Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
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Good Morning!
Longwood Gardens, February, 2012, Photo credit: joanneleon
“What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
-- Henry David Thoreau
News
Alaska lawmakers plan to sell ANWR drilling during D.C. trip
JUNEAU — A contingent of state representatives including House Speaker Mike Chenault are missing several days of the legislative session next week to head to Washington, D.C., and make a pitch — once again — for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
A measure to allow drilling on the Arctic coastal plain is expected to come for a vote in the U.S. House next week. It's part of a trio of pro-oil-production measures tacked onto the U.S. House transportation funding bill.
[ ... ]
Arctic Power, a private group with a Washington lobbying arm and state funds, has been working since 1992 to open the refuge coastal plain to drilling. The group, which got $160,000 this budget year from the Legislature to lobby on ANWR, asked the Alaska lawmakers to come just as the latest measure is about to hit the House floor, Chenault said Thursday.
We investigated ourselves and everything is okay.
Keystone XL: State Department cleared of conflict, not ineptness
An internal audit released Thursday cleared the State Department of major missteps and conflicts of interest in its three-year environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline.
But the report faulted the agency for its lack of expertise in conducting environmental assessments and for not doing enough to consider alternate routes for the Alberta-to-Texas pipeline, issues at the heart of criticisms of the State Department’s review.
Last month, the State Department denied the Canadian company TransCanada its application to build Keystone XL, after determining that a 60-day deadline imposed recently by Congress on the permitting process would not let it complete a thorough review.
Voters Want Obama's Clean Energy Plan
Another major poll has confirmed that American voters across the political spectrum welcome clean energy development. It also found that when given the facts, the majority of Democrats and independents oppose the Keystone XL pipeline for dirty tar sands oil.
The support for clean energy isn't news -- many pollsters have determined that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents embrace clean energy and want to develop more of it. But the timing of this latest poll is instructive.
It should remind candidates that clean energy is a mobilizing issue. It offers a positive way to address voters' biggest concerns right now: jobs, economic growth, and the health of our families.
A lot of people were wondering why nothing official was released. 49 AGs signed on to what?
There Is No Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Term Sheet
We are more than 24 hours removed from the foreclosure fraud settlement and the terms have, shockingly, not been released. In fact, American Banker reports that the terms will not be released before the filing of the settlement in federal court, because a document with actual terms does not yet exist.
Incidentally, why is nationalmortgagesettlement.com a dot-com, not a dot-gov? What’s going on here?
This is incredible. The Administration, the AGs, everyone involved in this made a big show of an agreement reached on foreclosure fraud. But there is no piece of paper with the agreement on it. There’s no term sheet. There are just agreements in principle.
Here come the cuts again?
Obama budget projects $1.3 trillion deficit this year
The deficit already was projected to top $1 trillion when Obama took office in January 2009, as tax revenues dropped because of the Great Recession and spending spiked to bail out banks and auto companies. It eventually reached $1.55 trillion for 2009, followed by $1.37 trillion in fiscal 2010 and $1.36 trillion in fiscal 2011.
The tide of red ink, which started under President George W. Bush, has helped define Obama's entire term and will be a key issue in the fall campaign as he seeks a second term.
With that in mind, Obama on Monday will propose a budget he'll use to portray himself as a deficit cutter, one who would combine $1.5 trillion in tax increases on the wealthy with $1.5 trillion in cuts from projected spending increases to slow — but not stop — the rapid increases in the nation's debt.
Obama’s Unprecedented War on Whistleblowers
From Manning to Kiriakou, critics are aggressively targeted as the White House turns a blind eye to abuses.
On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.
Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.
Punish the Whistleblowers
The Obama administration has already charged more people -- six -- under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history.)
Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky
5 Right-Wing Governors Gutting Schools to Fund Prisons, Tax Breaks for the Rich...And a Bible Theme Park
Like any other choice made by a politician, budgeting is a decision laced with ideology. When state after state slashes education dollars (and often at the same time funnels more of the money they do spend to private companies running charter schools, or gives it away as vouchers) we see what matters to them. And when you take a look at the programs that get funded, or the people who get fat tax cuts as money is drained out of the schools, well, you see what matters to state governments.
Government Finally Releases Narrative of Anwar al-Awlaki’s Role in UndieBombing Plot
As part of its sentencing memo asking for multiple counts of life imprisonment against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the government has finally officially laid out how it claims Anwar al-Awlaki was involved in Abdulmutallab’s plot. I’ve included the entirety of the account below the rule.
I agree with Evan Perez. Now that they’ve made this narrative available, surely they can make the OLC memo authorizing Awlaki’s death available (note, the narrative says only that Awlaki and Samir Khan died, not that we killed them).
U.S. officials: Al Qaida behind Syria bombings
WASHINGTON — The Iraqi branch of al Qaida, seeking to exploit the bloody turmoil in Syria to reassert its potency, carried out two recent bombings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and likely was behind suicide bombings Friday that killed at least 28 people in the largest city, Aleppo, U.S. officials told McClatchy.
The officials cited U.S. intelligence reports on the incidents, which appear to verify Syrian President Bashar Assad's charges of al Qaida involvement in the 11-month uprising against his rule. The Syrian opposition has claimed that Assad's regime, which has responded with massive force against the uprising, staged the bombings to discredit the pro-democracy movement calling for his ouster.
The international terrorist network's presence in Syria also raises the possibility that Islamic extremists will try to hijack the uprising, which would seriously complicate efforts by the United States and its European and Arab partners to force Assad's regime from power. On Friday, President Barack Obama repeated his call for Assad to step down, accusing his forces of "outrageous bloodshed."