Kirk James Murphy, M.D.

Yesterday Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Patrick Leahy offered up fulsome praise for Eric Holder, President-Elect Obama's nominee for Attorney General. Yep: Senators Whitehouse and Leahy chose to support Eric Holder to lead the Department of Justice. Yep: the same DOJ where Holder, as Number Two, chose to privately support the Marc Rich pardon for a year without knowledge of the DOJ offices and officials formally charged with reviewing Presidential pardons. Yep: the same Marc Rich who chose for his pardon attorney Jack Quinn, a personal friend of Eric Holder....the DOJ # 2 who served Quinn's client by cutting out the Department he puported to serve. Yep: the same Holder the DOJ # 2 who chose to ask Quinn -- lawyer to DOJ petitioner RIch -- to find jobs for a couple of Deputy Attorney General Holder's ex-hires.

When high-powered attorney Eric Holder -- partner in the high-power DC law firm Covington & Burling -- chose to allow American Lawyer to profile for a puff piece trial balloon about making him AG, he chose to allow American Lawyer to watch him work for Chiquita.

Reprinted from June 7, 2008:

This week American Lawyer floated a trial balloon for the next Attorney General. The fluff job started began with a casual vignette that showed us how the anointed candidate is connected - and obdieient - to Power. Which sounds exactly like what was wrong with all of Bush's AG's. After seven long years of depravity in Bush's DOJ, do you really want four more years of a DOJ prostituted out to corporate clients?

This week the Bushie FDA announced they'll finally begin screening food imports from China for the toxic chemical melamine. Last year's news? Nope: last year our pets were dying from imported wheat gluten Chinese producers had deliberately adulterated with melamine. This year there's an due to epidemic of kidney failure among Chinese babies and childrendairy products Chinese producers deliberately adulterated with melamine.

Folks, this news makes me feel like goin out to burn gas .... driving around with the top down whooping and waving a black cowboy hat. Yeehaw! World on track for 6 degree warming, says report Tim Colebatch, Canberra November 13, 2008 The world is on track to increase average temperatures by six degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100 - three times the target limit set by governments at last year's Bali summit.

This weekend the WaPo reports Obama's transition team will restore Federal safeguards the Bushies tossed overboard (or never even allowed onboard) during their misrule. Should the WaPo report prove accurate, we'll have a lot to celebrate: the article plots a 180 degree course reversal for the White House. The good news?

Hallelujah! The End Is Near! We're living in the End Times. Forty years of Rethugs poisoning our families and giving away Federal lands, forty years of sacrificing our futures and communities on the altars of the Chicago Cult, forty years of the corporatist Big Lie of "deregulation"...forty years of lethal greed in the service of corporate rule are nearly over.

As I write, a few miles away witches and other pagans create altars they've imagined over the last months, witches in the choir prepare to perform the songs they've practiced, and witches collect the last few names of the Beloved Dead to be recited at this evening's Spiral Dance. Last night above the towers of the Golden Gate I sat beneath the wild sky upon the Marin Headlands with witches as we honored their Beloved Dead. We heard a lot of names: the woman reading the list alone had lost six of her family this last year.

On one level, the study Reuters reports is real news: extensive direct correlations of BPA levels and disease in humans. On another level, the fact the study's results are "news" to the EPA so frustrates me I could just scream. Endocrine disruptors are old news.

This week Matt Stoller served up the Sierra Club's dish on Senator Gordon Smith's massive veggie-packing business. Senator Smith's very own Smith Frozen Foods takes in sewage from Weston, OR....and spreads the sewage water on the veggies they grow, pack, and ship off to your supermarket's freezer. Smith Frozen Foods must love them their E Coli.