Breaking Point: Obama and the Death of the Democratic Party

By Jane Hamsher
According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Obama is proposing cuts to Social Security in exchange for GOP support for tax hikes. Lori Montgomery in the Post:

 At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation's budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.  As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal.

And Jay Carney's carefully chosen weasel-words today do not contradict this:

 "There is no news here - the President has always said that while social security is not a major driver of the deficit, we do need to strengthen the program and the President said in the State of the Union Address that he wanted to work with both parties to do so in a balanced way that preserves the promise of the program and doesn't slash benefits."

Nobody ever says they want to "cut" Social Security or Medicare. They want to "save" it.  Just ask Pete Peterson, he wants to "save" it. Likewise AARP.  They don't want reduced benefits for senior citizens, they want to "preserve" it for future generations.  If they have an enormous customer base they can market private "add-on" accounts and other retirement products to when Social Security goes bye-bye, I guess that's just a happy coincidence.


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Bill McKibben: Bring Your Obama Buttons: Momentum Builds for White House Tar Sands Action

By Bill McKibben
I know that there been some bitterness in the blogosphere in recent weeks between those who are mad at President Obama, and those who are mad at those who are mad at President Obama.

I want to tell you about an upcoming action -- it looks set to turn into the biggest civil disobedience protest in the history of the North American climate movement. It will take place at the White House from August 20-Sept. 3, and we need your help spreading the word. But I want to explain the reasoning behind it in some detail, because for me it helps illustrate how some of the debate about Obama is unproductive.

First, the issue: the Canadians are proposing to build a huge new pipeline from their tar sands in Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. It's disastrous for native lands in the far north (check out this video from the wonderful Cree activist Melina Laboucan) and it will doubtless cause horrible spills much like last week's disaster on the Yellowstone River.

But there's a bigger problem here too. Those Alberta tar sands are the biggest carbon bomb on the continent -- indeed, on the whole planet, only Saudi Arabia's oil deposits are bigger. Some of you have followed the work fo 350.org, and know that above 350 parts per million co2 in the atmosphere you can't have, in the words of NASA climatologist James Hansen, "a planet similar to the one on which civilization evolved and to which life on earth is adapted." We're already at 390 ppm, which is why last year, according to Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, we had the most extreme weather the planet has seen at least since the great volcanic eruption of 1816. But the tar sands of Alberta will make it impossibly worse: if you could burn all that oil at once, you'd add 200 parts per million co2 to the atmosphere, and send the planet's temperature skyrocketing upwards. Any serious exploitation of the tar sands, says Hansen, means it's "essentially game over" for the climate. So, high stakes. And don't think that the Canadians will automatically find some other route to send their oil out to, say, China. Native tribes are doing a great job of blocking a proposed pipe to the Pacific; Alberta's energy minister said recently that he stays up nights worrying that without Keystone his province will be 'landlocked in bitumen.' Without the pipeline, said the business pages of Canada's biggest paper, Alberta oil faces a 'choke point.'


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Where Are the White House Solar Panels Obama Promised This Spring?

Thirty two years ago today, President Jimmy Carter installed a series of solar panels on the White House roof. He stood up there on the roof that day, and issued an oracular warning: "A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, or it can be a small part of the greatest adventures undertaken by the American people."

We found out the answer in much less than a generation -- it only took six years for Ronald Reagan to rip them off the roof. But we thought we'd gotten a new chance last fall when the Obama administration promised that solar panels would go back up this spring.

Spring ended last night, and...no solar panels. Instead there was a press release from the director of the Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technology Program saying "the Energy Department remains on the path to complete the White House solar demonstration project, in keeping with our commitment, and we look forward to sharing more information -- including additional details on the timing of this project -- after the competitive procurement process is completed." Translated from the bureaucratic, I think this means "we're working on it, just not very hard."


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Obama Deregulates GMO Crops Despite Supreme Court Injunction

By Robbie Hanna Anderman

Early this spring, while the world was distracted by Egypt's uprising, President Barack Obama pushed the Secretary of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets in the United States. The USDA came through as he directed, totally deregulating these Monsanto-patented genes in early February.

In so doing, Obama and the USDA have chosen to override and ignore decisions and injunctions made by the U.S. Supreme Court that banned planting of genetically engineered alfalfa and sugar beets without consideration of the Environmental Impact Assessments, which showed high risks to organic and conventional (chemical) farmers.

So how does this affect you and me? Neither of us remembers seeing alfalfa or sugar beets on our breakfast table or even on our Seder table. Or do we?

Sugar beets provide over 50 percent of the sugar Americans use in their coffee, cereals, and desserts. For the moment, let's not focus on the fact that sugar beets can cross-pollinate with red beets and make our borscht genetically modified.

Alfalfa reaches our tables within milk, cream, butter, and meat, as it is used as a major animal feed in the dairy industry. It is also used to enrich soils in organic farming.

At this time, no genetically engineered crops are permitted for sale in the European Union (though WikiLeaks has revealed that the U.S. government is exerting strong pressure on the EU to allow them). Thus this new deregulation will potentially close off present markets for organic farmers' crops.

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Three Strikes and You're Hot: Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List

By Bill McKibben

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades -- those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.

But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent's geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province's prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.

There's a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world's richest deposits of coal. If we're going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal -- and so all that future carbon dioxide -- needs to stay in the ground.  In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.

Doing so, however, would cost someone some money.  At current prices the value of that coal may be in the trillions, and that kind of money creates immense pressure. Earlier this year, President Obama signed off on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining.  It holds an estimated 750 million tons worth of burnable coal. That's the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, we're talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat the planet.

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Outrage of the Week: Obama Gang Letting the Mortgage Giants Kill the PACE Program

By Jonathan Hiskes
Grist Magazine, Aug 5, 2010
Straight to the Source

Why isn't the Obama teamtrying harder to save the promising PACE clean-energy model?

Mortgage giants FannieMae and Freddie Mac have essentially quashed PropertyAssessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, which have been launched in localcommunities around the U.S. to make green improvements more affordable to homeowners. The Obama administration has taken modestmeasures to help out, but it hasn't put its top people on the case. If it did,there's reason to think PACE could be quickly restored.

Instead, Fannie and Freddieare undermining administration priorities like clean energy, energy efficiency,job creation, homeowner relief, and economic stimulus.

"If

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