For years, leading plaintiffs’ lawyers have promised a legal assault on industrial America for contributing to global warming.

So far, the trial bar has had limited success. The hurdles to such suits are pretty obvious: How do you apportion fault and link particular plaintiffs’ injuries to the pollution emitted by a particular group of defendants?

Today, though, plaintiffs’ lawyers may be a gloating a bit, after a favorable ruling Friday from the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which is regarded as one of the more conservative circuit courts in the country.  Here’s a link to the ruling.

The suit was brought by landowners in Mississippi, who claim that oil and coal companies emitted greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming that, in turn, caused a rise in sea levels, adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity…

President Barack Obama has been talking about cleaning up the mess he found after his election for some time.

Now his party is cleaning up some of his own words.

“The mop’’ has gotten the attention of people who say they are tired of Republicans taking the blame for the state of the nation. Time for everyone to pick up a mop, the president says, and clean up the mess the Republicans have made.

The Democrats, however, have cleaned up the president’s own comments—editing the “socialist mop’’ out of remarks that he made at a party fundraiser last week, in a new Website video picking up the presidential mop line and running after the Republicans.

hehhehhehheh he said socialist

Even with an economic revival, many U.S. jobs lost during the recession may be gone forever and a weak employment market could linger for years.

That could add up to a “new normal” of higher joblessness and lower standards of living for many Americans, some economists are suggesting.

persistent as a horsefly

More than a decade after Congress cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), another federal health agency has been spending millions of dollars to study such topics as whether teenagers who carry firearms run a different risk of getting shot compared with suffering other sorts of injuries.  [cost: $642,561]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also has been financing research to investigate whether having many liquor stores in a neighborhood puts people at greater risk of getting shot.

erm… duh. Why this would even need a $1 “study” is beyond me.

[Don Ralbovsky, NIH spokesman] “Gun related violence is a public health problem - it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH, ...

“These particular grants do not address gun control; rather they deal with the surrounding web of circumstances involved in many violent crimes, especially how alcohol policy may reduce the public health burden from gun-related injury and death,”

Funny how “choosing to be a dumbass-gang-banger” is not a part of this study.  Nor how there came to be so many unemployed, unmotivated youth hanging out on street corners [*cough*War on Poverty*cough*] Odd how “keeping MS-13 from swarming en mass across the border” wasn’t even mentioned.  Nor studying how “gun-free” societies like England deal with street violence—or is a cricket-bat beating easier [cheaper] to treat?

No.  These Progressives in their Infinite Wisdom™ are still trying to legislate utopia.

Ahh, yes—here’s the phrase:

“Whether the members of Congress like it or not, gun violence is a public health problem in America today.” [Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence]

Here is the Good Morning America segment on Mike’s son, Sgt. Christopher Rudzinski: Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan

Our thanks to Chris Cuomo and the GMA producers for both their thoughtful tribute and respectful consideration towards Christopher’s family.

TUA

a constant learning experience

Listen up all you redneck, bitter clinging ignorant moronic ruralist Amerikkkanz!  Here’s a new one on ya—albeit somewhat more erudite in tone.

“Today, common sense won out over ideological stubbornness as our nation’s law enforcement agency formally adopted a new and well-balanced policy on medical marijuana use...”

[Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) [on] the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) directive to agency lawyers not to prosecute individuals who use or prescribe medical marijuana in states that have legalized the drug for that purpose.]

I guess I’m just ideologically stubborn if I think we ought to follow—and enforce—the Laws of the land as they are written.  I’m ideologically stubborn if I think that a work-around by fiat is not a particularly good way to go, instead of bringing the facts before The People and giving them the opportunity to change the Law if they believe it to be a bad Law.

The merits of this particular case are not what is occupying my focus, here [although the billboard on the freeway advertising “Doctors” who will give any dang fool a “prescription” for “Medical MJ” “Seniors 10% discount!” gives me a clue].  What worries me is the penchant—unquestioned by anyone—of this administration to simply create Change without playing by the rules.

What might they decide to ignore next?  What other Law might they directive out of existence?  And what can We The People do about it, anyway?  Write your Congressman?!? Hell—they’ve been attenuated to the point where they’re ‘bout as useful as a milk bucket under a bull.  And they seem not to even realize it.  Or care.

Yanno....  When some∅ne clings to his ideologically stubborn Maoist comrades, that’s somehow not A Bad Thing…

Funny Old World....

When will these Right Wingers quit with the faux quotes????

---Larry, head Lympian of the mookatorium

Oba Mao?

Stand Up—Here Tehy Come Again

Gordon Brown has warned the UK faces a “catastrophe” of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change. ...Negotiators have 50 days to save the world from global warming, he added.

So what happens in 50 days?!?  Heat wave?  Drought? Return of the Dinos?

[Christopher Lord Monckton, the 3rd Viscount of Monckton of Brenchley] “I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’ - because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.”

Of course this “government” which is short hand for an international enforcement authority would not be actually elected by the people who would be required to live under its dictates. No doubt taxes would have to be raised in countries that would be compelled to pay environmental reparations to the Third World. The enforcement authority or “government” would also have the power to regulate energy policy in the countries that sign the treaty.

Oh.  That deadline.

Still, if any kind of treaty arrives at the United States Senate with the kind of provisions that Lord Monckton warns of, it is inconceivable that the Senate would be disposed to ratify it. President Obama may decide to try to enforce the treaty anyway, perhaps passing a statute that would require only a simple majority rather than two thirds required to ratify a treaty. That kind of maneuver would contravene the Constitution, but then what is an old document drawn up by 18th Century white men have to do with the imperative to remake the world in the 21st Century?

*Rot In Hell

A discussion of the mental stages people go through when facing climate change and dwindling natural resources will feature eco-psychologist Sarah Edwards from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday in the MIXX-96 meeting room, 119 Washington St. N.E., Olympia.

The free public event is sponsored by Transition Olympia, an Olympia-based grass-roots group working on solutions to climate change and dependence on oil.