This just in! Polar bears threatened

This hasn’t hit the news yet but you heard it here first: the US Fish and Wildlife Service has officially decided to list the polar bear as a threatened, but not endangered, species under the Endangered Species Act.

Leg updates: Energy Bill and Climate Change bills

The energy bill is still held up in closed negotiations within the Democratic leadership, the auto industry is still hoping to gut the increased fuel economy standards, and Senator Domenici’s overwhelming love for nuclear power transcends all political divides, reason, space, and time.

Dems drafting energy bill in secret, too [Politico]

Joe Lieberman’s crappy version of a climate change bill has made it out of his subcommittee, over the objections of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and two Republicans (for very different reasons, of course).

Global warming bill advances in Senate [Yahoo News]

Tracking Lieberman-Warner: What’s Next? [Gristmill] 

I’d much prefer to see Democrats and the environmental community wait until 2009 and pass a much stronger climate change bill, than wheel and deal their way to a much weaker one in the current Congress.

Why Mike Huckabee scares me; Why I’d like to go get a beer with Mike Huckabee

Of the Republican Presidential hopefuls with any reasonable chance of the nomination (Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, McCain, Huckabee, and what the hell let’s say Ron Paul too), the one I think would be hardest for any Democratic nominee to beat is Mike Huckabee. Yes, the other man from Hope, Governor of Arkansas, Baptist minister, and former fat man.

Why is this? Primarily, it’s because he is just a likable guy. Down-home Southern likability was a big part of how the media played up Bush in 2000. Huckabee tells jokes, he plays bass, and he even played ping-pong with the folks at NPR! He also refuses to engage in fear-mongering on foreign policy or play the 9/11 card ad nauseum. He may not believe in evolution, and may be an extreme social conservative, but he’s an economic populist much in the same way as John Edwards. He might lose the vote of the most libertarian or free-market Republicans who call him a “nanny-stater” (he advocates a nationwide smoking ban, and talks up the obesity epidemic often), but he would keep the Christian evangelical vote to a far, far greater degree than any other Republican front runner.

So basically, Huckabee keeps the entire social conservative/values voter base, steals the Democrat’s thunder on economic populism, and wins over any independents or undecideds who pay more attention to personality than anything else. He is by far the hardest opponent for the Democratic attack. It’s just hard to get someone to dislike Mike Huckabee! I disagree with him on almost everything and yet I’d still like to go get a beer with him! Too bad he doesn’t drink.

Second toughest opponent would be Romney, because he would keep at least some of the Christian evangelical vote on board, firmly keep the free-market wing of his party, probably win over the more business-minded of the independents and maybe even the Democrats, and have the press go all ga-ga over his dashing good looks and creepy tan.

This, of course, is all in contrast to Rudy Giuliani, who would lose almost all of the Christian evangelical and values vote, possibly to a third party candidate, doesn’t seem even remotely likable to anyone, and basically scares the shit out of everybody to the left of Condoleezza Rice.

Code Pink plants fake Blackwater press release, dupes Politico!

The anti-war group Code Pink put out a press release in Blackwater’s name, saying they were creating a new “Department of Corporate Integrity” in an attempt to “put the mercy back in mercenary.” Hilarious! Political news site Politico fell for it, running a story ripped right out of the release, as most news is these days. When asked, a Blackwater spokesperson said “We do some silly things, but we didn’t do that.”

Yes, silly silly things like, you know, shooting children for fun!

 Politico Falls for Hoax Blackwater Press Release [Wonkette]

Scare Bears: The Rising Tide of Human-Bear Violence

While shark attacks get nationwide, or even worldwide news coverage, our ursine friends are marginalized by what I like to call the “soft bear-gotry of low expectations.” It’s time for that to change.

Just in the past week:

• Wisconsin bow-hunter suffers treetop mauling
  

  Schultz says he met the bears while bow hunting a few miles outside Tony, Wisconsin. He says he began hearing noises, then saw four bears under his tree stand. One of them, a cub, began to climb up towards him and the mother followed.

  “That’s when I started getting nervous. She got about to where my feet were and after that it was all big commotion I’m not sure exactly what happened in what order but I tried to fight her off with my bow and I tried to kick her, then she really started grabbing me, trying to pull me out of tree stand.”

  Schultz says his stand safety belt kept him from falling 14 feet to the ground. But it didn’t help him stop the clawing, biting bears.

  “I’ve got puncture wounds in my leg, but my arm right here is the worst. There’s a big kind of a hole and I can feel all the stuff inside, but wasn’t even able to see it back then.”

• Grizzly mauls Montana bird hunter
• Boy scout escapes bear attack by playing dead
  

  The commission has been trapping and relocating bears out of the park when possible, but the bear population in Pennsylvania has been on the rise. It is estimated to be about 15,000, the highest in 150 years.

  A black bear has never killed anyone in Pennsylvania.

• Hunter killed in bear attack on Swedish-Norwegian border, other hunters exact revenge
• Bear attacks 71-year old man in his own garage
  

  “The bear slashed through the back of his jacket,” she said, noting that it was a particularly heavy jacket that likely prevented the bear’s claws from doing greater damage. The bear latched its jaws on Clark’s arm at one point, and “he actually punched the bear.”

And bears aren’t always the instigators: Three Marsican bears, a subspecies with only 30-50 remaining in the world, were poisoned and found dead in the mountains of central Italy.

“One death could have been by natural causes, but with three dead bears in the same area at roughly the same time it’s clear that there has been foul play,” forestry official Luciano Sammarone said.

You may have read about our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, but in addition to gross neglect and the grim prospect of terrorism, bridges also now have BEARS to contend with. Is This Bear a Terrorist?

All attempts at humor aside, such interspecies violence is what happens when we encroach too far into vulnerable habitats in our demand for more housing, food, resources, or recreation. It’s not just bears. Human-elephant conflict in Africa is actually a very serious topic of academic research.

Finally, even when bears prove fertile subjects for interstate cooperation, the law of unintended consequences can still reign. A U.S.-Russia conservation agreement on polar bears whose ranges are shared between the two countries (“shared bears”), may actually force Russia to reintroduce hunting of the bears. Polar bears, of course, rightfully receive much more press than their sub-polar brethren (bear-thren?), both for their pending endangered status and association with global warming.

Indeed, if melting Arctic Sea ice drives the polar bear to extinction, do we not all deserve maulings for our inaction?

Liveblogging the Matt Lauer Larry Craig interview!!!

This may not go so well…

8:00 IT BEGINS!!! “It’s all on the line- his career, his HONOR”

8:01 Lauer: “You walked into that bathroom, Senator. Six minutes later you were under arrest.”

8:02 Craig: I became the hurricane that everyone wanted to talk about.

8:05 whoa Larry looked even OLDER in 1982 than today. timewarp? stealing the vitality of young children?

Mrs. Craig is grimacing already. Her name is Susanne?

8:06 Susanne says marrying someone to cover up their repressed sexuality is like “selling your soul”

8:08 oh sweet later on Matt’s going to re-enact the foottapping sequence of events!

8:09: PHEW commercial break. liveblogging is hard!

Energy Bill updates

from the Gristmill blog, and from CQ.com

The Senate passed their version of the 2007 energy bill in June, the House passed theirs at the beginning of August, and since then…? Nothing. Still no conference, to reconciliation of the two or any movement forward of any kind. Pelosi and Reid put energy on the back burner first for the Iraq funding fights, then for SCHIP, and seemingly anything else that came along. Now the most important provisions – increased fuel economy requirements (along with closing the loophole for SUVs), a nationwide renewable electricity standard, and reallocating millions in oil company subsidies to be incentives for renewable energy – may well be left out of the final bill to avoid pissing off Blue Dog Democrats and the auto industry. And Bush may veto it anyway.

It seems like the biggest fight is over increasing CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards, which could very well mean the renewable electricity standard has been abandoned altogether as too politically infeasible. Many southern Democrats are against it because they say solar and wind power are not feasible for their states.

Monday Links

• Turkey may attack Kurdish rebels in Iraq, cut off logistical support for American troops, if Congress passes Armenian genocide resolution
• Burma news: ruling junta tries to appease world opinion; frees hundreds of detained monks, restores internet access, and shows Aung San Suu Kyi on state TV for first time in 4 years.
• Condoleezza Rice calls for Palestinian state ahead of peace conference
  

  “Frankly, it’s time for the establishment of a Palestinian state,” she added.

  Rice is on a four-day shuttle mission, trying to create some common ground ahead of the meeting. A State Department official hinted on Sunday that the conference might be postponed because of the gaps between the two sides.

  The Israelis and Palestinians are trying to work out an outline for a final peace deal ahead of the Annapolis conference, but tensions arose on Sunday when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet that he did not regard that outline as a prerequisite for the meeting to take place.

  The Palestinians said that without such a document, they would not attend.

  Israel has been pushing for a vaguely worded document while the Palestinians want a detailed outline, complete with a timetable for establishing a Palestinian state.

• Atlanta running out of water, may restrict commercial and industrial uses, “drought-fighting steps that not even arid Southern California or Las Vegas has had to make”
• Spending on 2008 elections could reach $3 billion

Prospects for the S-CHIP Veto Override

From the Washington Post Capitol Briefing blog

The Senate has enough votes (67) to override, so it’s all up to the House. The Democrats need 15-20 more votes, either by convincing Republicans to vote against their party and President’s wishes, or by convincing the 8 Democrats who voted against the bill to begin with.

Among those Democrats? Dennis Kucinich. Why? Because it denies coverage to children of legal immigrants. Interesting stand. While I respect it, I do hope that if the override came down to the wire and his vote was needed, he would change his mind.

How the Right’s S-CHIP Smear Backfired

“Hi, my name is Graeme Frost,” began the Democrats’ September 28th radio address. “I’m 12 years old and I live in Baltimore, Maryland. Most kids my age probably haven’t heard of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But I know all about it, because if it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today.”The right certainly wishes he hadn’t been on the radio that day. Three years ago, Graeme, along with his sister, Gemma, was badly injured in a car accident. He spent the week after the accident in a coma, and remained in the hospital for five-and-a-half months. He still attends rehabilitative therapy, speaks with a lisp, and moves slowly. His sister, Gemma, is worse off: She endured severe brain damage, and receives state assistance to attend a school for the developmentally disabled.

The Frost family bears a heavy burden, and much sadness. But they are not bankrupt, and were not incapable of procuring care for their injured children. That’s because the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which extends health insurance to low-income children, covered the costs. The program worked exactly as promised, providing high quality medical care for children of limited means in their time of need.

The right’s response to 12-year-old Graeme Frost was breathtaking: They tried to Swift Boat him. They implied that his family was rich and fraudulently freeloading off the government. They posted pictures of the private school he attends. They repeatedly called his home. In a particularly deranged act, Michelle Malkin drove to his block, tried to eyeball the value of his house, and interrogated his neighbors as to the family’s financial situation.

More – The American Prospect

Art below ground, and a crack in the floor

• Iran Keeps Picassos in Basement

  This was from a few weeks ago but I highly recommend reading it – the writing is simply superb.

  We are not talking about the paintings on the wall at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which Sadeghi directs. Those are, at the moment, a stylish if bland collection of Iranian textile and costume design for the fashion-conscious and appropriately modest Iranian woman.

  No, we’re talking about the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos — the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S.

  Ruled by one of the most vehemently anti-Western governments in the world, Iran is, by many assessments, home to the most extensive collection of late 19th and 20th century Western art outside the West. It is a treasure trove of masters that is all but forgotten outside knowledgeable art circles because, for all but a few of the last 30 years, it has been virtually unseen.

  The author goes on to describe the former museum director who, knowing he would soon be fired with the election of President Ahmadinejad, insisted on holding an exhibit simply “to get the paintings before the eyes of the world, to publish a catalog to ensure that everyone knew, forever, just what was in the basement. So no one would forget.”

• Five hundred-foot crack installed in Tate Modern museum in London
  

  So, I’m standing astride this 548ft crack that that has rather alarmingly appeared in the floor of Tate Modern. I’m with an architect and a couple of builders, and we are examining the crack from a wide variety of angles and sticking our fingers inside and giving it a damn good poke and generally trying very hard indeed to work a few things out. The first is: how on earth did it get here? The second is: could it be dangerous? This being the Tate, we also feel obliged, finally, to consider the possibility that it might be art.
  [...]
  Ferhan Azman, an award-winning Turkish-born architect with lots of experience in concrete, kneels to probe the crack’s sides. “Isn’t it great?” she asks. “It works as art for me. It’s about how our physical environment affects us. Look how wary, how destabilised you feel in a building with a great big crack down the middle.”

hello again

Whoops! I’ve been gone for awhile. What has happened? Let’s see… there were some hopeful events in Burma/Myanmar for awhile as tens of thousands of monks joined by ordinary citizens went marching in Rangoon and other major cities, in protests nominally sparked by increased fuel prices but which became statements against the total lack of democracy or respect for any individual freedoms by the ruling generals. Burma is the closest thing in the modern world to an Orwellian dystopia. After a few days of peaceful marches, the government cracked down, shut down the internet to the entire country except for state offices or businesses wealthy enough to have their own satellite connections, and allegedly “disappeared” thousands of monks into the forest where they ended up in mass graves. Fairly bleak and depressing turn of events…

Also, Larry Craig is still guilty and will not resign, Republicans hate children, the religious right will run a third party candidate if Giuliani is the Republican nominee, and everything you’ve ever bought has lead and rat poison in it.

Sunday Links: Climate, Energy, Industry

• The “Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off”
• Former Shell Chairman predicts oil production could peak within 20 years, price will hit $150/barrel
• Some US industries now seeking federal regulation
  

  For toys and cars, antifreeze and fireworks, popcorn and produce and cigarettes and light bulbs, among other products, industry groups or major manufacturers are calling for federal health, safety and environmental mandates. Some of those industries are abandoning years of efforts to block such measures, often in alliance with the Bush administration, which pledged to ease what it views as costly, unnecessary rules.

  The consequences for consumers, though, are not yet clear. The tactical shift by industry groups is motivated by a confluence of self-interests: growing competition from inexpensive imports that do not meet voluntary standards, and a desire to head off liability lawsuits and pre-empt tough state laws or legal actions that were a response to laissez-faire Bush administration policies. Concerns that Democrats could soon expand their control in Washington have also prompted manufacturers or producers to seek regulations that they consider the least burdensome, regulatory experts say.

  [...]

  Last year, almost all of the nation’s spinach crop was destroyed after contaminated spinach from one 50-acre California farm sickened nearly 200 people in 26 states, killing a Wisconsin woman. It was the last straw for large growers, who now support mandatory safety standards. But the Department of Health and Human Services has been slow to endorse them, leading some proponents to conclude that the agency has objections.

  “It’s a little unique when both consumer groups and industry associations are out there saying that we need new regulations, and the government doesn’t agree,” said Jenny Scott, vice president for food safety programs of the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

  Ms. Dudley, of the Office of Management and Budget, said the Bush administration was not trying to block regulation requests. “There is no effort to delay anything,” she said. “We are not trying to stop these things from occurring.”

  Robert Shull, deputy director for auto safety and regulatory policy at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group based in Washington, said his organization and other consumer watchdogs would be keeping close tabs to see if these different proposals amounted to more than simply “opportunistic attempts to avoid real regulation.” But Mr. Shull said he was encouraged that at least some companies appeared to be coming forward with meaningful ideas.

  “It can give American companies a leading edge,” Mr. Shull said, “especially if the safety or environmental standard is in the vanguard of what is going to happen worldwide.”

..but we already had a Governor Moonbeam?

Bill Richardson pushes $110 million “Southwest Regional SPACEPORT”

Richardson says he told his aides: “Go after the big one. Go after 5,000 jobs and something to be remembered for. Go after Branson and the spaceport. Politicians are known for talking about 9/11 and gloom and doom, and I like to infuse people with visions of the future and space. It’s bold and risky, but people turn on to that.”

He adds: “It’s not a very organized management style, but it is what it is.”

Richardson called Branson. The two met and hit it off. Branson agreed to base Virgin Galactic at New Mexico’s spaceport.

Richardson got in touch with the Rocket Racing League and XCor Aerospace, which is building the first rocket racers. Yes, they are serious. They agreed to run races at Richardson’s spaceport. “Hopefully it will be as popular as NASCAR,” he says.

In 10 to 15 years, Richardson believes, the spaceport will be humming with activity. Virgin Galactic field trips will get down to $10,000, he predicts. Low-Earth orbit flights will reach Australia in 30 minutes. The spaceport will draw thousands of rocket racing fans to — where is this being built again? Oh, right — Upham, N.M., a mere 30-minute drive from Truth or Consequences.

“All of us had pretty much blood on us…” Further violence in the ongoing war between bears and men

• BEARS VS BIKES: bear mauls cyclist, rangers vow revenge
• Black bear mauls helpless Canadians; compost to blame
• British Columbia – “Conservation officers had no choice but to destroy a black bear”
• BEARS VS BIKES: troubled Virginian on motorcycle hits, kills black bear, says it “replayed all the bad memories he had from the time when he was shot.”

and most harrowing of all…

• MARYLAND RABID BEAR INSANITY!!!
  HAGERSTOWN, Md. – A rabid black bear trying to rip out a window air conditioner lost its tug-of-war with a terrified housewife when her husband blasted the beast with a shotgun, the woman and a state wildlife official said Wednesday.
  …
  “All of us had pretty much blood on us.”

• Washington Post writer shocked that people steal bikes, use Craigslist
• Stock market fever sweeps Kenya

A recent opinion poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that people surveyed in 10 African nations were on the whole optimistic about the future. In Kenya, 78 percent of those surveyed said life was getting better, even though a majority also reported that there were times in the past year they did not have enough money for food.

Sarkozy and Saramago

• Nicolas Sarkozy, the human bomb

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

• Portuguese novelist José Saramago profiled in NY Times Magazine

Can fiction make the world a better place? “An ethical novel can perhaps influence a reader temporarily,” he went on, “but no more. I write as well as I can, but when my readers say, ‘Your book has changed my life,’ I don’t believe it. Maybe like a New Year’s resolution — for a week you try to be good, then you forget.”

Nonetheless, for all his pessimism, in Saramago’s most powerful novels there remains a stubborn sprig of utopianism, flickers of “what if?” and “why not?” In “The History of the Siege of Lisbon,” published in 1989, Saramago redevises the past. His hero, Raimundo Silva, is a lonely, impoverished proofreader who, like Melville’s Bartleby, finds himself inexplicably driven to an act of quiet sabotage. Correcting a manuscript on the Reconquista of Lisbon in the 12th century, Silva inserts one word in the text that he imagines will change the course of history. In the original text, an army of crusaders on their way to the Holy Land are asked to join King Alfonso’s attack on Lisbon: after Silva’s amendment, they decide “not” to help. The Iberian Peninsula thus presumably remains Muslim, and the world is spared the Inquisition, as well as the discovery of America.

Links: so tell me again how safe nuclear power is?

• Tennessee nuclear leaks and violations kept secret for years
• Space Shuttle DOESN’T explode, lands safely??!!

• Hurricane Dean approaches Category 5, Jamaica likely a direct hit

• Bush Commerce, Treasury Secretaries used grant announcements to stump for GOP candidates

• Las Vegas running out of water, predicts shortage of 64 million gallons/day in 3 years

• Chinese entrepreneurs thriving in Africa, at least 750,000 working in the continent

Texting It In: Monitoring Elections With Mobile Phones

In Sierra Leone’s national election today, 500 election observers at polling stations around the country are reporting on any irregularities via SMS with their mobile phones. Independent monitoring of elections via cell phone is growing aqround the world, spearheaded by a few innovative NGOs.

The story starts in Montenegro, a small country in the former Yugoslavia. On May 21, 2006 the country saw the first instance of volunteer monitors using SMS, also known as text messaging, as their main election reporting tool. A Montenegrin NGO, the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), with technical assistance from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in the United States, was the first organization in the world to use text messaging to meet all election day reporting requirements.

Since then, mobile phones have been deployed in six elections in countries around the world, with volunteers systematically using text messaging in election monitoring. Pioneered by NDI, SMS monitoring is becoming a highly sophisticated rapid reporting tool used not just in a referendum election like in Montenegro, but in parliamentary elections with a plethora of candidates and parties and complex data reported via SMS. This was the case in Bahrain, a small country in the Middle East, where monitors reported individual election tallies in a series of five to fourty concurrent SMS messages, using a sophisticated coding system, with near accuracy.

Today’s election in Sierra Leone is lead by the National Election Watch (NEW), a coalition of over 200 NGOs in the country. Assisted by NDI, NEW has monitors at 500 of the 6171 polling stations. Monitors report on whether there are any irregularities via SMS back to headquarters. This election is particularly significant for the country: It is the first presidential election since U.N. peacekeepers withdrew two years ago. It considered a historic poll that many hope will show that the country can transfer power peacefully after a long civil war and military coups. In the run-up to the election there was sporadic violence in Freetown; making the independent monitoring by NGOs particularly relevant and necessary.