It Was Oil, All Along
June 28, 2008
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.

A Home for the Holidays

What would you do if you lived in one of Henry Kravis' mansions for a day during the holidays?

Would you feed the homeless? Throw a huge party? Sell everything on eBay?

How 'bout a little solidarity?....
Pledge Not to Ship With FedEx Ground This Holiday
FedEx has built a successful company on the backs of its drivers while pledging to "never recognize any unions" at the company. Only public pressure will drive FedEx Ground's leadership to stop harassing workers and meet them at the bargaining table. Take this pledge to show your support for the drivers at FedEx Ground.

It's easy: just don't use FedEx Ground for your holiday deliveries this year. We'll deliver the signatures to FedEx to show them we mean business.
Full Petition Text:...

TOXIC TRADE

Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer
As American consumers buy a sharply increased share of their goods from overseas, the American government has been cutting back its ability to regulate and inspect imports. Americans consumers are thus exposed to increasing numbers of products that were neither produced in America nor subject to American safety standards. The results put people at risk.

Our report, "Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer," documents these two trends. Government statistics show that imports have increased by 338 percent since 1974, the year the Consumer Product Safety Commission was created. Yet the budget for that agency today is less than half what is was in that year. In effect, we have been disarming our ability to protect ourselves, even as the need to do so has been soaring. Our report concludes that it is past time for a change.

Download this report (PDF)

TAKE ACTION: Ask your member of Congress to back a law that will help shut down the flow of dangerous consumer products into our stores...

Petition: http://WhenTheSaints.org It's been two years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, and still there are tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scattered across the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any of
the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt. Support
the Gulf Coast Recovery Bill of 2007 by signing the petition at
www.WhenTheSaints.org

Kucinich campaign is awaiting ABC News explanations for its actions

The Kucinich campaign is still awaiting an official response from ABC News about the unexplained – some have charged "inexplicable" - way in which the network has handled its post-debate online coverage of Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich over the past few days.

Among the "outrages" that have energized tens of thousands of Kucinich supporters - and even non-supporters - thousands of whom have flooded the ABC News website and other online news sites with comments of protest:

• * Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a "Politics Page" photo of the candidates.
• * Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC's own on-line "Who won the Democratic debate" survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.
• * ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.
• * After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking "Who is winning the Democratic debate?"
• * During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.
• * Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.
• * AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.

The campaign submitted objections and inquiries to ABC News representatives on Monday and Tuesday. ABC News representatives have failed to respond - or even acknowledge - those objections and inquiries.

Stayed tuned for further details.

Comment by TNJP - You can let ABC and ABC's This Week know how you feel by dropping them a line at thisweek@abc.com or politicalunit@abcnews.com

Michael Moore makes the case for media reform whilst putting CNN's Wolfie Blitzter in his place...

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Now we've all heard the oil industry and the coal industry and their indentured servants in the political process telling us that global climate stability is a luxury that we can't afford. That we have to choose now between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other. And that is a false choice.

In 100% of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy --- if we want to measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, how it preserves the values of the assets of our community and how it averts the catastrophe of global warming....

Action Alert: Don't Let Conservation Buy The Farm
I have a not-very-taxing question for all you tax payers out there:

Would you like to see your hard-earned dollars used to conserve precious wetlands and vital habitats, or would you prefer to see that money used to build football field-sized pools of pigshit generated by industrial pork producers?...

If you wanna try and keep score, Slate has an excellent expose' on the various Bushnik and RepubliCon scandals. An amusing interactive flash presentation and much more thorough text version laying out quite a few (if not most) of the myriad scandals dragging down the CrippledChimp and the moribund GOPers...

Bushies Behaving Badly - A guide to GOP scandals By Holly Allen, Christopher Beam, and Torie Bosch Friday, May 11, 2007
Paul Wolfowitz in the World Bank With Nepotism
The World Bank president and "Iraq war architect" allegedly helped his girlfriend get a generous salary package and promotion when she transferred to the State Department. Wolfowitz said an ethics panel approved the deal, but the panel denies it. An investigative committee found that the deal was a conflict of interest. (He apparently helped her career in the past, too.) Wolfowitz critics also allege that he used his position at the bank to promote a conservative agenda on family planning and global warming...