Sherry Chandler

Here’s one from John Cheves at Pol Watchers:

FRANKFORT — Global warming is a myth concocted by former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, Hollywood and the news media, Kentucky lawmakers were told yesterday.

The interim joint Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to dispute the idea that the Earth is warming, at least in part because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere produced by industrial activity.

Chairman Jim Gooch, D-Providence, a longtime ally of the coal industry, said he purposefully did not invite anyone who believes in global warming to testify.

“You can only hear that the sky is falling so many times,” said Gooch, whose post makes him the House Democrats’ chief environmental strategist. “We hear it every day from the news media, from the colleges, from Hollywood.”

Neither of Gooch’s invited panelists was a scientist.

So, Al Gore may be screaming like Chicken Little but Jim Gooch seems determined to bury the collective heads of our Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee in the sand.

One of the speakers, the Viscount Monckton (!), in addition to denying global warming, recommends that people with HIV and AIDS be locked up for life. Gooch really does seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Chives says:

Survey USA reported in September that 69 percent of Kentuckians believe in global warming.

I love that “believe in.” As though it were the difference between being a Baptist or a Methodist.

As one of the commenters at Pol Watchers points out, my tax dollars paid for this nonsense.

P.S. Clean coal is sponsoring tonight’s Democratic presidential debate.

Blackwater: bulging biceps fueled by ideological purity, from Floyd J. McKay in the Seattle Times (via Informed Comment):

BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America’s war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.

Military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater are the brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A major goal of Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration was to privatize as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient. He commissioned a study by Halliburton, which predictably liked the idea and wound up as America’s largest military contractor. Cheney was hired as Halliburton’s chief officer, awaiting the return of a Republican administration.

When that occurred, Cheney and Rumsfeld enthusiastically promoted privatization, and went so far as to include private contractors in the “Total Force” of the American military, standing never before given to contractors.

…

Blackwater is the private empire of billionaire Erik Prince, a major Republican fundraiser and bankroller of several fundamentalist Christian organizations. His private army employs some 2,300 active gunners and boasts a register of 21,000 ready to serve on call. He has the largest privately held arsenal in the country and the expertise and firepower to bring down a small country.

In 2006, Prince expanded internationally, forming a new subsidiary in Barbados, outside American taxes and regulation, to train foreign forces, often funded by American military aid. Elite Blackwater soldiers have conducted secretive “black jobs” for the CIA or other spy agencies.

…

Blackwater’s lawyers assert it cannot be sued because it is part of the “Total Force.”

…

In Prince, the Republicans’ radical Christian base is wed to the war-machine base, the one providing votes and manpower, the other providing campaign funds.

The resulting combination is one of rigid ideology and eagerness to solve any problem with overwhelming force.

Now let’s see — what’s the definition of a terrorist organization? Doesn’t it have something to do with being an army without a state? an army outside the law? an army espousing some fundamentalist cause?

Read all of this excellent article.