Shale Wars Update

The natural radioactivity of the Marcellus Shale has caused concern since the mid-1980s, when high levels of radon gas were found in the basements of homes in Marcellus, a town in upstate New York, where the shale reaches the surface. The question has long been, if the Marcellus can cause radioactive gas to seep into people’s basements, how much radioactivity might be infused into the water left over from drilling? Add to that the question of how much human exposure can be expected from the radiation detected at some Marcellus drilling sites.

Is New York’s Marcellus Shale Too Hot to Handle?
by Abrahm Lustgarten,
ProPublica – November 9, 2009

drill

As New York gears up for a massive expansion of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, state officials have made a potentially troubling discovery about the wastewater created by the process: It’s radioactive. And they have yet to say how they’ll deal with it.

The information comes from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.

The findings, if backed up with more tests, have several implications: The energy industry would likely face stiffer regulations and expenses, and have more trouble finding treatment plants to accept its waste — if any would at all. Companies would need to license their waste handlers and test their workers for radioactive exposure, and possibly ship waste across the country. And the state would have to sort out how its laws for radioactive waste might apply to drilling and how the waste could impact water supplies and the environment.

What is less clear is how the wastewater may affect the health of New Yorkers, since the danger depends on how much radiation people are exposed to and how they are exposed to it. Radium is known to cause bone, liver and breast cancers, and the EPA publishes exposure guidelines for it, but there is still disagreement over exactly how dangerous low-level doses can be to workers who handle it, or to the public.

The DEC has yet to address any of these questions. But New York’s Health Department raised concerns about the amount of radioactive materials in the wastewater in a confidential letter to the DEC’s oil and gas regulators in July.

“Handling and disposal of this wastewater could be a public health concern,” DOH officials said in the letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. “The issues raised are not trivial, but are also not insurmountable.”

The letter warned that the state may have difficulty disposing of the drilling waste, that thorough testing will be needed at water treatment plants, and that workers may need to be monitored for radiation as much as they might be at nuclear facilities.

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What the hell is going on out there?

Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans: by Patrick Cockburn

The US is poised to send tens of thousands more soldiers to the country. The nature of the conflict is changing. What should be a war in which the Afghan government fights the Taliban has become one which is being fought primarily by the American and British armies. To more and more Afghans this looks like imperial occupation.

Read More to find out why the U.S. should Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

War spending in 2010 will exceed $190 billion if indeed the Pentagon seeks-and Congress approves–$50 billion in “emergency” funding. That’s more than the $179 billion spent under President Bush in 2008, the previous high water mark for war spending. War spending in 2010 will also far exceed spending in 2009 (which is about $145 billion).

War Funding, 2010: by Jeff Leys

This past Wednesday, Admiral Mullen (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) bush-foolannounced that the Pentagon will seek additional war funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2010. While he did not give a firm dollar amount, the New York Times reported that defense budget analysts are kicking around the number of $50 billion. The Times also reported that Jack Murtha, Chair of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, indicated on October 30 that he expects the supplemental spending bill for 2010 to be in the range of $40 billion. The final dollar amount won’t be known until the White House submits its “emergency” supplemental spending request to Congress, most likely around February 2.

In the immortal words of Coach Vince Lombardi: “What the hell is going on out there?”

We should be so lucky if it were a simple matter of the Green Bay Packers screwing up the power sweep.

Instead, it’s a matter of the Obama Administration now leading us down the path of the most expensive year in war funding since President Bush began the so-called “Global War on Terror” (now morphed into the “Overseas Contingency Operations” under President Obama).

You read that correctly. War spending in 2010 will exceed $190 billion if indeed the Pentagon seeks-and Congress approves–$50 billion in “emergency” funding. That’s more than the $179 billion spent under President Bush in 2008, the previous high water mark for war spending. War spending in 2010 will also far exceed spending in 2009 (which is about $145 billion).

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Binge on this!

In a recent story, Some sobering numbers on college drinking, Times-Union Staff bingeWriter, Scott Waldman reports that:

Nationally, seven out of 10 college students, or 1.4 million, under age 21 consumed alcohol in the past month, according to Karen Carpenter-Palumbo, commissioner of the state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. A million of them met the criteria for binge drinking, generally defined as consuming four or five drinks in a two-hour period.

That would mean 28,000 Capital District college students under age 21 drank in the past month, and 20,000 of them have been binge drinkers, Carpenter-Palumbo said.

These folks bandy about the term “binge drinking” as if it were “written in stone” and that is not the case.

A recent Swedish study, for example, defines a binge as the consumption of half a bottle of spirits or two bottles of wine on the same occasion. Similarly, a study in Italy found that consuming an average of eight drinks a day was considered normal drinking — clearly not bingeing. In the United kingdom, bingeing is commonly defined as consuming 11 or more drinks on an occasion.

But in the United States, some researchers have defined bingeing as consuming five or more drinks on an occasion (an “occasion” can refer to an entire day). And now some have even expanded the definition to include consuming four or more drinks on an occasion by a woman — Despite that fact that many so-called binge drinkers remain legally sober.

Ms. Carpenter-Palumbo has strongly opposed a proposal to drop the 21-year old drinking age, so it’s in her interest to cling to an unrealistic definition of binge drinking.

However, Scott Waldman is, allegedly, a professional journalist and, given that role, he has a responsibility to present his readers with an objective report instead of the state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Service’s talking points. A fact underscored by his inclusion of the state’s toll-free snitch line, so people can “rat out” adults under age of 21 who quaff a few beers.

Walter F. Wouk for Rabble Rouser

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Get more facts — and no fiction — about binge drinking from Professor David J. Hanson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Sociology of the State University of New York at Potsdam.

ON THE NET

A poorly edited version of this post was published in The Times Union (Albany, NY)

Local Yokel Update

sears

Tea Party Prevaricator – by John Pagoda

Once again the delusional thinking of Tom Sears finds its way to the printed media when he recently claimed that things are looking up for “the conservative side of the Republican Party” because the right is winning the war of ideas in an article that is absent of any ideas and one in which he claims to possess “a wealth of facts” yet even gets the self serving facts wrong.

Seems like Mr. Sears prefers fabrication to fact because the official count in the recent tea bag demonstration in D.C. was actually 70 to 80,000 people not nearly the 2 million he claims.

Mr. Sears claims that conservative radio talk show hosts are also dominating and growing stronger but he conveniently neglects to mention the fact that the top 257 radio stations have only 5 owners and 91 percent of the programming is conservative that preaches a failed ideology which divides rather than unites America.

When Mr. Sears writes “It’s like watching a Keystone Kops episode, except the bumbling ineptness and incompetence are going to seriously harm this country”. Yet this reader wonders why Mr. Sears expressed no concern about the “the bumbling ineptness and incompetence” of George Bush, who proudly declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq where to date more than 4,350 US Soldiers have been killed in Iraq and over 31,500 seriously wounded.

Mr. Sear’s pretends to be Conservative Republican when in fact he is a reactionary obstructionist who sullies the Party of Lincoln by claiming truth is on his side while exhibiting a total disregard for “a wealth of facts.” that proves otherwise.

At the end of the day however one can’t disagree with Mr. Sears conclusion that “We can’t let these ideologues get away with lying any longer”. It’s time for Mr. Sears to look at the man in the mirror.

RELATED NEWS:

Tea Party Activists Embrace Russian Crackpot and His Doomsday Scenario

Crime Scene Update

Every death of a police officer “in the line of duty” is solemnly memorialized and carefully tabulated. However, there is no official record kept of civilians who are unjustly killed or otherwise brutalized by police.

Why The Innocent Flee From The Police – by William Norman Grigg

crimescene“Why did he run?” This question thrusts itself upon us every time an unarmed or otherwise harmless person is gunned down while fleeing from police.

Often that inquiry takes the form that assumes the guilt of the victim: “If he did nothing wrong, why did he run?” It’s also common for that second version to contort itself into a nicely circular argument: “Well, he ran, and resisting arrest is a crime, so obviously he got what was coming to him.”

For reasons unclear to a mind not enthralled by statist assumptions, most people simply assume that both reason and morality dictate an unqualified duty to surrender without cavil or complaint whenever armed, violence-prone strangers in peculiar government-issued garb seek to restrain one of us.

This is why police are trained to interpret any hesitation, reluctance to cooperate, inhospitable body language, or verbal expression of resentment as “resisting arrest” and thus a justification for the use of “pain compliance” — or even lethal force. Police and their apologists likewise insist — contrary to both law and judicial precedent — that there is no right to resist even a clearly unwarranted or abusive arrest, or even for a citizen to take steps to protect himself when he’s on the receiving end of unjustified physical violence from police.

Police are constantly catechized about the dangers they encounter when they conduct traffic stops or detain people on the street. Why, the random “civilian” they encounter might be armed, trained in the use of weapons, and prepared to use violence without warning! This is to say that this hypothetical “civilian” would be …. just like the typical police officer.

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Tea Baggers Tank in the North Country

teabaggersLawyer and retired Air Force Capt.  Bill Owens defeated “Tea Bagger” Doug Hoffman in a special election Tuesday in northern New York. Hoffman was endorsed by Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rabid right wing of the Republican Party

This seat has been has been in GOP hands since the end of the Civil War (for “you folks in Rio Linda,” that’s 144 years).

The real news here is not that a Democrat won an election in a Republican stronghold, but that sane Republicans and rationale independents rejected an attempt by the inmates to take over the asylum.

Fact Checking Limbaugh

oxycontinFox News Sunday host Chris Wallace dedicated the first half of his November 1 program to an interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh, during which Wallace allowed and in some cases prompted Limbaugh to advance numerous misleading, baseless, or outrageous claims, as well as engage in inflammatory attacks on President Obama.

Read Media Matters: Fact Checking Limbaugh

Marcellus Shale

The Marcellus Shale – America’s next super giant

Down in Texas the big gas companies are talking about northeast Pennsylvania and New York as the place to shalebe. The Catskills and the Delaware River Valley sit on top of Marcellus Shale. Marcellus Shale lies under much of northern Appalachia 6,000 to 8,000 feet below the surface; the pores in the shale contain large quantities of natural gas. The shale layer becomes thicker from west to east beginning at about 50 feet in Ohio to more than 100 feet thick in central PA and NY. Geologists have known about the gas here for years but now with the new technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, recovering the gas is now the big new “Shale Play” as the industry refers to it. We are seeing the “land men” knocking on doors to obtain gas leases for various companies, with Chesapeake leading the charge in our area (mostly the Delaware River Valley in PA, Sullivan and Delaware counties). Community groups are forming on both sides of the issue from landowner associations to better negotiate a lease to groups fighting drilling altogether.

Get the latest updates from Catskill Mountainkeeper and checkout Shaleshock.org

ON THE NET:

Trading the Watershed to Trash the Catskills

Police State Update – October 2009

Attack of the right-wing nuts

“This is about a campaign that goes back a decade to big business and that people who don’t like what ACORN does and is effective at — namely, helping groups to organize and put pressure on banks around sub[prime] mortgage loans to stop racial discrimination,” Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, told us.

The manipulations and media machine behind the assault on progressive ideasbeckhalloween
by Rebecca Bowe and Sarah Phelan – San Francisco Bay Guardian

In April 2006, with the approval ratings of President George W. Bush plummeting, his senior political advisor, Karl Rove, began discussing a plan to turn things around.

His strategy: attack progressive organizations that were registering low-income people to vote and helping them fight corporate power — and claim it was about voter fraud.

The main White House target, newly released records show, was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). By the end of 2006, Rove would oversee the removal of eight U.S. attorneys, including two who refused to press bogus charges against ACORN in New Mexico and Missouri, and a third under similar suspicions in Washington state.

ACORN made a convenient target for Rove and his gang — and the well-orchestrated attacks on that group, which have exploded into the headlines this year, provide a compelling case study in how the right wing operates in this country.

Although it was the GOP that removed tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the rolls in the 2000 and 2004, the Republicans and their allies were able to make the issue of voter fraud all about ACORN, using a handful of isolated problems to undercut an organization focused on giving a voice to poor people.

Founded in Little Rock, Ark. at the end of the 1960s, ACORN has grown into the nation’s top community-organizer group, thanks to success in improving poor people’s housing, wages, and educational access. By the eve of the 2008 presidential election, ACORN had helped register more than 1.3 million voters — mostly young, low-income minorities — in 21 states, including the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.

As The Nation put it, these successes made ACORN “something of a right-wing bogeyman.”

And while the recent furor over a conservative videographer secretly taping ACORN employees saying dumb things has somehow become one of the big political stories of the year, the major media have mostly ignored how this attack is part of a larger conservative strategy.

In August, hundreds of pages of e-mails and transcripts related to the 2006 U.S. attorney-firing scandal were released to the press and public — but few news outlets mentioned that Rove was focused on attacking ACORN’s voter registration efforts, even though ACORN and voter fraud are repeatedly mentioned in these documents.

“This is about a campaign that goes back a decade to big business and that people who don’t like what ACORN does and is effective at — namely, helping groups to organize and put pressure on banks around sub[prime] mortgage loans to stop racial discrimination,” Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, told us.

It wasn’t really about voter fraud. As former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, a Republican from New Mexico, recently stated on The Rachel Maddow Show: “They were looking at numbers [and] didn’t like the demographic tidal wave that was coming their way so they wanted to engage the machinery of the Justice Department to stop that wave.”

After two years of investigating ACORN and other supposed perpetrators of left-wing voter fraud, Igelias said, “I couldn’t find one case I could prosecute.”

But for the right-wing attack machine, it didn’t matter — the damage was done.

Read the rest of the story