tagged w/ anti-animal welfare
-
Climate Progress » Blog Archive »
Some people just don’t think President Bush has done a terribly good job on climate change...
But, just because he single-handedly stopped any international action on climate and reneged on his 2000 campaign pledge to regulate CO2 and stopped California from regulating tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions and muzzled climate scientists and forced Congress to drop almost all non-oil-related provisions to cut GHGs from the 2007 energy bill
— that’s no reason to think the FHA (Future Historians of America), having previously named Bush the Worst President in American History will award him one of their rare Worst Leaders of All Time Awards, alongside such notables as Neville Chamberlain and Nero.Climate Progress » Blog Archive »
Some people just don’t think President Bush... more
-
-
Sarah Palin may have seen the light - sort of - on climate change but that did not spare her from being singled out yesterday as America's environmental enemy of the year.
The Centre for Biological Diversity awarded Palin its Rubber Dodo award for her insistence - despite evidence to the contrary - that the polar bear population was rising across the Arctic. The Arizona thinktank condemned the Alaska governor as a "global warming denier".
"Governor Palin has waged a deceptive, dangerous, and costly battle against the polar bear," Kieran Suckling, the centre's director, said. "Her position on global warming is so extreme, she makes Dick Cheney look like an Al Gore devotee."
The slap comes less than a week after Palin belatedly admitted the possibility of a human factor in climate change, in her first television interview since she was chosen as John McCain's running mate.
The conversion was followed by further revelations of Palin's tenuous relationship with scientific fact. News reports yesterday said that Palin bought a tanning bed and moved it into the governor's mansion soon after her election. A few months later, in May 2007, she issued a proclamation during skin cancer awareness month urging Alaskans to take preventive measures. "Skin cancer is caused, overwhelmingly, by overexposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun and from tanning beds," she said in a press release.
McCain had skin cancers removed in 1993 and 2000, and is religious about using sun screen and wearing a hat outdoors.
Sarah Palin may have seen the light - sort of - on climate change but that did not... more
-
-
We’re getting the word out to voters about Governor Sarah Palin’s barbaric record on killing America’s wildlife, especially her active promotion of the brutal aerial hunting of wolves and bears.
As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has proposed paying a $150 bounty for the foreleg of each dead wolf. The aerial hunting program she champions has already killed nearly 800 wolves. She’s opposed efforts to save America’s polar bears from extinction. She’s fought against efforts to save some of the world’s most endangered beluga whales.
At nearly every opportunity, Governor Palin has sided with Big Oil, mining companies, wealthy trophy hunters and other entrenched special interests in support of policies that would greatly harm the wild animals we treasure.
Warning: This television ad -- like the governor’s support for this brutal practice -- is disturbing.We’re getting the word out to voters about Governor Sarah Palin’s barbaric record... more
-
-
For TV ad Defenders Action Fund's 2008 endorsement: www.defendersactionfund.org
McCain-Palin campaign studiously avoids most environmental issues and offers energy proposals based largely on Big Oil's wish list, the Obama-Biden campaign is offering solid positions in nearly every environmental area, including forward-looking energy solutions.
Defenders Action Fund underscored its endorsement by launching a new TV ad about Palin's environmental record, focusing on her support for the aerial hunting of wolves, a cruel practice she actively champions in Alaska. The program licenses private citizens to fly airplanes and shoot wolves from the air or chase them to exhaustion before landing and shooting them point blank. The gunners then sell the pelts of the animals they kill for profit. The program also targets grizzly and black bears, which are chased by air and then shot on the ground. The ad, which will air in presidential swing states, shows a new and extreme side to the Governor, which has yet to be fully explored in the media.
"Sarah Palin not only condones the aerial hunting of wolves and bears, she actively promotes it," continued Schlickeisen. "She has even gone so far as to propose a bounty of $150 for every severed left foreleg of a wolf the hunters can produce. Her promotion of this ghastly and unscientific program - which she pursues while simultaneously suing the federal government to eliminate protections for the imperiled polar bear - offers voters a glimpse of her values and character that is quite different from the picture carefully crafted by the McCain-Palin campaign's professional speechwriters. It should also provide voters with a good idea of what a McCain-Palin administration's approach to stewardship of our nation's natural resources would be like. Americans deserve to know about this real side of Sarah Palin before they make up their minds about her.
"Put simply, if voters care at all about the environment, about protecting our air, land, water and wildlife for future generations, then they should look past the misleading rhetoric of the McCain-Palin campaign and support Obama-Biden," concluded Schlickeisen. For TV ad Defenders Action Fund's 2008 endorsement: www.defendersactionfund.org... more
-
-
The fate of the ban on whale hunting to be decided behind closed doors.
The survival of whales is perhaps the most successful conservation story of the 20th century. Since a moratorium on commercial hunting, some whale species have staged dramatic recoveries. In May it was announced that the humpback whale population has climbed from 1,500 to 20,000 individuals, resulting in it being "downlisted" from vulnerable to least concern, according to the IUCN's Red List. Others, like the blue whale, appear to have stable populations but recovery remains slow.
The moratorium on hunting, begun in 1982, was the decisive moment for whale conservation. Next week, the fate of that moratorium will be decided by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). In St. Petersburg, Florida twenty-six of the eighty nations making up the IWC will gather under a media-blackout to discuss the continuance of the commercial hunting ban on whales.
"These closed-door meetings pose a grave risk to the future of the IWC and the whales it was established to protect," said Patrick R. Ramage, Global Whale Program Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). "Whales face more threats today than at any time in history and Americans from sea to shining sea want to see them protected. The last thing we need is a secret deal to re-open whaling.”
Despite the moratorium a few nations continue commercial whaling. Both Iceland and Japan partake in annual hunts, stating that their whaling is only conducted for scientific purposes. Many conservationists, however, believe that scientific whaling is just a cover for commercial whaling. Japan remains the world’s largest consumer of whale products and meat is widely available in grocery stores, restaurants, and even children’s school lunches. Norway also actively participates in commercial whaling...
Whale populations still face a variety of threats, even without commercial hunting, such as collisions with ships, pollution, by-catch, seismic testing for oil, the use of sonar, and climate change. --
--Many of the twenty-six nations attending the meeting in St. Petersburg are suspected of being aligned with Japan and Iceland in their desire to lift the ban on whaling. In an op-ed piece, Ramage states that he believes the Bush administration is preparing to allow the ban to be lifted in order to placate Japan. The IWC chairman, William Hogarth, is a Bush administration appointee.
Ramage says that Hogarth, “should either open up the process for scrutiny, or simply cancel the meetings."
The fate of the ban on whale hunting to be decided behind closed doors.
The survival... more
-
-
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — John McCain’s presidential campaign did not talk with the Alaska House speaker and other leading Republicans before McCain tapped Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
The low-profile vetting allowed McCain to spring Palin onto the national scene uncolored by media scrutiny. But it has left the campaign open to criticism that McCain did not fully explore her qualifications.
“I haven’t heard of anybody being contacted, not that that’s bad,” said John Harris, speaker of the state House of Representatives. “I just haven’t heard of anybody.”
State Senate President Lyda Green and GOP chairman Randy Ruedrich said no one called them in advance to talk about the governor.
“I’ve not heard of one person who was talked to,” said Green, who lives in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla and has feuded with the governor.
Palin also has had a rocky relationship with Ruedrich, whom she tried to oust as party chairman.
The subject is now closed, said McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds. “Gov. Palin was fully vetted as previously described, and we are no longer commenting on the vetting process,” Bounds said. “She was selected, is qualified and is ready to serve.”
Attorney Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., who led the review, told the Associated Press that Palin underwent a “full and complete” examination.
Culvahouse said Palin’s review, like others, began with two dozen people sifting through information from public sources: speeches, financial records, tax information, litigation, investigations, ethical charges, marriages and divorces.
The team also studied online archives of the state’s largest newspapers, including the Anchorage Daily News.
Palin answered a personal data questionnaire with 70 “very intrusive” questions, Culvahouse said, and was asked to submit years of tax returns. Culvahouse conducted a lengthy interview.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — John McCain’s presidential campaign did not talk with the... more
-
-
Sarah Palin's small-town-girl-takes-on-Washington act is a brilliant success, for today anyway. But anytime political parties bring their aw-shucks, folksy Gomer Pyles out in front of the klieg lights, it's time to suspend disbelief. And that's especially true when the Republicans, party of corporate America and Big Oil, are casting the show.
Yes, Governor Palin was born and raised in a town called Wasilla, hunts caribou, married "her guy" from high school who races, in her words, "snow machines" (when did they graduate from being snow-mobiles?) and apparently knows how to load and shoot a gun. She also really is a mother, a mother of a hockey player too, and a member of the PTA.
However, one need only check out Jim Yardley's enlightening reportage from Wasilla in yesterday's New York Times to smell the rat. Sarah Palin is no average Jane, much as she looks and sounds like one. On the contrary, Sarah Palin's entry into politics and subsequent rise has all the hallmarks of having been engineered, coached and groomed by bigger outside forces with a bigger plan.
Her first election to mayor in 1996 was based on "wedge Issues" - abortion, gun control, and proof of hard-core religiosity - issues that had never been discussed before in the town of 7,000, where politicians had run on where they stood on bingo revenue and fixing muddy roads.
Listen to the shell-shocked fellow she beat in that first election, the three term incumbent Mayor of Wasilla, John C. Stein. "Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, 'Whoa. But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I'm not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: 'We will have our first Christian mayor.'"
There was a time when America's small town governments were about local civics and its churches really were mainly about spirituality. That quaint era vanished, within living memory, with the rise of the "Christian right" which literally infected mainstream American Christianity with hateful brochures about gays, guns, and abortion.
For the rest of this story & more on Palin, please visit:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2008/09/will-palins-anti-environment-stance-be.htmlSarah Palin's small-town-girl-takes-on-Washington act is a brilliant success, for... more
-
