Which Leaders Fought to Protect the Environment?

Brian Clark Howard from thedailygreen.com has assembled a succinct slide show imparting his top 10 environmentally friendly commanders in chief. The pictures are accompanied by brief explanations of the former presidents’ green qualifications.

Take Nixon (yes, Nixon), for example:

…Responding to a 60s-era public, Nixon signed the bills that established the Environmental Protection Agency and the landmark Clean Air Act. Going further, in 1972 Nixon signed the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Ocean Dumping Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungide, Rodenticide Act; and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Nixon’s term also saw passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974.

Follow the “read more” link below to see the whole post.

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Among the top 10: FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. Real Clear Politics post includes fantastic audio & video links & clips from past conventions, some recent, some not so much.

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Also among the top 10 is JFK’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.  RCP sets the scene:

Heading into the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy was a clear frontrunner for the nomination, but did not have it locked up. Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson was at the very least a threat, not to mention the possibility of a surge of support for the party’s nominee in the last two elections, Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy, of course, went on to secure the nomination and gave his acceptance speech on live television from the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

Perhaps the best part of the post is the AV goodies embedded within its text, and when the link or clip is unavailable it links to the full text of the ranked speeches. However, sometimes reading the text doesn’t provide the flavor of an event as well a video can.

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2008, by Jeffrey R. Young:
Borrowing a technique from Hollywood, historians at the University of Richmond have created animated maps that chart voting patterns in U.S. presidential elections since 1840.

The maps show county-by-county data for every major election year in which data are available, and that information shifts over time. One map, for example, highlights counties where the victor won by only a small margin. It reveals how “battleground states” have changed over the years. The maps are displayed as video montages, with each election year shown sequentially. A slow-fade effect—that’s the Hollywood-inspired part—is used between maps, which helps highlight the changes…

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Olbermann and Professor Turley discuss the Attorney General’s dismal record of holding public officials responsible for violations of the public trust.

When historians examine the Bush administration, they’ll likely conclude that their purposeful politicization of the Department of Justice did the most domestic harm.  It’s going to take a great deal of time to repair, and if it is to be fixed, as the good professor notes, it will require resuscitating the Independent Counsel Act.

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Ron Suskind’s book forces Conyer’s to stop dragging his feet.

In a recent post, I noted Suskind’s expressions of sympathy for the pressure put upon his sources; indeed, his sources implicated Dick Cheney’s office and the CIA for forging a letter which implied a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Husein’s regime. It is alleged that the forgery was intended to bolster support, domestic and abroad, for the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Dick

If Suskind’s sources weren’t expecting such pressure, they should have been.  Regardless, they may breathe a little easier today, as the vice president’s aides soon may be absorbing some of the pressure over the potential scandal.  The Raw Story reported yesterday on the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, John Conyers, and his written correspondence, requesting answers regarding the allegations contained within Suskind’s book, The Way of the World.

These developments could inspire Conyers to begin impeachment hearings regarding Cheney’s behavior as VP.  Conyers and others have been widely criticized for dragging their feet on the matter.

I’ll include some excerpts from Raw Story below, but be sure to check out the whole article.  If for no other reason than it contains the text of Conyers’ letters to Former CIA Director George Tenet, former VP Chief of Staff I. Lewis Scooter Libby, VP advisor John Hannah, and former CIA Deputy Director (and Suskind source) Bob Richer.  The post also links to pdf files where the letters may be downloaded from.

I sincerely hope that I never receive a letter like that.

From The Raw Story’s John Byrne, posted August 20, 2008:

Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) issued letters of inquiry Wednesday to Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, regarding a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks…

Conyers asked that Richer “set up a time” to discuss allegations surrounding the false letter.

“According to recent allegations in your capacity as the former CIA Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations and Chief of the Near East Division, you were tasked by former CIA Director George Tenet to create the false letter and may even have seen the White House stationery on which the false letter assignment was reportedly written,” Conyers wrote Richer Wednesday. “Given your reported direct knowledge of these events, I am requesting that you contact Judiciary Committee staff as soon as possible to set up a time to discuss your involvement and knowledge of the allegedly false letter…”

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From Rawstory’s August 19, 2008 post, by way of the AP :

“There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward’s longtime editor, Alice Mayhew, said Tuesday in a statement. “This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes…”

According to Simon & Schuster, Woodward’s book “takes readers deep inside the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq.

“Based on extensive interviews with participants, contemporaneous notes and secret documents, the book traces the internal debates, tensions and critical turning points in the Iraq War during an extraordinary two-year period.”

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From the NYT’s International Herald Tribune, August 17, 2008 post by Bill Keller:

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” – which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy.The great nightmare tyrannies of last century – the Evil Empire, Red China – had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new “Age of Authoritarianism” was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international VIPs, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee…

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No one mixes high and low brow humor quite like Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert.  His satirical caricature of right-wing pundits brilliantly illustrates the seemingly tragic state of political affairs in America while making his viewers smile.  For if we weren’t laughing, we should certainly be crying.

The below video is from Colbert’s Wednesday, August 13, broadcast, and it brings us an update on a previous post regarding an internal Department of Justice report detailing the illegal activity within the department, under the Bush Administration.
Earlier this week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey declared that he or the DOJ would not pursue the matters outlined within the above mentioned report.  Mukasey reasoned, “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.”

This from the highest ranking legal officer in America.  Again, if we couldn’t laugh we would have to cry.  View the clip & have a laugh.