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Nice headline

Politico — SOPA protest rattles Congress

January 18, 2012 | 0 Responses

Morning Post Jan 18

Tar! Sands!

Looks like the Keystone project is getting a big ‘hell no.’
Via The Hill:

The Obama administration will reject the Keystone XL pipeline Wednesday afternoon, according to a source closely following the issue.

The State Department is expected to make an announcement at 3 p.m. Wednesday. While the administration is expected to reject TransCanada Corp.’s permit application, it will allow the company to re-apply, according to the source.

I’ll put the State Department’s statement on Keystone up as soon as I can get it.

Here’s the Sierra Club’s information page on the tar sands and pipeline projects including the refineries that would be working with the heavy crude from the sands.

Problems with the pipeline include a route through Nebraska that could threaten the area’s fragile Ogallala Aquifer.
Charles Pierce explains:

Make no mistake. You screw with the Ogallala Aquifer and you screw with this nation’s heartbeat. Twenty percent of the irrigated farmland in the United States depends upon it. Pumping the water from it is all that has kept the Dust Bowl from coming back, year after year. Any damage to it fundamentally changes the lives of the people who depend on it, their personal economies, the overall national economy, and what we can grow to feed ourselves.

Another thing to take into consideration is the role China is playing in the Tar Sands region, including the recent purchase by a state conglomerate of a major stake. From Reuters earlier this month:

Lastly, don’t be surprised if one part of the pipeline project does get built. There’s been a push for years to expand pipeline capacity between a key hub in Cushing, Oklahoma and Texas refineries.

January 18, 2012 | 0 Responses

More on super pac men

January 17, 2012 | 0 Responses

Tolerance in Durham

One notable aspect of the Daily Beast MLK feature naming Durham the country’s most tolerant city is the photo they chose to use for the illustration.
That’s Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis. How the civil rights organizer and the former KKK leader developed “An Unlikely Friendship” is an interesting story that helps illustrate the transition of race relations in Durham in the 1970s and 80s. Local filmmaker Diane Bloom captured it in a documentary a few years back.
The sad coda to the story is in this piece for the Indy by Mosi Secret.
Here’s Ann about that time talking to NPR.

I’m glad that Durham was named a place of tolerance, but as I’ve said many times the top ten (or 20 or 50) list is one my least favorite forms of cheap journalism. It’s made even worse because people paid to be boosters of the top places fuss over them way too much.
Here’s the criteria the Daily Beast used:

To find out, we first limited the cities under consideration to those with a population greater than 250,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. From there, we considered three major categories:

• The number of reported hate crimes per 100,000 residents in 2010, according to the FBI, (weighted 25 percent).

• State-wide statistics on the scope of anti-discrimination laws, attitudes regarding same-sex marriage, according to projections by Columbia University professors, and religious tolerance, based on a Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life survey (weighted 25 percent).

• And the diversity of the urban population in terms of race, according to the Census; the number of same-sex couples per 1,000 households, based on research by Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute at UCLA; and religion, according to the most recent statistics on adherents from the Association of Religion Data Archives (weighted 50 percent).

That’s a start, but it hardly captures the full reality. Is Durham a tolerant city in terms of how health care is distributed, percent of children in poverty or supporting ailing, elderly civil rights heroes?

And there’s a glaring omission in the data. The description of each city doesn’t break out Hispanic populations, something that would have been interesting and informative in Durham’s case since the city is fairly evenly divided between black, white and brown.

Nice to be at the top of a list, but let’s be real about it.

January 16, 2012 | Comments closed

Morning Post Jan 16

A wonderful Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to you all. Practice some determination today and every day.

Here’s what it’s all about according to Coretta Scott King:

On this day we commemorate Dr. King’s great dream of a vibrant, multiracial nation united in justice, peace and reconciliation; a nation that has a place at the table for children of every race and room at the inn for every needy child. We are called on this holiday, not merely to honor, but to celebrate the values of equality, tolerance and interracial sister and brotherhood he so compellingly expressed in his great dream for America.

Some reading/watching for the day:
• Wander through the archives at the King Center. Here are a gazillion photos.
• Two of the many speeches on the tubes

Last 14 minutes of his last speech.

January 16, 2012 | Comments closed

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