Apparently Christ is a big fan of the Brazilian soccer team

I guess that explains why they win so many World Cups. BBC:

Brazil's famous Christ the Redeemer statue has been re-opened after a $4 million (£2.7m) renovation.

The Rio de Janeiro monument has undergone a four-month restoration, covered with scaffolding as workers fixed cracks and damage due to water.

As it was unveiled, it was lit up in green and yellow to honour the Brazilian football team playing in the World Cup.

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Tony Blair to receive US peace medal

What a goddamn sick joke. Oh right, it's Bill Clinton who is delivering the prize and who is a previous winner of this peace medal. It's hard for the US to be taken seriously as a country interested in peace when they give medals to someone who was a critical player in invading Iraq and who recently defended the Israeli attack on the supplies being delivered to Gaza.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is to receive a prestigious US medal and $100,000 (£67,000) prize for his work in conflict resolution.

The National Constitution Centre is awarding him its Liberty Medal for "steadfast" efforts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Previous winners include Nelson Mandela and former US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior.

Mr Blair said he was driven by values of "freedom, liberty and justice".

Mr Clinton, the centre's chairman, will present the medal in Philadelphia on 13 September.

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First photo of a planet outside our solar system

Terribly cool. (H/t HuffPost Hill) Read the rest of this post...

BP 'reporters' try to get the positive message out

Does anyone really believe such obvious propaganda? Well, I mean besides Sarah Palin? Read the rest of this post...

Uniformed Louisiana police working for BP

Once again, the craziness of this disaster gets more bizarre by the day. Mother Jones:

First, some gratifying news: The ACLU has put Louisiana law enforcement on notice. In a letter (PDF) released yesterday, Marjorie Esman, executive director of the group's Louisiana chapter, reminded the sheriffs of the coastal parishes that "members of the public have the right under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to film, record, photograph, and document anything they observe in a public place. No one—neither law enforcement nor a private corporation—has the legal right to interfere with public access to public places or the recording of activities that occur there. Nor may law enforcement officials cooperate with private companies in denying such access to the public."

Esman told me that the ACLU had discussed the matter due in large part to Mother Jones' reporting. She says it would consider filing a lawsuit if appropriate.

Louisiana police don't have any right to tell you you can't walk onto a public beach (even to, as Esman puts it, "roll around in sticky gunky tar that I'll never be able to get off—if I want to, that's my right"). However, they do have the right to mislead you about who they're really working for. In Louisiana, as in many places, it's legal for police officers to wear their uniforms regardless of whether they're acting in an official capacity or working for a private corporation. Which is why Andrew Wheelan, the environmentalist mentioned above, was unaware that the cop who pressured him to stop filming a BP building and later pulled him over so that a BP official could question him wasn't on duty at the time. The Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office told me that the deputy who pulled Wheelan over is just one of 40 in the parish who are working for BP on their own time. And the BP-police collusion goes beyond uniformed deputies moonlighting. In nearby Lafourche Parish, for example, the sheriff's office is filling 57 security positions a week for BP; the shifts are on the clock, and BP reimburses the sheriff's office for them.

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Kick-ass ad about GOP serial liar Mark Kirk (IL Senate candidate)

Spot on ad.

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Pay-for-Play, the (Right-Wing) Non-Profit Way

In Washington lines are never clear. As we all know, the town constantly moves in the gray.

And that continues to be the case with the ongoing controversy over the Joint Strike Fighter jet engine - a battle that has taken on epic proportions for years.

As ABC News reports in its story A $3 Billion Government Boondoggle?

At issue is the engine for the aircraft known as the Joint Strike Fighter, an all-purpose military jet that is expected to become the backbone of American air supremacy for a generation. The fighter already has an engine – built by Pratt & Whitney and in use as the jet is being tested. Some members of Congress want to pay General Electric and Rolls-Royce to develop a second one….The money involved is not insubstantial. By some estimates, Congress has paid $3 billion to GE and Rolls-Royce since first setting aside money for a second engine in the mid-1990s, and it will take close to $3 billion more to have the engines tested, proven and in full production.

Congressional members are fighting tooth and nail on both sides, depending on their state’s economic dependency on the project, but there is also strong disagreement between non-profit organizations, Defense Secretary Gates and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), about which direction to take.

While Secretary Gates believes it is a colossal waste of money to continue down the current path spending billions more, the GAO -- which exists as a congressional watchdog to investigate how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars -- at a congressional hearing a year ago, testified that according to its analysis, “we remain confident that competitive pressures could yield enough savings to offset the costs of competition over the JSF program’s life.”

And that brings us to the non-profit organizations. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a “good government” organization generally considered on the conservative end of the spectrum, is supposedly fighting for taxpayers like you and me. But, it has been working overtime against the second engine with all its might and resources.

If you live in DC, you may remember CAGW ads plastered in every metro car you could find denigrating the possible GE project as wasteful.

Turns out, as Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington helpfully points out, CAGW had an incentive to get the word out.

The conservative blog RedState.com has revealed that CAGW, which was apparently the source of information for ABC’s piece – secretly has been paid by Pratt & Whitney for its efforts. This certainly calls both CAGW’s credibility and the reliability of the ABC story into question.

Harper’s Ken Silverstein and former Congressman Bob Barr have both reported on another organization’s pay-for-play on the issue, this time it’s the Lexington Institute.

Barr explains the non-profit’s role in the debate in the Politico this week.

…The Lexington Institute’s chief operating officer, Loren Thompson, cites as proof that his company’s advocacy supporting certain weapons systems (in this case, Pratt & Whitney’s single-engine proposal) is fair and honest the fact that it “received money from donors on both sides of the issue…”

The Project on Government Oversight reported this in a July 2009 article. Specifically, as reported in 2006, Thompson expressed concerns about Pratt & Whitney’s “monopoly” position as the developer of the only engine to be used in the multibillion-dollar F-35 program.

But now, Lexington vocally opposes Congress’s awarding funding for the development of a competing engine for the multirole fighter to Rolls-Royce and General Electric.

Thompson (incredulously) told Silverstein, "I'm not going to work on a project unless somebody, somewhere, is willing to pay. This is a business." Wow, so much for an independent voice.

The Lexington Institute’s mission, according to its website, reads “We believe a dynamic private sector is the greatest engine for social progress and economic prosperity.”

Well, you most certainly do, especially if that economic prosperity is your own. Read the rest of this post...

Scientists report oxygen-depleted 'dead zones' in Gulf

The environmental freak show that BP created gets worse yet again. The Guardian:

In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as "astonishingly high" levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.

Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark sightings closer to the Alabama coast.

Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.

"The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion," he said. "When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are moving closer to shore to try to get to better water."

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The two faces of Patrick Fitzgerald

Scott Horton at Harpers, one of the international go-to guys on the subject of torture, tells a rather interesting story about our own Patrick Fitzgerald, the former Plame special prosecutor. It seems Mr. Fitzgerald is involved in two torture-related cases at the same time.

In one case, he's investigating the use of police-station torture by the Chicago police. (I know, who'da thought that could happen?) According to the AP, whom Horton quotes, Fitzgerald successfully prosecuted former police Lt. Jon Burge:

A decorated former Chicago police lieutenant accused of suffocating, shocking and beating confessions out of scores of suspects was convicted Monday of federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges for lying about the torture. Former Lt. Jon Burge, whose name has become synonymous with police brutality and abuse of power in the country’s third-largest city, did not react as the guilty verdicts were read.

Horton continues (my emphasis):

A federal investigation concluded that more than 100 victims had been tortured, sometimes brutally, by Chicago police, especially on the city’s South and West Sides, in incidents dating back to the seventies. Although allegations were frequently made, they were routinely batted down by prosecutors as nonsense until students at a clinic at Chicago’s Northwestern University Law School began rigorously documenting the allegations. When Illinois Governor George Ryan ordered a moratorium on executions out of concern over the torture allegations, he found himself the target of a corruption inquiry by local prosecutors, who also took extreme measures to intimidate the law students investigating the torture allegations.

Chicago prosecutors, it seems, were eager to protect the police—and themselves—from the allegations of torture now validated by a Cook County jury. They used all their prosecutorial powers to interfere with and block probes, and sought to criminalize their critics.

The south and west sides of Chicago are the two largest African-American communities. Again, who'da thought?

Pay attention to that part about how prosecutors protected the police by investigating the investigators. In this case, Fitzgerald seems to have acted differently. (Chicago corruption investigations, on the other hand, are notorious for turning up just one perp — as in, just one corrupt traffic judge, just one corrupt city-connected lawyer, and so on — before closing shop and going home. So we'll see.)

The other investigation that Fitzgerald is involved in includes torture allegations against CIA officials. Horton again (my emphasis):

Fitzgerald is also special prosecutor in an investigation into the involvement of CIA agents in the torture—and occasionally the torture-homicide—of prisoners held in the war on terror. Amazingly, however, rather than the allegations of torture, Fitzgerald is going after the efforts of private investigators, working under the instructions of counsel for the prisoners who were on the receiving end of these techniques. The preposterous theory on which Fitzgerald’s inquiry is premised is official impunity taken to a wild extreme—CIA officers argue that their identities and their involvement in the torture episodes are matters of the highest secrecy, and any effort to learn the facts about them is a crime. In other words, just like the Cook County prosecutors who sought to harass and criminalize those who investigated torture in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald is being charged to harass and criminalize human-rights investigators who have probed the use of torture techniques by CIA agents.

The two faces of Patrick Fitzgerald.

I've often thought that "Fitz" (as he was lovingly known during his Plame days), did as much to contain the damage caused by l'affaire Plame–Cheney as to expose it. That is, it could be said that Fitzgerald capped the well at Libby, leaving Cheney tarred, but free.

For me, this story seriously tars Fitzgerald. Good catch, Mr. Horton.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Jindal seals oil spill records - blocks transparency

Because an open government is clearly not the way Jindal wants to govern. Jindal has consistently been against openness during her term as governor.

For more than two months, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has made it clear that he considers the response of the federal government and BP to the gulf oil leak a failure on many fronts.

But elected officials in Louisiana and members of the public seeking details on how Mr. Jindal and his administration fared in their own response to the disaster are out of luck: late last week the governor vetoed an amendment to a state bill that would have made public all records from his office related to the oil spill.

The measure was proposed by Senator Robert Adley, a Republican, and easily passed the Democrat-controlled Legislature. He told the Associated Press that the veto was a “black eye” on the state. “This governor has opposed transparency for the three years he’s been in office,” he said.

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Harry Reid's GOP opponent thinks your rape is part of God's plan

From Salon:

Sharron Angle may be giving the press the silent treatment now, but she hasn't always been so tight-lipped. Think Progress (via Alternet) has dug up some eyebrow-raising audio of a radio interview the Nevada Senate candidate did with Bill Manders back in January. The subject: abortion. Her stance: disgusting.

Manders asks her whether there is "any reason at all for an abortion," and she answers: "Not in my book." For clarity, he says: "So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?" And Angle replies with this reasoning: "You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things." You see, God planned your rape and pregnancy. Isn't that reassuring?

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Is Obama the first woman president?

Don't look at me. Others are saying it. And I'm not sure it's any compliment to women. The thing is, the qualities they're pointing to that supposedly make him "feminine" - "he would rather talk than fight" - are not necessarily traits that make a great leader (at least not when present in excess).

I think (fear) that people are sensing weakness in the President and they're defining that weakness (wrongly) as feminine. Read the rest of this post...

BP contingency plans somehow never considered hurricanes

To be fair to BP, how often do we see hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico? It's a mistake that any Fortune 500 company with record profits and unlimited political connections could make. Huffington Post:

Rep. Edward Markey says BP's disaster response plan for an oil spill doesn't mention hurricanes or tropical storms.

Markey says the omission is yet another example of what the oil giant was not prepared to handle.

The Massachusetts Democrat's comments came during a congressional hearing on a law to improve technology intended to prevent disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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GOPers target Pelosi (again), but they should be worried about Boehner

Today's Washington Post reports that the GOPers are going to target Speaker Nancy Pelosi in elections this year. Um, heard it. It's not like the Post and other political reporters haven't written that story dozens of times over the past ten years. Here's a news flash for the DC political reporters: GOPers have been targeting Pelosi for years. By now, Pelosi's caucus is used to it and know how to fight back against the attacks.

One thing you can say about Speaker Pelosi is that she would never make the kinds of gaffes that her GOP counterpart is making. This week alone, in one speech, Boehner said he'd cut Social Security to fund wars and he actually stated that the recent global economic crisis, the "Great Recession," was an "ant."

Yep, this week, John Boehner not only defined the GOP. He made himself a campaign issue. Boehner told us how he'd govern as Speaker: Wall Street would win. Seniors would lose. It's pretty clear Boehner has disdain and contempt for Americans who suffered in the economic crisis. He and his fellow GOPers drove us over the economic cliff -- and they could care less.

So, the GOP can target Pelosi (again.) The Democrats now have John Boehner to kick around -- and there's so much fodder:
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Countdown interviews oil slick fly-over reporter John Wathen

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's painful to watch the video but it's good to hear someone covering this disaster who is not part of the spin machine. According to John Wathen of BP Oil Slick, it's much worse than anyone can imagine or has been reported. Listen to the interview and keep checking his website that has regular updates and flyovers throughout the region. Despite some of the talk about "safe" beaches in the Florida panhandle, Wathen saw massive oil slicks just beyond the beaches which swimmers could not see. Read the rest of this post...

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President is giving what's being touted as a major address on immigration reform today at American University. I think a lot of people would prefer more than just another speech, they'd like some real action on this issue.

Tonight, I'll be attending the graduation festivities at Language ETC, an organization in my neighborhood whose mission is "To empower and enable adult immigrants through education to become contributing and self-reliant community members." It's the program where Carlos and I teach English to adult immigrants on Monday Nights. We've just completed another semester. This year, we taught the introductory Basic level class. Sometimes, the two hours teaching feel like the most productive hours in my week. And, our students are so diligent. It's just great to watch the students improve and to have conversations in English now with people who could barely speak a word of it several months ago.

Elena Kagan has made it through the toughest part of her confirmation hearing. Her testimony is completed. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear from witnesses who support and oppose Kagan's nomination. All you need to know about the GOP's witnesses is that one of their headliners is the way-too-gay-obsessed President of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins. Yep, the Republicans are showcasing the extremists on their side, because that's all they've got. The full witness list is here.

It is a beautiful day here in the District. No humidity... Read the rest of this post...

Thousands of sea turtle eggs to be rescued and relocated away from oil

It's a worst case scenario plan and of course, we're well into the worst case. Well done by the US Fish and Wildlife Service for planning this and putting it into operation.

For the tens of thousands of sea turtle eggs incubating in the sands of the northern Gulf of Mexico—and dangerously near the oil—it's come to this: Officials are planning to dig up the approximately 700 nests on Alabama and the Florida panhandle beaches, pack the eggs in Styrofoam boxes, and fly them to a facility in eastern Florida where they can mature. Once the eggs have hatched, the young turtles will be released in darkness on Florida's Atlantic beaches into oil-free water. Translocation of nests on this scale has never been attempted before.

"This is really a worst-case scenario," says Michael Ziccardi, a University of California, Davis, veterinarian and oil-spill veteran who is leading the government's response efforts for marine mammals and sea turtles. "We hoped we wouldn't get to this point."

Sea turtles that hatch in the Northern Gulf of Mexico typically spend a few months near the coast, and many eventually enter the Loop Current to make their way into the Atlantic. This year, that path would put them right in the oil spill. Federal officials in charge of response "believe that most, if not all, of the 2010 Northern Gulf hatchling cohort would be at high risk of encountering oil during this period," according to the written translocation plan, developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. They estimate that 50,000 hatchlings could be lost to the oil.

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Broadband now a legal right in Finland

This is easy enough in Helsinki but Finland is not the most densely populated country in the world. Coverage in this wide area with few inhabitants (compared to Europe or say, the East Coast in the US) makes this very interesting.

Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen.

From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection.

Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.

In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but has stopped short of enshrining this as a right in law.

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Standard & Poor's rating agency may downgrade Moody's credit rating

This is almost too funny to watch. The ratings industry played a very important role in the recent economic crisis. The banks would slap together piles of junk and somehow (wink, wink, nod, nod) the ratings agencies would provide top ratings for these products. Often the products were the now infamous liar loan or risky mortgages. The "wink, wink, nod, nod" tended to be deals between those selling the packaged products full or junk and the ratings agencies. (It's not unlike the odd relationships between the large accounting firms who were supposed to be validating the books of their clients and but sometimes don't quite get there due to the size of the financial relationship.) A higher rating was supposed to show that the investment was stronger so the higher the rating, the more business and better terms the rated business (or government) could expect. Greece, for example, has a low rating today which makes borrowing to pay off debt that much more expensive.

The ratings industry is in dire need of reform which apparently is why S&P; is investigating the downgrade. Whether Moody's will turn around and do the same to S&P; is up for debate but they'd both probably be right for downgrading each other. Of course, it would be much more of a surprise if either downgraded their customers or owners even though they or their products probably deserve it as well.

Standard & Poor's said late Tuesday that it may downgrade the short-term rating of rival rating agency Moody's Corp. because of new legislation. S&P; has an A-1 short-term rating on Moody's.

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