A totally biased and unreasonable list of blogs that I think you might enjoy reading.
Keith Hummell, who previously suspended his campaign against Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA-1)(That’s him on the left. That guy’s our Congressman now), has finally dropped out of the race.
Other prospective candidates are being talked to, but nothing definitive yet. Unfortunatley, I just get word that Brig. Gen. David McGinnis (ret.) is unable to run for the seat. McGinnis flirted with running in last December’s special election, and he’s been a very strong supporter of Barack Obama this year.
Our favorite Congressperson here at Democratic Central is Virgil Goode, the man that liberals and moderates and citizens of the world like to mock for his righteous support of American and Judeo-Christian values. And Virgil doesn’t like being mocked.
So when Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show aired a brief clip of Virgil in the Fourth of July parade in Scottsville with his campaign float being pulled by a Hummer (and nothing says “energy conservation” like driving a Hummer), and then made fun of Virgil by saying that he was “pimp”, and suggesting that he could “make it rain,” Virgil wasn’t going to take that lying down.
“First of all, I never watch ‘The Jon Stewart Show,’” he told the Danville Register & Bee said Thursday. ”I didn’t ride in the Hummer. I don’t even know who owned the Hummer.” (Actually, Virgil, I’ll bet you do. I have been told that it belonged to Doug Johnson, the Fluvanna County Republican Chair, though I also read on another blog that it belonged to Fluvanna Republican Ty Wigal. http://southeastvirginia.blogs… I am sure that you know them both. Who was driving? You walked alongside it for a mile and a half. Here’s the picture of you standing in front of the Hummer, taken from the Fluvanna County Republican Party website. Does this refresh your recollection?)
The show also compared rap musicians with Republicans because they both like guns and money.“I don’t know what a rapper is,” Goode said.
Goode pointed a finger at his Democratic opponent Tom Perriello for filming the parade and making it appear like he was hiding in the huge sports utility vehicle. He said Perriello and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama are the candidates of celebrities, and that’s why they went after him.
Jessica Barba, Perriello spokesperson, said Goode was walking in the parade and not riding in the Hummer. She said the campaign has nothing to do with the video and never had any contact with Jon Stewart.
“It was a humorous video made by someone not affiliated with our campaign,” Barba said.
http://www.wsls.com/sls/news/p…
Perriello was at the same parade, walking the route while the Democratic float was pulled by a tractor running on biodiesel.
Continue reading " Virgil Goode doesn’t know what a rapper is… "
In the northeastern corner of Ecuador, near the headwaters of the Amazon River, lies the ramshackle Ecuadorean city of Lago Agrio, or Nuevo Loja (its official name). There, in a run-down courthouse, corporate lawyers employed by Chevron have been fighting for years with a group of determined plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The plaintiffs — some 30,000 residents of Ecuador’s Amazon Basin known as the Amazon Defense Coalition and backed by Philadelphia plaintiffs’ firm Kohn Swift & Graf — hope to hold the Chevron accountable for environmental abuses committed by Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001. For details on the Texaco abuses, you can read a report at http://www.chevrontoxico.org/d… or go to http://www.vanityfair.com/poli… for a much more entertaining account. Chevron is represented by mega-corporate law firm Jones Day, which has thousands of lawyers around the world.
Texaco spent 30 years in the region, pumping billions of gallons of oil hundreds of miles west over the Andes to Ecuador’s port cities for shipment to the U.S. Lago Agrio was the classic oil company town. Even the name shows it — “lago agrio” is Spanish for “Sour Lake,” named after Sour Lake, Texas, which was Texaco’s corporate headquarters. The area around the city has many ecological problems. The rainforest has been all but obliterated, in this region and environmental degradation is severe, with catastrophic oil pollution in some areas. The area is referred to as “the Amazon Chernobyl.”
The lawsuit accuses Texaco of dumping 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways from 1964 to 1990, decimating the ability of the indigenous groups to live off the rainforest (as they had done for eons). Texaco also built roughly 1000 unlined open-air waste pits that have been leeching toxins into the soil and groundwater for decades. The picture to the left is of one such pit.
Now Newsweek reports that Chevron received some unwelcome news in April; a court-appointed expert recommended that the company be ordered to pay $8 billion to $16 billion to clean up the jungle and any waterways ravaged by oil pollution. And so Chevron is doing what corporate America always does — it is turning to Washington for help. It has assembled a strong team of lobbyists, including former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, former Democratic senator John Breaux, and Wayne Berman, a top fund-raiser for John McCain. Chevron wants the Bush administration to revoke special trade preferences for Ecuador if the country doesn’t put the kibosh on the Lago Agrio proceedings — now in their fourth year. Note that in American courts, this would be impossible, and almost certainly illegal. What does this tell us about why large corporations do not serve American interests as goodwill ambassadors around the world?
“The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company,” Newsweek quotes one unidentified Chevron lobbyist as saying. (The company claims that it’s the victim of a corrupt Ecuadorean judicial system.) “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this — companies that have made big investments around the world.” What Chevron doesn’t tell you is that Chevron already had agreed to submit to jurisdiction in Ecuador and be bound by the court’s decision when years ago it requested the case be transferred out of U.S. federal court. I infer that they thought that they could buy the Ecuadorean government. Unfortunately for them, a more liberal, anti-Chevron government won last year’s elections, causing Chevron to think that perhaps they’ll just have to buy the U.S. government instead.
But the plaintiffs aren’t rolling over; Newsweek reports that after the lead plaintiffs’ attorney Steven Donziger made a presentation to Barack Obama several years ago (did I mention that Donziger and Obama played basketball together at Harvard Law School 20 years or so ago?), Obama co-wrote a letter with Pat Leahy to U.S. Trade Rep. Rob Portman, urging Portman to keep the American government out of this, and to let the Ecuadorean court system do its work.
An Obama spokesperson confirmed to Newsweek last week that his position on the matter remains the same.
Leaders from Ecuador’s rainforest — from the Cofan, Secoya, and Siona tribes — are planning a trip to Washington, D.C. in September to talk directly with Members of Congress and to Portman (unless he is the Vice-Presidential nominee; he is rumored to be on McCain’s “short list.”)
“We are coming to tell the truth about Chevron’s desperate attempt to quash the legal claims of thousands of vulnerable people in the Amazon rainforest who are struggling to survive due to oil contamination,” said Pablo Fajardo, the lead Ecuadorian lawyer for the plaintiffs.
“These people deserve their day in court without interference from Chevron,” he added. “Chevron must respect the rule of law.”
A final decision in the case, which could lead to the largest ever damages award in an environmental lawsuit, is expected next year.
Continue reading " Amazon environmental litigation has a U.S. presidential connection "
Courtesy of the Augusta Free Press’ Chris Graham, this is truly pitiful:
Something I got in the mail from Sixth District Congressman Bob Goodlatte the other day caught my attention, though not, I’d bet, in the way it was intended.“A NEW G.I. BILL FOR OUR VETERANS,” the headline blared at me, with a U.S. flag in the background and a picture of a smiling young soldier with maybe his wife or fiancee or significant other of some sort down in the bottom-left corner.
But didn’t Goodlatte vote against the New G.I. Bill when it came up for a vote in Congress on May 15, I wondered to myself. (And then went back and checked the record - and yup, he did.)
That’s bad enough, but as Chris Graham also writes:
…The question I’m asking myself is - shouldn’t he at least be up front about the entirety of his voting record in his mailer? I ask that because it wasn’t a campaign mailer, but rather something sent out by his congressional office that in the end we, the people paid for.Should we, the people foot the expense for Congressman Goodlatte to tell us half the story on his position on the New G.I. Bill when the effect is to create a political advantage for the congressman?
I think the answer to that is clear.
Personally, I think the answer is clear about a congressman who would: a) mislead/lie about such an important matter as the GI Bill for our troops; and b) send out this garbage on the taxpayer’s dime as part of his congressional mailing privileges? Is that even legal? What the hell?
Continue reading " Augusta Free Press Catches Rep. Goodlatte Lying About GI Bill "