Political MoJo

Louisiana did not need any additional environmental problems. With a rapidly disappearing coastline, a number of invasive species that have played havoc with the ecosystem, a Formosan termite crisis in New Orleans of shocking proportions, and lax pollution laws, the state had major problems before Katrina and Rita landed. Now, it will have even more.

10,000 family foresters in southeast Louisiana may lose 90% of their income, according to an article in today's New Orleans Times-Picayune. The article featured Roy Wood, a forester with 800 acres of ecologically sound forest, which hosts one of the state's two remaining gopher tortoise dens. He has lost almost everything. The downed timber can be used to make plywood and paper, but much of it will have to be used as fuel wood, burned in boilers for energy.

Louisiana's national wildlife refuges have taken a huge blow from Hurricane Katrina. Big Branch Marsh, which extends from Mandeville to Slidell, lost too many trees to count. The cavity trees served as home to the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, and between 40 and 50% of are gone. There was also coastal marshland erosion and the displacement of other wildlife.

Initial damages to the state's wildlife-and-fisheries facilities now exceed $94 million. It is unknown how many animals drowned, how many birds were destroyed by high winds, or what the effect of oil and chemical spills will be on wildlife. Wildlife experts are concerned about southwest Louisiana's rich bird habitats, for there is both habitat loss and the loss of refuge from prey. It is estimated that 200,000 nutria died in the two hurricanes.

The only good news so far is that Lake Pontchartrain is relatively healthy and should return to full health. Several years ago, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation set about cleaning up the lake, which was in abysmal shape because of shell dredging, dairy farm run-off, and the dumping of sewerage and chemicals.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

According to Newsweek, it looks like the Senate wants to authorize domestic spying inside the United States:

[T]he Senate Intelligence Committee recently approved broad-ranging legislation that gives the Defense Department a long sought and potentially crucial waiver: it would permit its intelligence agents, such as those working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to covertly approach and cultivate "U.S. persons" and even recruit them as informants—without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the U.S. government. The Senate committee's action comes as President George W. Bush has talked of expanding military involvement in civil affairs, such as efforts to control pandemic disease outbreaks.

The provision was included in last year's version of the same bill, but was knocked out after its details were reported by NEWSWEEK and critics charged it could lead to "spying" on U.S. citizens. But late last month, with no public hearings or debate, a similar amendment was put back into the same authorization bill—an annual measure governing U.S. intelligence agencies—at the request of the Pentagon. A copy of the 104-page committee bill, which has yet to be voted on by the full Senate, did not become public until last week.

At the same time, the Senate intelligence panel also included in the bill two other potentially controversial amendments—one that would allow the Pentagon and other U.S. intelligence agencies greater access to federal government databases on U.S. citizens, and another granting the DIA new exemptions from disclosing any "operational files" under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). "What they are doing is expanding the Defense Department's domestic intelligence activities in secret—with no public discussion," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil-liberties group that is often critical of government actions in the fight against terrorism

As they say, "no public hearings or debate" on this…

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

James Dobson is just plain bizarre:

An anguished James Dobson prayed Wednesday for a sign from God, telling his Christian radio listeners he was questioning his early endorsement of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers.

Dobson, founder of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, is one of the most prominent religious conservatives to back Miers, citing his trust in President Bush and a confidential briefing he received about her from the White House.

But in his regular radio broadcast Wednesday, Dobson prayed he was not making a mistake.

"Lord, you know I don't have the wisdom to make this decision," Dobson said. "You know that what I feel now and what I think is right may be dead wrong."

As near as I can guess, Dobson endorsed Miers early on because she was an evangelical, and hailed from a fairly conservative congregation in Dallas, the Valley View Christian Church. But evangelicals are hardly a monolithic bloc, even evangelicals at conservative churches; occasionally you get all sorts of closet liberals, compulsive gamblers, people who think sex and abortion are just fine and dandy, and people who don't care all that much about faith and are just there for the company and coffee bar, all lurking in the pews. Harriet Miers, for instance, has been organizing radical feminist conferences in her spare time, probably not something high on Dobson's list of approved behaviors. Furthermore, as Jon Cohn reported yesterday, the Valley View Christian Church itself underwent a schism of sorts recently, with the Flintstones wing of the congregation breaking away, leaving a more progressive pastor to take the helm, and since then, most of the church's truly fire-breathing positions have been moderated or abandoned. All very mysterious.

So, you know, Dobson really might not have the wisdom to make this call, and he really might be dead wrong when he endorsed her. But who knows? This only emphasizes how stupid this whole "stealth nominee" idea was in the first place. It was bad enough when a prominent religious conservative had "secret information" about Miers that no one else in the public sphere had. But now it seems that even Dobson doesn't know for sure. So the Senate is supposed to assess this nominee how, exactly? The only thing anyone can be truly confident about is that she'll be a pro-administration hack who will, one assumes, happily and irresponsibly vote to expand presidential wartime powers when the opportunity arises. For that alone she deserves blanket rejection, but beyond that, there's just a whole lot of senseless guessing here.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

It was bad enough when Virgil Butler first did his report on the Tyson Chicken plant in Arkansas, which exposed horrific conditions for factory farm hens, as well as poor employee conditions. The resulting publicity made trouble for Tyson, but did nothing to change consumers' buying habits or make them demand an end to factory farm torture.

Now, a Philadelphia-based animal rights group is reporting the results of its undercover investigation of Kreider Farms, a large Pennsylvania egg producer. The Kreider report is similar to the Tyson report: Thousands of chickens are crowded into battery cages, where each has a space of about 4 by 6 inches to live. The hens' feathers are ripped off of their necks in order to push them through the cage bar, which are stacked 3-high, resulting in feces dropping all over each of them.

There are about 300 million hens stacked in battery cages in the United States. The "good" cages provide 16 inches of space for each chicken. They cannot stretch their legs or wings, and they have their beaks cut off to prevent excessive pecking. Debeaking is, as you can imagine, a painful procedure. The hens often suffer from fatty liver syndrome and "cage layer fatigue," which frequently results in death. Many suffer from calcium deficiency.

In 2003, at San Diego's Ward Egg Ranch, more than 15,000 spent laying hens were tossed live into a wood chipper to dispose of them. The San Diego District Attorney refused to prosecute because, he said, this was a "standard industry practice." The male chicks of laying hens are frequently grouond up alive or tossed into a trash heap, where they suffocate.

At some supermarkets, cartons of "free range hen" eggs are sold, but there is no reason to believe that the hens that laid those eggs have it much better than the ones at Kreider Farms or similar egg-producing factories. The only way to be sure that your eggs did not come from brutalized chickens is to buy local yard eggs.

Billions of animals are killed at factory farms in America every year. For those who eat meat, buying factory farm meat not only encourages and supports the most inhumane practices imaginable, it also guarantees that customers will consume significant amounts of hormones that have been injected into the animals.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet