Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features blues harmonica player Sonny Terry. Enjoy!
Sonny Terry & Brownie Mc Ghee - Hootin' Blues
"I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."
-- Barack Obama
News and Opinion
Obama says US troop increase in Iraq a 'new phase'
US President Barack Obama said Sunday sending more troops to Iraq signals a "new phase" in the fight against the Islamic State group, amid unconfirmed reports its leader has been wounded.
After earlier unveiling plans to send up to 1,500 more American troops to Iraq to advise and train its forces, Obama told CBS News the US-led effort to defeat IS was moving to a new stage.
"Phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible -- and we now have done that," Obama told the broadcaster.
"Rather than just try to halt (IS's) momentum, we're now in a position to start going on some offence," he added, stressing the need for Iraqi ground troops to start pushing back IS fighters. ...
The extra troops announced by Obama would roughly double the number of American military personnel in Iraq to about 3,100, a significant return of US forces by a president who has hailed his role in their 2011 departure.
Obama is doubling down on an Isis war with no end in sight. Why does he get a free pass?
We have entered the fourth official month of the latest war without end in the Middle East, and the Obama administration has suddenly doubled America’s troop presence in Iraq – yet there is no approved declaration of war in sight. The so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels receiving millions in weapons are now being defeated, and those same weapons are ending up in the hands of al-Qaida – yet there is no public sign of dialing back in the fight again the Islamic State.
You would think the faces of the mainstream American press would start questioning the White House’s strategy of perpetual war, but you’d be wrong. The drumbeat seems louder than ever; the challengers of power are nearly silent.
Fresh off his party’s drubbing in the US midterm elections, Obama appeared Sunday on Face the Nation, as a meek Bob Schieffer of CBS News lobbed weak questions at the president on his Isis war policy. It was a quintessential example of how some in the mainstream American press have refused to ask critical questions about our new Forever War – even as the most important questions stare everyone in the face. ...
At no point did Schieffer point out to Obama that he still has no legal authority from Congress to conduct a war that virtually everyone in the US government now acknowledges will last for years, if not decades. As it requests $3.2bn more, the Obama administration has made very clear that it would be just fine if Congress made the Isis campaign technically legal – “I’m going to begin engaging Congress” about authority for force, Obama said at a rare press conference last week – but if legislators still don’t pass a war resolution, Obama has already indicated he will continue it anyway.
I mean, who cares if war is legal, right? ...
It’s a wonder President Obama doesn’t go on these softball Sunday shows every week, as he’s given a free pass to say what he wants without worrying in the least that he’ll actually be challenged on the substance of his policy.
"This is Crazy": Ex-State Dept. Official Matthew Hoh Blasts Obama’s Doubling of U.S. Troops in Iraq
General Dan Bolger says what the US does not want to hear: Why We Lost
Senior army officers tend not to use the “L” word, certainly not in public, despite one war stretching into its 14th inconclusive year and the other one restarting. ... But Bolger considers a reckoning with the military’s poor record in Iraq and Afghanistan overdue. The army in which he soldiered for three decades comes in for the greatest amount of blame, a decision that flatters the military’s pretensions about being above politics but arguably lets the Bush and Obama administrations off the hook. ...
“Here’s one I would offer that should be asked of every serving general and admiral: general, admiral, did we win? If we won, how are we doing now in the war against Isis? You just can’t get an answer to that question, and in fact, you don’t even hear it,” Bolger said. ...
Bolger has several explanations for why the US lost. The post-Vietnam army was built, deliberately, for short, conventional, decisive conflicts, yet the post-9/11 military leadership embraced – sometimes deliberately, sometimes through miscalculation – fighting insurgents and terrorists who knew the terrain, the people and the culture better than the US ever would. ...
More controversially, Bolger laments that the US did not pull out of Afghanistan after ousting al-Qaida in late 2001 and out of Iraq after ousting Saddam in April 2003. Staying in each conflict as it deteriorated locked policymakers and officers into a pattern of escalation, with persistence substituting for success. No one in uniform of any influence argued for withdrawal, or even seriously considered it: the US military mantra of the age is to leave behind a division’s worth of advisers as insurance and expect them to resolve what a corps could not. ...
Some in military circles view Bolger’s book as the first shot of an internecine fight to purge the army of counterinsurgency, much as the post-Vietnam generation attempted. ... John Nagl, a retired army lieutenant colonel and prominent counterinsurgency advocate, praised Bolger as a “smart, dedicated army officer” while rejecting his thesis.
“While I haven’t yet read his new book, I don’t agree with him that we lost, and find it hard to believe that he does,” Nagl said.
But if the wars succeeded, Bolger said, “how come two or three years later, everything’s a pile of crap?”
Islamic State Leader Possibly Killed — Or Possibly Not — by Airstrikes in Iraq
The fate of the Islamic State's top commander, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remains murky in the aftermath of coalition airstrikes that reportedly targeted a house in Iraq where top militants were meeting Saturday, according to witnesses and local media.
Dozens were wounded and killed in an attack that reportedly hit a gathering of Islamic State leaders near the western Iraqi town of Quaim, local residents told Reuters. Unconfirmed reports have stated that the reclusive al-Baghdadi was among those injured or possibly killed. ...
Conflicting reports on the possible death or wounding of al-Baghdadi, who rarely appears in public and has been reported killed on numerous previous occasions, continued to circulate over the weekend.
Tribal sources told Al Arabiya News that al-Baghdadi was "critically wounded" in the strikes. Other senior Islamic State members believed to be among the dead or injured include the group's leader of Iraq's Anbar Province and his deputy, local residents told Reuters.
As Germany marks fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev warns of new cold war
As Berliners watch 8,000 balloons being released into the night sky this evening, old divisions between east and west will symbolically vanish into thin air with them. Yet the runup to the festivities has already served up plenty of reminders that, 25 years after the fall of the wall that divided the city for three decades, the scars of history are hurting more than ever.
Speaking at a symposium near the Brandenburg Gate yesterday morning, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev warned that the world was “on the brink of a new cold war” and strongly criticised the west for having sown the seeds of the current crisis by mishandling the fallout from the collapse of the iron curtain.
“Instead of building new mechanisms and institutions of European security and pursuing a major demilitarisation of European politics … the west, and particularly the United States, declared victory in the cold war,” said the man behind the Soviet Union’s glasnost and perestroika reforms.
“Euphoria and triumphalism went to the heads of western leaders. Taking advantage of Russia’s weakening and the lack of a counterweight, they claimed monopoly leadership and domination in the world.”
The enlargement of Nato, Kosovo, missile defence plans and wars in the Middle East had led to a “collapse of trust”, said Gorbachev, now 83. “To put it metaphorically, a blister has now turned into a bloody, festering wound.”
[Gorbachev's full speech here. - js]
Close military encounters between Russia and the west ‘at cold war levels’
Close military encounters between Russia and the west have jumped to cold war levels, with 40 dangerous or sensitive incidents recorded in the past eight months alone, according to a report published on Monday.
The report, Dangerous Brinkmanship by the European Leadership Network, logs a series of “highly disturbing” incidents since the Ukrainian crisis began earlier this year, including an alarming near-collision between a Russian reconnaissance plane and a passenger plane taking off from Denmark in March with 132 passengers on board.
What made the incident especially dangerous was that the Russian plane did not have on its transponders, the usual method of signalling its presence to other aircraft.
The report by the London-based thinktank comes after a warning from former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that the world is “on the brink of a new cold war”.
The encounters have taken place mainly around the Baltic Sea but also in the Black Sea and along the US and Canadian borders.
“We believe the nearly 40 incidents logged are a very serious development, not necessarily because they indicate a desire on the part of Russia to start a war but because they show a dangerous game of brinkmanship is being played, with the potential for unintended escalation in what is now the most serious security crisis in Europe since the cold war,” say the report’s authors Thomas Frear, Lukasz Kulesa and Ian Kearns.
Worst east Ukraine shelling for month; ceasefire looks in doubt
East Ukraine's rebel stronghold Donetsk was pummeled on Sunday by the heaviest shelling in a month, and the OSCE said it spotted an armored column of troops without insignia in rebel territory that Kiev said proved Moscow had sent reinforcements.
A two-month-old ceasefire to end a war that has killed 4,000 people has appeared shakier than ever in the past few days, with each side accusing the other of having violated the terms of the peace plan.
Reuters journalists inside Donetsk, who have been there throughout the fighting, said the shelling sounded more intense than at any time since early October. Sunday's strikes appeared to come from territory held by both government and rebel forces.
Israel to Seize Over 3,000 Acres From West Bank Palestinians
Villagers from Beit Iksa, on the outskirts of occupied East Jerusalem, reportedly have received notice from the Israeli military that they intend to seize 3,176 acres of land from the villages “for military purposes.”
The details of the seizures are scant at the moment, and the military is refusing all comment, but the villagers reportedly received a preliminary warning about the plan back in 2012, and today’s notice reiterated the plans, with orders to vacate by the end of 2017.
Israeli woman killed as Palestinian stabbings add to escalating violence
Two separate stabbing attacks by Palestinians – the first in central Tel Aviv and the second at the entrance to a settlement in the occupied West Bank – have killed an Israeli woman and left three other Israelis wounded, two of them seriously. ...
The latest attacks came as Israel’s prime minister promised a harsh response to the ongoing wave of violence and protests. Speaking to members of his Likud party, Binyamin Netanyahu said he will use all means available to stop weeks of unrest that has shaken east Jerusalem, northern Israel and Tel Aviv. He said he will pursue new measures, including demolishing the homes of instigators.
And in a veiled threat toward Arab demonstrators in Israel and east Jerusalem, he said attackers should consider moving to the West Bank or Gaza Strip.”Believe me, we will put no difficulties in your path,” he said.
In response to Netanyahu’s remarks Ahmed Tibi, a prominent Arab MP, accused the right-wing Likud party leader of having “gone off the rails”. ...
Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have been high in recent weeks, following last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip and increasing friction over a contested Jerusalem holy site.
Life After Guantanamo: The Rehabilitation Program for Kuwait's Released Inmate
On Wednesday morning, a Kuwaiti man was discharged from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he had been held without trial for 13 years. The US Department of Defense gave scant detail of the release, confirming only that 37-year-old Fouzi Khalid Abdullah al-Awda had been transferred to the custody of the Kuwaiti government.
Anonymous officials later told the New York Times that al-Awda will live in Kuwait and complete a yearlong "rehabilitation program." ...
The al-Salam rehab program will begin with a full-time residency at the Central Prison. Gradually, al-Awda will be able to receive his family for visits and make weekend trips home. The final stage will be outpatient care.
Even then, al-Awda will be the subject of "constant security surveillance," according to Kuwait's Minister of the Interior. Lawyers say that al-Awda will be required to surrender his passport and check in weekly with local police. His "internet usage, religious instruction, social networks, and financial affairs" will also be monitored, as will his visits to local mosques.
According to secret files released by Wikileaks, Kuwaiti officials announced in September 2009 that the al-Salam Rehabilitation Center was "100 percent completed and ready to begin receiving the four remaining Kuwaiti Guantanamo detainees." The officials reportedly stressed that Kuwait was willing to abide by American security requirements — despite the fact that it had "not received any information clearly and legally implicating any of the four detainees in terror activities."
Final Rule of Dodd-Frank Won't Address Incentives, Lax Regulation, or Size of Banks
Populist language usually precedes a capitulation by Mr. Obama. I hope that is not the case this time:
Obama demands 'strongest possible rules' to protect net neutrality
Barack Obama called for “the strongest possible rules to protect” the open internet on Monday and came out against proposals championed by cable and telecoms companies to create fast lanes for the web.
The president’s statement comes as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prepares to publish new rules to regulate the internet after a series of legal defeats at the hands of telecoms and cable companies.
“An open internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life. By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known,” Obama said.
The president came out firmly against a proposal that would allow cable companies to create “fast lanes” for higher paying customers. Cable and telecoms companies have lobbied for fast lanes, arguing that companies like Netflix should pay more for the large amount of bandwidth they use.
Oops, looky here, somebody found Obama's weasel words (Hat tip:
accumbens)
Obama is selling us out on net neutrality
On Monday, Obama issued his first direct comments on [net neutrality]. It took only 4 million comments from citizens worried about their access to a staple of modern life. The good news is the president sounded tough and very much on the side of consumers. ...
Then comes the weak-kneed part. “The FCC is an independent agency, and ultimately this decision is theirs alone.” What the president didn’t say was a lot. For instance, he didn’t call for tougher regulation of Internet service providers who may be tempted to create pricing plans that punish users who are used to flat-rate access. ...
[Y]our public servants in Washington aren’t who they seem to be. Tom Wheeler, the head of the FCC, took the job last year after a career as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, including head of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.
So now Obama is surprised that Wheeler is coming up with rules that benefit the companies he used to work for? Just wait until the president finds out that the Treasury secretary used to work at Citigroup Inc. and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission defended Wall Street against regulators for more than a decade.
Mr. President, spare us a letter that says you agree with us but aren’t really going to do anything other than “ask” the FCC to consider your opinion.
How Will the GOP-Controlled Senate Affect Trade Deals?
Hat tip, Don midwest:
Despite Outcry of Opposition, Obama Pushes "Horrific" Trade Deal in Asia
Though president once railed against so-called "free trade" agreements, he has now become outspoken champion of secretive deals that critics call attack on democracy, workers, and the planet.
Despite consistent and vocal opposition from organized labor, environmentalists, progressive economy experts and others warning against the damaging impacts of a trans-Pacific trade agreement that remains under negotiations by the U.S. and twelve other nations, President Obama on Monday once again voiced his support for what he said would be a "historic" agreement.
In Beijing for talks with his Chinese counterpart and to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, Obama championed the so-called "free trade" deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), even though critics have described the agreement as a "horrific" corporate giveaway that would further codify the undemocratic mechanisms of global trade, breaking down protections for workers, consumers, and the planet's natural systems.
Though Obama ran for president in 2008 as a staunch opponent of similarly designed trade deals, including NAFTA, since taking in office, he has forcefully pushed for the TPP and a similar deal with European nations, called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). ...
If approved, the TPP would be the world's largest economic trade agreement, encompassing more than 40 percent of the world's GDP. Though China would not be party to the agreement, the TPP would cover the U.S., Canada and Mexico in North America; Chile and Peru in South America; and Japan, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam in the Pacific-Asia region.
This is a long but excellent essay by Judge Jed Rakoff. Here's a teaser:
Why Innocent People Plead Guilty
The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” The Constitution further guarantees that at the trial, the accused will have the assistance of counsel, who can confront and cross-examine his accusers and present evidence on the accused’s behalf. He may be convicted only if an impartial jury of his peers is unanimously of the view that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and so states, publicly, in its verdict.
The drama inherent in these guarantees is regularly portrayed in movies and television programs as an open battle played out in public before a judge and jury. But this is all a mirage. In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.
In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.
While corresponding statistics for the fifty states combined are not available, it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed; and again, the plea bargains usually determine the sentences, sometimes as a matter of law and otherwise as a matter of practice. Furthermore, in both the state and federal systems, the power to determine the terms of the plea bargain is, as a practical matter, lodged largely in the prosecutor, with the defense counsel having little say and the judge even less.
Here's another excellent article along the same lines, which is also too information dense to abstract:
Why Are There Up to 120,000 Innocent People in US Prisons?
Guilty pleas and false confessions by the innocent are counterintuitive phenomena, says Rebecca Brown, director of state policy at the non-profit Innocence Project. But of the 321 DNA exonerations that have occurred in the United States, 30 have involved people who originally pled guilty to crimes they didn't commit. It's hard to accept that people who are innocent would knowingly incriminate themselves, but it happens frequently.
"Our cases are almost exclusively rapes and murders — very, very serious crimes — and even then, innocent people are pleading guilty," Brown says. "Now spread that out across the entire system to include lower-level offenses, the vast majority of which are pled out, and the implications are clear."
According to the Innocence Project's estimates, between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of all US prisoners are innocent. The American prison population numbers about 2.4 million. Using those numbers, as many as 120,000 innocent people could currently be in prison. ...
"The system isn't geared to discover innocence or guilt — it's geared to get people through the system as quickly and efficiently as possible," says John Pollok, a defense lawyer who has defended clients ranging from the mayor of Waterbury, Connecticut to members of the Gambino crime family. "What it comes down to for a defense lawyer is really to try and minimize harm."
Overwhelmingly, minimizing harm means taking a deal instead of taking your chances at trial. And just as false confessions lead to false convictions, coercive plea bargains are also responsible for sending thousands of innocent people to prison.
"Everybody swallows the lie because they want to believe that the system works," Pollok says. "The short of it is, each component of the system, from lawyers to judges to the way we charge people, is broken."
Supreme Court will hear newest challenge to Affordable Care Act
The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear the most serious challenge to the Affordable Care Act since the justices found it constitutional more than two years ago: a lawsuit targeting the federal subsidies that help millions of Americans buy health insurance.
More than 4 million people receive the subsidies, which the Obama administration contends are essential to the act by making insurance more affordable for low- and middle-income families. ...
The question in this challenge is whether the subsidies should be available to all Americans who qualify or only to those who purchase insurance through exchanges “established by the state.”
About a third of the states have created exchanges, and the challengers say the subsidies should be available only in those places. As the law authorizes, federal authorities have stepped in to establish exchanges where the states have refused.
"I’ve Had Enough": Mexican Protesters Decry Years of Impunity After Apparent Massacre of 43 Students
Fiery Protests Erupt in Mexico Over Missing Students
Anger and frustration over the case of Mexico's 43 missing students erupted in violence Saturday as protesters set fire to vehicles outside the Guerrero statehouse, and demonstrators in Mexico City torched the main doorway of the National Palace on the Zócalo central square. ...
On Friday, Mexican attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam said the students were killed on the night of their kidnappings by Iguala municipal police officers working for a local drug cartel called the Guerreros Unidos. He said human remains found in a remote dump in the community of Cocula will likely never be fully identified due to how severely they were burned.
Near the end of his press conference, the nation's chief prosecutor attempted to ignore further questions by saying "Ya me cansé," or "Enough, I am fed up," before reporters. The statement quickly caught the attention of social media users, as Mexicans on Twitter and Facebook said they too felt a need to declare "#YaMeCansé," in reference to the violence, lawlessness, and impunity that reigns over much of the country after nearly eight years of the military-led and US-backed drug war in Mexico.
Catalan leader to step up independence push as 80% vote to split from Spain
Catalan leader Artur Mas vowed to step up the push for independence after early results from Sunday’s symbolic vote showed that four out of five voters in the region backed breaking away from Spain.
With more than 2m votes cast, Mas called the symbolic referendum a “lesson in democracy, spelled out in capital letters”. He said he would send a letter on Monday to Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, urging him to confront “the Catalan question” with a formal, binding referendum on independence.
“We want to decide a new political future. All nations have a right to do so and mature democracies respect that,” said Mas. ...
As reports on the millions of voters began to dominate headlines on Sunday evening, the Spanish justice minister, Rafael Catalá, dismissed the vote as “fruitless and useless”, arguing that it had been “carried out on the margin of any legal framework”.
In a statement, he added: “The government considers this to be a day of political propaganda organised by pro-independence forces and devoid of any kind of democratic validity.”
Catalans hold symbolic vote on breaking away from Spain
The Evening Greens
670,000 People Died in China During 2012 Because of Pollution Caused by Coal Burning
Six hundred and seventy thousand people died in 2012 because of air pollution generated by coal burning in China, according to a new study released by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
"The study focuses on quantifying the impacts of China's overuse of coal," NRDC's Jake Schmidt told VICE News.
Coal burning accounts for more than half of all air pollutants in China known as PM2.5, which are more toxic than other pollutants because their small size allows them to travel deep into respiratory tissue. Exposure to PM2.5 pollution can cause coronary heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The study says people living in heavily polluted cities, like Beijing, have 10-15 percent greater risk of developing lung cancer. ...
The study also argues that China's large-scale coal mining depletes the nation's scarce water resources and causes severe water pollution. Mining waste includes heavy metals and radioactive materials, which destroys more than one billion cubic meters of groundwater resources each year.
"Driving China's overall water shortage is the coal sector," Jennifer Turner, Director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center, told VICE News. "Coal is very thirsty."
This is an excellent article, go ahead and click the link...
The real story of US coal: inside the world's biggest coalmine
At the east pit of Peabody’s North Antelope Rochelle mine, the layer of coal takes up 60ft of a 250ft trough in the earth, and runs in an interrupted black stripe for 50 miles.
With those vast, easy-to-reach deposits, Powder River has overtaken West Virginia and Kentucky as the big coalmining territory. The pro-coal Republicans’ takeover of Congress in the mid-term elections also favours Powder River. ...
Peabody’s official position on climate science is divorced from scientific reality. But their grasp of the politics of coal clearly is not.
America gets about 40% of its electricity from coal - and by far the biggest share of that coal comes from Powder River. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), its use of coal for energy rose 4.8% last year, in part because of the Arctic blasts of the polar vortex. Carbon dioxide emissions from energy registered one of their steepest rises in the last quarter century.
Australia, where Peabody has three mines and which has the world’s second largest reserves of coal, has ramped up production 37% since 2000, helped by up to $3.5bn in government subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, a forthcoming report from the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International will say.
China has doubled its use of coal over the last decade. India is preparing to open its large coal reserves to foreign mining companies to meet a promise to hook up the 400 million without electricity on to the grid in the next five years.
Coal use in Germany rose last year for the third year in a row, even as the country met its ambitious targets to transition to wind and solar power. Poland has been promoting its coal as an alternative to Russian natural gas.
Overall global coal use rose 3% last year, faster than any other fossil fuel, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
That’s a disaster in the making, scientists and energy experts say. The International Energy Agency has concluded that two-thirds of all fossil fuels will have to stay in the ground if the world is going to avoid crossing the 2C threshold into dangerous climate change.
Obama agrees. Burning all of those fossil fuels would trigger “dire consequences” for the planet, he told an interviewer last June. “We’re not going to be able to burn it all.”
But the reality is that Obama has spent the last six years expanding coal, oil and gas production under his “all of the above” energy strategy.
California’s strawberry industry is hooked on dangerous pesticides
Paul Helliker had a job for Dow AgroSciences.
As director of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, Helliker had allowed some growers to ignore the restrictions for a pesticide called 1,3-Dichloropropene, which the state believed caused cancer.
The loophole was supposed to be temporary. Helliker gave Dow, the company that manufactures 1,3-D, and growers two years to come up with a plan to follow his department’s rules or to create new ones.
It took Dow less than a year to hand in its proposal. The company’s plan didn’t close the loophole, however. It greatly expanded it.
Dow asked that the director allow growers across the state to use twice as much 1,3-D in a year as the rules permitted. ... Six days later, Helliker signed off on the heart of Dow’s plan.
With that simple memo in 2002, Helliker dismantled the strict oversight designed seven years earlier to protect Californians from cancer, opening the door to 12 years of nearly unfettered 1,3-D access as its use spread to populated areas near schools, homes and businesses.
The decision put people in more than 100 California communities at a higher risk of cancer, according to interviews with former state scientists and documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The system of exemptions, which has continued under two subsequent directors, runs counter to the department’s stated mission to protect the well-being of California residents.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
How Voter Suppression Helped Produce the Lowest Turnout in Decades
Beyond 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot': what if there's no indictment in Ferguson?
Governments agree on new protections for polar bears
The OPOL Report: I smoke 2 joints in the morning
A Little Night Music
Sonny Terry - Crow Jane Blues
Sonny Terry - Hooray, Hooray, These Women Is Killin' Me
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Climbin' on Top of the Hill
Sonny Terry - Uncle Bud
Sonny Terry - 'Shoutin' The Blues'
Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee - Rock Island Line
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Walk on
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee w/Pete Seeger - Fighting A Losing Battle
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Drinkin' Wine
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Pick a Bale of Cotton
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Stranger Blues
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Midnight Special
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - BBC (1974)
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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