ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The state of Alaska will sue the U.S. government to stop the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species, arguing the designation will slow development in the state, Gov. Sarah Palin said on Wednesday.
Palin said the state will file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington challenging U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's decision to grant Endangered Species Act protections to the polar bear.
The Republican governor has argued that the ice-dependent polar bear, the first mammal granted Endangered Species Act listing because of global warming, does not need additional protections.
"We believe that the listing was unwarranted and that it's unprecedented to list a currently healthy population based on uncertain climate models," said Alaska Assistant Attorney General Steven Daugherty.
Even though Kempthorne enacted a rule aimed at precluding any new restrictions on oil and gas operations as a result of the listing, the Palin administration believes a wide variety of other development activities in Alaska would be hampered if the listing goes through, Daugherty said. Any development or activity requiring federal permits or using federal funds would have to engage in a "consultation" process to ensure that polar bears are not harmed, he said.
That consultation, mandated by the Endangered Species Act, "is long and time-consuming process," he said. "It's just, basically, a big time-and-money-waster."
The date for filing the lawsuit is unknown, Daugherty said. The state Department of Law on Wednesday was drafting its 60-day notice of intent to sue, he said. (Editing by Vicki Allen)
Of course, God forbid, we endanger development in the sparsely populated Alaska over endangered natural habitat wildlife! Typical Republican agenda -- corporate interests over all else.
I'm so sick of the mantra. I'm ready to put all Republicans on some thin sheet of ice near a polar icecap and wait for them to start yelling "uncle."
I remember living in Portland, Oregon, and experiencing personally the "distaste" Oregonians have for Californians.
All I can say after today's ruling is "come on over!"
"You know, I'm wishing everyone good luck with their marriages and I hope that California's economy is booming because everyone is going to come here and get married," said Schwarzenegger, prompting laughs and applause, according to a recording.
Well, surprise, surprise, David Cook wins American Idol. I was stunned, because I thought the tween vote was going to give Archie the title. I even voted for Cook the last two times, just to x out a few tween votes for Archie!
I totally dug the George Michael finale, and although I was expecting him to rock it, the song was deep and compelling.
I'm watching the Academy of Country Music Awards tonight because Garth will be doing a medly of his greatest hits, while receiving the Crystal Milestone Award! (Nice tribute from Billy Joel, btw).
I remember when I first heard Garth on the radio, in 1989. I recognized immediately that this guy was going to be a superstar, and I was bugging all of my then hair band rock star friends to listen to him! (Of course, when Shania came along, it wasn't hard to get my rocker friends to come on board the country bandwagon!) Although "Friends In Low Places" won Garth his first award, it was "Unanswered Prayers" that stole my heart as a fan of Garth.
I know he's happy in his retirement and marriage with Trisha, but damn, I miss his voice and his rock and roll country style.
Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he's keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we're drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone's touchscreen. "OK! It's uploading now," says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. "It'll go public in a few seconds." Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.
There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffeese ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.
Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book.
Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.
This is a must read, not only for its sad poignancy, but for reality of today's minorities, and how one target pokes fun at his tragic situation.
Members of the National Association of Letter Carriers collect nonperishable items along their regular delivery routes, and the food is passed along to local food banks and pantries in the communities where it is collected.
"With rising prices for gasoline and food, an unbearable squeeze has been placed on family budgets, forcing many Americans to seek help for the first time from community food banks and pantries to get adequate nutrition," said NALC President William H. Young.
The carriers are asking donors to place food items such as canned meat and fish, soup, cereals, pasta and rice near their mailboxes.
WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration is withholding a list of Chinese heparin suppliers requested by congressional investigators looking into problems with tainted supplies of the blood thinner, saying confidentiality agreements prevent release of the companies' names.
As always, the interests of the corporate CEO's are outweighed by the interests of the American people. Ladies and gentlemen, your government in action (well, the Bush controlled government). Wake up, America, and vote Democratic, if you have any hope of surviving in this country as a people.
PART TWO:
WASHINGTON — The general manager and possibly other senior staff members at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, where nine miners died last August, withheld information from federal officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face a criminal inquiry, the chairman of a Congressional investigation said Thursday.
The chairman, Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, accused the company of concealing the extent of an earlier collapse in the mine that involved the same high-risk technique, retreat mining, that was being used when the disaster began.
POSTVILLE, Iowa — At least 300 people were arrested Monday on immigration and identity theft charges at Agriprocessors, one of the USA's largest packing plants for kosher meats.
Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the Agriprocessors complex in this northeast Iowa community of 2,500 during morning work hours, executing warrants for fraudulent use of others' Social Security numbers in connection with their employment at the plant. The packing plant has attracted workers from Mexico, Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.
It seems that all of the immigration raids that have taken place the past couple of years are at meat and poultry processing and packing plants. I guess their lobbyists are just not as good as oh, say, Myanmar's!
ABC News Jan Simmonds reports: Two of Sen. John McCain' campaign aides resigned this weekend after media reports brought to light their ties to a lobbying group that once represented the military junta of Burma, which the regime calls Myanmar.
When reading these articles about the raids, the key phrase that pops up as the reason for them is the prevention of ID theft. But, interestingly, these raids rarely prove that the immigrants picked up were using stolen ID's or worse yet, using someone else's ID to create wealth for themselves by buying houses, cars, and adult playthings. Mostly the raids end up in rooting out hard working people who are barely making it (and not stealing stuff from ordinary Americans), and with their meager earnings send money home to familys that have almost nothing.
Funny, though, how only the employees of these packing plants are punished. And here, I thought it was illegal, as well, to hire the illegals ...
News and bloggers have been all over this story, but it still boggles my mind that our government can be so callous -- especially when it relates to the very service men and and women that the current administration is always touting in front of us as the reason we must support "the war on terror."
On March 20, 2008 a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator sent the e-mail below to a number of VA employees, including psychologists, social workers, and a psychiatrist stating that due to an increased number of “compensation seeking veterans,” the staff should “refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out” and they should “R/O [rule out] PTSD” and consider a diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder” instead.
That's right. Let's continue to give the big corporate CEO's their "due," but, God forbid, we actually give the soldiers their due.
MIANYANG, China — With the death toll from this week’s earthquake rising rapidly, China has departed from past diplomatic practice, seeking disaster relief experts and heavy equipment needed for rescue operations from neighbors it has long shunned as rivals or renegades.
Officials on Thursday asked a longtime rival, Japan, to send 60 earthquake rescue experts, the first such team China has accepted from a foreign country during the current crisis and one of the few official relief missions China has ever accepted from abroad. This week it also accepted help from at least three private relief teams from Taiwan, the self-governing island with which China has long had tense relations.
As the urgency intensifies to get food, water and medicine into the worst-affected areas of Burma 11 days after the country was hit by Cyclone Nargis, the country's military government continues to baffle the world by stonewalling international disaster relief.
The government has taken pains to appear on state television as the sole source of humanitarian relief, even appropriating donations from others so that soldiers can hand out the aid. The United Nations warns of a second catastrophe unless a huge aid effort is begun immediately, and Buddhist monks and other Burmese citizens are quietly tending to the sick and hungry.
The junta's bewildering resistance stems from its fear that outside influence would weaken its control and from a distorted desire to maintain the impression that it is compassionate in the eyes of Burma's Buddhist majority, scholars say.
"The regime is trying to control the aid distribution because they want to be the ones to offer it ceremonially, partly to show they have legitimacy," said University of Wisconsin anthropologist Ingrid Jordt, who has lived in Burma as a practicing Buddhist nun.
"They are the patrons, the distributors of largesse," said Bruce Matthews, a Burma expert and professor emeritus of religion at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. "What anybody gets is what the military wants you to get.
Theoretically, they are Buddhists. They care about their Buddhist image."
The California Supreme Court, striking down two state laws that had limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman, ruled on Thursday that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
I've always been glad to be a resident of California. When my daughter was younger, and she would ask me about things she would hear on the news about restrictions on personal liberties in other states in this country, I would always tell her she was lucky to be living in California, where our state constitution is much more liberal than most states, and very much more liberal than the federal laws and statutes.
Just as I have never been able to understand one's prejudice toward people that are not white, I cannot understand people's equally ridiculous prejudice toward people with different sexual preferences.
It's a good day to be a Californian! And someone once told me this state was going red ... ha ha ha! NOT! This is a blue state that can easily handle having a Republican as governor without losing our liberties and rights guaranteed by our state constitution.
Congratulations to Travis Childers' win in the Mississippi First District special election, which was open because Roger F. Wicker resigned effective December 31, 2007.
Slowly, but surely, Americans are voting overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in traditionally Republican strongholds, which is definitely a harbinger of things to come.
2008 will bring us a Democratic president, a more secure Democratic Senate with enough votes to end the stupid "we now have to have 60 votes to pass any legislation," and a stronger Democratic House.
A place to enjoy good music, drink in some knowledge, and watch a little sports. Where there is always food for thought, topped with choice grillings of right wing talking points.
About Me
Name: Carrie Cann
Location: Hollywood, United States
I am a 56, single, white female, living in Hollywood. I'm as left as they come, and liberal to the core. If you can't take the "heat," stay out of my Bar & Grill.
