Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill Gets It Right at the Border, Say Enviro Groups

“This bill will restore the rule of law along America ’s border.” ~ Bob Irvin, Defenders of Wildlife

The new immigration bill introduced in Congress December 15 includes important provisions that will help protect wildlife, communities, and natural resources from damage wrought by border walls between the U.S. and Mexico, according to three major environmental organizations.

The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Defenders of Wildlife jointly issued an early and emphatic endorsement statement of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009, introduced by Representative Luis Gutierrez Luis Gutierrez.

To date, at least 633 miles of border walls and barriers have been constructed along the U.S. – Mexico border, and the construction has proceeded quickly and almost entirely without proper consultation or compliance laws. Three dozen environmental, archaeological, religious freedom, historic preservation, cultural, and other laws were waived by former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff Michael Chertoff for border wall construction.

The legislation would replace the border wall’s one-size-fits-all approach to border security with a strategy based on comprehensive analyses of the effectiveness and costs of various security measures, say the supporters. To address negative impacts from existing border infrastructure, the legislation would establish comprehensive monitoring and mitigation programs.

The bill would also ensure full compliance with landmark laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act that were enacted to promote public health and protect our country’s wildlife and natural heritage.

“Rep. Gutierrez and Rep. Grijalva [who introduced Border Security and Responsibility Act of 2009 (HR 2076) in April] deserve praise for recognizing the need for a responsible border security policy that minimizes harm to our precious borderlands, wildlife, and border communities,” said Sierra Club representative Michael Degnan.

“Much of this country’s rarest and most spectacular wildlife-including jaguar, ocelot, Sonoran pronghorn, and many other species–depend upon the borderlands for survival. This bill would restore crucial protections to such wildlife and help mitigate the widespread damage that has already been done to important habitat and migration corridors,” commented Randy Serraglio, conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Laws that protect our wildlife, our water, our air, and our right to a healthful environment should never have been circumvented by the Bush Bush administration,” added Bob Irvin, Senior Vice President for Conservation Programs at Defenders of Wildlife. “This bill will restore the rule of law along America’s border.”

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Press release sources: Kristina Johnson, Sierra Club; Randy Serraglio, Center for Biological Diversity; Mary Beth Beetham, Defenders of Wildlife.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION: Spectacular photographic slideshow/presentation,”Wildlife and the Border Wall,” explains impact of wall on borderland nature and creatures:

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SUMMARY of GUTIERREZ’ IMMIGRATION BILL: found HERE

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Don’t Fence US In! The real cost of the US-Mexico wall revealed.

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Et tu Obama?

Well, I couldn’t stay away from Countdown. Nope, and lemme tell ya..today was one helluva doozy. I learned all about the newly released torture memo’s (courtesy of TPM Muckraker) and how Obama has no interest what so evah in prosecuting those who tortured. I will look at the redacted memo’s shortly, but let me say this…

President Obama is going down the same road President Ford did, only Obama refuses to go after those who tortured. At least the underlings were prosecuted in the Nixon administration. No such luck with the Obama administration. So no one will be held accountable for torturing..no one.

KO’s Special Comment follows, as does his interview with John Dean on the subject. I am horrified that Obama wants to take this route.

But I am not surprised. President Obama has signaled he would lean this way, you just had to pay attention to hear it.

There are people out there that will be able to justify this newest fresh hell brought to us by President Obama..but I am not one of them. I find Obama’s decision unconscionable and wrong on many levels. I salute him for releasing the memo’s, and allowing us to see into the black hearts of the Bush Administration.

But I damn him and curse him for wanting to walk away from doing the right thing.

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From our Dept of WTF?

I couldn’t believe it. I thought perhaps it was the codeine cough medicine that was jerking me out. When I heard what The Shrub said in his cough…final Presser today about Katrina, I thought I was going to stroke the hell out.

First, he didn’t even get the number of “human’s rescued from rooftops right after the storm hit” correct..it took days and days. There were so many fuck ups by the Fed’s, who can name them all in five minutes? The sumbitch outright lied about Katrina today in his press conference…may Gawd have mercy on his lying ass.

Bush’s legacy will always be about Iraq, torture, loss of our constitutional rights and finally the worst…Katrina. Katrina was an abject failure of the highest order…on our own soil.

Watch Rachel and Jeb Horne tick off all the failures regarding FEMA and the Bush administration as a whole, when it comes to responding to Katrina, the levee’s failing and 1800 people dying:

One friggin week left of this lying sack of sheep shit..one more week.

Going back to bed, my throat is killing me and I now have a headache from thinking about the horror that was..and sadly still is..Katrina and how The Shrub lied his ever-loving ass off about it today.

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Bob Herbert: The Mask Slips

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has a great column in yesterday’s Times titled “The Mask Slips”, he makes the point of how important it is for to not abdicate our responsibility and to vote, and vote with our heads, not our guts:

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

Herbert continues his column with a nice summary of all of the wrong headed, egregious decisions taken by a government influenced by partisan, conservative Republicans.

Well, I’ve got my absentee ballot in hand, and this afternoon I will be voting for the Democratic ticket, it’s the least I can do to help my country when we are in such deep shit.

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Leadership By Fire Drill

Like most of us, I learned about and participated in fire drills at a very early age, starting in primary grades, then continuing all through middle and high school, in the military, and in the work environment. Fire drills are important, they prepare us to react to a dangerous situation, to remove ourselves from harm’s way as safely and quickly quickly as possible. But fire drills do not prevent fires, nor do they guarantee to always protect us from sustaining casualties, nor do they extinguish fires. Fire drills are in essence an ad hoc response to an unplanned event, with temporary effect, minimizing but not always preventing casualties.

Common sense helps us to realize that in addition to fire drills, good management of fire protection involves fire prevention efforts, and effective fire suppression tools and tactics. Effective prevention includes knowledge of cause and effect coupled with appropriate proactive planning actions, effective suppression includes developing appropriate tactics to respond to individual and diverse situations, acquisition and training of effective manpower, acquisition and mastery of appropriate tools; taken together, this all adds up to effective strategic thinking by those charged with the responsibility to protect us from fires.

Over the course of the past seven plus years both the Bush administration and Congress (whether a Republican or democratic majority) have led our country through a series of fire drills, at varying degrees of success, but arguably, lacking in strategic thinking and action. Or have they? Has the strategy all along been to back the American people in to a corner through fear and intimidation garnered from natural events and human actions in order to consolidate power in to the office of the president, and perhaps more significantly consolidate the power and reach of corporate interests, who pull the strings of the Oval Office and both houses of Congress? All in service to the fulfillment of ever greater corporate greed.

The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center should have been a wake-up call, and the intelligence about Al- Qaeda available to our government prior to the 9/11 attacks should have led to appropriate, proactive, strategic planning and action, instead government and civilian resources were left scrambling, in a catch-up effort at protecting the security of our nation in the intervening years. Then based upon fear and misinformation the Bush administration hoodwinked the country in to an invasion and start of a five year war in Iraq in which our military assets have been exhausted, been disabled from protecting us in other parts of the world, lead to needless casualties of Americans and Iraqis, and put future generations of American tax payers on the hook to the foreign nations that have loaned the money to the United States to conduct the folly that is the Iraq war. All the while enriching war profiteering corporations (Haliburton, Blackwater, KBR, et al).

In the midst of all of the damage done to our economy, to human life, to our reputation and influence in the world because of the Iraq war, our government has taken us through more fire drills:

The natural disaster that was hurricane Katrina and the bungled fire drill that followed, including the complete mismanagement of the situation by the local, state and federal government entities and in particular FEMA.

The fire drill that has followed 9/11 and the pursuit of the “war on terrorism” has resulted in the suspension of our constitutional protections, when prisoners of the United States have been denied the right of habeus corpus, and where, playing upon fear and claiming urgency the FISA rules were overridden and the government allowed to listen and read virtually all of our telecommunications at will. The Constitution has been discarded in this fire drill.

Now capping an era of uncontrolled corporate greed, an era in which many demanded less government oversight in to various facets of life in the United States (in the financial sector, in protection of the environment, in mine safety, in health care, etc.), an era in which government intervention in the form of sound regulation has been ridiculed and avoided, an era in which the government, corporations and individual American citizens pursuing short sighted, greedy financial gains, have resulted in the latest fire drill, with a claimed immediate need to inject as much as or more than $700 billion of our hard earned cash in to the financial system. In essence saying to those who put the country in to this situation, “OK, you screwed up, but we will bail your asses out, and let you go back to playing your games all over again”. The bailout bill as it seems to be presently constituted does little, if anything to address the root cause of the current financial disaster facing our country, it just, at best, restarts the economic cycle. It does not mandate any true change in behavior in the financial markets or in the conduct of business in the United States, it is simply just another fire drill, going through the motions of evacuating the financial industry principals, who through their playing with matches have started this conflagration, and evacuating them so they can play another day.

Is this really how we, as intelligent American people, as fathers and mothers responsible for providing a safe, nurturing environment compatible with a thriving life for our children want our society to operate, as one fire drill after another. With never an effort to embrace long term, strategic thinking, planning and actions. Never giving sufficient time, thought and effort towards building a better infrastructure, whether financial, medical, energy, transportation or telecommunications, to live safely and thrive in this county, but just constantly responding in a reactive, fire drill mode to the next crisis?

It is time that we, as American citizens, active in our role as owners of this society demand an end to governance by fire drill, time that we impose our will upon those who serve us in all governmental offices, whether elected or appointed, time that we say to the greedy, profit driven corporations and their lobbying agents that we have had enough of the fire drills, and that we demand more and smarter fire protection, that we demand fire suppression that serves not greedy corporation interests, but the greater good of all of the people.

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Ray McGovern to Colin Powell: Come clean dude

ConsortiumNews has an article up by the wonderful Ray McGovern. Ray is the man that spoke truth to power when BushCo was lying their way into the Iraq War. Ray spent an entire career working for the CIA as an analyst. He is also co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Ray has a few choice words for Colin Powell on how to restore his reputation. From the article:

Dear Colin,

You have said you regret the “blot” on your record caused by your parroting spurious intelligence at the U.N. to justify war on Iraq. On the chance you may not have noticed, I write to point out that you now have a unique opportunity to do some rehab on your reputation.

Ray then goes on to point out the obvious to Powell:

Your U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003 left me speechless, so to speak – largely because of the measure of respect I had had for you before then.

Outrage is too tame a word for what quickly became my reaction and that of my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), as we watched you perform before the Security Council less than six weeks before the unnecessary, illegal attack on Iraq.

The purpose – as well as the speciousness – of your address were all too transparent and, in a same-day commentary, we VIPS warned President George W. Bush that, if he attacked Iraq, “the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

Catastrophic is an understatement. What happened is beyond catastrosphic to me. McGovern then goes on to list each lie perpetrated by either Powell or the smarmy idiots in the Bush Administration. He doesn’t mince words and he backs up what he says. Its worth a read, so check out the entire article. Here is what McGovern suggests Colin Powell do:

Let me suggest that you offer yourself as a witness to help clear the air on these very important issues. This would seem the responsible, patriotic thing to do in the circumstances and could also have the salutary effect of beginning the atonement process for that day of infamy at the Security Council.

If we hear no peep out of you in the coming weeks, we shall not be able to escape concluding one of two things:

(1) That, as was the case with the White House Situation Room sessions on torture, you were a willing participant in suppressing/falsifying key intelligence on Iraq; or

(2) That you lack the courage to expose the scoundrels who betrayed not only you, but also that segment of our country and our world that still puts a premium on truth telling and the law.

Think about it.

With all due respect,

Ray McGovern

Its simple and straightforward isn’t it? McGovern suggests Powell appear before Conyer’s committee and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Any bets on whether Powell will do it? My guess is no..how about yours?

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The FISA Fight: It Aint Over ’til It’s Over

(The gist of this was originally posted  with the following title and subtitle on BFD Blog on August 8, 2007, and the fight is still ongoing.)

Bush Continues Abridging Our Constitutional Protections While The American Public Blissfully Applies Sunscreen

Enabled By A Weak Congress Afraid Of Their Political Shadows

Writing in The Huffington Post yesterday, Geoffrey R. Stone laid out the history of the recent domestic spying issues, beginning with the Supreme Court decision in 1972 protecting the 4th amendment of the constitution:

In 1972, in the Keith case, the Supreme Court unanimously held that even in national security investigations the president cannot constitutionally conduct electronic surveillance of American citizens on American soil without a judicially issued search warrant based on a finding of probable cause.

Then in 1978 congress enacted FISA:

In 1978, Congress enacted FISA, which established special rules dealing with foreign intelligence surveillance. FISA set up a special “secret” court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to handle these matters, but retained the probable cause and warrant requirements. FISA criminalizes any electronic surveillance not authorized by statute and made clear that it set forth the exclusive means by which foreign intelligence surveillance may lawfully be conducted.,/span>

In 2002 the Bushliburton administration began actively and covertly, violating the constitutional law and the 1978 FISA act and started monitoring communications in to and out of the United States, without any proper, court issued warrant, either through open court, or through the FISA court. The latest trouble started when all of this came to light, and congress and the people, rightfully questioned Bushliburton’s authority to conduct surveillance against citizens in the United States.

As reported by Stone yesterday:

Recently, the FISA court apparently ruled that it could not lawfully approve at least some of the president’s requests to engage in electronic surveillance of international communications because such surveillance was not authorized by FISA. This led to demands by the Bush administration that Congress amend FISA immediately to enable it to carry out this surveillance.

And that has led to our spineless congress (both Democrats and Republicans) to cave to the gamesmanship of Bushliburton and their (congress’s) perception of political pressure (coming most likely not from their individual constituents, but rather from K Street) and approving a bill to in essence retroactively acquiesce to wire tapping and surveillance of Americans in America at the will of the president and his operatives.

That is a very scary thought. As yesterday’s New York Times editorial put it:

Mr. Bush’s incessant fear-mongering — and the Democrats’ refusal to challenge him — has had one notable success. The only issue on which Americans say that they trust Republicans more than Democrats is terrorism. At least those Americans are afraid of terrorists. The Democrats who voted for this bill, and others like it over the last few years, show only fear of Republicans.

The Democratic majority has made strides on other issues like children’s health insurance against White House opposition. As important as these measures are, they do not excuse the Democrats from remedying the damage Mr. Bush has done to civil liberties and the Bill of Rights. That is their most important duty.

And as Stone said it:

That Republicans in Congress supported this legislation is unfortunate. That some Democrats supported it, and thus made its passage possible, is nothing short of disgraceful. Just as they were stampeded by trumped up hysteria into authorizing the invasion of Iraq, once again they have been stampeded into granting the president a power he should never have been granted.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

We at BFD can’t agree more. Wake up America, while we are all at the country club sucking down cold beverages, our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are slowly, steadily and insidiously being stolen from us.

(Fast forward to July 2008.)

Before adjourning for the Fourth of July, the House passed H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and when they return to work tomorrow, the Senate will take up the bill for consideration.  The quote compromise unquote bill compromises nothing but our constitutional rights by allowing continued unfettered domestic surveillance and granting immunity to the telecommunications companies.

There is still time to get Congress, in the Senate, to display some backbone, display respect for the Constitution, and reflect the will of the people, but rejecting this bill.  There is no good reason to attempt to resolve this issue now, except to cave to the criminal Bush administration during this “lame duck” period of their administration, Congress should cut the legs off this duck and wait to address the issue of FISA until after a new Congress and administration are sworn in next January.

What Can You Do To Influence The Senate

Go to this page at the League of Women’s Voters website, key in your ZIP code and generate emails to your Senators.

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