Brother Can You Spare a Dime - Dr.John & Odetta

Pissin' in the wind

We received a missive today from Rachel Mills, press secretary to our congressman Ron Paul, which reads:

Washington D.C. (July 23, 2010) – The House of Representatives is expected to act next week on a privileged resolution introduced last night by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Ron Paul (R-TX).  The resolution directs the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove the United States Armed Forces from Pakistan.

“We have known that U.S. forces have been operating in secret inside the territories of Pakistan without Congressional approval. We recently learned from an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, ‘U.S. Forces Step Up Pakistan Presence’ that the United States is engaged in a covert strategy to increase our troops’ role there incrementally, with the goal of convincing Pakistan to be more accepting of our presence. This is a violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution and it is our Constitutional responsibility as Members of Congress to act,” said Kucinich.

“The US military has significantly increased its activity in Pakistan – both in troop presence and Predator attacks – at a time when there are, according to the CIA, very few al-Qaeda members in that country. This increasing US military activity in Pakistan has little to do with protecting the United States and in fact is creating more enemies than it is defeating. The administration, like its predecessor, is misusing language in the original post-9/11 resolution to prosecute a wider regional war and Congress is sitting quietly on the sidelines. This must stop,” said Paul.

The introduction of H. Con. Res. 301 follows a promise last December to introduce bills to remove the U.S. forces from both Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March of this year, the House of Representatives debated H. Con. Res. 248, Kucinich’s resolution to debate and vote on whether to continue the war in Afghanistan.

Carry on.

In memoriam

You're driving along and it's a good day but then you spot a pickup ahead with a message on the back windshield and on the tailgate.

Michael "Eyre" is written along the top of the windshield, above the image of a soldier's helmet resting atop a rifle butt, the rifle's bayonet buried in the ground. At the bottom:   "My son, my hero" 

On the tailgate is a black ribbon set against a red, white and blue background.

At the top of the black ribbon it says "Tallil Iraq" and "Cpl. Michael E. Thompson" and "He Gave All" and "9-18-08"

The pickup moves on and you move on thinking, Jesus, what a waste.

**************************************
The story in the newspapers

Enviros lower their sights

The state agency that's supposed to police industrial pollution will undergo a sunset review and the enviros already have signaled they've lowered their goals.

The vice chairman of the sunset commission is our own Dennis Bonnen, the state rep from Angleton.

Will he welcome the enviros' new, pragmatic approach or continue to paint them as enemies of the people?

What say you, Mr. Bonnen?

The annals of failed hookups

From Deadspin ...

It was my last day at college for the semester, and I was leaving the state the following day to go back to my annual summer amusement park job. Over finals week, I had gotten pretty close with a girl (who I'll call Meg) and I knew this was my last chance to seal the deal before departing for three months.

We were at her house on a Saturday afternoon, when she got a knock on the door. A good friend of hers had stopped by briefly to say goodbye for the summer. This gave me a much-needed opportunity to use her bathroom for a monster dump.

This wasn't another of the liquid explosions that ruins so many hook-up attempts, but a very large solid #2. With no fans or windows in her bathroom, I knew it needed to be a quick mission-drop it and flush as quickly as possible. I was very confident in my ability to pull this off. Just as I was about to wipe up, I heard Meg invite her friend into the living room, which bordered the bathroom. I finished wiping, pulled up my pants, flushed, and... dammit. It wasn't going down.

Water was rising and nearly ready to flow over the bowl, and my crap was floating near the top, spinning around with the rising water. No plunger was anywhere to be found. Thinking quickly, I emptied her trash can and began scooping water from the toilet and into the bathtub to prevent overflow. It appeared I had at least stopped the overflow, but there was still that giant crap to deal with.

Digging through the cupboard under the sink, I found an old plastic sack with some rags in it. I picked the poop out of the toilet, placed it into the plastic bag and tied it shut, then washed my hands over and over, and added the final touch by spraying some sort of cleaning fluid everywhere to mask the odor.

I knew there was no way around the girls in the living room, so I was left with two options-either leave the bag of shit in the bathroom, or just make a run for it past them and dispose of the bag. I opted for the latter. I opened the bathroom door, darted through the living room, scurried through the kitchen, flung open the door, and side-armed that bag of crap as far as I could throw. It landed near Meg's friend's car in the parking lot.

"What the hell was that?!" asked Meg as I returned to the living room. "Why does it smell like Clorox in here?"

I thought about making up an elaborate story, but decided perhaps she and her friend would find this story humorous, so I actually told the truth. After I delivered the final line, I waited for the eruption of laughter. The only response to my tale was "So where did you throw the bag of shit?" We looked out the window and saw a pair of stray dogs clawing at it. There was to be no last-day hook-up.

BP

Back in 2005, when the BP refinery in Texas City blew up and killed 15 workers, we blogged our outrage about the safety deficiencies at the plant. 

Today, the New York Times took a look at BP's history in a story headlined, 

In BP’s Record, a History of Boldness and Costly Blunders

The Texas City explosion was beginning of the end for John Browne, the head of BP who received a knighthood and membership in the House of Lords after he took the company to new heights amid a radical program of company cost-cutting, the newspaper reports.

Writes The Times: 

"....Mr. Browne’s fall from grace really began on March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City.

A Troubled Workplace

"Acquired by BP in the Amoco purchase, the Texas City plant was America’s second-largest refinery, turning 460,000 barrels of crude oil a day into gasoline. But the facility, built in 1934, was poorly maintained and long starved of capital investment.

" 'We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real,'" the Telos Group, a consulting firm hired to examine conditions at the plant, said in a report two months before the accident.

"The explosion occurred when a 170-foot tower was being filled with liquid hydrocarbons. Because of poor communication among several workers who had been on 12-hour shifts for more than a month straight, no one noticed that the tower was filled too high.

"A 20-foot geyser of unstable chemicals shot into the sky, and the vapor ignited when a contractor, trying to get away, repeatedly tried to start the engine on his stalling pickup truck.

"The subsequent investigations were scathing. The explosion was “caused by organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP,” the United States Chemical Safety Board concluded in one report.

"The government ultimately found more than 300 safety violations, and BP agreed to pay a then record $21 million in fines."

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
After that, of course, Tony Hayward took the reins of BP, and we think you know what happened next.

This sort of stuff (the Texas City explosion, the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill) is just the cost of maintaining a "healthy business climate" in the eyes of many of our elected office holders in Texas, but we ain't buying it and neither should you. 

Ron Paul may make 2012 prez run

He hinted heavily on CNN that he may make another go of it.

“It is probably hard to believe, but I look at it a little bit differently than others,” Paul said in an interview during his recent visit to Iowa. “I don’t expect to be president. I don’t expect to be. That doesn’t mean I won’t run for president, but I am really energized when I think we make inroads … to broaden the outreach on the philosophy I have been talking about for 40 years.” [...]

“I am very serious about thinking about it all the time,” Paul said about his possible presidential aspirations. “My answer is always the same thing: You know I haven’t ruled it out, but I have no plans to do it.”

Says Mediate:

This time around, Paul would have much more name recognition than on his first run, given that 2008 saw him rise— both metaphorically and, in blimp form, literally— as an internet superstar and the heir apparent to the Libertarian throne. He also led the first post-British rule incarnation of the Tea Party movement, a monster of a political effort now wrested out of his hands by social conservative icon Sarah Palin.

So while Paul is probably right in not expecting to be President, he could prove a significantly stronger spoiler in a field defined by the divisions between those who support social freedoms and those who don’t (while national security is also a point of contention between conservatives and libertarians, this particular point is nowhere near as much of a wedge in the Republican Party as social issues are). And by openly declaring that he has no interest in winning a campaign he would still want to be a part of, he may be working towards a new standard of ideologically-driven candidates that are out to send a message more than to regain power. Yes, it’s not like Ross Perot,Ralph Nader, or– if you really want to go back in time– Eugene Debs didn’t do the same, but none of them quite reached the pseudo-mythical status Paul has as the original Tea Partier.

2012 is going to be a fun year.

 

"Nowhere Boy" traces Beatles origins

Happy 4th of July