousands to do so, and all on circumstancial evidence.
Obviously Saddam is a brutal dictator, and I'm sure he's got things to hide. But is he a threat to US national security -- worth throwing away lives and treasure to depose? That case has not been made. And it won't be made. But that's irrelevant to an administration that keeps using discarded "evidence" of a nuclear program (the aluminum tubes) and a hypothetical link to Al Qaeda to justify a war that even super-hawks like Normal Schwarzkopf won't buy.
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On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: TX derp roundup. Dan Froomkin laughs at Sharyl Attkinson. Jeb loves abusing executive power. Arrested for... resisting arrest?
Armando weighs in on that subject, and the new Gop love for judicial activism. More on scam PACs. Like Huckabee's! Open Carry Texas suggests legislators they intimidate... ought to get guns. No charges in the GunFAIL death of a 3-year-old Michigan boy, because the parents say they didn't know that the boy knew they kept a loaded pistol between their mattress and box spring. Oh well.
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