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News and Opinion
Holding Obama’s Feet to the Climate-Change Fire
The “Forward on Climate” rally comes less than a week after President Obama urged American leaders to “act before it is too late,” on climate change during his State of the Union address.
The demonstration’s timing — early in the administration’s second term — was important. While many say Mr. Obama achieved important green goals in his first term (Rendezvous wrote about tougher fuel efficiency standards for cars), critics say he did not achieve enough in the fight to address climate change. Many blame an uncooperative Congress and the always-looming re-election campaign. (The words “climate change” were not uttered during any of the three presidential debates between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney.
Call for Christie to consider climate change in Shore rebuilding
Did global warming and rising sea levels trigger Hurricane Sandy?
And does it matter?
Gov. Christie says it doesn't. Whether environmental changes caused the storm is an "esoteric question," he said at a news conference at the Shore earlier this month. Victims of the storm don't "give a damn" either - as confirmed by a group of Sandy survivors who applauded Christie's remark.
But scientists say they all need to start caring. Because regardless of what caused Sandy, even those skeptical about climate change say a Sandy-like storm will happen again. And so, steps must be taken now to prevent loss of life and property later.
Christie's focus, though, is more immediate: the tens of thousands of families who are still displaced, and a $16 billion Jersey Shore tourism industry, crucial to the state economy, that is struggling to get ready for the summer. When Christie's name is on the ballot in November, one year and one week after Sandy, he wants to say New Jersey is back to normal.
The headline for this story on the front page of the Washington Post was "In D.C., it’s fossil ‘fools,’ not fossil fuels" and then when you open up the article the headline changes.
Crowd marches to voice opposition to Keystone pipeline
The group rallied on a slice of the Mall just north of the Washington Monument before heading down Constitution Avenue, up 17th Street and past the White House chanting slogans such as “We are unstoppable, another world is possible” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Keystone pipeline’s got to go.”
The president wasn’t home, however. He was in Florida playing golf with Tiger Woods and Jim Crane, a Houston businessman who owns the Houston Astros as well as the residential compound where Obama is spending the holiday weekend.
[...]
“Mr. President, we have heard what you’ve said on climate; we have loved a lot of what you’ve said on climate,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Our question is: What will you do?”
Emptywheel
Colleen McMahon: The Covert Op that Killed Anwar al-Awlaki Was Illegal
A lot of people have discussed this section of Judge Colleen McMahon’s January 2, 2013 ruling dismissing ACLU and NYT’s FOIA for memos and other documents related to the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki:
I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret. [my emphasis]
But I’m not aware of anyone commenting at length on the section she titles, “Constitutional and Statutory Concerns about Targeted Killings,” a 5-page discussion of assessing targeted killing in terms of due process, treason, and other laws.
While the section is not entirely off point — she explores some of the legal questions raised in ACLU’s FOIA, though as I’ll show, she expands on the questions ACLU raised — the section is completely extraneous to her task at hand, determining whether or not the government has to turn over its legal justifications for killing Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. In other words, McMahon takes a 5-page detour from her work of adjudicating a FOIA dispute and lays out several reasons why the Awlaki killing may not be legal.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Today was the day the climate movement came together
Open thread for Night Owls: 4,000 show up Sunday for Keystone XL pipeline protest in San Francisco
BREAKING::Pod Protest for the Planet
I Got A Line On You - Spirit