Spill spoils argument EDITORIAL

One argument in behalf of drill ing for oil in the Arctic Na tional Wildlife Refuge is that it can be done without damaging the pristine nature of this world-class nature preserve.

That argument, never really credible, is in serious disrepute today as clean-up crews struggle to contain what, at this point, is the sixth largest oil spill ever on Alaska’s North Slope. And it comes as Congress once again struggles over whether to include projected oil revenues from ANWR in the budget authorization bill.

Isn’t it time to give this issue a rest and get on with bigger fiscal issues without spoiling the environment? …

Doesn’t it make sense to leave some oil for the future, when extraction techniques should pose less environmental risk? Or are we so absorbed with satisfying our gluttonous appetite for oil that we care not a fig what the next generation does in a petroleum-exhausted world?

Both Senate and House should reject efforts to reinsert this divisive issue in budget deliberations.

If there is anything the Radical Right hates more than the New Deal (and all of FDR’s legacy), it’s the Endangered Species Act. mjh

ES&T Online News: Hidden ties: Big environmental changes backed by big industry by PAUL D. THACKER

Lobbyists and industry officials who once pushed for the president’s Healthy Forests legislation now collaborate with Rep. Pombo to alter the Endangered Species Act.

Since President Bush took office, Republicans have successfully pushed through major reforms that target regulations for power-plant emissions and the management of federal forests. During his 2004 campaign for reelection, the president praised his Healthy Forests initiative as “a good, common-sense policy.” This year, the Republican-led Congress is gearing up for yet another “common-sense” reform to a major piece of environmental legislation—the Endangered Species Act (ESA). …

The movement to alter ESA is being led in Congress by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), a rancher from California and the powerful chair of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources. …

To write the bill, Pombo called on the help of Steve Quarles, a lobbyist who works for the timber industry. “I spent a great deal of time with Pombo’s staff,” Quarles told ES&T, and during that time he helped write the bill. …

Practically a Washington, D.C., institution, Quarles has long worked to shape environmental laws to favor corporations. During the debate over the president’s Healthy Forests legislation, Quarles lobbied for its passage on behalf of the American Forest and Paper Assoc., the largest trade group for the forest products industry. Previously, he represented the American Forest Resource Council (AFRC), a group that lobbies for management of public lands to favor industry.

Wigley, too, has a long history with the timber industry. … For the 2002 elections, Wigley raised $327,100 from timber companies, such as Weyerhaueser and Boise Cascade. This money was then handed out to Republicans running for state offices in Oregon. Before joining OFIC, Wigley worked as a press officer for Georgia Pacific, one of the world’s largest forest-products corporations. His biography also states that he is a graduate of the American Campaign Academy, a group created by advisers to former Rep. Newt Gingrich to train Republican political operatives. …

Jim Peterson of the industry-funded Evergreen Foundation was quoted calling Project Protect a “hardball approach” to get the president’s bill signed. “It’s not a warm, fuzzy PR campaign,” he said. “It’s a fight to the finish. We intend to work behind the scenes with industry associations with much of the PR off the radar screen by design.” …

Wigley wrote in February 2005, he revealed his own views on Project Protect. “When I directed the healthy forests battle two years ago, I had to change the way the forest products industry talked,” he wrote. “We didn’t change our goals—just the way we communicated.” …

“Some people call it Astroturf,” said Ken Gross, a lawyer who specializes in ethics and campaign-finance cases. Unlike traditional grassroots groups that may consist of local activists meeting in someone’s living room, these new operations are backed by corporate money and run like professional political campaigns. “It’s not mom-and-pop; it’s highly sophisticated, with well-compensated people. …”

An October 2005 Harris Poll found that 74% of Americans believe that “protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost.”

Senate urged to safeguard species act By Erica Werner, Associated Press Writer

As a Senate committee prepares to take up revisions to the Endangered Species Act, nearly 6,000 biologists from around the country signed a letter Wednesday urging senators to preserve scientific protections in the landmark law.

The House passed an Endangered Species Act rewrite last year that many scientists and environmentalists viewed as extreme. Interest groups are lobbying to ensure that legislation expected soon from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will be an improvement.

“Unfortunately, recent legislative proposals would critically weaken” the law’s scientific foundation, said the letter organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The 5,738 signers included six National Medal of Science recipients.

“For species conservation to continue, it is imperative both that the scientific principles embodied in the act are maintained, and that the act is strengthened, fully implemented, and adequately funded.”

FBI Cites More Than 100 Possible Eavesdropping Violations By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

The FBI reported more than 100 possible violations to an intelligence oversight board over the past two years, including cases in which agents tapped the wrong telephone, intercepted the wrong e-mails or continued to listen to conversations after a warrant had expired, according to a report issued yesterday.

In one case, the FBI obtained the contents of 181 telephone calls rather than just the billing records to which it was entitled. In another, a communication was monitored for more than a year after eavesdropping should have ended — although investigators blamed a third-party provider for the mix-up. …

“Despite the Bush administration’s attempt to demonize critics of its anti-terrorism policies as advancing phantom or trivial concerns, the report demonstrates that the independent Office of Inspector General has found that many of these policies indeed warrant full investigations,” [Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee,] said.

But Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department is “pleased that the inspector general once again confirmed that there have been no substantiated civil liberties violations from the Patriot Act.”

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | South Dakota ‘bans’ abortion by Robert Booth, et. al.

Republican senator Bill Napoli said on the US TV channel PBS that most abortions were being carried out for “convenience”. He insisted, however, that exceptions could be made for rape or incest under a provision that protects the mother’s life.

“A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged,” he said. “The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalised and raped, sodomised as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

Of course, we’ll need a Council of the Righteous to certify those virgins. And we’ll need a way to tell the virgins apart from the “spoiled” (whom it is OK to rape brutally). How about veils for the virgins and scarlet letters for the whores? mjh

Meanwhile, laws restricting abortions have been passed in El Salvador, Hungary, Poland and the Russian Federation, as well as the US.

In Poland the conservative Law and Justice party took power last October, and women’s rights groups now fear the country’s already restrictive abortion laws could be tightened further to deny abortions to rape victims and women with deformed foetuses (although Law and Justice has proposed no such measures).

At the European parliament, in Strasbourg, in November the League of Polish Families, an ultra-Catholic party, ran a controversial exhibition comparing abortion to Nazi death camps.

And in Mexico, where abortion law has been relaxed since 1995, Felipe Calderon, the presidential candidate for the incumbent National Action party, has cited scripture in stump speeches and trumpeted an anti-abortion party line – positions that proved critical in winning a three-way race for the party nomination.

DeLay Wins Tex. GOP Primary By Sylvia Moreno, Washington Post Staff Writer

Rep. Tom DeLay, facing an unusual four-way Republican primary, won the party’s nomination Tuesday, calling his victory a rejection by voters of “the politics of personal destruction.”

“I have always placed my faith in the voters, and today’s vote shows they have placed their full faith in me,” DeLay, 58, said in a statement issued by his reelection campaign.

“Democrat attacks and the politics of personal destruction were heavily used by my opponents in this Republican primary, and they were rejected just like they will be in November,” he said.

None of the reports I’ve read indicate when DeLay last got as little as 6x% of the vote or had 3 Republican challengers. Democrats should delight that Republicans have renominated him — he is THE poster child for the “culture of corruption.” Bring Him On! mjh

DeLay — under criminal indictment on a money-laundering charge; rebuked three times by the House ethics committee; and linked to former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to political corruption charges — faced his toughest primary race in his 22-year congressional career. Although he spent about $2 million, DeLay ran a low-profile primary campaign, focusing on reaching the most dedicated voters through direct-mail pitches and phone calls. He did not run any radio or television ads, reflecting the campaign’s belief that they would heighten the profile of the GOP primary and bring out anti-DeLay voters. …

“I’m honored . . . to defend this district from the funding and activism of America’s most radical Democrats,” he said. “Liberal activists like Barbra Streisand, George Soros and Nancy Pelosi all have a dog in this fight, and his name is Nick Lampson.”

GOP and tech lobbyists: Appearances be damned!

[O]ne leading Republican in the room was brazen about his cozy relationship with the industry.

Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) cited a newspaper headline saying he was in the “hip pocket” of the high-tech lobby and said he “proudly pleads guilty” to helping an industry that has been responsible for so much growth in the gross domestic product in recent years.

A technology-industry insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Dreier has indeed been one of the sector’s best friends over the past few years. He said Dreier’s one of the few who “get it.” But, he cautioned, Dreier likely isn’t in it for the cash because the tech sector is notoriously inept at political giving.

OK, everything’s cool as long as the bribe-givers are inept.

If you think the media will follow up on things like this, recall that Randy “Il Duce” Cunningham lived on a yacht in DC and drove a Rolls Royce to the Capital and the Washington Press Corp didn’t seem to notice. mjh

The Democrats’ Real Problem By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Bush critics will almost always point first to the administration’s arrogance, a word used recently not by some left-wing Bush hater but by the loyal conservative writer Byron York. In the New Republic, York chose the A-word to explain why Republicans are turning on the White House’s “we-know-best approach.”

The cure for an arrogant government that doesn’t take critics seriously is accountability. Divided government never looked so good. That’s especially true at a moment when polls suggest that a majority is yearning for more competence and greater moderation.

For example, moderates and liberals alike are mystified by budget policies saddling our kids with debt tomorrow to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy today. Moderating this radical fiscal approach is something the voters clearly could accomplish with their ballots this fall. …

Presidents deserve to be punished for insulting our intelligence.

[F]ighting bad policies is actually constructive… [B]etween presidential elections, keeping matters from getting worse is sometimes the most positive alternative on offer.