Zina Saunders: Kicked to death

Pushing Rope: Florida GOP appointed officials use "pancake and waffles" code in emails to avoid Sunshine Laws? Were the pancakes served with carbon dioxide? Yum.

Wait. Is Bill Kristol getting his column ideas from Wonkette? I guess they're Not Part of the Problem.

It's been a rough year for Tiger Woods, but he's still bringing home at least one more trophy. Congrats!

And speaking of awards, Susie Bright is a Golden Dukes judge this year: "the Dukes honor excellence in public corruption, betrayals of the public trust, and generally shameless behavior." You can nominate your favorites at her comment thread here.

Mike's away this weekend. Round up by Blue Gal.

Very good news, I think, on the climate change front. This is an excellent way to sidestep the political process and keep the necessary changes from getting bogged down in the politics:

The Obama administration will formally declare Monday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, a move that lays the groundwork for an economy-wide carbon cap even if Congress fails to enact climate legislation, sources familiar with the process said.

The move, which Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson will announce at an afternoon press conference, comes as the largest climate change conference in history gets underway in Copenhagen. It will finalize an initial "endangerment finding" by the government in April.

While an EPA spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, the agency sent out a press advisory that Jackson will make "a significant climate announcement at a press briefing" at 1:15 p.m. at EPA headquarters. Jackson will also speak at the U.N.-sponsored climate conference Wednesday; her address is titled "Taking Action at Home." Obama, who will attend the end of the U.N. talks Dec. 18, has sent a series of recent signals to the international community that the United States will curb its carbon output as part of a new global climate deal.

The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court decision in which the court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases qualify as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It could trigger a series of federal regulations affecting polluters, from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.

Businesses argue that such a finding would mean even emitters as small as a mom-and-pop grocery store would be forced to comply with onerous greenhouse gas regulations. The administration has crafted rules that would exempt facilities that emit less than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent annually. But it remains unclear if that exemption would hold up in court.

"An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery."

I wish I'd been paying closer attention to this, because now I have a whole lot of questions that weren't there before I read Matt Taibbi's latest story for Rolling Stone: "How Goldman Sachs took over Washington by engineering every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."

But first, the "good" news:

WASHINGTON -- Landmark legislation to curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions was approved by the House of Representatives in a close vote late Friday, securing a hard-fought victory for a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's agenda.

After months of negotiations, the Democratic-controlled House has narrowly passed sweeping legislation calling for the nation's first-ever limits on pollution linked to global warming. Stephen Power explains the bill's implications.

The 1,200 page bill—formally known as the "American Clean Energy and Security Act"—will reach into almost every corner of the U.S. economy. By putting a price on emissions of common gases, such as carbon dioxide, the bill would affect the way electricity is generated, how homes and offices are designed, how foreign trade is conducted and how much Americans pay to drive or to heat their homes.

Talking about how very deeply Goldman Sachs is embedded in the investors that will profit from cap-and-trade, Taibbi says:

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge-fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. [Ed. note - this was published yesterday.] Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework until the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.

RS hasn't put it online but really, I strongly recommend buying the issue to support this kind of journalism.

You can read some comments on the piece here, here and here.

Oh, and you can read a related Taibbi piece here.

[Ed. note: Please welcome to C&L our old friend and erstwhile congressional candidate from Washington's 8th District, Darcy Burner. Darcy's now heading up Progressive Congress, and we hope to have her contribute posts as often as she's willing and able. -- DN]

We talk a lot about wanting representatives who will display courage and conviction. But the real test of that isn’t what they do when it’s easy – it’s what they do when it’s hard.

**

When I was running for Congress, my son Henry would take every opportunity he could to talk about climate change. He talked to me, he talked to Democrats at legislative district meetings, he grabbed the microphone if he saw TV cameras. He used my webcam two years ago to cut this video:

Today the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Waxman-Markey energy bill, the most significant climate change legislation in history. It establishes a cap-and-trade regulatory system designed to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere over the next several years.

I want to help principled progressives who vote their conscience when it's politically costly understand that we have their backs.

Continue reading »

Another piece of the Bush legacy, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.

The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by the majority of scientists we surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.

What has worried many of the experts, who include recognised authorities from the world's leading universities and research institutes, as well as a Nobel Laureate, is the failure to curb global greenhouse gas emissions through international agreements, namely the Kyoto Treaty, and recent studies indicating that the Earth's natural carbon "sinks" are becoming less efficient at absorbing man-made CO2 from the atmosphere.

Levels of CO2 have continued to increase during the past decade since the treaty was agreed and they are now rising faster than even the worst-case scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body. In the meantime the natural absorption of CO2 by the world's forests and oceans has decreased significantly. Most of the scientists we polled agreed that the failure to curb emissions of CO2, which are increasing at a rate of 1 per cent a year, has created the need for an emergency "plan B" involving research, development and possible implementation of a worldwide geoengineering strategy.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

Host Bill Maher speaks to Jeffrey Sachs, author of Common Wealth, about the very critical need that we must acknowledge to find alternative fuel resources and focus on sustainable energy. That need is made more critical because with the priorities for funding placed by the Bush/Cheney White House, we're now eight years behind in terms of research.

Let me tell you, you know, if we put a little bit of thought to it, a small part of the Mohave Desert could provide more than half of the electricity needs of the United States without emitting any carbon dioxide, just using the solar power that’s available. Africa could be powering itself with the tremendous amount of solar power. But how much are we investing in this, Bill? We’re investing basically an hour or two of what we spend on the Pentagon for the whole year of our federal research budget right now. The total research budget of the Bush administration on sustainable energy resources has been between 2 and 3 billion dollars, which is 1 and 1 ½ days of what we spend on the Pentagon. So it’s been all war, no sustainability. And look where we are right now, right back into a corner and that’s the problem.

"60 Minutes" aired a piece last night that is "must see" TV. (Full story here)

DarkSyde at Kos:

NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen again blasted the Bush-Cheney White House, saying that Climate Change is 'real', and that human activity is the most likely cause

"There's no doubt about that, says Hansen. "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."

CBS asked Ralph Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, about Hansen's expertise and conclusions:

"I can't think of anybody who I would say is better than Hansen ..." Asked what is causing the changes, Cicerone says ... "Carbon dioxide and methane, and chlorofluorocarbons and a couple of others, which are all -- the increases in their concentrations in the air are due to human activities. It's that simple."...read on

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

The Left Coaster:
James Hansen is the country's premier Global Climate change scientist. Since the 1970s he has been at the forefront of the studying global climate change and has provided his expert opinion to every administration since then. Dr. Hansen believes that the world is in serious trouble -- so much trouble that he refuses to remain silent even when the Bush administration orders him to be so...read on"
Update: Rep. Brad Miller: "If you know of other instances of censoring, intimidating, blacklisting or whatever, e-mail my legislative assistance, Heather Parsons, at heather.parsons@mail.house.gov, or Dan Pearson of the Democratic staff of the Science Committee at dan.pearson@mail.house.gov."