Russ McBee

In 1990, Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act which ordered a state to set more stringent limits on air pollution if that state determined that the Clean Air Act was insufficient inside its borders. The monitoring requirements and sufficiency determination were not optional; states were required to make this determination.

In 2006, the Bush administration issued a rule that instructed the EPA to prohibit states from complying with this part of the law (keep in mind that this change was an administrative rule, and not a law passed by Congress). Of course, it's no surprise that the pollution-friendly Bush White House would take such action. We've seen that M.O. countless times from the cabal at 1600 Pennsylvania throughout the eight long, dark winters of the Bush presidency: if they don't like a law, they just ignore it.

Today, the generally conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the EPA must follow the 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act, negating the Bush gang's flouting of the law:

Environmental groups challenged the agency, saying that the new rule kept public agencies from gathering and making available the best data about industrial contributions to air pollution.

"E.P.A.’s about-face means that some permit programs do not comply" with federal law, Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote in the majority opinion. He added that thousands of permits allowing the operation of industrial facilities might not comply with the law "because their monitoring requirements are invalid."

Judge David B. Sentelle joined Judge Griffith’s opinion.

The ruling by the court, which has jurisdiction over most federal agency rules, was another judicial rebuke to the E.P.A.’s recent policies, leaving few of its major initiatives on air pollution intact.

Although the criminal gang in charge of the Executive Branch can still do a lot of damage in its remaining five months, the tapestry is beginning to unravel, one malignant thread at a time.

This week's roundup of Tennessee liberal bloggers is right here.

Go see what everyone's been talking about this week.

For today's edition of Feel Good Friday, here's Marvin Gaye singing "Sexual Healing," one of the greatest soul songs of all time:

He left us way too early.

The majority of US corporations are evading (or at least avoiding) paying their fair share of income taxes:

Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

While $2.5 trillion in corporate sales are going untaxed, individual taxpayers are left holding the bag. Out of the $2.4 trillion in federal revenue taken in 2006, less than 15 percent was paid by corporations, while 43 percent was paid by individuals (see Table 1 here).

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) put it this way:

This report makes clear that too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States.

Whether corporate tax evasion/avoidance is due to off-shoring of profits or plain old fraud, the end result is the same: individuals are left to subsidize the corporate welfare that the robber barons themselves are not willing to finance.

Sounds like the 1890's all over again.

Once again, Nancy Pelosi has demonstrated her utter lack of leadership skills by caving to the GOP; this time, it's on offshore oil drilling:

House Republican Leader John Boehner on Tuesday urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call lawmakers back into session to pass a bill expanding drilling in federal waters, now that she was willing to permit a vote on such a measure.

Reversing her position, Pelosi said she was willing to schedule a vote in the House of Representatives on legislation to expand offshore drilling, if the bill addressed other energy issues, such as extending tax credits for solar and wind energy and releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Pelosi is more than willing to substitute meaningless gimmicks for substantive policy, all based on her phobia of being called names by Republicans. She is a disgrace as Speaker of the House, and she should be replaced as soon as possible.

Please take the following poll:

I don't believe for one second that Pelosi would change her tactics even if Obama is elected President. She'll still have a GOP minority in the House to keep her quivering in her shoes, no matter who's in the White House. She really needs to go.

We're now witnessing a back-door repeal of the Endangered Species Act:

The Bush administration yesterday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades.

If the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill had any spine, they'd overturn this illegal end-run around Congressional authority.

I know, I know -- when pigs fly.

In today's Washington Post, Richard Holbrooke had this to say about Russia's invasion of Georgia:

Russia's goal is not simply, as it claims, restoring the status quo in South Ossetia. It wants regime change in Georgia.

[...]

But its greatest goal is to replace Saakashvili -- a man Vladimir Putin despises -- with a president who would be more subject to Moscow's influence.

This New York Times article details the history of the Russian/Georgian dynamic, the background to the current crisis, and Georgia's movement toward becoming a full member of NATO. That push toward NATO membership has been encouraged by the US government at every turn; President Bush said these words in Georgia in 2006:

The path of freedom you have chosen is not easy, but you will not travel it alone. Americans respect your courageous choice for liberty. And as you build a free and democratic Georgia, the American people will stand with you.

"Stand with you" apparently means the Pentagon agreeing to airlift Georgia's 2,000 troops from Iraq back home so they can become cannon fodder for the Russians, and the US president watching the carnage in Georgia with one eye, while watching women's volleyball at the Beijing Olympics with the other.

Here's something I don't say very often: a story in today's Knoxville News Sentinel is such a masterful example of beautiful storytelling, it brought a tear to my eye.

This piece by Scott Barker describes the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's Music And Wellness Program, in which musicians visit hospital wards to serenade the patients with the healing power of music. Barker tells the story of a visit to UT Medical Center's Cancer Institute by Sean Claire, a violinist with the KSO, but he doesn't just tell the story; he creates a symphony of words just as powerful as the music he describes.

It would be an injustice to Scott Barker to quote his article; just go read it, then wipe the tears from your eyes, then read it again. The KSO deserves acclaim for this program, and Scott Barker deserves an award for the way he tells the story.

For the remainder of August, I'll be substituting for R. Neal as author of the TennViews Sunday roundup.

This week's edition is here.

I've updated my PGP public key.

Click here if you want it.

Given yesterday's election results, I think this week's Feel Good Friday post should somehow reflect the relationship between Knox County voters and many of our local elected officials. Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools" describes that relationship pretty accurately:

Most of us are just links in their chain.

The Knox County primary election in February seemed to send a message that voters in this county were still angry over Black Wednesday and intended to exert their control over elected officials run amok; today's county general election proved that assumption wrong. With today's election of Sisk, Ballard, Witt, and especially Jones, the people of Knox County have demonstrated a distressingly short attention span and an apparently high tolerance for corrupt back-room deals among elected officials.

Today's message is simple: all the GOB's have to do is wait long enough, and the voters of this county will forget whatever transgressions may have angered them in the past.

A couple of bright spots in today's results don't banish the darkness; Amy Broyles won decisively against another Black Wednesday character, and two desperately needed county charter amendments passed overwhelmingly. Still, the balance of today's outcome tells the perpetrators of Black Wednesday (and their financial backers) that all they have to do is wait long enough, and the public will fall asleep once again.

Salim Hamdan was convicted today of providing material support to terrorists in a sham kangaroo court convened at Guantanamo. His "trial" included the admission of inflammatory, irrelevant evidence such as the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, neither of which he was accused of knowing about. Evidence derived through torture was also permitted, as was evidence kept secret from him and the public.

Instead of trying Hamdan under the UCMJ (which would have made him an official POW, and therefore subject to the Geneva Conventions), and instead of trying Hamdan under US civilian law (which would have opened his trial and the use of torture to public scrutiny), the Bush administration chose to fabricate its own rules, without oversight, precedent, or Constitutional basis. To shield itself from public accountability, the White House crafted rules which ignored centuries of legal precedent and tossed aside even the barest semblance of justice in favor of a system automatically tilted toward the prosecution.

Nearly equal blame resides with Congress, which caved to the horrid, unprincipled vampires in the White House to pass the Military Commissions Act, an abomination of justice if there ever was one.

Anyone who would call a proceeding such as Hamdan's "fair" should consider this: if they can do it to him, they can do it to you or me.

It really is that simple.

Via Rex Hammock, Paris Hilton responds to McCain's recent sleazy ad depicting Obama alongside her and Britney Spears:

Maybe I'm showing my age, but it seems like every presidential campaign becomes ever more surreal than the last one.

For today's edition of Feel Good Friday, I thought I'd share one of the funniest things David Sedaris has ever written. Here he is reading his classic essay, "Six To Eight Black Men" (audio only):

Source.

UPDATE: SquirrelQueen and Ginger have today's FGF roundups.

Every year, agricultural runoff from Midwestern states pumps extraordinary amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Mississippi River. These chemicals collect at the mouth of the river, in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. This causes a dead zone in the Gulf, in which low oxygen levels decimate marine life, rendering it devoid of fish and aquatic plant life:

Scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium led by Nancy Rabalais, PhD., found this year's dead zone is the second largest on record since measurements began in 1985 and is larger than the land area of Massachusetts.

Rabalais said the dead zone would have been even larger if Hurricane Dolly had not passed through the area, churning up the waters and restoring some oxygen to the zone's edges.

This year marks the second largest dead zone recorded in the Gulf (8,000 square miles), yet the EPA refuses to regulate agricultural runoff from those Midwestern breadbasket states. Apparently, agribusiness is more important than water quality:

In a report last October, the National Academy of Sciences that the EPA had shown little leadership to clean up these waters, calling the Mississippi River an "orphan." The report concluded that, "the EPA has failed to use its mandatory and discretionary authorities under the Clean Water Act to provide adequate interstate coordination and oversight of state water quality activities along the Mississippi River."

While the EPA twiddles its thumbs, our coastal waters and the main river basin of this country become ever more polluted. Such failures of policy and of leadership are no longer a surprise, given the long dark years of the Bush administration. Whichever candidate wins the election, he should clean house at EPA on day one.

Because I feel like it, here's my favorite stand-up comedian, Eddie Izzard, discussing Pavlov's somewhat less well-known experiments with cats:

The man's a genius.

David Neiwert, who has written extensively about eliminationist rhetoric from the right wing against liberals, had this to say about Sunday's tragedy in Knoxville:

In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of xenophobic brutality: functionally speaking, it gives violent -- and frequently unstable -- actors permission to act on these impulses. People like this always believe they're standing up for what "real Americans" think.

This is more complex than a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship between incitement and bloody action. Hate rhetoric (at least in this country) is agitprop for ditto-heads; more broadly, it serves as a channel for focusing social and political frustration, and the irrationality of that focus is entirely beside the point. To the murderer, the only thing that matters is that his paranoia and frustrations have an easily identifiable target with a justification handed to him by someone else. A murderer acting on hate rhetoric is still responsible for his own actions of course, but the fact that the rhetoric is given such a wide, mainstream audience lends credibility and support to the murderer's own thoughts that he would otherwise be hard-pressed to muster.

The only difference between the murderer and the celebrity who panders such filth on the radio is the willingness to pull the trigger on a crowd of innocents. The man who murdered those people on Sunday merely did what Limbaugh, Savage, Coulter, and their ilk have been advocating for years.

Incitement to violence is not protected speech in this country, and although the rhetoric of right-wing hatemongers might not technically qualify as "incitement" under a legalistic, picayune definition of the word, Sunday's assailant is nevertheless the poisonous fruit of their malignant tree.

They own him.

In a karmic sense if not in a technically legalistic one, they and their supporters are accessories to the murder of innocents.

Yesterday, a senseless act of non-random violence struck this city. A man, mad at the world and blaming liberals for his personal ills, targeted the innocent congregants of a progressive church in Knoxville, killing two and wounding seven. Like everyone else in Knoxville, I've spent the last couple of days in a state of shock over this.

Described as disliking "blacks, gays, anyone who was a different color or just different from him," the (alleged) murderer stated in interviews with the police that he "targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ... ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets." These statements echo the sentiments expressed in a four-page letter found in his vehicle after the shootings. A search of his home turned up virulently anti-liberal books by the usual suspects Hannity, O'Reilly, and Savage.

This was no random act. The (alleged) murderer targeted the congregation of the Tennessee Vally Unitarian Universalist Church precisely because of the progressive views of its members. Whether this is labeled a hate crime or terrorism, the effect is the same: a group was targeted for violence because of the socio-political views of its members. The man who did this is cut from the same cloth as Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh, and Theodore Kaczynski.

Meanwhile, followers of the aforementioned Hannity et al. predictably disavow any link whatsoever between the explicit incitements to violence perpetrated by right-wing hatemongers and yesterday's shootings. If this community is going to heal at all, step number one must be the identification and repudiation of the obvious link between hate speech and inevitable action carried out in its name.

As usual, Rikki Hall says it a lot better than I ever could.

Yesterday in Knoxville, two people died, seven were wounded, 200 more were traumatized for life, and my city was deeply injured because one man chose to see demons where influential hatemongers told him they lived.

For this week's edition of Feel Good Friday, I thought I'd share some Martha and the Vandellas.

Here's the classic "Nowhere to Run":

Those ladies were one of the greatest acts Motown ever produced.

For more of today's FGF, start here, here, and here.

UPDATE: LWC has the roundup here.