The Gulf Coast is thousands of miles away, but the federal response to Hurricane Katrina has become an issue in Connecticut’s hot U.S. Senate race…
…Lamont also says Lieberman, ranking member of the Senate
Homeland Security Committee, mistakenly agreed to put the troubled
Federal Emergency Management Agency under the control of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“I think FEMA worked really well when it had professional management as an independent agency,” Lamont said in an interview this week. “And sure, it was Senator Lieberman who said, ‘Let’s redo FEMA.’ It was Senator Lieberman who said, ‘Let’s put Michael Brown as No. 2 at FEMA.'”
…test reports in 2002 and 2003 distorted the alkalinity, or pH level, of the dust released when the twin towers collapsed, downplaying its danger.
Some doctors suspect that the highly alkaline nature of the dust contributed to the variety of ailments that recovery workers and residents have complained of since the attack.
Tests of the gray-brown dust conducted by scientists at the United States Geological Survey a few months after the attack found that the dust was highly alkaline, in some instances as caustic or corrosive as drain cleaner, and capable of causing severe irritation and burns.
Don’t tell the administration, but Argentina has announced a major nuclear initiative worth 3.5 billion dollars to finish its third nuclear power plant, start a fourth and resume production of enriched uranium. The main goal of the plan unveiled late Wednesday, which will be carried out in cooperation with Canada, is to meet the country’s energy demands. Though an oil producer and exporter, Argentina’s reserves are running low and its demand is higher, while investment has lagged.
The BBC reports a fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet. On Thursday, experts approved a definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category of object. But the lead scientist on NASA’s robotic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it “embarrassing”. And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been “hijacked”. [Were the votes counted by Diebold?]
Evolutionary biology is mysteriously missing from the list of undergraduate subjects eligible for a US federal grant. The department of education claims the omission is simply a mistake and insists that US students taking evolutionary biology majors are eligible for the grants. However, the incident has left pro-evolution campaigners wondering whether evolutionary biology was deliberately eliminated from the list by people who find Darwinian evolution impossible to reconcile with their own religious beliefs.
Speaking of evolution, cooling towers could be evolutionary hotspots for new respiratory diseases. Many species of bacteria, including those that cause legionnaires’ disease, are thought to have evolved in association with an amoebic host. The warm, wet conditions found in cooling towers at factories and oil refineries make them a perfect spot for amoebas and bacteria to thrive, increasing the chances of new strains of pathogenic bacteria emerging; amoebas in cooling towers are about 16 times as likely to host bacteria as those in ponds and lakes.
Want to know how severely Bush has damaged our National Security? Read on:
Six Questions for Michael Scheuer on National Security
1.We’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?
On balance, more vulnerable. [snip]
In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.[snip]
2. Is Al Qaeda stronger or weaker than it was five years ago?
The quality of its leadership is not as high as it was in 2001, because we’ve killed and captured so many of its leaders. But they have succession planning that works very well.[snip]
We also shouldn’t underestimate the stature of bin Laden and Zawahiri in the Muslim world now that they’ve survived five years of war with the United States.[snip]
3. Given all this, why hasn’t there been an attack on the United States for the past five years?
It’s not just a lack of capacity; they’re not ready to do it. They put more emphasis on success than speed, and the next attack has to be bigger than 9/11. They could shoot up a mall if that’s what they wanted to do. But the world is going their way.[snip]
4. Has the war in Iraq helped or hurt in the fight against terrorism?
It broke the back of our counterterrorism program.[snip]
5. Things seemed to have turned for the worse in Afghanistan too. What’s your take on the situation there?
The President was sold a bill of goods by George Tenet and the CIA–that a few dozen intel guys, a few hundred Special Forces, and truckloads of money could win the day. What happened is what’s happened ever since Alexander the Great, three centuries before Christ: the cities fell quickly, which we mistook for victory. Three years later, the Taliban has regrouped, and there’s a strong insurgency.[snip]
6. Has the war in Lebanon also been a plus for the jihadists?
Yes. The Israel-Hezbollah battle validates bin Laden. It showed that the Arab regimes are useless, that they can’t protect their own nationals, and that they are apostate regimes that are creatures of the infidels. It also showed that the Americans will let Israel do whatever it wants.[snip]
7. And finally, an extra question–what needs to be done?
This may be a country bumpkin approach, but the truth is the best place to start. We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do.[snip]
At the core of the debate is oil. As long as we and our allies are dependent on Gulf oil, we can’t do anything about the perception that we support Arab tyranny–the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other regimes in the region. Without the problem of oil, who cares who rules Saudi Arabia? If we solved the oil problem, we could back away from the contradiction of being democracy promoters and tyranny protectors.[snip]
What you want with foreign policy is options. Right now we don’t have options because our economy and our allies’ economies are dependent on Middle East oil.
The fact is that Bush has been disasterous for national security. The more we pound on that fact, the better.
Porkbusters: Secret Hold was placed on a bill in the middle of the night, and I’d really like to know why this isn’t being pushed – HARD – on the left. Here’s the lead sentence as Reported in the Senate:
This Act may be cited as the `Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006′.
SEC. 2. FULL DISCLOSURE OF ENTITIES RECEIVING FEDERAL FUNDING.
(a) In General-
(1) WEBSITE- Effective beginning January 1, 2007 and subject to paragraphs (2) and (3), the Office of Management and Budget shall ensure the existence and operation of a single updated searchable database website accessible by the public at no cost that includes for each entity receiving Federal funding–
.
Smells like someone has something to hide regarding federal expenditures, and right before the election cycle. WTF is going on here? Are your Senators on the record on this one? Mine are. (CA).
When legal immigrants Ali and Senay Ozmez returned from a trip to their native Turkey this month, they were unable to bring back their youngest daughter, 2-year-old Zehra, a Turkish citizen, because of a regulatory glitch they didn’t foresee.
The family, which also includes Zehra’s older, American-born brother and sister, has been without Zehra for three weeks, but the separation could stretch into years.
[snip]
At the airport in Phoenix, Zehra was allowed to fly, though she didn’t have a visa. Senay was told to get one in Turkey.
Senay assumed that meant a tourist visa and that the child’s return to the U.S. with her family would be no problem, especially because she had been admitted before.
But at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, she was told Zehra needed an immigrant visa.
Such visas have a seven-year waiting list. Outside the embassy, Senay Ozmez cried. – linkage
the system is so broken and difficult to navigate without legal assistance that its nearly impossible to make your way through it without hitting several landmines in the process. The legal assistance isn’t cheap either, which adds a whole other class issue to the mess.
That’s what pisses me off about people who say “they should just enter the country legally”. They have no idea how many hurdles you have to jump through, how many years it takes to navigate the system in most cases, how little accurate information is provided by immigration services, or how much money it takes for all of the above.
It took my father (A US citizen) over 2 years to get his wife into this country, partly because they kept changing the rules or requirements every time he had met the ones they had told him he had to follow before. Unreal.
STOCKHOLM, Aug 24 (IPS) – The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) believes that the growing environmental degradation of Africa is perhaps most starkly reflected in satellite images beamed from the skies.
And so, the Nairobi-based U.N. agency introduced a new atlas at an international water conference here which shows “the dramatic and damaging” environmental changes sweeping across the beleaguered African continent.
“I hope the (satellite) images in the atlas will sound a warning around the world that, if we are to overcome poverty and meet internationally agreed development goals by 2015, the sustainable management of Africa’s lakes must be part of the equation,” says Achim Steiner, the recently-appointed executive director of UNEP.
“Otherwise,” he warns, “we face increasing tensions and instability as rising populations compete for life’s most precious of precious resources.”
US and European Union authorities continue to dispute how much personal information should be released about travelers.
The USA wants access to databases that collect passenger information during the process of ordering plane tickets, newspaper Dagbladet reports.
This would include the person who ordered the ticket, who paid, who else is in the travel group, ordering of rental car and hotel, meal requests, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, and previous journeys.
An EU tribunal rejected a May agreement between the USA and the EU from 2004 on the grounds that it lacked a legal foundation. That agreement involved European airlines transferring 34 different types of information about each passenger traveling to the USA, prior to departure.
You’ve got to go: AP/Yahoo
The NY Times reports that a senior scientist at the EPA has accused the agency of relying on misleading data about the health hazards of World Trade Center dust:
…Remember this when state and federal officials claim that the “toxic soup,” “Katrina cough” and other hazards after Hurricane Katrina were myths boosted by media looking for a dramatic story.
Weather conditions appear favorable for Sunday’s planned launch of the space shuttle Atlantis from Cape Canaveral, Florida, a NASA official said Thursday.
A Europe-wide study offers “conclusive proof” that spring is getting earlier, say researchers.
The recovery of biodiversity after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction was much more chaotic than previously thought, according to paleontologists. New fossil evidence shows that at certain times and places, plant and insect diversity were severely out of balance, not linked as they are today. For example, a study reported today notes that insect species in tropical and temperate forests dine on about the same number of tree species, despite the more diverse menu in the tropics. Proving a conjecture going back to Darwin, the study found that the diversity of insect species in the tropics is a result of the diversity of plant species there.
Don’t tell the administration, but Argentina has announced a major nuclear initiative worth 3.5 billion dollars to finish its third nuclear power plant, start a fourth and resume production of enriched uranium. The main goal of the plan unveiled late Wednesday, which will be carried out in cooperation with Canada, is to meet the country’s energy demands. Though an oil producer and exporter, Argentina’s reserves are running low and its demand is higher, while investment has lagged.
The BBC reports a fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet. On Thursday, experts approved a definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category of object. But the lead scientist on NASA’s robotic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it “embarrassing”. And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been “hijacked”. [Were the votes counted by Diebold?]
A dramatic increase about 12,000 years ago in levels of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas, was most likely caused by higher emissions from tropical wetlands or from plant production, not a release from seafloor methane deposits, a new study concludes.
Evolutionary biology is mysteriously missing from the list of undergraduate subjects eligible for a US federal grant. The department of education claims the omission is simply a mistake and insists that US students taking evolutionary biology majors are eligible for the grants. However, the incident has left pro-evolution campaigners wondering whether evolutionary biology was deliberately eliminated from the list by people who find Darwinian evolution impossible to reconcile with their own religious beliefs.
Speaking of evolution, cooling towers could be evolutionary hotspots for new respiratory diseases. Many species of bacteria, including those that cause legionnaires’ disease, are thought to have evolved in association with an amoebic host. The warm, wet conditions found in cooling towers at factories and oil refineries make them a perfect spot for amoebas and bacteria to thrive, increasing the chances of new strains of pathogenic bacteria emerging; amoebas in cooling towers are about 16 times as likely to host bacteria as those in ponds and lakes.
Ruling that the Bush administration “plainly violated” the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge overturned a regulation Thursday that streamlined approval of pesticides.
From Feministing: Conservative reaction to Plan B over-the-counter approval
From Pandagon: The link between women’s financial indpendence and divorce rates
From slate: Pill price increase will hit low-income women the hardest
Want to know how severely Bush has damaged our National Security? Read on:
1.We’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?
On balance, more vulnerable.
[snip]
In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.[snip]
2. Is Al Qaeda stronger or weaker than it was five years ago?
The quality of its leadership is not as high as it was in 2001, because we’ve killed and captured so many of its leaders. But they have succession planning that works very well.[snip]
We also shouldn’t underestimate the stature of bin Laden and Zawahiri in the Muslim world now that they’ve survived five years of war with the United States.[snip]
3. Given all this, why hasn’t there been an attack on the United States for the past five years?
It’s not just a lack of capacity; they’re not ready to do it. They put more emphasis on success than speed, and the next attack has to be bigger than 9/11. They could shoot up a mall if that’s what they wanted to do. But the world is going their way.[snip]
4. Has the war in Iraq helped or hurt in the fight against terrorism?
It broke the back of our counterterrorism program.[snip]
5. Things seemed to have turned for the worse in Afghanistan too. What’s your take on the situation there?
The President was sold a bill of goods by George Tenet and the CIA–that a few dozen intel guys, a few hundred Special Forces, and truckloads of money could win the day. What happened is what’s happened ever since Alexander the Great, three centuries before Christ: the cities fell quickly, which we mistook for victory. Three years later, the Taliban has regrouped, and there’s a strong insurgency.[snip]
6. Has the war in Lebanon also been a plus for the jihadists?
Yes. The Israel-Hezbollah battle validates bin Laden. It showed that the Arab regimes are useless, that they can’t protect their own nationals, and that they are apostate regimes that are creatures of the infidels. It also showed that the Americans will let Israel do whatever it wants.[snip]
7. And finally, an extra question–what needs to be done?
This may be a country bumpkin approach, but the truth is the best place to start. We need to acknowledge that we are at war, not because of who we are, but because of what we do.[snip]
At the core of the debate is oil. As long as we and our allies are dependent on Gulf oil, we can’t do anything about the perception that we support Arab tyranny–the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other regimes in the region. Without the problem of oil, who cares who rules Saudi Arabia? If we solved the oil problem, we could back away from the contradiction of being democracy promoters and tyranny protectors.[snip]
What you want with foreign policy is options. Right now we don’t have options because our economy and our allies’ economies are dependent on Middle East oil.
The fact is that Bush has been disasterous for national security. The more we pound on that fact, the better.
On MSNBC Hardball Gen. Batiste asks why is Rumsfeld still at the helm of DoD and names the recipe:
(H/T: Thinkprogress)
Now, ya know I like experimenting with recipes but this is not one I’d take on. Does. not. need. any. spices. The military has it.
Serious though, where is Rummy?
Porkbusters: Secret Hold was placed on a bill in the middle of the night, and I’d really like to know why this isn’t being pushed – HARD – on the left. Here’s the lead sentence as Reported in the Senate:
.
Smells like someone has something to hide regarding federal expenditures, and right before the election cycle. WTF is going on here? Are your Senators on the record on this one? Mine are. (CA).
I have one who is “in the clear” (Santorum – how did that happen?) and one who is not (Specter).
Where is the common sense and human decency in all this? Why are even legal immigrant families ripped apart like this?
Absolutely disgusting.
the system is so broken and difficult to navigate without legal assistance that its nearly impossible to make your way through it without hitting several landmines in the process. The legal assistance isn’t cheap either, which adds a whole other class issue to the mess.
That’s what pisses me off about people who say “they should just enter the country legally”. They have no idea how many hurdles you have to jump through, how many years it takes to navigate the system in most cases, how little accurate information is provided by immigration services, or how much money it takes for all of the above.
It took my father (A US citizen) over 2 years to get his wife into this country, partly because they kept changing the rules or requirements every time he had met the ones they had told him he had to follow before. Unreal.
ENVIRONMENT-AFRICA:
Satellites Chronicle a Depleted Continent
USA wants to know all