Wiese told several hundred oil and gas pipeline compliance officers that his agency, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA), has "very few tools to work with" in enforcing safety rules even after Congress in 2011 allowed it to impose higher fines on companies that cause major accidents.
"Do I think I can hurt a major international corporation with a $2 million civil penalty? No," he said.
Because generating a new pipeline rule can take as long as three years,
Wiese said PHMSA is creating a YouTube channel to persuade the industry to voluntarily improve its safety operations. "We'll be trying to socialize these concepts long before we get to regulations."
The Hallowich case shows how drilling companies can use victims’ silence to rewrite their story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that before their settlement, the Hallowichs complained that drilling caused “burning eyes, sore throats, headaches and earaches, and contaminated their water supply.” But after the family was gagged, gas exploration company Range Resources’ spokesman Matt Pitzarella insisted “they never produced evidence of any health impacts,” and that the family wanted to move because “they had an unusual amount of activity around them.” Public records will show, once again, that fracking did not cause health problems.
A conservative group claims the United States Air Force violated religious freedom by advising officials not to discriminate against subordinates based on their religion.
The Family Research Council on Tuesday released a report on religious freedom in the United States Armed Forces, which concluded the Obama administration was cracking down on Christianity.
The report stated that high-level officers within the Air Force were cooperating with “anti-Christian activists” like attorney Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. As evidence, the report compiled a list of incidence which purportedly showed religious freedoms being violated.
Tasers kill. The police know this and keep on using them. So I guess they're just letting the lawsuits pile up?
Edward Snowden broke the law by releasing classified information. This isn't under debate; it's something everyone with a security clearance knows. It's written in plain English on the documents you have to sign when you get a security clearance, and it's part of the culture. The law is there for a good reason, and secrecy has an important role in military defense.
But before the Justice Department prosecutes Snowden, there are some other investigations that ought to happen.
We need to determine whether these National Security Agency programs are themselves legal. The administration has successfully barred anyone from bringing a lawsuit challenging these laws, on the grounds of national secrecy. Now that we know those arguments are without merit, it's time for those court challenges.
It's clear that some of the NSA programs exposed by Snowden violate the Constitution and others violate existing laws. Other people have an opposite view. The courts need to decide.
“These amendments say that government contractors who lie, cheat, and steal will now get the death penalty,” Democrat Grayson wrote in an email to his supporters. “If you cheat the taxpayer, you’re toast. If you evade Federal taxes, it’s all over. If you rig bids or forge documents, goodbye to you. No more government contracts. And for government contractors, cutting off government money is a death sentence.”
(Reuters) - Pigs fed a diet of only genetically modified grain showed markedly higher stomach inflammation than pigs who dined on conventional feed, according to a new study by a team of Australian scientists and U.S. researchers.
The study adds to an intensifying public debate over the impact of genetically modified crops, which are widely used by U.S. and Latin American farmers and in many other countries around the world.
The study was published in the June issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Organic Systems by researchers from Australia who worked with two veterinarians and a farmer in Iowa to study the U.S. pigs.
Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of Stone Age underground tunnels, stretching across Europe from Scotland to Turkey, perplexing researchers as to their original purpose.
German archaeologist Dr Heinrich Kusch, in his latest book ‘Secrets of the Underground Door to an Ancient World’ has revealed that tunnels were dug under literally hundreds of Neolithic settlements all over Europe and the fact that so many tunnels have survived 12,000 years indicates that the original network must have been huge.
A lot of men, it turns out, get off on having power over women’s bodies, and are willing to bully, coerce and even trick women into pregnancy to get that feeling of power over them. It’s called “reproductive coercion,” and it’s way more common that was previously thought, as Kat Stoeffel reports for The Cut.
As the Bush administration comes to a close, one overarching question is this: how were the transgressions and abuses of the last eight years allowed to be unleashed with so little backlash and resistance? Just consider -- with no hyperbole -- what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons -- "black site" gulags -- beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they'd be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of "war crimes".
Our Government turned the NSA apparatus inward -- something that was never supposed to happen -- spying on our conversations in secret and without warrants or oversight, all in violation of the law, and then, once revealed, acted to immunize the private-sector lawbreakers. And that's to say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people we killed and the millions more we displaced with a war launched on false pretense. And on and on and on.
Prime responsibility for those actions may lie with the administration which implemented them and with the Congress that thereafter acquiesced to and even endorsed much of it, but it also lies with much of our opinion-making elite and expert class.
Exactly. Those who protested in horror and astonishment were belittled, mocked, silenced. Those who loved the United States and knew what was being undermined were shouted down and slandered with words of traitor, communist, terrorist, Nazi-sympathizer. The more the Bush administration did in shredding the Constitution, the more rabid their followers became. All the Republicans who marched in lock goose step are responsible for shielding the criminal activity that went on.
They own the Bush era and all the effects of it.
To try and excuse themselves now is pitiful and cowardly. And hilarious.
Last year, former deputy attorney general James Comey revealed that in 2004, he refused to “certify” the legality of certain aspects of the National Security Agency (NSA) spy program. Comey witnessed Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card try to force a bed-ridden John Ashcroft to approve the program. Comey, however, did not publicly give specifics as to what program he opposed.
CAP’s Peter Swire wrote on ThinkProgress at the time that Comey’s testimony implied that “other programs exist for domestic spying” outside of the NSA program. Radar’s Christopher Ketcham suggests that another spy program does exist: “Main Core,” a program that authorizes “computer searches through massive [unspecified] electronic databases” in order to discover “potential threats” in the event of a “national emergency”:
According to a senior government official…”There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” … One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
These loyal Bushies must have been promised really neat uniforms and high glossy black boots so they could shock and awe their craven neighbors. Is that why they gutted the treasury? To create a depression that would make Americans desperate to support a fascist regime? It might have worked when Georgie's grandfather Prescott Bush tried to start a coup against FDR.
Harry Reid once again used Senate procedure to tank retroactive immunity and other changes Democrats wanted to the FISA bill. George Bush gets everything he ever hoped for.
It seems rather clear what happened here. There are certain amendments that are not going to get even 50 votes -- including the Dodd/Feingold amendment to strip telecom immunity out of the bill -- and, for that reason, Republicans were more than willing to agree to a 50-vote threshold, since they know those amendments won't pass even in a simple up-or-down vote.
But then, there are other amendments which might be able to get 50 votes, but cannot get 60 votes -- such as Feinstein's amendment to transfer the telecom cases to the FISA court and her other amendment providing that FISA is the "exclusive means" for eavesdropping -- and, thus, those are the amendments for which the GOP insisted upon a 60-vote requirement.
The whole agreement seems designed to ensure that the GOP gets everything they want -- that they are able to defeat all of the pending amendments which Dick Cheney dislikes, and to do so without having to engage in a real filibuster. In what conceivable way is this an instance of "Dems not caving" or "holding tough?"
What kind of blackmail did the NSA uncover when they were listening to Congressional phone calls pre-9/11?:
Still, one thing that appears to be indisputable is that the NSA surveillance began well before 9/11 and months before President Bush claims Congress gave him the power to use military force against terrorist threats, which Bush says is why he believed he had the legal right to bypass the judicial process.
According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."
C'mon Reid and Pelosi. NOTHING could be that bad that you sell our country out to the worst... THE WORST.. administration in our country's history. Tell us what you are being blackmailed for and we will forgive you if you just stand up to this 24% supported Moron-in-Chief.
Do the right thing and stand up to this administration.
In his Saturday liar-side chat™, the Shrubbery complained that the surveillance law needs to keep up with technology. What he was probably looking for was cover for some of the illegal activities that the cheney-bots have been up to for years.
He apparently thought that Congress was going to rubber-stamp a law to help him, but what he got was a response from a veteran of political battles, John Conyers: Committee demanding details of NSA data-mining.
Gee, you mean governing actually means being accountable and explaining yourself to people? I think they haven't yet gotten the memo. Sorghum Crow of Sorghum Crow's General Store detects a pattern.
And don't do anything incriminating that can be used as blackmail while you are at Camp David!
PHILADELPHIA - The White House has confirmed that U.S. President George W. Bush will be meeting Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown at Camp David next week.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush and Brown "will focus on continuing to move forward on issues of shared interests and concerns." The meeting follows the installation of Brown as the new British Prime Minster last month.
He took over from Tony Blair who had pursued a close relationship with the US and had co-operated in every aspect of foreign policy issues. However Brown has indicated that he would not be an 'yes" man to the US and his main aim is to win back voters to the Labour fold.
With all that NSA spying, God knows what Bush and Cheney had on Blair....
Is why it was such a big deal that the White House tried to force an ill man to sign off on the warrantless wiretapping:
It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.
When will we learn that the Bush administration has been blackmailing members of Congress to keep them in line? That they spied on the Democratic party? That they listened to John Kerry's phone calls?
We, as the employers of the White House residents, have the right to know.
skippy the bush kangaroo likes "the government disclaimer that lambert puts at the bottom of all his emails":
(confidential to all us government personnel to whom this private letter is not addressed and who are reading it in the absence of a specific search warrant: you are violating the law and you are co-conspiring to subvert the constitution that you are sworn to defend.
you can either refuse to commit this crime, or you can expect to suffer criminal sanctions in the future, when constitutional government has been restored to the united states of america. i do not envy you for having to make this difficult choice, but i urge you to make it wisely.)
It's called the "equities issue." Basically, the NSA has two roles: eavesdrop on their stuff, and protect our stuff. When both sides use the same stuff -- Windows Vista, for example -- the agency has to decide whether to exploit vulnerabilities to eavesdrop on their stuff or close the same vulnerabilities to protect our stuff. In its partnership with Microsoft, it could have decided to go either way: to deliberately introduce vulnerabilities that it could exploit, or deliberately harden the OS to protect its own interests.
A few years ago I was ready to believe the NSA recognized we're all safer with more secure general-purpose computers and networks, but in the post-9/11 take-the-gloves-off eavesdrop-on-everybody environment, I simply don't trust the NSA to do the right thing.
Steve Bates catches the Washington Post article: " When Microsoft introduces its long-awaited Windows Vista operating system this month, it will have an unlikely partner to thank for making its flagship product safe and secure for millions of computer users across the world: the National Security Agency."
It doesn't matter about the content of one's personal computer, it's the access that we should question. This is a war between who controls your personal information. Once the control tilts too far into the hands of the government, they will misuse it. It is human nature and the temptation will be too great.
Gonzales still thinks warrantless wiretapping needs to be made legal.
"He continues to demand that the Congress pass the NSA wire tap law or the terrorists will win. He implied as much to the cadets at the Air Force Academy at a speech Saturday. From an AP report:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales contended Saturday that some critics of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program were defining freedom in a way that poses a "grave threat" to U.S. security."
