Uranium Minig To Begin At Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon, AZ — In defiance of legal challenges and a U.S. Government moratorium, Canadian company Denison Mines has started mining uranium on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. According to the Arizona Daily Sun the mine has been operating since December 2009.

Denison plans on extracting 335 tons of uranium ore per day out of the “Arizona 1 Mine”, which is set to operate four days per week. The hazardous ore will be hauled by truck more than 300 miles through towns and communities to the company’s White Mesa mill located near Blanding, Utah.

After being pressured by environmental groups, U.S. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar initially called for a two-year moratorium on new mining claims in a buffer zone of 1 million acres around Grand Canyon National Park, but the moratorium doesn’t include existing claims such as Denison’s. The moratorium also doesn’t address mining claims outside of the buffer zone.

The Grand Canyon is ancestral homeland to the Havasupai and Hualapai Nations. Although both Indigenous Nations have banned uranium mining on their reservations the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management may permit thousands of mining claims on surrounding lands.

Due to recent increases in the price of uranium and the push for nuclear power nearly 8,000 new mining claims now threaten Northern Arizona. Uranium mined from the Southwestern U.S. is predominately purchased by countries such as France (Areva) & Korea for nuclear energy.

In July of 2009 members of the Havasupai Nation and their allies gathered for four days on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at their sacred site Red Butte to address the renewed threat. Red Butte has long been endangered by the on-going threat of uranium mining.

Under an anachronistic 1872 mining law, created when pick axes and shovels were used, mining companies freely file claims on public lands. The law permits mining regardless of cultural impacts.

Obama Approves New Nuclear Reactors and Increased Need for Uranium  

Currently there are 104 nuclear reactors in the United States which supply 20% of the U.S.’s electricity. In January the Obama administration approved a $54 billion dollar taxpayer loan in a guarantee program for new nuclear reactor construction, three times what Bush previously promised in 2005.

Since 2007, seventeen companies have now sought government approval for 26 more reactors with plans to complete four by 2018 and up to eight by 2020. New reactors are estimated to cost more than $12 billion each.

Although nuclear energy is hailed by some as a solution to the current U.S. energy crisis and global warming, those more closely impacted by uranium mining and transportation recognize the severity of the threat.

The Colorado River, Water & Uranium's Deadly Legacy

Uranium is a known cause of cancers, organ damage, miscarriages & birth defects.

Drilling for the radioactive material has been found to contaminate underground aquifers that drain into the Colorado River, and sacred springs that have sustained Indigenous Peoples in the region. In addition, surface water can flow into drill holes and mine shafts which can also poison underground water sources.

Emerging in the Rocky Mountains in North Central Colorado and winding 1,450 miles to the Gulf of California, the Colorado River is held sacred by more than 34 Indigenous Nations. The Colorado also provides drinking water for up to 27 million people in seven states throughout the Southwest.

The river that carves the Grand Canyon has been extensively used by the agricultural industry and cities that are dependent for drinking water, so much so that it now ceases to flow to the Gulf of California, forcing members of the Cocopah Nation (The People of the River) in Northern Mexico to abandon their homelands and relocate elsewhere.

Today there are more than 2,000 abandoned uranium mines in the Southwest. U.S. government agencies have done little or nothing to clean up contaminated sites and abandoned mines. At Rare Metals near Tuba City on the Diné (Navajo) Nation a layer of soil and rock is the only covering over 2.3 million tons of hazardous waste. A rock dam surrounds the radioactive waste to control runoff water that flows into nearby Moenkopi Wash. Throughout the Diné Nation,  Diné families have been subject to decades of radioactive contamination ranging from unsafe mining conditions to living in houses built from uranium tailings.  Well water is documented by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as undrinkable in at least 22 communities such as Black Falls on the Dine’ Nation. According to the EPA, “Approximately 30 percent of the Navajo population does not have access to a public drinking water system and may be using unregulated water sources with uranium contamination.”

Flocks of sheep and other livestock still graze among radioactive tailing piles and ingest radioactive water.

According to the Navajo Nation up to 2.5 million gallons of uranium contaminated water is leaching out of the Shiprock Uranium Mill near Shiprock, New Mexico into the San Juan River every year. At the Church Rock Mine in New Mexico, which is now attempting to re-open, up to 875,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste continue to contaminate the land.

In July 1979 a dirt dam breached on the Navajo Nation at a uranium processing plant releasing more than 1,100 tons of radioactive waste and nearly 100 million gallons of contaminated fluid into the Rio Puerco (which ultimately flows into the Colorado River) near Church Rock, NM. This was the single largest nuclear accident in US history. Thousands of Diné families that live in the region, including those forced to relocate from the Joint Use Area due to coal mining, continue to suffer health impacts resulting from the spill.

In 2005 the Diné Nation government banned uranium mining and processing within its borders due to uranium’s harmful legacy of severe health impacts and poisoning of the environment.  And yet, high cancer rates, birth defects and other health impacts still bear out  the uranium industry’s dangerous legacy.

Nuclear Waste & Indigenous Sacred Lands

Today the US has nearly 60,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear waste stored in concrete dams at nuclear power plants throughout the country. The waste increases at a rate of 2,000 tons per year.  Depleted Uranium (DU) is a byproduct of uranium enrichment and reprocessing which has controversial military uses including armor piercing projectiles. DU has been found to cause long-term health effects ranging from harming organs to causing miscarriages and birth defects.

In 1987 Congress initiated a controversial project to transport and store almost all of the U.S.’s toxic waste at Yucca Mountain located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. Yucca Mountain has been held holy to the Paiute and Western Shoshone Nations since time immemorial.

In February 2009 Obama met a campaign promise to cut funding for the multibillion dollar Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository project. The controversial project was initially proposed in 1987 with radioactive waste to be shipped from all over the U.S. via rails and highways. Currently a new proposal for an experimental method of extracting additional fuel from nuclear waste called “reprocessing” renews the threat to desecrate the sacred mountain on Western Shoshone lands.

Western Shoshone lands, which have never been ceeded to the U.S. government, have long been under attack by the military and nuclear industry. Between 1951 and 1992 more than 1,000 nuclear bombs have been detonated above and below the surface at an area called the Nevada Test Site on Western Shoshone lands which make it one of the most bombed nations on earth. Communities in areas around the test site faced exposure to radioactive fallout which has caused cancers, leukemia & other illnesses. Western Shoshone spiritual practitioner Corbin Harney, who has since passed on, helped initiate a grassroots effort to shutdown the test site and abolish nuclear weapons.

Indigenous Peoples in the Marshall Islands have also faced serious impacts due to U.S. nuclear testing. In her book, Conquest: Sexual Violence & American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith reports that some Indigenous Peoples in the islands have all together stopped reproducing due to the severity of cancer and birth defects they have faced.

Continuing Resistance

In March 1988 more than 8,000 people converged for massive 10 day direct action to “reclaim” the test site, nearly 3,000 people were arrested. Groups such as the Nevada Desert Experience (NDE) and Shundahai Network continue their work to shut down the test site and resist the corporate and military nuclear industry.

Throughout the 1980’s a fierce movement of grassroots resistance and direct action against uranium mining near the Grand Canyon had taken shape, galvanized by the Havasupai, Hopi, Diné (Navajo), Hualapai tribes and a Flagstaff group, Canyon Under Siege.  Prayerful and strategic meetings were held once a year throughout the 80s. In 1989 a group known as the ‘Arizona 5′ were charged for eco-actions including cutting power-lines to the Canyon Uranium Mine. Attributable in some part to the resistance and but mainly to a sharp drop in the price of uranium, companies like Dennison were forced to shut their mines down.

Mt. Taylor, located on Forest Service managed lands in New Mexico between Albuquerque and Gallup, has also faced the threat of uranium mining. The mountain sits upon one of the richest reservers of uranium ore in the country, it is held holy by the Diné, Acoma, Laguna, Zuni & Hopi Nations. In June 2009 Indigenous Nations and environmental groups unified to protect the holy Mountain and through their efforts Mt. Taylor was given temporary protection as a Traditional Cultural Property.

For 7 years Indigenous People from throughout the world have gathered to organize against the nuclear industry at the Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum on the Acoma Nation.

At the 2006 Indigenous World Uranium Summit on the Diné Nation, community organizations such as Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) joined participants from Australia, India, Africa, Pacific Islands, and throughout North America in issuing a declaration demanding “a worldwide ban on uranium mining, processing, enrichment, fuel use, and weapons testing and deployment, and nuclear waste dumping on native lands.”

Klee Benally (Diné) is a collective member of Indigenous Action Media, on the Board of Directors of the Shundahai Network, and is a musician with the group Blackfire.

Author Mary Sojourner assisted editing this article.

View Outta Your Backpack Media’s URANIUM PSA

For further information and action:

Southwest Research and Information Center

http://www.sric.org/

Shundahai Network

http://www.shundahai.org/

Nevada Desert Experience

http://www.nevadadesertexperience.org/

The Center for Biological Diversity

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/

Grand Canyon Trust

http://grandcanyontrust.org/

Uranium Watch

http://www.uraniumwatch.org/

World Information Service on Energy: Uranium Project

http://www.wise-uranium.org/

Western Mining Action Network

http://wman-info.org/

Network Sortir du Nucléaire

http://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/

Sources

Addressing Uranium Contamination in the Navajo Nation – Map of contaminated wells

http://epa.gov/region09/superfund/navajo-nation/contaminated-water.html

Tuba City Mill Site

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/umtra/tubacity_title1.html#_ftn51

EPA summit addresses uranium cleanup

http://www.gallupindependent.com/2008/08august/081408epa.html

Conservation groups challenge uranium mining threat to Colorado River

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/sep/30/conservation-groups-challenge-uranium-mining-threa/

A peril that dwelt among the Navajos – L.A. TImes – November 19, 2006

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/nov/19/nation/na-navajo19

Uranium Mining & Milling

http://www.wise-uranium.org/indexu.html#UMMCI

Colorado River Facts

http://www.azhumanities.org/movingwaters/faq.html

Nuclear power inches back into energy spotlight

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/environment/2009-03-29-nuclear-power-energy-return_N.htm

AREVA: France’s nuke power poster child has a money melt-down

http://acdn.france.free.fr/spip/article.php3?id_article=506&lang=en

Environmental Working Group – January 2008 – Report: Grand Canyon Threatened by Approval of Uranium Mining Activities

http://www.ewg.org/reports/grandcanyon

Shiprock Mill Site

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/umtra/shiprock_title1.html

Grand Canyon Trust

www.grandcanyontrust.org

The Center for Biological Diversity

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/

Las Vegas Review: Yucca Mountain seen as possible reprocessing site

http://www.lvrj.com/news/yucca-mountain-seen-as-possible-reprocessing-site-83787692.html

Southwest Research and Information Center

http://www.sric.org/

Nuclear Free Future

http://www.nuclear-free.com/

 Global Research Articles by Klee Benally

Let The Sun Shine In......

Healthcare Reform will be a Long Hard Slog

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

For mass consumption, the GOP is usually better at its creative Reasoning of the Day, or at the very least, it usually sticks to just one hallucinatory invention at a time. Rare, indeed, is this sort of conflicting simultaneity, which is more than enough to stop even the chronically inattentive American Voter in his or her logical tracks:

Just as House Minority Leader John Boehner was blasting the weekend airwaves with the message that he and his party are doing "everything we can to make it difficult for them, if not impossible, to pass the bill," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was convulsing in sympathetic anguish: Dear Democrats, you've got to realize, in the name of all that's holy, that passing this bill will severely harm your chances in the upcoming elections.

Asks The Voter, logically enough: Then what in hell is John Boehner doing, trying to stop it?

Ay, there's the rub, Denmarkian rottenness and all that -- which appears to be turning this health-care tragedy to a comedy; turning it, that is, from a revenge play to a rather one-sided political farce.

It might be funny if it were not DEADLY serious.

Being no Prince Hamlet, one hopes, President Obama is exploiting Republicans' curious cognitive dissonance: "I generally wouldn’t take advice about what’s good for Democrats" from the GOP leadership, he confessed to an amused Pennsylvania audience this week in an uncharacteristic moment of vigorous non-bipartisanship. His core message, however, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, is that the imminent health-care vote should be about what’s right, and not about the politics.

Oh, how I wish that were true. Taken literally, of course, it is. Every Congressional vote should  be about what's right, and not who goes home on a bus. But "should" is a foreign concept in Washington whenever the politics of self-preservation are in play, which means whenever politicians are breathing.

Before leaving office Obama may, in fact, clear to some small degree Washington's atmosphere of rancidity, but he -- as well as anyone else -- will never clear the smoke-filled cloakrooms of political self-interest.

No. The only things that will clean up Washington, D.C. are publicly funded elections and for the new Congress to do something about the latest power grab for corporations by the Supremes.

Which isn't an entirely bad thing, assuming one embraces the strictest canons of representative democracy. I recall a political science professor of mine -- an old-school gentleman I always suspected as a crypto-parliamentarian; none of this retardant separation-of-powers business for him --who'd become almost palsied while railing against the American electorate's immense disdain of politicians playing ... politics. What else in the sweet name of James Madison, he would furiously puzzle, do they think politicians should do?

All of which leads me to this rather charming observation about your average American liberal, as temperamentally separated from your average American conservative: The former, it now appears, as opposed to the rabidly ideological latter, is extraordinarily realistic. And in that, there can never be sufficient praise.

This point of American liberalism's overarching realism was driven home this week in a MoveOn poll, which tallied member opinions about the immediate future. "Should MoveOn support or oppose the final health care bill if it looks like the plan recently proposed by President Obama?" Yea, verily, 83 percent said Go with it!, even though, I'm sure, the very same 83 percent most recently and most vehemently demanded a public option.


Was the inclusion of a public option the right way to go? Of course it was. But it was also politically prohibitive, notwithstanding the astonishingly misleading countermessage now coming from some progressive organs. Demagoguery, it seems, is hardly the exclusive sales territory of the right.

But by and large, liberals aren't buying it. Immersed in an idealistic pragmatic realism, the larger liberal collective understands that American progress is a principled but long, tough, piecemeal slog -- not a pep rally that produces instant and happy results.

And I, for one, am proud of them. Only a trench-warfare mentality, determined to take a yard here and a yard there -- just as FDR's groundbreaking New Dealism did -- will prevail, since the politics of always doing only "what's right" is a surefire loser.

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com
...

Let The Sun Shine In...

Public option NOW!

more about "Public option NOW!", posted with vodpod

The Supremes Have deep-sixed The Last Shreds of Our Democracy

by Chisun Lee, ProPublica

The Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won't know it, because it's easy for them to legally hide their political spending.

Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it's virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it's spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well.

"There is no good way to gauge" how much any given company spends on elections, said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the Center for Political Accountability. "There's no central collection of the information, no monitoring."

Companies invest in politics to win favorable regulations or block those "that could choke off their business model," said Robert Kelner, chairman of Covington & Burling's Washington, D.C., political law group. But they'd rather hide these political activities, he said, because they fear backlash from customers or shareholders.

For instance, a company may want to help Democratic politicians who support health care reforms that would benefit the company, but it worries about offending "Republican shareholders who may care more about their personal ideology than about their three shares of stock in the company," said Kelner, who says he represents many politically active Fortune 500 companies. "The same would be true on the other side of the political spectrum."

Businesses must reveal their identities on public reports to the Federal Election Commission if they buy advertising on their own. But one popular and perfectly legal conduit for companies wanting to influence politics under the radar is to give money to nonprofit trade groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and its national affiliates spent $144.5 million last year on advertising, lobbying and grass-roots activism -- more than either the Republican or Democratic party spent, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of public records -- while legally concealing the names of its funders. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the Chamber is building a grass-roots political operation that has signed up about 6 million non-Chamber members.

Some of the positions the Chamber has successfully advanced on behalf of its donors include a nationwide campaign to unseat state judges who were considered tough on corporate defendants and opposition to a federal bill that would have criminalized defective auto manufacturing.

Now the Jan. 21 Supreme Court ruling that increases the potential political clout of businesses is drawing fresh attention to the problem of tracking them.

That decision (PDF), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allows corporations to run television ads that don't merely speak to an issue but say outright whether a candidate should be elected, and allows them to do so any time they want to, using their general funds. The ruling also gives nonprofit groups like the Chamber these new freedoms, because they are technically structured as corporations.

Before, corporations had to rely on employee and shareholder contributions to a separate political account to finance the most explicit commercials and, in the months before an election, any issue ads that mentioned a candidate. Although the decision addressed federal election rules, its constitutional rationale also dismantles similar restrictions in 24 states.

Soon after the ruling, two Democrats -- Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York -- announced they were writing a bill to make it easier to tell which companies are backing which ads in federal elections. An outline (PDF) of that bill, which is expected to be introduced this week, proposes forcing nonprofit groups to identify those who fund their political commercials.

At present, nonprofit groups don't have to disclose the sources of their advertising money, unless the donors specified that their contributions were intended for political ads.

"Unless you're sort of dumb enough to designate your contribution to the Chamber," said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, "no one will ever know who's the source of those funds."

Politically active nonprofits exist across the ideological and policy spectrum and include unions as well as trade groups. Their funders include both corporations and individuals, some of them very wealthy. But campaign finance experts say groups that advocate specifically for business tend to have the greatest resources, simply because corporations have the most money to give.

The lack of tracking mechanisms sometimes leaves company officials themselves in the dark about their organization's political activities, said Adam Kanzer, managing director and general counsel of Domini Social Investments, which files shareholder resolutions to push corporations to adopt self-monitoring and disclosure practices.

"In a lot of our conversations with companies, they say, 'We don't know exactly how our money is getting spent. It's hard to get those answers,'" Kanzer said. One major drug manufacturer, he said, signed on for voluntary disclosure after learning that its funds had supported a state judicial campaign that many voters -- who could be customers or shareholders -- viewed as racist.

The public price of spotty disclosure is not being able to gauge the real effects of corporation-backed politics, McGehee said. She questioned one argument, often made by defenders of the Citizens United decision, that the 26 states that have long allowed unlimited corporate advertising in their elections haven't suffered more political corruption than the rest of the nation.

"How would you know? Most of those states have next to no disclosure," McGehee said. Corporations "could be buying outcomes left and right, but because of no disclosure, we don't know." A 2007 examination by the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that, while 39 states required some degree of disclosure by political advertisers, the laws in most were riddled with loopholes. Only five states required enough detail to link sponsors with specific ads, the report said.

Rep. Van Hollen said the disclosure requirements he and Schumer are drafting would uncover the corporate political money flowing through nonprofit channels.

"If corporations spend money in these campaigns, we cannot allow them to hide behind sham organizations and dummy corporations that mislead voters," he said in a written comment to ProPublica. "Voters have a right to know who is delivering and paying for the message."

The requirements would apply to unions and liberal nonprofits as well as trade groups, according to the early outline of the bill. The proposal mentions additional transparency requirements -- such as mandating corporate disclosures to shareholders and "stand by your ad" appearances by CEOs of companies that finance commercials directly -- and seeks outright bans on political advertising by government contractors, bailout recipients and companies significantly controlled by foreigners.

A strong disclosure law would be "hugely effective" in revealing who is paying for political speech, said Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman and head lawyer for John McCain's presidential campaigns, who is now general counsel at Campaign Legal Center.

But precisely for that reason, Potter said, politics may get in the way of any serious reform. He expects trade groups on the right, unions on the left and other cause groups across the board to fight hard against such legislation.

Already the political battle is taking shape.

Asked to comment on the push for more disclosure, the Chamber's chief legal officer and general counsel, Steven Law, instead attacked the political motives of the proponents. "Unions overwhelmingly support those who are pushing this legislation," he said in an e-mail. "This isn't about reform, it's about politicians trying to secure advantages for themselves before an election."

That reaction drew fire from one of the nation's most politically active unions, the Service Employees International Union, which also declined to comment on the new disclosure proposals. "The coming flood of corporate and foreign money into our elections through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a threat to democracy, plain and simple," said Anna Burger, SEIU's secretary-treasurer, in an e-mail. She called on legislators to "drag the Chamber's practices into the light of day."

The Chamber revealed more about its view of disclosure in an amicus brief (PDF) it filed in the Citizens United case on behalf of the 3 million business members it says it has. It supported the plaintiff, a nonprofit corporation called Citizens United, which wanted the Supreme Court not only to lift corporate advertising bans but also to strike down the existing disclosure requirements.

The Chamber argued that those requirements inhibited corporations from speaking out. If the public discovered that corporations were "taking controversial positions," it might punish them, the brief said. As an example, it pointed to a 2005 boycott of ExxonMobil products after the public learned the company was lobbying Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

That argument failed to persuade the high court, which by an 8-1 majority decided to leave the current disclosure laws intact.

Transparency is important, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, because it helps voters "give proper weight to different speakers and messages," and because it allows citizens to "see whether elected officials are 'in the pocket' of so-called moneyed interests."

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Let The Sun Shine In......

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The U.S. is pressing Israel to scrap a contentious east Jerusalem building project whose approval has touched off the most serious diplomatic feud with Washington in years, said Israeli officials Monday.

(This feud has been a long-time coming.)


Tensions in the city at the center of the spat were high, with police out in large numbers in Jerusalem's volatile Old City in expectation of renewed clashes and Palestinian shopkeepers shuttering their stores for several hours to protest Israel's actions in the city.

J-E-R-U-S-A-L-E-M = City of Peace. Really?

Top U.S. officials have lined up in recent days to condemn the Israeli plan to build 1,600 apartments in east Jerusalem, the sector of the city that the Palestinians claim for their future capital.

The project was announced during Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the region last week, badly embarrassing the U.S. and complicating its efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

U.S. officials have not disclosed what steps they want Israel to take to defuse the crisis, and Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev refused to comment Monday. But Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because no official decision has been made public, said Washington wants the construction project canceled.

Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the timing of the project's approval, he has not said he will cancel it.

Israel does not stand to benefit from antagonizing its most important ally, but Netanyahu has historically taken a hard line against territorial concessions to the Palestinians, and a curb on east Jerusalem construction would threaten to fracture his hawkish coalition.

The Israeli officials said the U.S. also wants Israel to make a significant confidence-building gesture toward the Palestinians, including possibly releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners or turning over additional areas of the West Bank to Palestinian control.
Washington, they added, also has demanded that Israel officially declare that talks with the Palestinians will deal with all the conflict's big issues, including final borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees who lost their homes during the war around Israel's 1948 creation.

Possibly the worst mistake made by the allied powers after WWII. Perhaps the intentions were good, but it hasn't turned out so well. Israel has never been a safe place for the Jewish people. The allies took land that did not belong to them and gave it to a people so horribly persecuted. Can that ever been such a good idea. The abused almost always become abusers. I remember the pictures of Jena.  

The unusually harsh U.S. criticism has undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to suggest that the crisis had passed. Israeli newspapers reported Monday that Israel's ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Israeli diplomats in a conference call Saturday night that their country's relations with the U.S. haven't been this tense in decades.
The Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell is expected in the region this week to try to salvage peace efforts.

East Jerusalem has been perhaps the most intractable issue dividing Israelis and Palestinians. Israel annexed the territory after capturing it in the 1967 Mideast war, and Israelis tend not to see the Jewish "neighborhoods" in east Jerusalem -- home to some 180,000 people -- as settlements or as particularly controversial. Proposed peace agreements in the past have left them in Israel's hands.

The Palestinians and the international community reject Israel's position.

For a fourth straight day, Israel deployed hundreds of police around east Jerusalem's Old City, home to important Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines, and restricted Palestinian access to the area in anticipation of possible unrest. Israel also maintained a closure that barred virtually all West Bank Palestinians from entering Israel.

A Holy land made unholy by the blood of innocents for over 60 years.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said access to the city's most sensitive holy site -- the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary -- was restricted because police "have received clear indications that Palestinians are intending to cause disturbances."

The compound is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest shrine. It is Judaism's holiest site because two biblical Jewish temples once stood there.

Not far from the compound, inside the Old City's Jewish Quarter, Jewish residents were to rededicate a historic synagogue that had been destroyed twice, most recently in 1948 by the Jordanian army, and was recently rebuilt.

Some Palestinians charge that Jewish extremists were planning to use the rededication to try to rebuild the Jewish Third Temple. Similar rumors in the past have brought out Palestinian protesters and sparked violence.

The Palestinian Authority's minister of religious affairs, Jamal Bawatneh, condemned the synagogue rededication as "an attack on the rights of Palestinians."

Is Peace possible? I cannot be the only one who doubts that it is. The Palestinians hear what our fundamentalists say on a regular basis. No wonder they sound so insane when they say things like this. They are being well-informed by our news media and newspapers from around the world


Let The Sun Shine In......

Israel is REALLY getting on my nerves

Getting in bed with our religiously insane is cynical and despicable. Eithet that or just plain stupid.

Now we have more settlements in Jerusalem. When is Israel going to cut it out?

MIDDLE EAST

A Partner For Peace?

This week, Vice President Biden arrived in the Middle East to attempt to restart peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. On Tuesday, shortly after he assured Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, "Every time progress is made, it's been made when the rest of the world knows there's no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel's security," the Israeli Interior Ministry announced plans "to build 1,600 new housing units for Jews" in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem. In response, Biden issued an unusually strong statement: "I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel." Jerusalem is an especially sensitive area; Israel insists that it will remain its "undivided" capital, but the Palestinians claim Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. A European Union investigation last year found that the Israeli government was "working deliberately to alter the city's demographic balance and sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank." Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated his position on Wednesday that he would not move forward with proposed peace talks with Israel unless settlements were halted. In an emergency meeting Wednesday, the Arab League "demanded that Israel reverse the East Jerusalem housing decision," but did not revoke its endorsement of proximity talks.

APOLOGY FROM NETANYAHU: As former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk noted on MSNBC yesterday, it's unfortunately a common occurrence for the Israeli government to announce new settlements either just before or after a visit with U.S. officials, which damages American credibility in the region. This happened numerous times under the Bush administration. It also happened the day before Biden arrived in Israel, when the Israeli government announced approval for 112 new homes in Beitar Illit, an ultra-Orthodox settlement near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. It is uncommon, however, for Israel to announce new settlements during a visit from a high official like the vice president of the United States, especially when he had come to deliver a message of support. Interior Minister Eli Yishai apologized on Wednesday "for causing domestic and international distress" with the timing of the announcement, and Netanyahu reportedly told Biden, "No one was seeking to embarrass you or undermine your visit -- on the contrary, you are a true friend to Israel." According to the New York Times, aides say Netanyahu "was blindsided by the announcement from Israel's Interior Ministry, led by the leader of right-wing Shas Party. But he didn't disavow the plan." Meir Margalit, a member of Jerusalem's City Council told Israel's Ynet News that the Interior ministry "meant to sabotage the announcement that Netanyahu issued today regarding the renewal of indirect negotiations with the Palestinians. It is also a kind of slap in the face of the American administration."

A DEEPLY INGRAINED SETTLEMENT ENTERPRISE: A New York Times editorial suggested that President Obama "miscalculated... when he insisted that Israel impose a full stop on all new settlement building," noting that "one of the basic rules of diplomacy is that American presidents never publicly insist on something they aren't sure of getting -- at least not without a backup plan." Israel committed to freeze settlements under the "road map for peace" promulgated by the Bush administration in 2002, but has consistently failed to meet that commitment. While agreeing to a partial settlement moratorium last November (which specifically exempted Jerusalem), Netanyahu's own position in favor of settlement expansion is clear. The evening before Biden's arrival, "Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem." Hagee is a conservative American preacher who opposes the two-state solution and supports unlimited Israeli settlement expansion with millions of private American dollars. Hagee has said that "[i]f America puts pressure on Israel to divide Jerusalem we are following the blueprint of the Prince of Darkness." Israeli planning officials also told Haaretz that "some 50,000 new housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the Green Line are in various stages of planning and approval," and that "Jerusalem's construction plans for the next few years, even decades, are expected to focus on East Jerusalem." In a recent article examining how deeply ingrained the settlement enterprise is in the various institutions of the state of Israel, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer writes, "The challenge for the United States is how to pursue the issue in a persistent and intelligent manner. It should do so with the confidence that, ultimately, it will end up aligned not only on the right side of history generally, but even on the right side of the history of Zionism."

HOLDING ALL PARTIES ACCOUNTABLE: The Obama administration has made clear that resolving the conflict between Israel and its neighbors is one of its highest priorities, but the last year has been a frustrating one. None of the parties -- Israelis, Palestinians, or the Arab states -- seem willing to take the necessary bold steps to move the process forward. There is also the continuing humanitarian crisis in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, a major source of resentment among Palestinians and in the broader region. In a Center for American Progress report last July, authors Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Robert Adler stated that "the window of opportunity for achieving a viable two-state solution is rapidly closing -- at a time when Israelis and Palestinians seem incapable and unwilling to achieve a sustainable peace agreement." The report called on the Obama administration "to reassure Israel that it will continue to support its security and work to maintain a close bilateral relationship while also pushing forcefully for a two-state solution which it sees as in the best interests of the region," which is precisely what Biden's trip to Israel was intended to do. Meeting with Abbas on Wednesday, Biden said, "Our administration is fully committed to the Palestinian people and to achieving a Palestinian state that is independent, viable, and contiguous. Everyone should know, everyone should know by now, that there is no viable alternative to a two-state solution, which must be an integral part of any comprehensive peace plan." In a speech earlier today in Tel Aviv, Biden promised that "the US will continue to hold both sides accountable for any statements or any actions that will inflame tension or prejudice the actions of these talks."
All hail the Court Jesters and others who tell truth to power

Let The Sun Shine In......

The Splintering Right.

Can the Right get it back together? Not this Right, not now; let's hope not!

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Bear with me. This is a bit dry, but relevant -- more relevant than many appreciate.

In the mid-1950s, Bill Buckley founded the National Review in response to a crisis: conservatism, as broadly defined, could not in fact be broadly defined, except in terms of internal warring. For too long, as Buckley and his strategic lieutenants saw it, Burkean "traditionalists" and economic conservatives had been at each other's throat, producing a fault line which manifested in electoral drag.

And this, thought Buckley & Co., simply had to stop.

To the counterintuitive rescue: former Marxist Frank Meyer, who began mapping in the National Review and other conservative publications a means to right-wing unification and ultimate electoral victory. And in discovery of the winning path, Meyer had only to go home to Mama: the dialectic.

By 1960 he was insisting that conservatism's traditionalist and libertarian camps were indeed in fundamental agreement, yet each -- and this is the relevant key -- was so self-righteously cocksure of what it alone postured as philosophically "decisive," a self-destructive "distortion" set in; which is to say, each side took its dogma to exclusive extremes, refusing necessary compromise and accommodation -- necessary, that is, if ultraconservatives were ever to gain electoral dominance.

Thus, wrote Meyer, "Conservatism, to continue to develop today, must embrace both: reason [libertarianism] operating within tradition [old-school Burkeanism] ... It can only be achieved by a hard-fought dialectic ... in which both sides recognize not only that they have a common enemy" -- that being modern liberalism, glibly conflated by Meyer with communism -- "but also that, despite all differences, they hold a common heritage."

And achieve it they did; haltingly at first, through a Goldwater implosion that seemed to spell doom for the right and a "permanent majority" for the left. Nevertheless Meyer's synthesis - or detente, if you will -- held, and before long the right was whistling Dixie well outside of it. To its once rather subdued traditionalist ranks it added raucous "movement" conservatives of a Puritanical bent; the libertarians merely grinned and indulged. After all, mined in this uneasy synthesis was electoral gold.

And now, it's all unraveling -- the primordial fault line between, loosely, conservative traditionalists and economic libertarians has reemerged. A half-century of conservative unification appears shaky at best.

As Politico reported last week, "the evangelical Christian right ... [has] begun to express concern that tea party leaders don’t care about their issues" -- and that, friends, is a colossal understatement. More than "concern," they're at each other's throat, just like the good old days of a half-century past, those conservatively disunified days of self-righteous cocksuredness which denied accommodation's admission.

The right's reemerging divisions range from the delicately stated to the deliciously ugly: "There’s a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative," said Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association; said another social conservative leader, "As far as I can tell [the libertarian tea party movement] has a politics that’s irreligious. I can’t see how some of my fellow conservatives identify with it" as well as their "incivility" and "name-calling"; and said the ubiquitous Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, "They’re free to do it, but [the libertarians] can’t say [their economic platform] represents America. If they do it they’re lying."

What's more, there now runs a kind of tributary fault line among evangelical Christians, as much a generational as philosophical rift: "I don’t think younger Christians are all that interested in the tea party movement," wrote a "younger evangelical" leader to Politico. Yet he framed his dissent in a most curious way -- one that expresses even greater discontent with his evangelical elders: His generation, he said, is "increasingly dissatisfied by a myopic Republican party that seems unwilling to tackle important social justice issues" (my emphasis). And that's an in-house argument less with the 15-minute-stardom of Glenn Beck than with Tony Perkins.

Can they regroup? Can the right internally compromise and synthesize as it did 50 years ago in its cradle of ultraconservative resurgence? Here, skepticism abounds, chiefly because so much of the right's mobilization these days takes place impersonally and electronically.

The Internet, once wistfully envisioned as a road to mass enlightenment, has instead become a bloody battleground of shrillness and factionalized dogma. Absolutism reigns, with each mobilized and warring brigade self-righteously certain of its absolute correctness. For the right, electronic democracy is fostering an endless anarchy.

And in this, there's a warning to others.

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

Let The Sun Shine In......

Blackwater, AGAIN!

By Robert McCabe
The Virginian-Pilot
© March 12, 2010

Presidential Airways Inc., an affiliate of the firm formerly known as Blackwater, has been awarded a $39 million "task order" from the Defense Department to move passengers and cargo by helicopter in Afghanistan.

Presidential Airways is based on the grounds of U.S. Training Center Inc., which has a Moyock, N.C., mailing address. Owned by Xe Services LLC, U.S. Training Center was known as Blackwater until February 2009.

According to its Web site, Presidential Airways provides airlift and other aviation services to the U.S. government as well as state and local governments and "friendly nations around the world." Among the services it provides are vertical replenishment for the Navy's Pacific Fleet, helicopter support services for the State Department in Iraq and airlift services for the Defense Department in Afghanistan, the Web site said.

The latest task order, announced this week, calls for Presidential Airways to provide helicopters, personnel, equipment, maintenance and supervision from March 5 to Nov. 30. The task order came from the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Joe Yorio, president and CEO of Xe Services, filed an application March 4 with the North Carolina secretary of state for a new limited liability company called Xe Aviation. Yorio is listed as manager for Xe Aviation, which was formed Jan. 19.

Officials at Xe Services did not return phone and e-mail messages seeking comment Wednesday and Thursday.

In January 2008, Presidential Airways Inc. was awarded a $50.8 million contract for air transportation services using heavy fixed-wing aircraft in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. The sole-source contract was expected to run through June 2011 and was also awarded by the U.S. Transportation Command.

In 2006, the National Transportation Safety Board found that unprofessional behavior by a Presidential flight crew was a key cause of a Nov. 27, 2004, plane crash in Afghanistan in which six men died.

At the time, the company was transporting personnel, supplies, spare parts and mail in the Afghanistan combat zone under a $35 million Air Force contract.

Robert McCabe, (757) 446-2327, robert.mccabe@pilotonline.com

Let The Sun Shine In......

Would Karl Rove Lie About His Own Name?

Me thinks he would, but doubt it would work. Most people in the world would recognize the fat, pink frog.

Rove Falsely Claims Bush Administration Never Said Iraqi Oil Revenue Would Help Pay For War

In his new book and in recent media appearances promoting it, former top Bush aide Karl Rove has been revising the history of the Iraq war, particularly regarding the issue of Saddam Hussien’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rove continued with his Iraq war history revision campaign. Noting that the Bush administration had mishandled the management of the war, host Tom Brokaw mentioned that “the cost of the war skyrocketed almost from the beginning. There was not a sharing of the oil revenue that a lot of people had promised.” But Rove flatly denied that the Bush administration said Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for the war:

ROVE: No, no. Tom with all due respect that was not the policy of our government that we were going to go into Iraq and take their resources in order to pay for the cost of the war. … [T]he suggestion that somehow or another the administration had as its policy, “We’re going to go in to Iraq and take their resource and pay for the war” is not accurate.

Rove’s claim is simply not true. In fact, days after the U.S. invasion, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel that Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for reconstructing the country, i.e. a cost of the war. “The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” he said.

One month before the war, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Iraq “is a rather wealthy country. … And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction costs.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Health Insurance Criminals Laughing All The Way To The Bank

Arianna Huffington

Posted: March 14, 2010 12:03 AM

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ike Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th, the public option rose from the grave this week (instead of slashing teenage victims, it would slash health care costs). With zero input from the White House, 41 Senators have agreed to support a public option via reconciliation. Ryan Grim lays out how that can easily become 50 -- and Dick Durbin has promised to "aggressively whip" a health care bill that includes a public option. But Nancy Pelosi won't include it in the reconciliation package. Why? She claims it's because the Senate doesn't "have the votes" -- which could also be said about the House passing the Senate bill (Stupak, anyone?). So the Senate blames the House, the House blames the Senate, the White House acts as if it doesn't have a say in the matter, and the insurance companies -- lacking real competition -- keep laughing all the way to the bank.

Let The Sun Shine In......