Yeah, I’m not exactly thrilled with President Obama rolling back the EPA’s tougher smog regulations either, folks. But there’s a difference between constructive criticism of the President’s policies, and firebagger nonsense like this. The President’s environmental record is rock solid, and Renee Schoof’s piece at McClatchy this weekend is exactly what the anti-Obama left wants…along with Republicans who don’t have to lift a finger to attack the President and demoralize the left. We’ll do it ourselves. After all, President Obama is apparently the worse environmental Chief Executive of our age:
“The White House is siding with corporate polluters over the American people,” Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke said in a statement. “The Clean Air Act clearly requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set protective standards against smog — based on science and the law. The White House now has polluted that process with politics.”
Really? Because a prudent observer would have figured out that Republicans made the protecting the environment political years ago, not to mention corporations themselves. But it’s President Obama’s fault. And the NRDC’s statement implies that President Obama has eliminated protective standards completely, not kept them as is. It’s almost like they want you to believe that the President has weakened existing standards, which he has not done…but it sure gives the NRDC political ammo to fundraise, doesn’t it? God forbid anyone play politics with the environment.
You should spend some time reading about it especially if you are, like I was, resistant to even giving a crap simply by virtue of the involvement of Hamsher (and her sidekick Choi).
Here’s a video from Mark Ruffalo. He’s pretty. Focus on him. We like Mark Ruffalo:
What follows is The Hamsher making everything about The Hamsher.
I’m tired of all these motherfuckin’ phone books on my motherfuckin’ door step!!
So I woke up this morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tired and pissed off, and decided a walk with old Nate Dogg would improve my mood. Boy, was I mistaken.
As soon as I opened my door, what did I see?
A horror that is permanently imprinted into my eye areas:
Then on August 10, I got another uninvited phone book intrusion. I did not blog about it, but I posted a picture on Facebook. (And made a rather witty reference to The Police, if I do say so myself, which I totally just did.) And a mere 20 days later, I get yet another phone book? What the fuck do I need three phone books in the span of three months for? What is going on? People are just straight murderin’ trees to provide phone books to people who do not want phone books! Indeed, to people who fucking hate phone books! And these poor phone books? They don’t want to be here. They don’t want to sit unused and worthless in a closet only to be tossed away, tattered and torn, years later. They want to be useful! They want to be turned into other shit. Like toilet paper. Paper towels. WINE.
Stupid phone book.
Even though I was uneasy by the phone book that appeared on my doorstep… for the third time in three months, I soldiered on. First I kicked it. Then I stared at it. Then I flipped it off. And then I said “Come on, Nate Dogg! We’re outta here!”
STOP PICKING ON LOUISIANA! IT’S GETTING RIDICULOUS.
Considering I have two good friends who live in Louisiana, I’m starting to get a little pissed off at whomever is dropping the peoples’ elbow all over Louisiana’s delicious face:
There’s a new oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico after a tug boat crashed into the wellhead on Tuesday. Located near Louisiana marshland, the leak was seen spewing a geyser of oil 20 feet into the air. Officials also fear that natural gas is leaking, since boats reported seeing a gas cloud near the wellhead. “There is a pretty good amount of oil flowing there,” said one Jefferson Parish councilman. It’s unclear currently who owns the well. Emergency crews are currently at the site of the leak, figuring out how to stop it.
First BP, and now this? What did Louisiana ever do to you?
Now, some conservatives are complaining that Barack Obama is being too hard on BP. I mean, it’s not like it’s BP’s fault that the oil is threatening the very existence of nearly 400 species of wildlife. It’s not BP’s fault that tens of millions of gallons of oil have gushed and are STILL FUCKING GUSHING NEARLY TWO MONTHS LATER. It’s not like BP was cited time and time again for safety violations. It’s not like people died. It’s not like BP denied the existence of underwater plumes even after scientists confirmed the existence of underwater plumes. It’s not like BP immediately started attempting to settle with potential plaintiffs, like, two days after the explosion. I mean, what the hell, Obama? How dare you require a private foreign company to pay for the destruction it has wreaked on the Gulf ecological system and on the livelihood of Gulf residents and implement a system that would facilitate compensation?
Conservatives are all about private responsibility and the free market, right? So, of course, they would demand that a private corporation responsible for this disaster should pay for the clean up and compensation to the victims of this disaster. Right? Of course they would never feel sorry for the corporation that caused the disaster in the first fucking place, right?
WRONG!
During the hearings on the Hill, Joe Barton (R-Texas) actually apologized to the nitwit CEO of BP, Tony Hayward–the guy who just wants the spill to be over so he can get back to his life–for what he called a 20 billion dollar shakedown:
Why are you on my doorstep? It’s 2010, for fuck’s sake. I have an iMac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, and working limbs to walk to my neighbor’s apartment and say, “Hey, can I use your phone?” I mean, you’ve heard about the Internet, right? I’m typing on it right now. It’s aight. It’s like this interconnected thingamabob that has information about all kinds of shit. You can listen to music. Chat with your friends. Watch porn. It brings you food sometimes. You know what else it does? It has phone numbers. ALL KINDS OF PHONE NUMBERS.
Don’t you get it, phone book? It’s not me, it’s you. You’re the one who keeps showing up, year after year. I kick your ass to the curb. Every time. But what happens? I come home and find you sitting on my fucking doorstep again. This time you were wrapped in some sort of opaque plastic. YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME PHONE BOOK. I can see through your plastic. You’re the only thing that looks like a phone book and is about the same size as a phone book. Seriously, dude. You’re not fooling anyone.
Where do you come from, anyway? I wasn’t even gone that long. Did you drop from the sky? Are you a witch? I don’t even have a landline phone! Why are your overlords delivering you to my house?
Don’t answer that.
And don’t trot out that tired argument: “Oh, but what if the telecommunications network collapses? Then you’ll wish you had treated me with some dignity.” Please. That’s absurd and you know it.
If there’s some sort of terrorist attack and the entire telecommunication network collapses, you know what people are going to do?
FUCKING PANIC.
They’re not going to pick up the Yellow Pages because they’ll all be on fire.
And besides, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE RESIDENTIAL PHONE NUMBERS.
I hate you, phone book. Right in that stupid coupon section you always have stashed in your midsection.
Oh, and P.S. You’re bad for the environment. But everybody hates the environment anyway, so who cares about that. Mostly, just get the fuck off my doorstep.
Update: Check out what commenter Awed Job did about the growing threat of Phone Book Proliferation:
Shaking my tiny fist at epic asshattery since 1979
This past Thursday, a week after the horrifying explosion on the Deepwater Horizon claimed the lives of eleven men, I awoke to a peculiar smell and a pounding headache. Four Advil later, I realized what I was smelling: crude oil, hanging like an omen over New Orleans.
Can you even fathom that? I sure as hell can’t. I’m angry, scared and strangely determined to fix my home.
I am a gulf coast gal, raised near Escambia Bay and proud owner of that peculiar southern/gulf twang so endemic of these parts. I grew up digging my toes in the soft, quartz sand of the Florida panhandle. I have gone scalloping in Steinhatchee and oyster harvesting in Apalachicola.
In ten years, my hopefully non-mutated children won’t know about shrimp boils and raw oysters and the other epicurean delights of living along the coast.
In ten years, the once vibrant Gulf of Mexico will probably be a murky dead zone.
That’s why I care – my husband and I planned to settle here in the Crescent City. We had dreams of rehabbing a historic house, baptizing our children at our parish church and enjoying the incredibly awesome quality of life here.
Because entire economies (fishing/shrimping and tourism/hospitality) are being eradicated.
Because Rush Limbaugh should shut his goddamned trap. So should the entire group of sheeple at Fox News, actually. Fuck you, Rush Limbaugh, you fucking fuck (if you haven’t watched Treme yet, you’re missing out on an epic characterization of the late, great Ashley Morris). Listen, whackjobs – this wasn’t ecoterrorism. This wasn’t some leftist plot to derail offshore drilling, douchebags.
(And hey, for those who refer to this as Obama’s Katrina? Like Katrina, this is a manmade disaster – but the Chernobyl analogy is probably more accurate than a goddamned hurricane destroying poorly constructed levees.)
Switch off your fucking lights or I will kill you.
Our Darkest Hour
Um, so yeah. I guess it was Earth Hour yesterday. Did you hear? Who knew? Not me. I heard jack taco about it, and I’m usually pretty hip to current events. I’m down with what the kids are doing. I’m on the Twitter and the Google Buzz. I may even still have a Friendster profile rattling around out there in cyberspace.
I’m hooked into the Matrix, is what I’m saying, people. But yet I heard diddlypoop about Earth Hour. Apparently, it touched a billion people. I hope it wasn’t a bad touch. I wonder if the Vatican was involved. ::rimshot::
So, despite my lack of participation, Earth Hour went ahead and happened.
Here’s the Official Earth Hour 2010 video. Watch it, but be forewarned; the Coldplay may asssail your senses (why is Coldplay so annoying now?):
I think it’s amusing. It’s so aggressively librul:
@marker 32: Black girl with braids and white folksy chick girl share a candle-lighting and a hug. Look at us! Maybe we’re not so different after all! Hey, I wonder whose earrings are bigger? Yours are pretty big, but mine have these feathers!
@ marker :35: A crazy white lady dancing at what can only be a drum circle. (I went to Oberlin. I can spot a drum circle from three clicks away.)
@ marker :37: A gaggle of Asians swaying in unison holding candles but looking over their shoulder to make sure they’re not about to be mowed down by a bunch of murderous tanks.
@ marker :55: A token colored kid (Indian? Pakistani? Bangladeshi? Who can tell? It doesn’t matter!) winks and smiles and says “I’m voting because I care” but let’s face it, from the looks of where he’s sitting, doesn’t seem like he’s got any electricity to turn off. It plays to your white liberal guilt, right? Better start sending 75 cents a day to Sally Struthers so she can buy more anti-aging cream. Colored folks, we’re off the hook. We’ve got our own shit to deal with.
@ marker :57: Folksy white people playing the guitar? I can practically smell the weed and patchouli oil seeping through my computer monitor.
And candles. Lots and lots of candles.
Here’s the part that really kills me though; at marker 1:10, some Random “Climate Researcher: Arctic” is wearing a parka (to suggest he is standing in some cold climate when, in actuality, he’s at that sound stage in Hollywood where they faked the moon landing), and this dude is really excited about Earth Hour. You can hear it in his voice:
“It’s 8:29 p.m., and I’m about to count you down to the world’s largest mass participation event, ever!”
Hooray! Earth Hour is, like, totally the world’s largest mass participation event, evah! Except for the fact that it totally isn’t.
Everyone turned out their lights at 8:30 p.m. local time. LOCAL. That means New Zealand and Australia turned off their lights on Friday in celebration of Earth Hour while I was sitting here yesterday—Saturday—not turning my lights off.
Am I taking crazy pills, here? People are aware of time zones and, like, the international date line and stuff, right?
“Mass participation” implies that a bunch of people were doing the same shit at the same time. Otherwise, you know, pretty much any activity you can think of is a “mass participation event,” as long as a bunch of people are doing that activity within the same 24 hour period.
Perhaps I’m being too rational. Too cynical. I should lighten the fuck up.
Earth Hour is fine. I ain’t mad at it. It’s supposed to be a symbol of hope for our planet. Rad. Unsurprisingly, however, I forgot all about it. I just realized this evening that I missed my chance to rock the Earth Hour casbah last night. I don’t even know what I was doing during Earth Hour. Probably napping with all the lights on.
Oh well. I’ll participate next year. That’s, like, what… 8760 hours from now? I can’t wait! I wonder what I should wear. I better set a reminder to charge my phone. Oh, please, like you wouldn’t do it too. There’s no sitting in the dark for an hour without the warm glow of my iPhone. Don’t be ridiculous.
Anyway, last year, Angry Black Lady wrote about this very topic. You should read it here. (No really, you should. It’s one of my favorites.)
And then you should share your thoughts, feelings, and concerns abut Earth Hour in the comment section. Don’t let my cynicism poison your little conservationist souls, though. You know how grumpy I can get when I haven’t had my butterscotch pudding.
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
Former mermaid and eye patch enthusiast Daryl Hannah, along with NASA climatologist James Hansen and 31 other do-gooders, was arrested yesterday for obstructing officers and impeding traffic after sitting in the middle of a road outside Massey Energy’s Goals Coal preparation plant. She was protesting mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia as a part of a civil disobedience campaign to abolish the anti-environmentally friendly practice,
Hannah addressed a crowd of miners at the plant:
“I’d like to thank all of the miners for all of the work you’ve done powering America…But there is no need to destroy our planet to power our future.”
It wasn’t the first green-related arrest for Ms. Hannah. In 2006, she was arrested for chaining herself to a walnut tree which was to be demolished to make space for a warehouse in Los Angeles.
Yeah, I’m not exactly thrilled with President Obama rolling back the EPA’s tougher smog regulations either, folks. But there’s a difference between constructive criticism of the President’s policies, and firebagger nonsense like this. The President’s environmental record is rock solid, and Renee Schoof’s piece at McClatchy this weekend is exactly what the anti-Obama left wants…along with Republicans who don’t have to lift a finger to attack the President and demoralize the left. We’ll do it ourselves. After all, President Obama is apparently the worse environmental Chief Executive of our age:
