Gas prices: appeal to the ultimate decision maker

When "the decider" fails you, I guess you gotta go a little higher up.

Pray Live
Event to pray for lower gas prices.
Location: Pennsylvania Ave., between North Carolina Ave. and Fourth St., SE, Washington, D.C.. 12 noon (April 27, 2006)
Contact: Tina Nicole, 877-XXX-XXXX

Fashion notes from today's commute

A. Black lipliner confuses me.

B. Communication devices (celphone, Blackberry, pager) in a holster? It's a functional thing and you might need to do it for work, so I'm not going to give it a blanket denunciation. But let's just be clear. When this happens to you, you have officially gone and done it: you have become The Man. And I don't mean "da man!" I mean The Man. It may no longer be possible for you to have fun. What're you gonna do, bring that holstered celphone with you to the Black Cat for the Pretty Girls Make Graves show? Those kids with the LCD belt buckles would kick your ass.

Unintentionally Hilarious Resources Committee Web Pages--vol. 2!

I love that "Unintentionally Hilarious Resources Committee Web Pages" is now an actual, multi-post category on this blog.

It's going to take a few posts to plow through all of the BS on the Resources Committee's "Earth Day" website, which purports to expose environmental nonprofit fundraising and lobbying as "big business" by posting environmental groups' CEO salaries, lobbying expenses, and annual revenues. Apparently we're all living like princes drinking martinis in our high-rise offices. Clearly the Resources Committee Web Team has not been to my phat group house recently. The martini part is pretty accurate though, if you want to call straight shots of Smirnoff a "martini."

More to the point--the enviro lobbying expenditures page is what makes this website an UNINTENTIONALLY HILARIOUS RESOURCES COMMITTEE WEB PAGE. That's because the expenditures posted for enviro groups are so ridiculously small compared to the lobbying expenditures of the special interests we are commonly lobbying against. To wit:

The Resources Earth Day site looks at the past 5-7 years of expenses for a slate of major enviro groups, and comes up with a grand total of $31,599,114 in total lobbying expenditures. In contrast, the oil and gas industry alone spent $220,732,499, or seven times that amount, lobbying Congress over just the last 5 years. Agribusiness spent $353,316,615. The chemical industry spent $112,066,610. (Source: Opensecrets.org)

And these are just three of the industries that commonly advocate for dangerous and harmful policies that environmental groups must fight against, from weak standards for securing chemical plants against terrorist attack, to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, to weakening the Clean Air Act or the Endangered Species Act.

This is not going well for us

Linked on the main web page of the WP this morning. Applebaum is not exactly a habitual anti-environmental shill, either. Maybe she's just confused because Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) is somehow ending up on the same side as Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) on the Cape Wind project...(AP) Can't say I can blame her.

As I used to say when I worked in West Virginia: If you think windmills for power generation are ugly and harmful to the environment, you'll really love mountaintop removal mining.

National security, hello?

According to Scooter Libby, our president, George W. Bush, authorized staff to leak information from a classified military document--the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq--to the media. During wartime. Pretty bad, but W has proven to be enough of a screwup that this is not the hugest deal, in of itself, in the context of his entire administration to date.

What makes it a huge deal is the reason why he authorized the leaking of this information. Was it because the president thought the American people needed to know this vital information, so he declassified it and threw a big press conference to announce it? NO. Was it because it wasn't really that important or relevant to administration policy at the moment, so it was not necessary to keep it secret? NO.

Nope, he did it to cover his own ass. (And Dick Cheney's too, which means there was an awful lot of ass to cover.) If Libby's testimony is accurate, the president authorized the leak in order to restore the credibility of the administration's arguments for war on Iraq after Ambassador Joe Wilson's NYT op-ed arguing that Iraq had not tried to obtain nuclear fuel from Niger.

Petty, manipulative, self-serving, dangerous. Please, somebody make some of this stick.

"Fewer Marshes + More Man-Made Ponds = Increased Wetlands"

The above headline from the New York Times sums this story up neatly--

Last week, the Bush administration proudly announced that there has been a net increase in wetlands since 1998. Sounds good, right? Well, there's more:

...the net gain noted in the report was fueled by an increase in pond acreage, which includes things like ornamental ponds in new developments and mine reclamation ponds.

For instance, the mining of sand and clay for the construction of two major highways in South Carolina, Routes 22 and 31, left the Myrtle Beach area dotted with large, deep ponds that qualify as wetlands in the Interior Department's survey but do not provide the wildlife habitat or perform the filtering functions of tidal marshes or cypress swamps. (NYT)

So in other words, the Bush administration has presided over a loss of 523,500 acres of ecologically valuable wetlands and marshes, which was offset by a gain of 715,300 acres of...like...koi ponds or something.

It's kind of like if your dad accidentally runs over your pet kitten, and then promises to get you a new kitten, and gets you a new kitten, except it's a toy kitten and not a real live kitten. Yeah--kind of like that.

File under: Unintentionally hilarious Resources Committee web pages

Sure. Meets it in a dark alley and gets the crap kicked out of it, maybe.

[This is from Pombo's new "OceanAction" web page on the House Resources Committee website.]