Opening the Gates

Arnold Schwarnegger is thinking about releasing 20,000 inmates from California prisons to save money, begging the question: Is there a problem with the justice system in California? Should those people have been put in jail in the first place? Were their sentences too harsh? Or are they getting off easy?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Energy Task Force

Or...How Dick Cheney and Karl Rove bankrupted California's PG&E and forced governor Gray Davis out of office to be replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

March 2001:

Cheney had just been informed by his longtime friend Thomas Cruikshank, the man who handpicked the vice president to succeed him at Halliburton in the mid-1990s, that federal energy regulators were close to completing an investigation into allegations that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies and AES Corporation of Arlington, Virginia had created an artificial power shortage in California in April and May of 2000 by shutting down a power plant for more than two weeks.

[...]

California's electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers in the state between 2000 and 2001. The crisis resulted in widespread rolling blackouts and forced the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. California was the first state in the nation to deregulate its power market in an effort to provide consumers with cheaper electricity and the opportunity to choose their own power provider. The results have since proved disastrous. The experiment has cost the state more than $30 billion.

[...]

[D]ocumentary evidence of widespread market manipulation that FERC [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] obtained in March 2001 [...] was sealed by FERC on direct orders by Cheney because it would have been a political nightmare for the Bush administration and would have derailed a recommendation of one of the cornerstones of the vice president's National Energy Policy: deregulation, and perhaps scuttle the policy altogether if evidence about the energy companies behavior in California was made public, according to half-a-dozen former FERC officials and former Energy Department officials.

[...]

This story is based on a two-month investigation into Cheney's energy task force; how the vice president pressured cabinet officials to conceal clear-cut evidence of market manipulation during California's energy crisis, and how that subsequently led Cheney to exert executive privilege when lawmakers called on him to turn over documents related to his meetings with energy industry officials who helped draft the National Energy Policy and also gamed California's power market. Truthout spoke with more than a dozen former officials from the Energy Department and FERC as well as current and former energy industry executives all of whom were involved in personal discussions with Cheney relating to the National Energy Policy.

  The story here at TruthOut

Out With the Old

Tony Blair is out. Gordon Brown is in.

I understand Tony's last day in office was spent, perhaps not only symbolically of his tenure, with Arnold Schwarzeneggar.

He also had this to say about the current mess he's helped generate...

"I know some may think that [our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are facing] dangers in vain; I don't and I never will. I believe they are fighting for the security of this country and the wider world against people who would destroy our way of life."

  Yahoo

He could well be right about people who would destroy our U.S. and British way of life, considering the fact that our way of life is exploitive of other people and resources all over the globe.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Butthead Two takes on Butthead One

The Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, today sent a robust message to US President George Bush to face up to the reality of global warming.

Climate change is at the top of the agenda for next week’s G8 summit in Gleneagles, but reports suggest that Mr Bush is blocking a deal on action to tackle it, with some commentators even predicting the other seven nations may agree a statement excluding the US rather than leave Scotland without an accord.

Leaked drafts of the proposed communique on climate change appear to suggest that Washington is unwilling even to sign up to a document which states that global warming is occurring or that human activity is responsible for it.

Without mentioning his president by name, Mr Schwarzenegger used an article in tomorrow’s Independent on Sunday to send a clear message of his disagreement with Mr Bush’s stance.

“The debate is over,” wrote the Governor of the US’s largest and most economically powerful state.

“We know the science. We see the threat posed by changes in our climate. And we know the time for action is now.”
  Breaking News article

Well, some of us don't believe in science. And some of us don't believe in placing environmental concerns in the way of corporate profits.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.