For Want of a Nail: Making sure one is on the right team

Reader Supported News: Right Wing Thought Police: An Analysis

R&D Mag: Alaska says to hell with polar bears. They cut into oil profits

Hullabaloo: Blasting right wing lies right out of the oil-soaked water

Counter Punch: Confronting rendition to torture in North Carolina

Bob Broughton: Hard to believe there's still a need to oppose this: International Day Against Stoning

This video shows how scientists were misled. They thought the healthy ice was expanding, when it was actually thinning and spreading out over a wider area. I can't wait until all the right wingers who've been triumphantly pushing this as proof there's no climate change acknowledge they were wrong. I'll just sit here and hold my breath:

WINNIPEG–One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin "rotten" ice that can't support weight of the bears. "It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multi-year sea ice. The whole world thought it was multi-year sea ice," said Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.

"Unfortunately, what we found was that the multi-year (ice) has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice."

Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba. The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.

"As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multi-year ice floe broke up into pieces," Barber said. "This floe was 16 km across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes."

Climate Progress asks the question -- Why does Sarah wear a polar bear pin?

A1: She wants to help people remember what they looked like before her policies render them extinct.

A2: She likes sticking it to the bears.

A3. She couldn’t find a wolf-cub pin.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is famously fighting the Bush administration liberals who designated the polar bears a threatened species, and her global warming denial, if enshrined into law, would finish off the bear’s habitat (see “McCain VP Palin is a global-warming-denying, polar-bear-dissing, Pat Buchanan acolyte“).

Read on...

All right, you’ve slept in long enough. Brad Jacobson of MediaBloodhound here. Saturday. Last day. Music about to play over parting words. Thanks to everyone for your generous feedback and submissions (sorry if I didn’t get yours in there). We can still meet a few times each week over at my place. (I cordially invite you to subscribe as I don’t post daily at MBH.) OK, let’s inhale some links:

Dashiell delivers his own Swiftian magic.

The Manifest Destiny in New Orleans continues (at least John Edwards is lending his voice to fight the good fight).

Glenn Beck on life support? Say it ain’t so! The guy who compared Al Gore to Adolph Hitler. (Polar bears everywhere rejoice.)

Hawke and Dove slip bamboo shoots up the fingernails of the torture debate.

Sensen No Sen is all over FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s stealthy pursuit to relax media ownership rules.

Spineless Dems walking: Chris Floyd (h/t Cursor) decries the latest capitulation; Susie Madrak asks, “When do we say ‘enough’?” (h/t Kevin Hayden, who leads the chant: “Dump Jay today!”)

Norman Solomon on America’s “human rights daze.”

And exhale. Finally, a special thanks to Mike, Nicole and John for tossing me the keys for the week. (Psst…inside scoop: they’re really good people.) It’s been a pleasure, folks. Peace.

AP Via Yahoo:

A federal appeals court has ordered Shell Oil to stop its exploratory drilling program off the north coast of Alaska at least until a hearing in August.

The order, issued Thursday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, comes after the federal Minerals Management Service in February approved Shell's offshore exploration plan for the Beaufort Sea.

Opponents contend that the Minerals Management Service approved Shell's plan without fully considering that a large spill would harm marine mammals, including bowhead and beluga whales. They say polar bears could also be harmed, and they question whether cleaning up a sizable spill would even be possible in the icy waters.

Company officials are obviously disappointed, said Shell spokesman Curtis Smith. Read more...