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Republican party drops to Cheney-levels of unpopularity.

Republican party drops to Cheney-levels of unpopularity.
Jun 19th, 2009

A NBC/WSJ poll released this week showed that Vice President Cheney now has a 26 percent approval rating, “up eight points from April.” However, Greg Sargent today points out that the “overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped” below Cheney’s “abysmal level.” In fact, the party is now at only 25 percent, down four points from April. “Okay, the difference is within the margin of error, making this a statistical tie,” said Sargent. “But still, this is pretty awful for the GOP, given that for a long time Cheney’s historic unpopularity seemed to define a kind of low-water mark among Republicans.”

The new Chrysler

CNN, June 10, 2009

Late Monday the US Supreme court lifted a temporary stay of the sale, stalled, by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The pension funds argued that the Chrysler sale unlawfully rewarded unsecured creditors (employees) ahead of secured lenders, that it amounted to an illegal reorganization plan, and that the U.S. Treasury Department overstepped its powers by using bailout funds for Chrysler when Congress intended the money for banks.

Chrysler and the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court to allow the sale to go forward and said a long delay could kill the deal, resulting in the automaker’s liquidation and the loss of more than 38,000 jobs.

They cited Chrysler’s worsening financial situation, with $100-million-a-day losses. The sale agreement sets a June 15 deadline to close.
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Climate change may displace up to 200 million people

Wed June 10, 2009 By Moni Basu, CNN

“Fosil fueling climate change”

A new kind of refugee is on the rise. And by 2050, there could be as many as 200 million of them.
They are not fleeing despicable acts of violence or persecution but the very land and water on which their livelihoods depend. They are some of the world’s poorest, forced from their homes by global climate change.
Alarmed by the predictions on climate refugees, humanitarian agencies warn that recent gains in the fight against poverty could vanish unless issues of forced migration become an integral part of the dialogue on global warming.
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Climate change forces Eskimos to abandon their village

Tue April 28, 2009 By Azadeh Ansari, CNN

The indigenous people of Alaska have stood firm against some of the most extreme, frozen, weather conditions on Earth for thousands of years. But now, global warming has brought flooding blamed on climate change, already forcing at least one Eskimo village to move to safer ground.

The community of the tiny coastal village of Newtok voted to relocate its 340 residents to new homes 9 miles away, up the Ninglick River. The village, home to indigenous Yup’ik Eskimos, is the first of possibly scores of threatened Alaskan communities that could be abandoned.

Warming temperatures are melting coastal ice shelves and frozen sub-soils, which act as natural barriers to protect the village against summer deluges from ocean storm surges.

“We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now,” said Stanley Tom, a Yup’ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council.
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Von Spakovsky: Still Fabricating “Facts”, Still Suppressing Votes

Jun 9th, 2009

Further demonstrating that no Republican “conservative” can be so disgraced that they cannot later be published in the Wall Street Journal, Bush-era vote suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky has an op-ed in today’s WSJ claiming that the Justice Department has “spent the last several months misinterpreting key voting rights laws for nakedly political reasons”:

In truth the DOJ halted an illegal voter suppression scheme that systematically screened out “thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote.”
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Interrogation, Torture and Waterboarding at Guantanamo

After Waterboarding: How to Make Terrorists Talk?
By Bobby Ghosh/Washington Monday, Jun. 08, 2009

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.
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Doctors’ complicity in U.S. detainee abuse

First, Do Harm

The American Prospect(TAP) talks to Oath Betrayed author Steven H. Miles about physicians’ complicity in U.S. detainee abuse.
For an update, see First, Do Harm by Justine Sharrock in Mother Jones, August, 2009
August 11, 2006

When the pictures from Abu Ghraib came out, it was clear that this was more than a matter of a few bad apples. You don’t have torture of this kind without a command that authorizes it. The question then was why the doctors hadn’t blown the whistle. I wrote an article for the medical journal Lancet in August 2004 based on the Taguba report and on congressional hearings, about how physicians were involved in designing abusive interrogation procedures and in falsifying death certificates to hide abuses. The Department of Defense reacted by criticizing the tone of that article but did not contradict any of the factual claims.

Then, six days before the 2004 election, the government dropped 6,000 documents in response to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request. This was too much to analyze before the election. Another 15,000 pages came in January 2006, and another 15,000 in the next four months. This material gave me my story.

What did you find based in these documents?

The government’s policy was to do coercive interrogations. Donald Rumsfeld had set up a “rump” interrogation system within the Army, which came up with new a new, non-doctrinal, illegal, set of policies for the Joint Interrogation and Detention Centers, or JDICs, in all three theaters. There was an administratively similar system for all three theaters — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. (more…)

The Cars You’ll Drive in 2014

Forbes Magazine dated June 08, 2009, Hannah Elliott +, 05-20-2009
Motivated by new consumer tax credits - as much as $7,500 for a robust plug-in hybrid

Detroit, Motor City, had better get cracking. It takes four years to produce a market-ready vehicle, and a typical lifecycle for one model is seven years. While we wait to see what brands emerge victorious, Honda’s CR-Z and Ford’s “eco-boosted” Euro models point to the types of cars we can expect by 2014.
[and the Dodge EV and the Chevy Volt - and the Tesla Roadster and the Fisker Karma - even sooner]
Nissan is testing battery-charging networks in Arizona, saying an unnamed electric vehicle will go on sale by late 2010.


Chevy Volt


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Battery Stimulus Scramble

Forbes Magazine dated June 08, 2009, Kerry A. Dolan, 05-20-2009

Dangle $2 billion of stimulus money in front of them and battery makers will get all charged up. As many as 50 are applying for a piece of the loot available for electric-vehicle batteries. Among them: a small company called Quallion in Sylmar, Calif. that is 90% owned by Alfred Mann, who made his fortune in medical devices.

Mann founded Quallion in 1998 to supply long-lasting batteries to the devices his other companies made: pacemakers, insulin pumps, cochlear implants and the like. Over the past few years Quallion has expanded into supplying lithium-ion batteries for spacecraft, airplanes and military Humvees and helicopters. It says it produces 70,000 lithium-ion cells a year (mostly for medical devices), more than any other U.S. company. Revenues should come in north of $25 million this year.

The batteries for hybrid cars now on the road are the nickel metal hydride variety, but automakers expect that lithium, which packs more energy per pound, is the way to deliver on the high-mpg promise of plug-in hybrids. The U.S. doesn’t have much to crow about when it comes to battery manufacturing. For hybrid electric cars such as the Toyota Prius and the Ford Fusion, pretty much all the batteries are made in Japan or Korea. Hence, the taxpayer stimulus.
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Imperative: overhaul the U.S. health care system!

WASHINGTON, June 2, 2009

(CBS/AP)
The report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers says that health care costs - now about 18 percent of the gross domestic product - will rise to 34 percent in 30 years if left unchecked, wreaking havoc on the federal deficit, businesses and working Americans.

Obama administration officials, urgently seeking to build momentum for health care legislation, planned to discuss the report’s findings at the White House on Tuesday with leaders of the key Senate committees drafting bills.

“Health care reform is incredibly important not just for the American people but for the American economy,” said Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers. “Good health care reform is essentially good economic policy.”

Fixing the economy requires overhauling the U.S. health care system, the White House report concludes - just the message the administration needs to help implement a sweeping new social welfare program during a recession.

“Sicko” — viewer’s comment:
In the light of Moore’s impressive research and documentation, after listening to the film’s horror stories of patients raped by the “disease-care” system, after witnessing the confessions of former players in that system who have come clean and can only live with themselves by spilling their guts regarding the devious methods they used to keep the system intact and bloat its profits, after hearing the Oval Office conversation between Richard Nixon and John Ehrlichman in which the two salivated over the spoils guaranteed to the industry as a result of creating a sprawling network of HMO’s, after the poignant scenes near the movie’s end of real people-9/11 rescue workers, actually getting extraordinarily humane and completely free healthcare in Cuba, there is little left to say about the American system because one can only hold one’s nose and gasp for fresh air in face of the overpowering, nauseating stench of the most brutal medical industry on earth. I do not hesitate to label it unequivocally, pure evil.

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Can GM, Chrysler, Ford, compete with fuel-efficient vehicles of China, Japan, Korea, and Germany?

June 1, 2009, CBS News, by Stephanie Condon

“It’s important the federal government as the new overseers (of GM) keep that car on track,” Weiss said. U.S. auto companies “have to be able to compete with China, Japan, Korea, and Germany, who are building the super-efficient cars of the future.”

There are some ways the government should interfere in GM’s business, Daniel J. Weiss, director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress said, such as insisting on the continued development of the Chevy Volt, the company’s much-anticipated plug-in hybrid vehicle. GM has said the car remains on track for a 2010 launch, according to Reuters. One of President Obama’s priorities is to get one million hybrids on the road by 2015.
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Can Fiat put Chrysler on road to recovery?

By Jorn Madslien 6-1-2009, Business reporter, BBC News

It looks like the end of the road for Chrysler’s chief executive Bob Nardelli. The faltering US car firm he is still in charge of is entering the bankruptcy courts, and it plans to hand over the steering wheel to Italian industrial group Fiat. Yet as Mr Nardelli looks back at his legacy, it seems his efforts in recent weeks to hammer out a deal between Chrysler’s shareholders, workers and lenders have nevertheless yielded results.

According to Quattroroute Magazine, it looks like Fiat is designing a hybrid system specifically for small cars which Chrysler will get to make use of. The new hybrid vehicles would see Fiat’s new 900cc 2-cylinder turbocharged engine working with an electric motor and a lithium-ion battery. Interestingly this hybrid system will also be able to be plugged in. While plug-in hybrids aren’t breaking any new ground, Fiat is looking to put the system into their little 500 series as well as the soon to be released Topolino. This would be a landmark for hybrid vehicles in that a 500 would be the smallest hybrid-electric out there. This type of vehicle might see some decent sales in the US which would be great for a struggling Chrysler assuming that they really do get some Fiat models with this hybrid system.

During the last week or so:
* Following recent negotiations, aided by government arm twisting, Chrysler’s United Auto Workers union have agreed to forego bonuses and pay raises, reduce unemployment and health care benefits, and limit their right to strike
* Daimler has agreed to give up its 19.9% stake in Chrysler and write off its debts
* Current owner Cerberus will forfeit its 80.1% stake
* Bond holders will get $2bn (£1.36bn) cash for the $6.9bn they are owed
* Union trust fund will take a 55% stake, the government 8%, Canada and Ontario 2%
* Fiat will take a 20% stake, rising to 35% and potentially to 51%.

Advantage of bankruptcy
The deals he has struck have smoothed the way for bankruptcy and a restructuring of the company, analysts say.

Having reached such “general agreements on a plan going forward” mean Chrysler has narrowly avoided a chaotic collapse, observes Aaron Bragman, an automotive analyst at Global Insight.
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U.S. Carbon Emissions Fall by Most Since ‘82

“No surprise.” Recession, Oil Prices Cited in 2008 Decline
By Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, May 21, 2009

U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide related to energy use fell 2.8 percent last year, according to an estimate by the Energy Information Administration, driven down by high oil prices and the sagging economy. The drop in carbon dioxide emissions was the steepest since 1982.

The amount of carbon dioxide produced for every dollar of economic output also declined by 3.8 percent, the federal agency said, as industry and motorists became more efficient and frugal and as renewable energy sources gained a slightly larger share of the energy market. That was far greater than the average decline in carbon intensity in previous years.
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Behind the scenes of the auto emissions deal

Behind the scenes of the auto emissions deal

The agreement for a strict nationwide standard for U.S.-sold cars by 2016 is a mix of firm demands and minor concessions from the government. Obama sees the talks as a ‘template for more progress.’
By Jim Tankersley, May 20, 2009

What made the agreement possible was a combination of unyielding demands by the federal government on some points and a willingness to make major concessions on what it considered smaller ones, said officials involved who requested anonymity when discussing the negotiations. With the U.S. auto industry on the brink of collapse, its leaders came to see that they could no longer forestall action — and would be better off with a single, strict national rule than a state-by-state patchwork.

“We were able to convince everybody to keep their eye on the ball — a national standard — and work on the way we get there,” said Browner, who spearheaded the effort.
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The Road To Slashing Emissions

The Progress Report, May 19, 2009
The 2007 Supreme Court ruling said President Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had violated the Clean Air Act by failing to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

Today, President Obama will unveil “the first-ever national emission limits for cars and trucks,” a move that Sierra Club President Carl Pope says is “one of the most significant efforts undertaken by any president, ever, to end our addiction to oil and seriously slash our global warming emissions.” Daniel Becker of the Safe Climate Campaign calls it “single biggest step the American government has ever taken to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.” The Obama administration will also raise fuel efficiency targets so that by 2016, cars and light trucks will have an average mile requirement of 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2016. For 2009 model cars, the average fuel efficiency is 25 mpg. “The projected oil savings of this program over the life of this program is 1.8 billion barrels of oil,” announced a senior administration official on a conference call with reporters last night. “The program is also projected to achieve reductions of 900 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions under the life of the program. That is equivalent to shutting down 194 coal plants.” Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Daniel J. Weiss called today’s announcement a “triple play” because it will “help move America off foreign oil, save families money, and spur American businesses to take the lead in developing the job-creating, clean-energy technologies of the future.”
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Obama Heralds New Fuel, Emission Standards

President Announces National 35.5 MPG Efficiency Standard, Pollution Reduction Plan
WASHINGTON, May 19, 2009

(CBS/ AP) Stating that “the status quo is no longer acceptable,” President Barack Obama on Tuesday announced a new fuel and emission standard that he says will, at last, put the United States on the road to a cleaner environment and better fuel efficiency.

The plan creates the first-ever national emissions limits for vehicles and sets the overall or industry average fuel efficiency standard at 35.5 miles per gallon, an increase of more than 8 miles per gallon per vehicle. It is aimed at saving billions of barrels of oil, and, although it also is expected to cost consumers an additional $1,300 per vehicle by 2016, “In fact, over the life of a vehicle, the typical driver would save about $2,800 by getting better gas mileage,” he said.

“We will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years,” the president said. “Just to give you a sense of magnitude, that’s more oil than we imported last year from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Libya, and Nigeria combined.”
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Republicans and Pelosi still being lied to by the CIA

Republicans and Pelosi still being lied to by the CIA
May 18th 2009

Conservatives have been on a media blitz accusing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of lying last week when she said that she believed she had been “misled” by the CIA during intelligence briefings regarding the use of torture. Last night on Fox News’s On The Record, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) continued this blitz, arguing that Pelosi did not want to “take accountability and responsibility for the actions that she took in 2002, 2003″ and is instead simply “blaming the CIA.”

Yesterday on CNN’s American Morning, Hoekstra made similar remarks, referring to Pelosi’s claims as “outrageous accusations.” He also appeared last night on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight and this morning on talk radio with Bill Bennett and Laura Ingraham.

Hoekstra’s repeated objections to Pelosi accusing the CIA of having lied to Congress is quite odd given the fact that he’s made nearly identical claims on multiple occasions. As Marcy Wheeler first noted, Hoekstra wrote a letter to President Bush in 2006 accusing the intelligence community of withholding information on their activities from Congress. “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoekstra wrote. He said that he believed the Bush administration’s failure to fully brief his committee could constitute “a violation of law“:

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.
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