Big Oil and the GOP Order A Hit On Climate Science

I read in the Washington Post this morning that a Republican/Oil Company congressman is demanding the internal memos and emails of climate scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This extortionist is Lamar Smith (R-TX). His constituents will cheer; he is from Texas and Texas is owned by the oil industry. He and they are employed by Big Oil. He is doing their bidding. Unfortunately the internal memos and emails between Smith and his handlers in Big Oil are confidential. He'll ask the questions. The public is not going to know how his thoughts are controlled or his actions are directed.


We should be demanding the internal memos and emails of the fossil fuel companies and lobbyists and congressmen. We should be demanding this loudly, but we don't have a congressional subpoena power or a congressional microphone. The oil and gas companies' enormous taxpayer subsidies entitle us to know how much they are lying to us. Why exactly are we subsidizing them anyway? They are obscenely profitable. They don't need subsidies. Why are they subpoenaing scientists? Call it blackmail. Call it intimidation. Business as usual.

If this congressional operative of the fossil fuel companies thinks scientists’ casual banter can be twisted into something the public might be persuaded to dislike by an expensive oil-funded ad campaign, well, the toadying congressmen like Smith do to get paid by the oil companies doesn’t need twisting. The congressional GOP has its own private intellectual kama sutra, a set of bizarre positions it assumes to pleasure their funders. They probably keep it under their pillows.

Which is funny until you realize they are accepting money in exchange for allowing the extremely profitable destruction of our civilization. Their only “out" being that this destruction will occur after they’ve been paid all the money and retired from their corrupted offices.

It might give them pause if they realized that their longterm strategy includes an even better paid period working as a lobbyist. In that role they will be reaping the whirlwind they’ve sown. They will be right there in the oil and coal company’s employ, wearing their black hat, explaining why Baltimore and New Jersey port facilities are under water, explaining why it was worth it to turn our nation’s breadbasket into a near-desert thus making it vital that we import our food via the port facilities that their decades of fossil fuel shilling has rendered unusable. The anger of millions of persons who have lost their homes in submerged coastal regions will not be a fun thing for them to deal with. Climate change will create more refugees than the war in Syria and they will be Americans with American voices and American families and an American level of resentment and anger.

Unequal Justice

First off, a brilliant accusatory letter to Antonin Scalia from the Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Jr., which I will insert in full. Emile Zola couldn't have done it better.

To the Honorable Antonin G. Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

Dear Sir:

Twenty-one years ago, your then-colleague, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, wrote what became a famous dissent to a Supreme Court decision not to review a Texas death-penalty conviction. In it, Blackmun declared that he had become convinced “the death penalty experiment has failed” and said he considered capital punishment irretrievably unconstitutional.

The death penalty, he wrote, “remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination...and mistake...From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”

You mocked him for this stance in an opinion concurring with the majority, invoking as justification for capital punishment the horrific 1983 case of an 11-year-old girl who was raped then killed by having her panties stuffed down her throat. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection,” you wrote, “compared with that!”

A few months later, the very case you had referenced came before the court. Henry Lee McCollum, a mentally disabled man who was on death row in North Carolina after having been convicted of that rape and murder, applied to the court for a review of his case. You were part of the majority that rejected the request without comment.

The demagoguery of your response to Justice Blackmun is pretty standard for proponents of state-sanctioned death. Rather than contend with the many logical and irrefutable arguments against capital punishment, they use a brute-force appeal to emotion.

Certain crimes, they say, are so awful, heinous and vile that they cry out for the ultimate sanction. For you, Sabrina Buie’s rape and murder was one of those, a symbol of why we need the death penalty.

As you have doubtless heard, it now turns out McCollum was innocent of that crime. Last year, he and his also mentally disabled half-brother Leon Brown (who had been serving a life sentence) were exonerated by DNA evidence and set free.

A few days ago, McCollum was pardoned by North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory.

The case against him was never what you’d call ironclad. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was a confession McCollum, then a 19-year-old said to have the mentality of a child 10 years younger, gave with no lawyer present after five hours of questioning.

“I had never been under this much pressure,” he told the News & Observer newspaper in a videotaped death row interview, “with a person hollering at me and threatening me...I just made up a false story so they could let me go home.”

But he didn’t go home for over 30 years. You and your colleagues had a chance to intervene in that injustice and chose not to. Not incidentally, the real culprit avoided accountability all that time.

The argument against the death penalty will never have the visceral, immediate emotionalism of the argument in favor. It does not satisfy that instinctive human need to make somebody pay — now! — when something bad has been done. Rather, it turns on quieter concerns, issues of inherent racial, class, geographic and gender bias, issues of corner-cutting cops and ineffective counsel, and issues of irrevocability, the fact that, once imposed, death cannot be undone.

Those issues were easy for you to ignore in mocking Blackmun. They are always easy to ignore, right up until the moment they are not.

This is one of those moments, sir, and it raises a simple and obvious question to which one would hope you feel honor-bound to respond. In 1994, you used this case as a symbol of why we need the death penalty.

What do you think it symbolizes now?

Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald


The problem we have in this country is too many public duties are handled in a "businesslike" way, as cheaply and superficially as possible. But complex matters like criminal justice shouldn't be managed the same way we manage a fast food restaurant.


There's also this story, from Texas Monthly. A prosecutor loses his job after a man spends 18 years on death row only to be exonerated.


And meanwhile (in case you didn’t think our justice system kicks down and kisses up) there are these stories:

From TIME, a story about a rich kid getting off after using the excuse that he suffers from being rich.

From Alternet, a perp walks free and an innocent goes to prison.

It gets hard to tell satire from reality.

Racism Top to Bottom

Racism top to bottom.

No matter if you’re president of the United States.

(Obama's re-election resulted in a flood of deeply racist tweets)

Or those trying to advance the agenda of this black president of the United States.

(The Atlantic reported on the Republican obstruction of Obama)

Or if you’re the best female tennis player ever to play the game.

(Serena Williams gets more racist catcalls on court than Sharapova does.)

Or some middle class black kids using a public pool.

(You no doubt heard about the mass arrest of teens swimming-while-black in Texas)

(Reported in The Guardian)

Or if you are black and behind the wheel of your own damn car.

(Reported by the Washington Post)

(The ACLU began responding to this problem 16 years ago)

God help you if you are voting-while-black

(The National Memo reports on the GOP push to limit voting)

If you are black or a person of color in this country, you have powerful enemies who will oppose your right to do anything. Still. In 2015.

If you are president and black and are attempting to advance the interests of ALL working Americans, there are many millions of white Americans who will despise and oppose you because you are doing this while black.

Voting while black. Getting elected while black. Driving while black. Playing tennis while black. Using a public pool while black. Walking on the public sidewalk while black. Breathing while black. All these things are up for debate, insulting opposition, hatred, violence and arrest.

Serious Threat of Government Takeover in Texas (and related stories)

From NPR we have this report In Texas this week, Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered a mobilization of the National Guard to defend his state against a takeover by the federal government. Texans have become very alarmed recently about the joint U.S. special forces and military exercises scheduled to begin in Texas and adjacent states. Concerned Texans have been emailing back and forth about imminent roundups of conservatives who will be sent to FEMA camps for indoctrination. These rumors contain a lot of vague information about secret underground tunnels at Walmart stores where this mass arrest will supposedly take place.

There’s more:

This public access program features a wonderful example of pure-hearted level-headed and completely sincere American womanhood who honestly believes the first black president is the leader of an alien invasion bent on destroying America, perhaps by sapping our precious bodily fluids. It is impossible not to believe every word she says. She has documents.

Watch and Learn.

It is in this alien conspiracy theory video that we learn, for the first time, key details of the use of tunnels underneath Walmart stores for the enslavement of patriotic Americans. Watch and inform yourself before you go out and buy large weaponry and canned goods. (But not at Walmart.)

The swift action by Texas Governor Greg Abbott precipitated some letter writing between a few apparently sane and deeply embarrassed Texas Republicans and their governor. (We may assume the letter writer is one of the Texans who has already been kidnapped by the aliens and indoctrinated in the tunnels under one of those Walmarts in Texas. They’re also warning us about Lowes stores.)

Two top talk radio hosts believe Obama is arming black urban gangs to take over the government in a coming race war. Right Wing Watch reports. It’s the typical nonsense. What’s scary is how closely this resembles the official Republican line.

Meanwhile, Back East, VOX is reporting that Senator Lindsey Graham (another patriotic Republican) has identified the greatest existential threat to Americans and our way of life. That threat, says Senator Graham (R, SC), is comprised of ANYTHING originating in the Middle East that starts with the word “Al”.

Al Qaeda begins with “Al”, which is why this makes so much sense.

Al is the Arabic word for “The.”

Again. Firearms. Canned goods. Not from Walmart.

And, for God’s sake, not from the Middle East where these items will come with the word “AL” somewhere on the label.

The tragic thing is while we’ve been worrying about the mass imprisonment and police shootings of African Americans in this country, the actual kidnapping and enslavement of real Americans in tunnels underneath Walmart stores has been planned and possibly has already begun and nobody seems to be paying any attention to the imminent danger except Governor Abbott, Senator Graham and this woman on YouTube.

Ironic.

Is Michele Bachmann Right After All?

World Net Daily (always fascinating) reports Michele Bachmann blames/thanks Obama for triggering the End Times. Hooray! Now Jesus will come!

A priest on FoxNews says we can't trust our "atheist president" because he isn't afraid of eternal damnation.

The Dallas Morning News reports Texas Governor Abbott has called out the National Guard to keep watch on U.S. Military maneuvers which he thinks are a secret plan to take over the state of Texas.

(This is from way last year) Tom Delay, unseated corrupt Republican Speaker of the House, explains how God wrote the U.S. Constitution.

In Kansas, a new law permits prosecutors to put teachers in jail for assigning books they disapprove of.

In Texas, the state has approved a new history textbook for schools which includes Moses as one of our Founding Fathers.

The Guardian makes an interesting observation: in most American cities police can be put in jail for shooting animals, but not for shooting people.

Speaking of the Baltimore riots, New York Magazine published this interesting list of times white people have rioted, burned and looted over stupid things like basketball teams winning games.

On Fox'N'Friends a black woman put in a leadership post in the Miami police raises fears she might be a dangerous Muslim terrorist.

…maybe these are the End Times.

Rick Perry Wants More Poor People Working Harder For Less Money and Paying More Taxes

A good article from the Guardian last week points up the flaws in Rick Perry's Texas jobs picture.

Let me see if I understand this: Rick Perry wants more people to be poor, and wants more poor people working harder and longer for less, and wants more poor people paying more taxes so rich people can pay less than they already do which is less than poor people pay.

Nod if you agree.

I get this information from Forbes, by the way. And CNN Money. And the New York Times.

More middle class Americans have become poor in the past ten years, so Bush already accomplished what Perry said he wants to do. And Bush already guaran-darn-teed that very very rich people paid lower income taxes than bus drivers and office managers, making it better to own for a living than work for a living. And all the other Republican candidates agree on this. So what's the fuss about? Why are networks covering this? Instead of covering thousands of protesters on Wall Street...

So, the real Texas story? More jobs but not enough to keep up with the population growth. More jobs but lower paying jobs, more new government funded jobs than private sector ones, and worse conditions in many important categories. In effect, Perry has done to Texas what George W. Bush did to the U.S. Do we need it done all over again?