From CNN:

At a recent kindergarten graduation ceremony, young girls smiled behind their brightly colored princess dresses and the boys showed off their best dress shirts. They sipped on juice boxes, played on swings and jumped on and off seesaws.It was a welcome relief from the war that surrounds them. But when these 5-year-olds spoke, it became apparent just how much the ongoing violence has affected them.

“I’m going to bomb, bomb, bomb the school with everybody in it,” said Omar Hussein, as he clutched a pink toy airplane.

At another point, a girl enthusiastically sang, “I give a knife to my father to slaughter the chicken. He gives me a machine gun and a rifle. Now, I am a soldier in the liberation army.”

The same kindergarten taught up to 180 children just four years ago, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. Today, the class has just 16 children, a result of families fleeing the war or parents keeping their children at home, fearful of bombs or kidnap gangs.

Okla. Senator Vows Block, Saying Author Stigmatized Insecticides

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has effectively blocked a resolution to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth, saying that her warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, congressional staffers said yesterday.

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In a statement on his Web site yesterday, Coburn (R) confirmed that he is holding up the bill. In the statement, he blames Carson for using “junk science” to turn public opinion against chemicals, including DDT, that could prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes.

The male bovine fecal material that this S.O.B. is spouting reminds me of the right wing revisionist claims of the Vietnam War. Here he is negatively spinning the work of Carson. (Click here to see his claims debunked.) Tom Coburn is truly an S.O.B. to denigrate a woman who gave so much even as she was dying from breast cancer; a woman who hid her desperate plight because she knew in her bones that if the chemical lobby found out about her cancer, then they would distort that fact to claim that her work was biased. Coburn is an absolute slimeball.

Click here to see a very short retrospective of Carson’s life.

Happy birthday, Ms. Carson.

Data from the Energy Information Agency seems to indicate that we may have hit peak oil. Graphs from a Live Journal blog show oil production hitting a plateau in the last two years and starting to decline.

Extrapolating the trend out for the next two years shows oil production falling 8 mbd short of expected demand.

This summer’s gas prices may only be a prelude of things to come.

This just goes to show yet again that you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell the full story if it conflicts or undermines the U.S. elite’s policy goals.

I received the following from Steven L. Robinson via Green Alliance’s Green All Views Listserve.

by Joshua Holland & Raed Jarrar

AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/52135/

May 21, 2007.

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because [the resistance groups are] opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

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An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition.

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But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

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As early as 2005, the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole reported that the Sadrist movement — named after the father of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — had gathered a million signatures on a petition demanding a timetable for occupation forces to withdraw. More recently, the Arabic press reported that as many as a million Iraqis — a million Shia and Sunni working together — had protested the continuing occupation in Najaf on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad last month.

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One of the few laws left on the books from the Saddam Hussein era is one that severely limits the rights of Iraqi workers to organize. As journalist
David Bacon reported in the winter of 2003, coalition forces “escalated their efforts to paralyze Iraq’s new labor unions with a series of arrests”
that left one of the few surviving segments of Iraq’s once-vibrant secular civil society toothless.

Paramilitary Ties to Elite In Colombia Are Detailed

Commanders Cite State Complicity in Violent Movement

Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some of Colombia’s most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been systematically built with the help of bigger forces.

Is it any wonder that Columbia is a poor country?  (click here for article)  These elites find it second nature to rape the country’s natural resources and to ignore the plight of the poor.

Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers’ Prying Eyes

In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories.

Talk about gall! Telling a physician what he should be subscribing to his patients!

Now the issue is bubbling up in the political arena. Last year, New Hampshire became the first state to try to curtail the practice, but a federal district judge three weeks ago ruled the law unconstitutional.

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“In this case commercial interests took precedence over the interests of the private citizens of New Hampshire,” Rosenwald said. “This is like letting a drug rep into an exam room and having them eavesdrop on a private conversation between a physician and a patient.”

The April 30 ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, nominated to the federal bench in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, called the state’s pioneering law an unconstitutional restriction on commercial speech.

How typical of a REPUGNican judge! To place the interests of Big Pharma over the interests of the patients! This is an unequal contest — Big Pharma has more resources to lobby physicians than states do.

A drug company might use the database to help determine whether physicians prescribing a particular high-risk drug have undergone required training about the medicine, said Marjorie E. Powell, senior assistant general counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade association.

“If you don’t have that information, then you are in a very difficult situation,” Powell said. “There is no way you can implement the risk-management plan that the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] is requiring you to implement in order to allow the drug to be on the market.”

To me, this sounds like a threat; but judge for yourself — here’s the link to the article.

Yet more disturbing news on the ecological front…

Antartica’s Southern Ocean, a crucial “carbon sink” into which 15 percent of the world’s excess carbon dioxide flows, is reaching saturation and soon may be unable to absorb more — a deeply troubling development, the journal Science reported Thursday.”This is serious,” said lead author Corinne Le Quere of the University of East Anglia and British Antarctic Survey.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to say that climate change itself is responsible for the saturation of the Southern Ocean sink,” Le Quere said, adding that the trend was likely to intensify over time.

The four-year study, which the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry also took part in, shows that an increase in winds over the Southern Ocean caused by greenhouse gases and ozone depletion has led to a release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere — preventing further absorption of the greenhouse gas.

The Southern Ocean, the world’s fourth largest, also is known as the Antarctic Ocean or South Polar Ocean, is completely in Earth’s southern hemisphere.

“With the Southern Ocean reaching its saturation point, more CO2 will stay in our atmosphere,” Le Quere said.

All told, Earth’s carbon sinks absorb about half of all human carbon emissions. Researchers said that since 1981, the Southern Ocean sink has ceased to increase, while CO2 emissions have increased by 40 percent.

“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the world’s oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatons of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans,” said Professor Chris Rapley, director of British Antarctic Survey.

“The possibility that in a warmer world the Southern Ocean — the strongest ocean sink — is weakening is a cause for concern,” Rapley said.

 http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/05/17/southernocean_pla.html?category=earth&guid=20070517150030&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000

Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up

Democrats Have Big Edge on Web

Besides TechRepublican, the group blog started two weeks ago by All, who worked as communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), there is QubeTV, founded in March as an alternative to what one of its founders, Charlie Gerow, a former Reagan campaign aide, calls “the liberal bias” of YouTube.  [my emphasis]

YouTube has a liberal Bias???!!!  YouTube???!!!  (Click here for the entire article.)   ANYBODY can post to the site!  ANYBODY!!!  By definition, it is impossible for the site to have any kind of bias!  (with the exception of “objectionable” and copyrighted material)

“But look at the short history of online politics,” Glover said. “For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment. . . . You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.“  [my emphasis]

“WHERE THE MOB RULES”???!!!  Somebody tell me that that is not an elitist and condescending remark! How typical of the Repugnicans!  (not that the Democratic leadership is much better…)

Ashcroft’s Complex Tenure At Justice

On Some Issues, He Battled White House

According to former officials, it was not the only time that the former Missouri senator chosen for the Bush Cabinet in part for his ties to the Christian right would challenge the White House in private. In addition to rejecting to the most expansive version of the warrantless eavesdropping program, the officials said, Ashcroft also opposed holding detainees indefinitely at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without some form of due process. He fought to guarantee some rights for those to be tried by newly created military commissions. And he insisted that Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers, be prosecuted in a civilian court.

These internal disputes often put Ashcroft at odds with Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said the officials, who recalled heated exchanges in front of the president. In the end, the officials said, the conflicts contributed to Ashcroft’s departure at the conclusion of Bush’s first term, when the president replaced him with a close friend from Texas, Alberto R. Gonzales, who presumably would be more deferential to the White House.

Click here for the whole article.  I am now going to repeat something that I wrote last week:

There can now be no doubt now that Alberto “Gonzo” Gonzales is quite the S.O.B. I NEVER thought that I would see the day when John “Pentacostal and proud of it” Ashcroft would be venerated by the left for his stands. That is how bad things are.