November 30, 2006

EPA Standards Drop,...


 
EPA’s New Air Quality Standards

 Endanger Public Health

 

Here’s something that will take your breath away. The EPA, charged with protecting our environment, has adopted new air quality standards that actually put our environment and health at greater risk.

At issue is the standard for annual releases of fine particulate concentrations. Fine particulates are an insidious form of pollution that originates from a wide variety of sources, including car exhaust, smokestacks and coal-fired power plants. Composed of microscopic particles 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair, they are easily inhaled into the lungs, causing chronic, intractable and ultimately, fatal, pulmonary disease.

They are also implicated in the increased incidence of cardiac arrhythmias, heart attacks, strokes, cancer and asthma attacks, resulting in thousands of hospital admissions, doctor visits and millions of lost school and work days.

The EPA, however, declined to strengthen the nation’s annual standard for fine particulate pollution concentration. The agency did strengthen the 24-hour fine particle standard; however, public health experts and its own analysts indicate that the new standard (which drops from 65 micrograms per cubic meter to 35 micrograms per cubic meter) is still too week. In proposing these standards, EPA has ignored the recommendations of its own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, the advice of the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, the recommendations of 100 leading research scientists and physicians, and comments from two dozen national and local health organizations.

The EPA’s disregard of such evidence is deeply troubling to the scientific community. Its “action is truly breath-taking in ignoring the dangerous impact of particulate pollution on America’s hearts and lungs,” says Dr. John Balbus, health program director for Environmental Defense and co-founder of the Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health and the Environment. “By ignoring medical science, EPA is fundamentally failing to protect Americans from death and serious disease associated with particulate pollution.”


Greenwatch Today
 
 
 
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November 26, 2006

JFK - Words of Wisdom

 

 

 JFK

 

WORDS OF WISDOM

 

CLICK TO VIEW

 

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

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November 23, 2006

The Future of US Civil Liberties,...

 
 
Bush’s Defeated Foe: US Civil Liberty

 
By Paul Craig Roberts

 

George Orwell warned us, but what American would have expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States would become a country in which lies and deception by the President and Vice President were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression, and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution?

If anyone had predicted that the election of George W. Bush to the presidency would result in an American police state and illegal wars of aggression, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic.

What American ever would have thought that any US president and attorney general would defend torture or that a Republican Congress would pass a bill legalizing torture by the executive branch and exempting the executive branch from the Geneva Conventions?

What American ever would have expected the US Congress to accept the president’s claim that he is above the law?

What American could have imagined that if such crimes and travesties occurred, nothing would be done about them and that the media and opposition party would be largely silent?

Except for a few columnists, who are denounced by “conservatives” as traitors for defending the Bill of Rights, the defense of US civil liberty has been limited to the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. The few federal judges who have refused to genuflect before the Bush police state are denounced by attorney general Alberto Gonzales as a “grave threat” to US security. Vice president Richard Cheney called a federal judge’s ruling against the Bush regime’s illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program “an indefensible act of judicial overreaching.”

Brainwashed “conservatives” are so accustomed to denouncing federal judges for “judicial activism” that Cheney’s charge of overreach goes down smoothly. Vast percentages of the American public are simply unconcerned that their liberty can be revoked at the discretion of a police or military officer and that they can be held without evidence, trial or access to attorney and tortured until they confess to whatever charge their torturers wish to impose.

Americans believe that such things can only happen to “real terrorists,” despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the Bush regime’s detainees have no connections to terrorism.

When these points are made to fellow citizens, the reply is usually that “I’m doing nothing wrong. I have nothing to fear.”

Why, then, did the Founding Fathers write the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

American liberties are the result of an 800 year struggle by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government. For centuries English speaking peoples have understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power. If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government has grown in size, scope and power beyond the imagination of the Founding Fathers.

But, alas, “law and order conservatives” have been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have forgot that we need protection from government more than we need protection from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns on us?

This is the famous question asked by Sir Thomas More in the play, A Man for All Seasons. The answer is that we stand naked, unprotected by law. It is an act of the utmost ignorance and stupidity to assume that only criminals and terrorists will stand unprotected.

Americans should be roused to fury that attorney general Alberto Gonzales and vice president Cheney have condemned the defense of American civil liberty as “a grave threat to US security.” This blatant use of an orchestrated and propagandistic fear to create a “national security” wedge against the Bill of Rights is an impeachable offense.

Mark my words, the future of civil liberty in the US depends on the impeachment and conviction of Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales.

Paul Craig Roberts , was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington ; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Information Clearing House

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK
 
 
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November 14, 2006

An Honor to Serve

 
An Honor to Serve

By Monica Benderman
Staff Writer

 

In the spirit of sacrifice there are those who serve.  

Slaves once served.  

Can anyone see the honor there?

An honor to serve who?

The country?  
What makes a country worthy of a man’s sacrifice?

Authority?  
Isn’t it a man’s willingness to serve that defines true authority?

This weekend in a small town in Connecticut a giant Norway spruce was cut down.  Forty-five feet tall, the tree had stood for decades beside a comfortable family home, creating memories for those who had walked beneath its stately branches.  It became a living testimony to the lives of those who had grown near its shadow.  It is now making its way to New York City to grace Rockefeller Center’s Ice Plaza for the Christmas holidays.  Its towering trunk now cut, it will bear the plastic tinsel, glittering ornaments and thousands of twinkling lights until no longer appropriate and then its death already begun, it will no longer matter.  The tree stump, surrounded by a circle of dirt on the ground where its branches once brushed, may spark thoughts of what had once stood on that place but how will that memory ever be what the tree had been?

An honor to serve.

One of the former residents, a man who as a child had walked around that tree with his mother, said it was an honor for his tree to serve as the tree of Christmas at Rockefeller Center.  

The honor in dying – even among trees we look to find honor in destroying life often not realizing until we only have memories that it was the life that mattered, life that brought the memories.  We look to create memories forgetting they don’t bring life.  

Hidden throughout the acres of training grounds surrounding Ft. Stewart, Georgia, are over 100 cemeteries – testimony to lives that have now become only memories.  The cemeteries date to the early part of the 1900’s, and in many places are rows of markers with children’s names.  Whole families of children lost their lives in a span of weeks – lives sacrificed to the childhood diseases of a time when we had not yet learned their cures.  Perhaps their deaths were instrumental in encouraging the development of research to find those cures?  Indeed, if this is true then their memories have given life – does this mean it was with honor that they served?

On Veterans’ Day we honored those who have served and those who continue to serve – with special attention paid to those who have died in their service to our country.

They have died.  Whose honor is it now that they served?  Whose honor is it now that they gave their lives to leave only memories for a country that seems to believe the memories are more important than the lives.  

An honor to have served.

How can there be an honor in dying for a country whose people, rather than learn from the memory of the lives their veterans lived, honor their death?  How can there be an honor in dying for a country whose people continue to glorify dying as the highest form of service to our country?  

Wasn’t their service so that others could live?  

Wasn’t their sacrifice to ensure that no others had to die before we came to understand that it was life that mattered and not the memories of what life had been before we so quickly sacrificed it for an honor lost in dying?

There will be no honor in their service until we, as civilians with the responsibility of ensuring that they only serve in war as a last resort, fulfill our duty to them – and also serve with honor, by living as if the sacrifices of our veterans truly matter.    

When will the memories of the honor for which they served give life?

Monica Benderman is a Senior Staff Writer for Choice America Network.  She has been widely published throughout the Internet and Newspapers around the world.  Her husband is Sgt. Kevin Benderman.   You may contact her at mdawnb@coastalnow.net 

Permission to reprint is hereby granted.

 Copyright 2006 EvansMediaUSA

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

 

 

 

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November 10, 2006

Rumsfeld Out,..BUT,.. Bob Gates??

 
Gates Has History of
 
Manipulating Intelligence

 
    By Jason Leopold

    t r u t h o u t | Report

Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas's good o' boy network.

 He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein with American-made weapons in the country's war against Iran in the 1980s.


Gates, who currently is president of Texas A&M University, came under intense fire during confirmation hearings in the early 1990s for being unaware of the explosive situation in Iraq in the 1980s, and the demise of the Soviet republic.

Gates joined the CIA in 1966, and spent eight years there as an analyst before moving over to the National Security Council in 1974. He returned to the CIA in 1980, and a year later was appointed by Ronald Reagan to serve as deputy director for intelligence. Five years later, he was named deputy director for the agency, the number two post in the agency. In 1989, he was appointed deputy director of the National Security Council and in 1991, when the first Bush administration was in office, he was named director of the spy shop.

During contentious Senate confirmation hearings in October 1991 - which are bound to come up again -Gates's role in cooking intelligence information during the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed. It was during those hearings that senators found out about a December 2, 1986, 10-page classified memo written by Thomas Barksdale, the CIA analyst for Iran. That memo claimed that covert arms sales to the country demonstrated "a perversion of the intelligence process" that is staggering in its proportions.

The Barksdale memo was used by Gates's detractors to prove he played an active role in slanting intelligence information during his tenure at the agency under Reagan. Eerily reminiscent of the way CIA analysts were treated by Vice President Dick Cheney during the run-up to the Iraq war three years ago, when agents were forced to provide the Bush administration with intelligence showing Iraq was a nuclear threat, Barksdale said he and other Iran analysts "were never consulted or asked to provide an intelligence input to the covert actions and secret contacts that have occurred."

Barksdale added that Gates was the pipeline for providing "exclusive reports to the White House," intelligence that was "at odds with the overwhelming bulk of intelligence reporting, both from U.S. sources and foreign intelligence services."

In testimony before the Senate on October 1, 1991, Harold P. Ford, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described an aspect of Gates's personality that mirrors many of the top officials in the Bush administration today.

"Bob Gates has often depended too much on his own individual analytic judgments and has ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own. This would be okay if he were uniquely all-seeing. He has not been ..." Ford said.

At the hearing, other CIA analysts said Gates forced them to twist intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by the former Soviet Union. Analysts alleged a report approved by Gates overstated Soviet influence in Iran that specifically led the late President Ronald Reagan into making policy decisions that turned into the Iran-Contra scandal.

Jennifer Glaudemans, a former CIA analyst, said at the 1991 Gates confirmation hearings that she and her colleagues at the CIA believed "Mr Gates and his influence have led to a prostitution of [Soviet] analysis."

Melvin Goodman, Glaudemans's former boss at the CIA, also said that under Gates, the CIA was "trying to provide the intelligence analysis ... that would support the operational decision to sell arms to Iran."

Gates testified at his confirmation hearing in October 1991 that he was aware the United States was selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. But he denied that he had any knowledge that Oliver North, the former National Security aide, was diverting money from arms sales to Iran to secretly aid the Nicaraguan contras.

But White House memos released at the time showed that North and John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, engaged in classified briefings with Gates on numerous occasions about Iran-Contra. Poindexter testified that he discussed the situation with Gates, but Gates said at his Senate confirmation hearings he had "no recollection" about those conversations.

Alan Fiers, a former CIA officer who served as an agency liaison along with North and met weekly with Gates, testified at Gates's confirmation hearings that he discussed specific details of the covert operation with Gates.

"Bob Gates understood the universe, understood the structure, understood that there was an operational - that there was a support operation being run out of the White House," and "that Ollie North was the quarterback," Fiers said at Gates's confirmation hearing in 1991. "I had no reason to think he had great detail, but I do think there was a baseline knowledge there."

If confirmed, Gates would arguably be overseeing a war that removed a dictator he personally helped to prop up. Tom Harkin, a senator from Iowa, described Gates's role in intelligence sharing operations with Iraq during a time when the United States helped arm Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran.

"I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates's role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq," Harkin said during Gates's confirmation hearings on November 7, 1991. "Robert Gates served as assistant to the director of the CIA in 1981 and as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986. In that capacity, he helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually evolved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986. The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and narrative texts provided to Saddam may not only have helped him in Iraq's war against Iran, but also in the recent gulf war."


 

 
 
 
 
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November 04, 2006

A Blow for Republicans - Haggard Resigns,....


US pastor resigns in gay sex row

 
The leader of the 30-million-member
National Association of Evangelicals
in the US has resigned after being accused
of paying for sex with a man.


The Reverend Ted Haggard said he would also temporarily step aside as head of his 14,000-strong New Life Church while his colleagues investigated the claims.

Mr Haggard, who is known as a vocal opponent of same-sex marriages, denies the accusations.

But a spokesman for his Colorado church said he had admitted "some guilt".

The row began after Mike Jones told a radio show in Denver, Colorado, that he had been paid to have sex with Mr Haggard nearly every month over the past three years.

In a statement to the New Life Church, Mr Haggard said he could "not continue to minister under the cloud created by the accusations".

"I am voluntarily stepping aside from leadership so that the overseer process can be allowed to proceed with integrity," he said.

In an interview with KUSA-TV, Mr Haggard said he "never had a gay relationship with anybody".

"I'm steady with my wife, I'm faithful to my wife," he said.

'Some admission'

But the acting pastor of his church in Colorado, Ross Parsley, said Mr Haggard had made some admissions.

"There has been some admission of indiscretion," he said. "Not admission to all of the material that has been discussed, but there is an admission of some guilt."

The allegations come as voters in Colorado and several other US states are due to hold simultaneous votes on gay marriage laws.

Mr Jones, 49, said Mr Haggard's public stance on gay marriage had prompted him to reveal the details of their relationship.

"It made me angry that here's someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex," Mr Jones told the Associated Press news agency.

Mr Haggard, who has five children, became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 2003.

 The preacher - who is also known as Pastor Ted - is one of America's most influential and politically well-connected religious leaders, says the BBC's Jane Little in Washington.

He has maintained close contacts with the White House and helped promote a conservative values platform.

His resignation comes as a blow for Republicans, who are hoping to energise a demoralised Christian base ahead of mid-term elections, our correspondent says.


 
 
 
 
 
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