Battle against LNG readied

Note from Greetings: If approved, this would, every other day, take very dangerous LNG tankers past potential terrorist targets, such as the Naval War College and the Naval Undersea War Center, as well as through very populous areas. In this day and age, and with reports of new terrorist strikes being planned... why would this President and Congress provide another potential terrorist target when it is not needed for energy supply?

It would also dredge up a previously polluted bay and shut down jobs to an entire region that has high unemployment at a time when they are trying to "promote" adding jobs.

Where are you on this, President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid? Not to mention our Senators Reed and Whitehouse? (To his credit, Senator Whitehouse has said he opposes this.)

By Phil Zahodiakin , Jamestown Press

Grassroots efforts to block a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal proposed for Mt. Hope Bay have redoubled in the wake of a federal appellate court decision slamming the door on the R.I. agency that reviews applications to dredge in the state’s coastal waters.

Under the proposal from Weaver’s Cove Energy, a subsidiary of Amerada Hess, the LNG terminal would be constructed about a mile from the Fall River shoreline, where a storage facility would be built to receive the gas from an expected 140 supertanker shipments per year.

The East Passage, which the tankers would use to transit into Mt. Hope Bay, is deep enough for the ships, but Weaver’s Cove would have to dredge the channel leading up to the site of the terminal – a project requiring permits from Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the Army Corps of Engineers.

On Oct. 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the Coastal Resources Management Council had run out of time to process the permit application from Weaver’s Cove, leaving the application review in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers.

John Torgan, Narragansett baykeeper and advocacy director for Save the Bay, said the volume of sediment that Weaver’s Cove would have to dredge “is upwards of 3.5 million cubic yards.” However, all but 230,000 cubic yards of the total would be dredged out of Massachusetts waters, and “the Massachusetts review of the permit application for that dredging is alive and ongoing,” he said.

Torgan also said that “there are still some 21 state and federal permits that Weaver’s Cove has to obtain before starting construction.” Moreover, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates natural gas transmission facilities – and which will have the final say on the project – has yet to issue an environmental impact statement for the proposal.

An earlier proposal, which failed to pass U.S. Coast Guard muster, proposed to build the terminal on a shoreline site north of the Braga and Brightman Street Bridges. Weaver’s Cove responded to the Coast Guard’s concerns with its 2008 proposal to site the terminal in the bay.

Save the Bay this week launched a campaign “to make sure that people are aware of the Weaver’s Cove proposal and the EIS, which may be released before the end of the year,” Torgan said. “The EIS will be several ‘phone books’ thick, and we want to equip people with the information they’ll need to provide FERC with informed and appropriate public comments. It’s all part of the overriding goal of our campaign: Preventing this project from going forward.”

To that end, said Save the Bay Communications Director John Martin, the group this Monday started running its campaign messages in newspapers and radio spots. The group also has a commitment for billboard space on Rt. 24 or I-195 – whichever billboard becomes available first.

Additionally, “a number of environmental groups have asked for links to our website,” Martin said, “and we’ll be e-mailing our message to all our members – a constituency of 12,000 people. Our social networks account for many more supporters, and we’ll be reaching out to them as well.”

The website also includes etools that enable people to send letters – or Save the Bay’s recommended letter – to their senators and representatives, Martin said.

“We have a downloadable petition which we’re asking people to circulate in their neighborhoods or their places of worship or anywhere else where people are picking up on our concerns,” he said. “We’re also in the final stages of setting up an online petition. We’re hoping to sustain our amplified campaign all the way up to the EIS hearings, which FERC could open this winter. But, that’s not to say that people haven’t been hearing our message: We were quite encouraged by the strong response of our constituency when they heard about the court decision.”

The decision affirmed a U.S. district court ruling against the CRMC – which, Weaver’s Cove asserted, had waived its right of review by failing to issue a decision on the permit application within the timeframe specified by the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. The CRMC argued that the regulatory clock could not start ticking until the application was complete. But the district court ruled that the timeframe, which is intended to ensure that no individual state can arbitrarily delay a project, had been violated.

CRMC Public Educator and Information Coordinator Laura Ricketson-Dwyer said that the council had not engaged in any “arbitrary” delay.

“We had to know where the dredge material would be going,” she said. “We have a prerequisite regulation requiring applicants to provide a letter of acceptance from the disposal facility.

“We were concerned,” Ricketson Dwyer continued, “because Weaver’s Cove had indicated that the material would be sent out of state, but we didn’t have their plan and, as the responsible state agency, we had to make sure that the material wouldn’t return in Rhode Island. We didn’t want a situation like the infamous New York City ‘garbage barge to nowhere.’ We didn’t want a ‘dredge scow to nowhere.’ So, based on that lack of information, we could not accept the application as complete.”

Michael Rubin, an assistant state attorney general and chief of the environmental unit in the state AG’s office, represented the CRMC in the Weaver’s Cove case. He said that the state would not appeal the decision of the three-judge panel to the full panel of First Circuit Court judges, adding, “We have suffered a setback, but that’s all it is. There are many more fronts on which we intend to fight this proposal. The decision does not preclude FERC from forcing Weaver’s Cove to return to the CRMC for a review of issues that weren’t included in the court decision, including the hazards from scow transits.”

Rubin explained that there is a threat of environmental damage from dredge sediments spilling off the barges.

“There is also a concern about the hazards from the 800-foot tow lines,” he said. “You’d be looking at approximately 1,000 scow transits through Newport harbor, including transits at the height of the boating season, and there are documented cases of masts being ripped off sailboats by those cables. The court decision doesn’t preclude a review of those hazards, so this decision is not, by any means, the end of our fight against this abomination.”

Rubin added that there will be exclusionary zones around the tankers, and that their arrival in the bay will be practically unannounced.

“Assuming you’re listening to the marine band on your radio, you’ll have 15 or 20 minutes in which to get out of those zones – two miles ahead of the tankers and one mile behind – or you’ll find your boat being boarded by Coast Guardsmen or private security agents,” he said. “I am not exaggerating. It’s going to be a very grim scene out there if this proposal goes through.”

Information about the Save the Bay campaign is available at www.savebay.org.

Sources: Clinton supporter pressures Pelosi

This just in from CNN: (Note from Greetings preceding) Weinstein is one of the same Democratic financial backers I blogged about back in March (28th), when a group of them threatened Pelosi and the DCCC back then with pulling out their financial support for both the DCCC and various Congressional races, if Pelosi did not step back from suggesting that the superdelegates vote according to their states' votes. They were leading up to this, I'm sure.. which is to win any way possible, despite the popular vote - since Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan and did not campaing in Florida, abiding by the DCCC rules - something Clinton "suggested" she would do at the time. If you go back to my March 28th blog again, you can learn more about these super-rich "superbackers" of Senator Clinton's. Are these folks whose special interests you want running the White House?

By Ed HenryCNN White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off contributions to congressional Democrats unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi embraced his plan to finance revotes in Florida and Michigan, three officials familiar with their conversation said.

Sources say Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut contributions to congressional Democrats.

Weinstein and Pelosi talked on the phone late last month, the sources said.

The three officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the conversation.

They said Weinstein, a top supporter of Clinton's presidential campaign, appeared determined to buy Clinton more time in her battle against Sen. Barack Obama by pushing for the revote. He was also pressing Pelosi to back off her previous comments that superdelegates should support the candidate who's leading in pledged delegates in early June, the sources said.

Weinstein, a co-founder of Miramax Films who now runs the Weinstein Company, called CNN Thursday to vehemently deny that he issued any threats. "Never, ever was the thought about denying funding to Democrats," he said.

Weinstein said the phone call focused on his offer to put together a team of people to help finance a revote in Florida and Michigan. "I told her people felt there would be a disenfranchisement of voters" unless Democrats came up with a remedy, he said.

Another person familiar with the phone call said what might have upset Pelosi is that Weinstein also suggested that if Democratic leaders "did not fix" the Florida and Michigan problem, powerful Democrats may abandon the eventual party nominee in favor of Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in November.

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But the three officials briefed on the call insisted Weinstein went further by suggesting that if Pelosi did not consider his proposal on the revote, he would help slow the flow of donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect House Democrats.

"He was trying to get [Pelosi] to promise not to shut the race down," said one of the officials familiar with the call, which came before the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.

But Pelosi, who has repeatedly insisted she is neutral in the presidential showdown, refused to meet Weinstein's demands.

"She said, 'Don't ever threaten me again,'" said a second official familiar with the heated conversation.
Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami would not characterize the phone call to CNN, saying only: "This was a private conversation, one of many the speaker has about the presidential campaign."

The possibility of a revote in the delegate-rich states of Florida and Michigan is a critical issue because it may be Clinton's last chance to catch up to Obama in the delegate count.

Currently, Obama has 1,845 pledged delegates to Clinton's 1,686.

The tense confrontation between Pelosi and Weinstein is raising private concerns among some Democrats that tensions run so deep that it may be difficult to heal the party's wounds when the primary season is scheduled to end in early June.

Pelosi's decision to refuse to sign on to Weinstein's proposal for revotes in Florida and Michigan -- which were stripped of their delegates by the Democratic National Committee for moving up their primary dates -- is likely to further irk Clinton allies who have charged that the speaker has been tilting her support to Obama.

A superdelegate herself, Pelosi angered the Clinton camp in March by saying that superdelegates should back the candidate who leads in the pledged delegate count by early June.

Clinton allies saw that as favoring Obama, who has been leading in the pledged delegate count. Pelosi has stressed she is only concerned it will be a problem for the Democratic party as a whole if superdelegates are perceived to have overturned the will of the people by backing a candidate who is behind in pledged delegates.

In March, 20 Clinton fundraisers scolded the speaker in a letter for her remarks on the superdelegate issue, hinting they might hold back funds for the DCCC if Pelosi did not allay their concerns. Weinstein was not among the fundraisers who signed the letter.

"We have been strong supporters of the DCCC," the fundraisers wrote to Pelosi. "We therefore urge you to clarify your position on superdelegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August."

Pelosi did not back down then either, and Democratic party officials hardly seem scared by any of the threats. The DCCC reported more than $44 million in cash-on-hand recently, far outpacing its rival, the National Republican Congressional Committee.

While Weinstein is a prolific fundraiser for favored candidates like Clinton, he has not given much money out of his own pocket to the DCCC. His only contribution to the DCCC was a mere $2,000 in 1993, according to Federal Election Commission records, though he has given tens of thousands of dollars in personal money to Senate Democrats over the last decade. The mogul has also raised tens of millions of dollars for Democratic candidates from other donors.

Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism

from Glenn Greenwald, Salon Saturday August 4, 2007 11:39 EST

[updated below - updated again (with Sen. Dodd interview) - Update III]

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 -- almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history -- that George W. Bush can "demand" that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

I just finished a discussion panel with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero which was originally planned to examine his new (superb) book about the work his organization has done for years in battling the endless expansion of executive power and presidential lawbreaking. But the only issue anyone in the room really wanted to discuss -- including us -- was the outrage unfolding on Capitol Hill. And the anger was almost universally directed where it belongs: at Congressional Democrats, who increasingly bear more and more responsibility for the assaults on our constitutional liberties and unparalleled abuses of government power -- many (probably most) of which, it should always be emphasized, remain concealed rather than disclosed.

Examine virtually every Bush scandal and it increasingly bears the mark not merely of Democratic capitulation, but Democratic participation. In August of 2006, the Supreme Court finally asserted the first real limit on Bush's radical executive power theories in Hamdan, only for Congress, months later, to completely eviscerate those minimal limits -- and then go far beyond -- by enacting the grotesque Military Commissions Act with the support of substantial numbers of Democrats. What began as a covert and illegal Bush interrogation and detention program became the officially sanctioned, bipartisan policy of the United States.

Grave dangers are posed to our basic constitutional safeguards by the replacement of Sandra Day O'Connor with Sam Alito, whose elevation to the Supreme Court Congressional Democrats chose to permit. Vast abuses and criminality in surveillance remain undisclosed, uninvestigated and unimpeded because Congressional Democrats have stood meekly by while the administration refuses to disclose what it has been doing in how it spies on us. And we remain in Iraq, in direct defiance of the will of the vast majority of the country, because the Democratic Beltway establishment lacks both the courage and the desire to compel an end to that war.

And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA -- a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated.

Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.

The intense rush to amend this legislation means that most of them have no idea what they are actually enacting -- even less of an idea than they typically have. But what they know is that George Bush and Fox News and the Beltway establishment have told them that they would be irresponsible and weak and unserious if they failed to comply with George Bush's instructions, and hence, they comply. In the American political landscape, there have been profound changes in public opinion since September of 2001. But in the Beltway, among our political and media establishment, virtually nothing has changed.

I don't have time this morning to dissect the various excesses and dangers of the new FISA amendments, though Marty Lederman and Steve Benen both do a typically thorough job in that regard. Suffice to say, craven fear, as usual, is the author of this debacle.

There are many mythologies about what are the defining beliefs and motivations of bloggers and their readers and the attendees at Yearly Kos. One of the principal myths is that it is all driven by a familiar and easily defined ideological agenda and/or a partisan attachment to the Democratic Party. That is all false.

The common, defining political principle here -- what resonates far more powerfully than any other idea -- is a fervent and passionate belief in our country's constitutional framework, the core liberties it secures, and the checks and balances it offers as a safeguard against tyrannical power. Those who fail to defend that framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable.

With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who -- having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it -- instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it.

UPDATE: Much of this was undoubtedly the by-product of the Democratic Beltway consultant geniuses who insist that Democrats not resist the President's instructions on terrorism lest they look "weak." They need to look "strong," and they achieve that by giving the President what he wants and thereby generating articles like this one in The Washington Post, the first paragraph of which reports (accurately):

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.In the mind of the moderate Democratic Beltway centrist consultant, that is how Democrats look Strong -- by "bowing to pressure" exerted by one of the weakest and most disliked presidents in modern history. There is nothing like being described as "bowing" and "capitulating" to give an appearance of strength.

And can we please be spared the condescending assurances about how great it is that the law has a six-month sunset provision, since -- in 6 months -- it will be exactly the same Democrats voting on whether to renew these powers and they will be intimidated by exactly the same threats that if they do not renew it and give the President all of the powers he wants, the Terrorists will kill us and it will be all the fault of the Democrats for disobeying President Bush. The cycle is just going to repeat itself 180 days from now. Why would it be different?

UPDATE II: This afternoon I interviewed Sen. Chris Dodd, who more than any other presidential candidate is attempting to make issues of executive power and constitutional encroachments the centerpiece of his campaign. I'll post the entire transcript and some commentary in a few days, but for now here is part of the discussion we had concerning last night's FISA vote in the Senate (Dodd, along with Obama and Clinton, voted against the FISA bill):

GG: Can you describe what you think it is that motivated 16 of your colleagues in the Democratic caucus to vote in favor of this bill?
CD: No, I really can't . . . We had caucuses during the day, so everyone knew what was there. You had a vote at 10:00 at night, people say I didn't know what was there, then normally I can understand, but we had a caucus during the day. There was a lot of conversation about it.
GG: So this wasn't a Patriot Act case where people can claim ignorance because there was a rushed vote? There was a careful assessment of what the terms in this statute were?
CD: Absolutely. In fact, even during the vote, Carl Levin was sitting there, and Carl said: "look, I want everyone to read this" . . . . Most people know about the Gonzales references and the 180 days -- there is also a section, as Carl pointed out, that basically says that if they can prove reasonably that you're out of the country -- not that you're not a citizen, just out of the country [then they can eavesdrop on you] . . . .
But I wish I had a better explanation. Normally after that, we would be in session Monday or Tuesday, around today, people would be talking about it. So I'm a little stunned, and grasping for some answer here. So I really don't know. . . .
GG: There is this gap in FISA, which everyone, even Russ Feingold, says needs to be filled, which is that if there is a foreign-to-foreign conversation which happens to be routed through the U.S., it requires a warrant -- so why not just say "OK, we fixed this gap and here's our bill and if you veto it, and there's a terrorist attack, then it's your responsibility"?
CD: Hello? Sounds pretty reasonable to me. But part of what this comes down to is that too many people in public life are not secure enough in their own beliefs -- feel vulnerable to attacks by people who will attack you -- and feel unwilling or unable to respond to them with clarity and conviction. And if you lack that clarity and conviction, and if you haven't been through this in the past, then you're likely to be a little weaker in the legs.

I also asked Dodd why Democrats repeatedly engage in the same self-destructive behavior -- refusing to take a hard-core principled stance against the administration, and instead capitulating just enough to look like losers, but -- despite the capitulation -- still allowing the vote to be used against them. As always (see e.g., Iraq War Authorization, warrantless eavesdropping, Military Commissions Act), they capitulate in order to prevent the vote from being used against them, even though it ends up being used against them anyway because so many of them vote (with futility) against it, but do so without ever fighting for, explaining or defending their position.

I also asked him why, when they were in the minority, the Democrats were so afraid to filibuster anything, even something as drastic as the Military Commissions Act or the Alito nomination, whereas the Republicans run around filibustering everything they can find and don't care at all about being called "obstructionist." Why are the Republicans so aggressive with using their minority tools to block all Democratic initiatives whereas Democrats failed to filibuster for years?

Dodd, by his own candid admission, has no good explanation for the Democrats' behavior, which repeats itself endlessly. He has no good explanation as to why so many of his Democratic colleagues are so deeply afraid of being attacked by one of the weakest presidents in modern American history.

Although Dodd's convictions about the constitutional issues are impressively authentic and come from a place of real passion, and although he agreed with most of the criticisms voiced regarding the timidity of Congressional Democrats, I found the interview rather dispiriting, to put it mildly. That was not due to Dodd per se, but because it is clear that Beltway Democrats have no real strategy for doing anything differently or even any real awareness that something different is necessary.

UPDATE III: The House has now also voted in favor of the FISA amendments by a vote of 227-183 (h/t EJ). A total of 41 Democrats voted in favor.