28 September 2008

The Methane Time Bomb

Melting ice-caps at the poles of the planet could end up releasing massive reservoirs of sub-oceanic methane into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect and accelerating climate change to an even greater degree....

Read more at
The methane time bomb by The Independent

Wake up and vote OBAMA for PRESIDENT!


Juniper R. from Care2.com said:

THIS is what gives me nightmares-the way she treats the environment and nature with absolute IGNORANCE and INDIFFERENCE. Mercury in your fish? Sarah adds more- "The Miami Herald reported: The Alaska governor has said that she has tried to persuade McCain to agree with her on drilling in the wildlife refuge. She also has said that she was happy that he changed his position over the summer and now supports offshore oil drilling." So McCain will let her make the decisions? GREAAAT! I'm putting the blame on her for Global Warming. "Palin said, "Let me take my governor's hat off just for a minute here and tell you, personally, Prop. 4 -- I vote no on that." And what is that? A state initiative that would have banned metal mines from discharging pollution into salmon streams. She also approved legislation that let oil and gas companies nearly triple the amount of toxic waste they can dump into Cook Inlet, an important fishery. It looks like being an avid outdoorsperson doesn't mean Palin really has the health of watersheds, natural resources or our environment at heart."

21 September 2008

Drill, Drill, Drill

Esther Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist wrote the following about Sarah Palin:

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference.

This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether
we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill."

I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain. Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008

20 September 2008

Sarah Palin Earns Prestigious Rubber Dodo Award



The 2008 Rubber Dodo Award goes to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. (For a high-resolution version of this image, click here.)

The second annual Rubber Dodo Award goes to... Sarah Palin. The Center for Biological Diversity honored her with the 2008 award for her valiant efforts to protect her state's oil industry -- sacrificing the well-being of our earth, our climate, the polar bear, and numerous other warming-threatened species in the process. Starting in 2006, Palin worked hard to block the government from protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act -- and when the bear was declared "threatened" anyway, she sued, joined shortly thereafter by her oil-industry friends. According to the Center's executive director Kierán Suckling, Palin's lawsuit will put her in the history books as perhaps the only person ever to have accused the Bush administration of excessive use of the Endangered Species Act.

The Center's Rubber Dodo Award is reserved every year for the person in public or private service whom we feel has done the most to contribute to endangered species' extinction. Last year, we gave the award to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Check out this press release and learn more from the Guardian.

06 September 2008

Elect Sarah Palin, Elect Extreme Evil

TOP TEN REASONS SARAH PALIN SHOULD NOT BE ELECTED VICE PRESIDENT

#1: Palin opposes a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body, opposing the right to an abortion even for rape victims.

#2: Palin believes that Creationism should be taught in public schools, which runs both counter to well-settled evolutionary science, and to the Constitutional separation of church and state.

#3: Palin is a global warming denier, who (as with her views on evolution) has expressed skepticism about the well-settled science.

#4: Palin opposes listing polar bears as an endangered species, because it means oil and gas companies might have to be just a little bit careful out there.

#5: Palin is rabidly dedicated to drilling in the Artic wildlife refuge, known as ANWR.

#6: Palin is in the midst of a growing ethics scandal, involving the alleged abuse of her gubernatorial power to punish a State Trooper who is her sister's ex-husband, firing a State Commissioner who refused to go along.

#7: Palin called Hillary Clinton a "whiner", even as she cynically tries to woo Clinton voters to the McCain ticket.

#8: Palin has very little experience for the Vice Presidential job, serving less than two years so far of her first term as Governor of a state with fewer residents than Fort Worth, Texas. (Previously, she was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, pop. 8,500.)

#9: Palin has no foreign policy experience at all, so little in fact that her supporters are reduced to citing Alaska's proximity to Russia.

#10: Palin is virtually untested, unvetted and unknown to Americans, a fact which throws into relief the hypocrisy of the many unfair criticisms leveled at Barack Obama during this campaign.

BONUS REASON, #11: Palin only recently said that she doesn't even know what the job entails, saying on the CNBC show Kudlow and Co. that:

"[A]s for that V.P. talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the V.P. does every day?" (July 2008)


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Wolf dying in agony. Sarah Palin causes this, supports it 100% and even PAYS for it with tax money.




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Skinned wolves. Sarah Palin initiated a program where the state of Alaska pays $150 for the left front leg of wolves.




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Shooting a scared, tired wolf from a plane. Sarah Palin approved a $400,000 state-funded propaganda campaign to promote aerial hunting.




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Sarah Palin introduced legislation to make it even easier to use aircraft to hunt wolves and bears.




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This undated photo provided by the Heath family shows Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with one of her daughters posing with the caribou she killed.




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"Pro-lifer" Sarah Palin.
From http://gov. state. ak. us/bio. php



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Gov. Sarah Palin responds to a question in her downtown Anchorage office next to a grizzly her father shot in Denali Highway country.




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Sarah Palin's family.
The bumper sticker on her dad's truck says "Vegetarian - Indian word for 'bad hunter'"



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YouTube "sarah palin rifle training" and "sarah palin: party animal mom"



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It's ok to kill this? Sarah says YES!
See: http://abcnews. go. com/Technology/wireStory?id=5514992



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Owned by big oil.




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