Headlines - Monday March 14

 

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Where was Obama on Saturday?

 

Earthquake. Tsunami. Nuclear meltdowns. Invitation to stand with over 100,000 workers in Madison. But, more importantly, what about your golf game?

ABC News' Tahman Bradley reports on how President Obama spent his Saturday:

For the second week in a row, the most powerful man in the world stepped away from the White House to hit the golf course.

Even as his administration and the U.S. military help Japan recover from a devastating earthquake, and as the world worries about Fukushima's nuclear reactor, the president could not resist taking advantage of the 48-degree weather in the Washington, D.C., area.

With cloudy skies, it's not the best weather for golf, but Obama loves to spend his Saturdays on the greens. Last fall, Obama went golfing darn near every weekend.

Remember how we all used to bitch when Bush was golfing or clearing brush?

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Looking back, Obama '08 was pretty funny.

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Truth has a liberal bias.

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Dennis Hartley: Crisis? What crisis?

 

 

 

 

 

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Hacker group to release Bank of America emails Anonymous, a WikiLeaks-like group, says it will release corporate emails showing "corruption and fraud" at the bank on Monday.

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Are you a white male? there's a scholarship just for you

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A sixth reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plants has lost its ability to cool the reactor core since the massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck Japan Friday.

I wonder how long it will take the Coal Spinners in this country to start promoting ads about the "safe" uses of "clean" coal - you know...the methane explosions, cave-in, black lung myths? All, of course, being much safer than turning "Murikans" into mindless toads! (Hmmm? Isn't that statement repetitively redundant? lol!)

Let's see...which way do the prevailing winds blow from Japan? Hmmm? Maybe Sarah better cover the porch where she watches Russia with some of Tom Ridge's Plastic and Duct Tape. The Aurora Borealis won't be the only thing glowing in Alaska...and that glow will make a lasting impression even down here, sooner than you can say nukyular! But don't fret, those of you who have never seen it. If it's half as bad as the talk (and that may mean many times worse than Three Mile Island), all us here in the good ol' Corporate States of "Murika' will get to see it up close and very personal.

Watch for the CEOs, Banksters, most politicians and Evangelicals all decide to take extended vacations over the next month - somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere! I guess this is one of the possible reasons why Georgie Boy and Heartless Dick bought all that land in Paraguay.

Or things will be just peachy and we'll all forget about the dangers involved!
Have a nice day!

Domo Arigato Mr. Capitalist and to all who believe in "Clean, Safe, Nukyular Energy!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CNN reported this afternoon that State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley is resigning over public statements last week about Bradley Manning's imprisonment.

You don't screw with the national security state. They do what they want, and if you speak up, you just gotta go. So much for that team of rivals shit.

And if you are wondering why we will stay in Afghanistan for as long as Obama is President, wonder no more. The mildest disagreement with the national security state and the war pig is cause for immediate dismissal.

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Earthquake? Check. Tsunami? Check. Nuclear threat? Check. Volcanic eruption? Check. All that's left are locusts and frogs. "A volcano in southwestern Japan erupted Sunday after nearly two weeks of relative silence, sending ash and rocks up to four kilometres (two and a half miles) into the air, a local official says. ... It was not immediately clear if the eruption was a direct result of the massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked northern areas Friday, unleashing a fierce tsunami and sparking fears that more than 10,000 may have been killed. ... The 1,421-metre (4,689-feet) Shinmoedake volcano in the Kirishima range saw its first major eruption for 52 years in January. There had not been any major activity at the site since March 1."

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Daddy Frank is moving on. This is his last column at the NYTimes.

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Steve M. is damned right that this cannot and should not turn into yet another example of "no one could have predicted". Here's the NYT newsroom:

... Over the years, Japanese plant operators, along with friendly government officials, have sometimes hidden episodes at plants from a public increasingly uneasy with nuclear power….

Last year, [a] reactor with a troubled history was allowed to reopen, 14 years after a fire shut it down. The operator of that plant, the Monju Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor, located along the coast about 220 miles west of Tokyo, tried to cover up the extent of the fire by releasing altered video after the accident in 1995….

And yet here's the Times Week in Review:

...The sobering fact is that megadisasters like the Japanese earthquake can overcome the best efforts of our species to protect against them. No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature bats last. Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, warned that an earthquake in the United States along the New Madrid fault, which caused strong earthquakes early in the 19th century, could kill tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people in the more densely populated cities surrounding the Mississippi River.

All technology can do in the face of such force is to minimize damage to communities and infrastructure, he said, and "on both of those fronts, we're never going to be perfect." ...

Let's be clear, all of our hearts go out to our Japanese brothers and sisters. That's all the more reason that a shrugging "shit happens" can't be the right response here.

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Brian Manning talks to PBS about his son't detention.

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Jill: Who needs nuclear meltdowns when you have the TSA?

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What do the state of New York and the Catholic church have in common?

It is this: Physical and sexual abuse of the powerless became an institutional norm. You all know, by now, the Church's sordid history in this country and that abuses continue to come to light around the world.

In New York State, the abuse of disabled people in state-run group homes was routinely covered up. State law requires reporting cases of abuse to law enforcement; the administrators of the group homes flouted that law. The managers ordered employees at the group homes not to document cases of abuse or neglect, telling them, in writing, that if there was nothing written down, the incident never happened.

One would hope that the end result of this will be both lengthy prison terms for the perpetrators and the bosses who covered it up, along with meaningful oversight.

But knowing something about how New York state government operates, I predict this: The odds of some underlings going to prison is pretty high. The odds of any of the bosses going to prison are only slightly better than the chance that Rumsfeld will see the inside of a jail cell. And the odds of any meaningful oversight or changes to the way New York State deals with the residents of group homes is nonexistent.

 

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Hankie alert Get a tissue before you click the link. Especially if you have pets that you love and would be worried sick about if they were missing in the wake of a tragedy.

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We'd like to appeal, too - on behalf of the human race.  This fine is too small by a couple of orders of magnitude. "US oil giant Chevron has launched a legal appeal against a $9.5bn (£5.9bn) fine by an Ecuador court for polluting much of the country's Amazon region. Chevron accused lawyers and supporters of the indigenous groups who brought the case of "corrupting" the trial. It said the judgement contained "numerous legal and factual defects". The oil firm Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, was accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic materials into unlined pits and rivers. Protesters said the company had destroyed their livelihood. Crops were damaged, farm animals killed and cancer increased among the local population, they said."

 

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Cool Evolutionary Anthropology news of the week "In chimpanzee societies, males stay where they are born and females disperse at puberty to neighboring groups, thus avoiding incest. The males, with many male relatives in their group, have a strong interest in cooperating within the group because they are defending both their own children and those of their brothers and other relatives. ... Human hunter-gatherer societies have been assumed to follow much the same pattern, with female dispersal being the general, though not universal, rule and with members of bands therefore being closely related to one another. But Dr. Hill and Dr. Walker find that though it is the daughters who move in many hunter-gatherer societies, the sons leave the home community in many others. In fact, the human pattern of residency is so variable that it counts as a pattern in itself, one that the researchers say is not known for any species of ape or monkey. Dr. Chapais calls this social pattern "bilocality." ... Modern humans have lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 90 percent of their existence as a species. If living hunter-gatherers are typical of ancient ones, the new data about their social pattern has considerable bearing on early human evolution. ... On a genetic level, the finding that members of a band are not highly interrelated means that "inclusive fitness cannot explain extensive cooperation in hunter-gatherer bands," the researchers write. Some evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection can favor groups of people, not just individuals, but the idea is hotly disputed."

 

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How you can help Japan.