Kirk Murphy

It’s back! Remember the 50 billion the world’s greatest zombie-feeding station debate club wanted to give away to those nice folks who just can’t keep their nuclear waste to themselves? Remember how the nuclear pork had mutated into a part of the stimulus bill, and how the House/Senate conferees excised the whole thing in February?

Tonight Toby Warrick and Julie Tate at the Washington Post report that earlier this evening at the New York Review of Books Mark Danner posted the Red Cross’ secret February 17, 2007 report to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo. Danner’s account, like Warren and Tate’s earlier work, reveals what the Red Cross saw in America’s gulags.

Remember Tim DeChristopher? He’s the University of Utah student who last December gave us all an early Christmas present when he wrapped up 22,000 acres of our Federal land, thus protecting it from Bushie auction to Big Carbon. Tim showed up at Bush’s “last great gift to oil and gas”, the Bureau of Land Management’s giveaway auction in Utah, where he entered the high bid on almost one-sixth of the public land at risk.

Last Tuesday Homeland Security’s very own Border Patrol announced they were canceling their plans to begin aerial spraying of the pesticide imazapyr along a stretch of the Rio Grande the following day. In other words, the agency that demands billions to seal America’s borders in large part so they can prevent Americans from voluntarily putting dangerous chemicals in their own bodies grudgingly changed their own plan to involuntary expose Americans to dangerous chemicals.

In his weekly address last Saturday President Obama announced two superb appointments to head the FDA. He also confirmed reports that his Administration will create a Food Safety Working Group: here the good news is who won’t be running the show. For weeks food safety activists and organic growers had campaigned against Obama transition team member Michael Taylor’s rumored appointment to head the FSWG.

California’s vast Delta — the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast of the Americas and the hub of the state’s sprawling water projects — shows every sign of ecological collapse. For the second year in a row, the number of Sacramento River salmon going out to sea is so small that the commercial fishing season will likely be canceled. Will California’s recent drought and chronically unsustainable water use finally stop the flow of Federally subsidized water to the wealthy deadbeats in the Westalnds Water District?

When we have the USDA and FDA, why are we still dying from the salmonella and risking brain damage from the mercury in contaminated food? How were industrial food megacorps and the Peanut Corporation of America able to get foodstuffs they knew were tainted past Federal food safety agencies?

The dirty little secret about America’s food safety agencies is that for decades leaders in both corporatist parties have been sacrificing our

Speaker Pelosi, the spoiled boys in the Senate left a big mess to clean up: they’ve bagged up more than 50 billion stimulus dollars the addicts from coal and nukes can delay withdrawal from their Treasury subsidies. Like addicts everywhere, the coal and nuke junkies will starve families and steal from strangers to keep the fixes going. Like dealers everywhere, their Senate dealers will sell out the rest of us to keep the fixes coming: they’re planning to sell the junkies over 55 billion of the Treasury’s finest. Speaker Pelosi, how can we help you stop the deal from going down?

I can’t figure out if these Bushies are doing it for the usual bribes, or because they’re homicidally jealous of sentient beings.

The good folks at Center For Progressive Reform recently released their report on the issues surrounding Cass Sunstein, Obama’s pick for OIRA – the part of OMB with the power to kill off health, food, enviro, and any other regulation intended to protect us and the living world we depend upon.