Um...Irony? I'm Not Sure

Take a look at this Sunday Pop found on the pages of the Richard Mellon Scaife-owned Tribune-Review:

The speaker of the California Assembly says he's “deeply concerned about media outlets being purchased to further a political agenda.” John Perez is referring to speculation that billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, economic conservatives and social libertarians, are considering buying the Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers. Never mind that the L.A. Times has been furthering the far-left political agenda for decades. [Bolding in original]

Never mentioned: The Tribune-Review is also owned by another billionaire who's also an economic conservative/social libertarian who's also using his ownership of some other media outlets to further a political agenda.

Huh.  You think someone would notice a pattern.

Woodie Guthrie, Happy Birthday

Number 34 on the 2002 National Recording Registry list of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" recordings, "This Land of Your Land" was intended, as the description on the Registry to be a "a grassroots response" to "God Bless America."

Both are songs we all know from grade school, right?

But there's more to the story.  From Will Kaufman, professor of American Culture, University of Central Lancashire, England:

Woody saw [God Bless America] as a strident, jingoistic, complacent, tub-thumping anthem to American greatness. And now, he had just come from the Dust Bowl. He’d just come from the barbed-wire gates of California’s Eden there. He’d seen the Hoovervilles. He’d seen the bread lines. He’d seen labor activists getting their head busted. And so, he’s thinking, what—God bless—what America, you know, is Kate Smith singing of? So he sits down and writes a song in response to Irving Berlin, and he calls it "God Blessed America for Me." And later on, he decides to come back to that song and change the title, change the verses, change the refrain, and it becomes "This Land Was Made for You and Me."

We all know the beginning lyrics.  But do you know the ending?  There are many versions from Guthrie himself but let's take a look at how Arlo Guthrie (Woodie's son, in case you're younger than 40 or so) ends it:

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

Happy Birthday, Woodie.

I wonder what you'd think about Citizens United, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party Movement.

I Think I Hear ALEC Knocking At My Door

From In These Times:

On February 25, 2011, Florida State Representative Chris Dorworth (R-Lake Mary) introduced HB 1021. The bill sought to curtail the political power of unions by prohibiting public employers from deducting any amount from an employee’s pay for use by an employee organization (i.e., union dues) or for any political activity (i.e., the portion of union dues used for lobbying or for supporting candidates for office).

And:

Given the similarities between HB 1021 and a rash of like-minded bills in states across the country, including Wisconsin, on March 30 a public records request was sent to Dorworth’s office seeking copies of all documents pertaining to the writing of HB 1021, including copies of any pieces of model legislation the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) may have provided.

And finally:

Dorworth’s office delivered 87 pages of documents, mostly bill drafts and emails, detailing the evolution of what was to become HB 1021. Buried at the bottom of the stack was an 11-page bundle of neatly typed material, labeled “Paycheck Protection,” which consisted of three pieces of model legislation, with the words “Copyright, ALEC” at the end of each.

The ALEC "Paycheck Protection" documents can be found here.I get ahead of myself.

When I wrote about ALEC in mid-June, I ended the blog post with a set of questions, the first one being:

I wonder how much ALEC legislation has oozed into Harrisburg?

Given all of the above, I have to wonder about State Senator John Eichelberger's Public Workers Paycheck Protection Act.

Eichelberger's conservative bona fides are set. He's proposed an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman and has already insulted the commonwealth's LGBT community.

So I gotta wonder how much of Eichelberger's legislation has been enhanced by the Scaife and Koch funded secret society?

Elections Have Consequences

And among the consequences of the last one is another GOP war on science.

Witness the House Energy And Commerce Committee yesterday. From the NYTimes:

Moving on a central tenet of the Republican energy and environment platform, a House committee on Tuesday approved a measure to halt the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed program to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Republican leaders promised a floor vote on the bill before the Easter recess.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the bill, known as the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, by a vote of 34 to 19. Three Democrats, Representatives John Barrow of Georgia, Jim Matheson of Utah and Mike Ross of Arkansas, voted with the unanimous Republican majority.

The bill would repeal the E.P.A.’s finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are a threat to human health and the environment and would bar the agency from imposing new rules to control them. Its Republican sponsors argue that new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from refineries, power plants and other major sources would drive up energy prices, depress the economy and hamper job creation.

And here's what the EPA said in December, 2009:

After a thorough examination of the scientific evidence and careful consideration of public comments, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten the public health and welfare of the American people. EPA also finds that GHG emissions from on-road vehicles contribute to that threat.

GHGs are the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the health and welfare of Americans.

And:

Scientific consensus shows that as a result of human activities, GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are at record high levels and data shows that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years, with the steepest increase in warming in recent decades. The evidence of human-induced climate change goes beyond observed increases in average surface temperatures; it includes melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans due to excess carbon dioxide, changing precipitation patterns, and changing patterns of ecosystems and wildlife.

And here's where the EPA begin:

The Administrator has determined that the body of scientific evidence compellingly supports this finding. The major assessments by the U.S. Global Climate Research Program (USGCRP), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Research Council (NRC) serve as the primary scientific basis supporting the Administrator’s endangerment finding

The U.S. Global Climate Research Program according to its website "research carried out under the auspices of a number of Agencies of the US Federal Government." And they are:

• Agency for International Development
• Dept. of Agriculture
• Dept. of Commerce, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Admin. (also, National Institute of Standards and Technology)
• Dept. of Defense
• Dept. of Energy
• Dept. of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health
• Dept. of State
• Dept. of Transportation
• Dept. of the Interior, US Geological Survey
• Environmental Protection Agency
• National Aeronautics & Space Administration
• National Science Foundation
• Smithsonian Institution

You can read their latest findings here. They include:

Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.

And:

Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow.

And so on.

The IPCC report can be found here. (We all know the anti-science crowd doesn't accept anything the IPCC says as credible so let's not waste any time going there. It's still true, however, that the Earth is warming and that Greenhouse Gasses are largely to blame.)

And the National Research Council's Division of Earth Science says:

A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems, concludes this panel report from the America's Climate Choices suite of studies.

None of that science had any meaning for the anti-science Republicans now running the House Energy and Commerce Committee who voted against this:

Congress accepts the scientific finding of the Environmental Protection Agency that ‘‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.’’.

They then voted (all the Republicans on the committee and three democrats) voted in favor of HR 910 - which denies the science. All that science ignore for all that Koch money.

Elections have consequences, in this instance it's a mind-numbing war on science.