I Don't Know if We Can Mutate Fast Enough

Our environmental pollution is outpacing us.

According to new research coming out of the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, floating plastic debris, similar to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has been found in the Great Lakes.

The pacific garbage patch is an area of trash in the Pacific Ocean that's estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The spot acts as a vortex of plastic particles and other pollutants that the currents have pushed together. The actual dimension varies because the garbage itself is often hard to see from satellites. The Pacific is not alone, there's also a garbage patch in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, and now the Great Lakes.

  CBS

One of my greatest fears is that the massive environmental problems this country faces — climate change being only the most serious of them — are completely beyond the capacity of our political system to solve. There are tiny ecological Hiroshimas all over the country waiting to go off — from lagoons of pig feces to leaky superannuated nuclear waste dumps. None of these problems are going to get better. They're all going to get worse, and all the money seems to be on the side of people who profit from the problems and, even if one of them pops on the national radar, there comes inevitably a lavishly funded attack on the science that's telling us what we all need to know.

  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Actress Glenda Jackson Recounts Thatcher Legacy

But We Still Haven't Hit Rock Bottom Yet

Hey, between the Manchin-Toomey gun-control compromise, and the president's new budget, we've got...an entire loaf.

Oh, and feel free to shoot me now.

"We're not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn't do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years," said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

Who thinks this way? More to the point, who in the White House ever has thought this way? And what kind of a four-toed idiot gives this quote to a reporter, even anonymously?

[...]

There is only one reason for anyone in the White House to adopt this rationale, and there is only one reason for anyone in the White House to float this rationale in public. The only plausible reason for adopting this rationale, or for floating it in public, is because this is what you really want to do in the first place and you are groping for a plausible alibi. The only plausible reason for it is that you've bought the deficit-hysteria to the point where you believe that you have to do this thing right now. Nothing else makes sense, unless the White House mess has changed where it shops for its mushrooms.

[...]

There's more in the budget proposal that's pretty damned bad. ("Overhauling" the corporate tax code "in a way that doesn't generate additional revenue"? I will now shave my eyeballs with a lemon zester.) I will yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from New Jersey on the most egregious of those. But my money's still on this budget being exactly what this president wants. Or on the mushrooms.

  Charlie Pierce

How Generous

The Obama administration on Wednesday is expected to grant members of the Senate Judiciary Committee access to its legal justification for killing suspected terrorists who are U.S. citizens.

  The Hill

Perhaps we should ask ourselves: What does a legal justification have to do with national security?

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

About Those Drones...

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

Copies of […] top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

[...]

Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”

The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”

[...]

The administration has declined to reveal other details of the program, such as the intelligence used to select targets and how much evidence is required for an individual to be placed on a CIA “kill list.” The administration also hasn’t even acknowledged the existence of so-called signature strikes, let alone discussed the legal and procedural foundations of the attacks.

  McClatchy

I know you’re shocked, but not to worry your pretty little head.

Leaders of the Senate and House intelligence committees say they maintain robust oversight over the program.

Indeed

But did it get hotter or colder?

Meanwhile in Afghanistan

US warplanes pounded the village of Shigal in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan today, destroying several houses in the course of a “support” operation that NATO officials bragged led to the deaths of two “senior Taliban leaders.”

[...]

Provincial officials checked the houses, however, and found a grim consequence of the bombing campaign: a large number of women and children within were killed and injured beneath the rubble of their homes. 11 children in all were reported killed, and one woman. Several other women were badly wounded.

  AntiWar

The deaths came on the same day that a car bomb killed five Americans, including three US soldiers, a young diplomat and a US Defence Department contractor, in the southern province of Zabul.

  RTE

Good Luck, Arkansas

Activists with the group Tar Sands Blockade published new videos on Sunday showing oil from the Arkansas pipeline rupture purportedly diverted from a residential neighborhood into a wetland area to keep it out sight and, most importantly, out of the media.

  Raw Story

Well, that would be UNHEARD of.

Activists also interviewed a local resident who claimed the oil has continued “flowing” into Lake Conway since the spill happened.

Which is exactly what they were afraid of, although they ought to have some concerns for their groundwater, if they don’t. And since we get media stories, we only know what the media distributors are worried about.

A letter sent by ExxonMobil to residents of Mayflower on March 31 claims the oil did not reach Lake Conway.

It WOULD claim that, wouldn’t it?

While it’s not clear if the oil was intentionally moved into the wetland, the company says it is cleaning pavement with power washing devices, which could cause some of the oil to be pushed off neighborhood streets and into other areas.

Could? COULD? SOME of the oil? Are we to believe that power washers atomize the oil? Make it disappear like a blast from some atomic incinerator? Where the hell do people think that oil IS going?

In two separate videos, nearby residents say they’ve been made sick by the spill, which has tremendously affected their air quality.

[...]

“I don’t have allergies,” a man who lives on Lake Conway told tar sands activists. “But now my sinuses are bothering me. My throat’s bothering me. My eyes water constantly. But they [Exxon] act like nothing’s wrong. They don’t have to live here, we do. And we’re not moving just because of them.”

Well, sir. You may HAVE to. Of course, by the time all the oil companies get through polluting all the water resources, I’m not sure where you’re going to go.

This footage has largely remained out of the media due to the lockdown that’s descended upon Mayflower nearly a week since the spill. Reporters touring the damage with Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel were allegedly turned away by Exxon workers. One journalist, InsideClimate News’s Susan White, was even threatened with arrest when she asked a question of Exxon’s “public affairs” desk inside the spill cleanup command center. The company has also secured a no-fly zone over the spill area.

One thing you can say for the oil companies – they’ve learned how to handle an oil spill.

Video of Lake Conway’s wetlands shows thousands of what Exxon called “absorbent pads” — which appear to be nothing more than paper towels — littering the blackened landscape as thick, soupy crude bubbles across the water’s surface. The company insists that air quality in the affected region is being measured by the Environmental Protection Agency, and that tests show “levels that are either non-detect or that are below any necessary action levels.” Exxon also says that the area’s drinking water remains unaffected.

Sure.

A phone number given by Exxon to reach the company’s “downstream media relations” team did not appear to be correct, and a spokesperson was not available for comment.

America's Governing Class and the Sequester

[If members of Congress and the executive branch want to give up a pittance of their salary “in solidarity” with the people who are being affected by sequestration,] that is their prerogative. But it really straddles the line between silly and offensive grandstanding. Given that this entire package of cuts was essentially a game of Russian Roulette in which the Washington political class pointed the pistol at most of the rest of the country and then decided to see what would happen if they just decided to pull the trigger, this seems like a particularly tone-deaf way of claiming awareness of everyone else’s pain.

It reminds me, sort of, of the House Republican and No Labels-supported “no budget, no pay” movement, which similarly missed the point. None of these people rely on their paychecks to make the rent or feed a family or pay down crushing debt. The Senate is full of millionaires; the House only looks middle-class in comparison. Instead of calling attention to the real effects of a pointless and intentionally destructive spending cut, comfortable people voluntarily “giving up” a pittance of their salaries only distracts.

  Salon

So, maybe that’s the aim.

And, I don't think it straddles any line.  It's full-on offensive grandstanding.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

President Barack Obama’s administration will seek $100 million in funding for a mission to tow an asteroid closer to Earth for the purpose of helping future expeditions to Mars, NBC News reported on Saturday.

[...]

NASA’s mission proposal, adapted from a scenario (PDF) designed by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, calls for a robotic probe to grab an asteroid measuring approximately 500 tons and 25 to 35 feet in width in 2019 and bringing it into orbit near the moon, which would shorten future asteroid expeditions by months, on top of providing access to the asteroid’s natural resources.

  Raw Story

Another brilliant introduction.

Never mind what happened when someone had the brilliant idea to introduce blackbirds to New York, or kudzu to Arkansas, or brown tree snakes to Guam, or bush currant to Hawaii, or the Indian mongoose to Puerto Rico, or US military bases to Saudi Arabia.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.