Via Think Progress:

Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

Lee’s immigration screed bears a troubling resemblance to views and policies espoused by anti-immigrant groups such as NumbersUSA, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Progressives for Immigration Reform, and others. Just this past month, FAIR released “The Environmentalist’s Guide to a Sensible Immigration Policy.” The report connects immigration to “pollution, sprawl, congestion, and ecological degradation,” complaining that “so-called environmentalists pretend as if this connection does not exist.” As usual, FAIR prescribes an overall reduction in immigration as the solution to the country’s environmental woes (in slightly more diplomatic terms).

This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.

I always allow myself to get hopeful when peace talks break out on the Middle East, and my hopes are always dashed. But, there were some very fine statements made tonight at the opening dinner. They are worth a read. No doubt there are little clues riddled throughout that signal where real problems lie, but the sentiments are seemingly sincere. Even Netanyahu’s statement showed more enthusiasm that I would have expected. But, you know, these may be fine words, but they are still just words.

Somehow, when something like this happens, it makes a lot of other things seem petty. Here’s hoping it comes to something.

Written by Sarah Stoesz for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty landed three punches to the people of the state this week.

First he rejected federal funding for the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), which would have provided nearly $1 million in federal funding to the state for comprehensive sex education.

At the same time, he accepted federal monies for abstinence-only initiatives.

On Tuesday, he released an Executive Order barring state agencies from submitting any applications to the federal government in connection with requests for grant funding for programs and projects connected with the federal health care reform bill.

The effect is to deny people access to $1 billion in desperately needed health-care dollars, including nearly $1 million in teen pregnancy and STI prevention dollars, while bringing in $500,000 (with $379,000 required from the state) for failed abstinence-only programs.

You can do the math, but you can’t begin to calculate the damage. Read more

This post originally appeared on Think Progress.

Earlier this week, when the Daily Caller asked neoconservative war hawk John Bolton if he wanted to run for president in 2012, the former (recess-appointed) U.N. ambassador wouldn’t rule out the possibility. “You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that…there is a limit to what that accomplishes,” he said. But today on Fox News, Bolton indicated that he’s getting more interested in making a run for the White House, saying, “I’m not saying ‘no’”:

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When candidates have to raise millions of dollars just to run a competitive campaign, they’re going to turn to wealthy donors, and the voice of the everyday American isn’t going to be heard. It’s time we take the “for sale” sign off the Capitol lawn. We can’t afford the price we’re paying for corporate-sponsored government.

Jim, Barb, Dominica and Chuck, featured in the video above, can’t afford to compete with the influence of corporate donations. When Washington makes decisions regarding their lives, they are not the people getting meetings with lawmakers. Instead, corporate lobbyists come to collect on prior donations made. And the end result means working people suffer from legislative decisions that benefit the rich.

As long as politicians are accountable to the corporations and lobbyists who finance their campaigns, they’re never going to be accountable to the people that elected them. It’s time ordinary Americans had their voices heard. Our elected officials should be concerned with solving our problems and concerns, not those of special interests who can afford to pay for special treatment.

The only way to make Congress accountable to working Americans is to have Fair Elections, where a coal miner’s voice can be heard as clearly as the owner of that mine. We need to put elections back in the hands of ordinary Americans.

It’s time we return government to of, by, and for the people, not government bought and paid for by special interests.

Join us today in demanding Fair Elections Now.

“If we are to remain leaders in the green economy, then we have to be relentless in our pursuit of clean energy. We have to constantly evaluate all aspects of our energy footprint. Find opportunities to collaborate and partner with other companies and organizations. And as one of Nike’s long-held business maxims so aptly declares, never stop evolving, especially when it involves doing the right thing.”–Sarah Severn, director of stakeholder mobilization for Nike Inc., August 17, 2010

So much for evolution, NIKE.

Still embroiled in infamous sweatshop practices, NIKE is now running an ad with a background of a massive strip-mine or mountaintop removal operation in one of the most bizarre panders to Big Coal–and one of the most disrespectful slights of coal miners.

As part of their Pro Combat football uniforms, Nike’s campaign is being run under the guise as a “tribute to the hardworking people of the Mountain State, as well as the fallen miners in the Upper Big Branch disaster in April.”

Instead of featuring underground miners, such as those who died at the Upper Big Branch disaster, Nike features an open strip mine with a dramatic voice over: “It’s just the way things are done in West Virginia.”

It gets even worse.

In an act of total disrespect, Nike claims the West Virginia University football players put their lives on the line every day, just like coal miners.

What? Over 104,000 coal miners have died in disasters and accidents in our mines; over 10,000 coal miners still die each decade from black lung.

How many football players die?

And just how are coal miners benefitting from Nike’s ad? The sports company made over $19 billion in revenue last year–how much is Nike donating to the Upper Big Branch family fund, or to the United Mine Workers or to black lung programs?

According to a recent report, West Virginia loses more than $97.5 million in expenses to support the coal industry.

Before buying into this sickening pander to Big Coal, WVU should read the studies of its own professors. Last year, a WVU study found that “coal mining costs Appalachians five times more in early deaths as the industry provides to the region in jobs, taxes and other economic benefits.”

Instead of honoring fallen coal miners, WVU is already accepting blood money from Big Coal barons Murray and Massey–the companies responsible for the Crandall Canyon disaster and the Upper Big Branch disaster.

Meanwhile, Nike’s blatant advertisement for devastating strip-mining and mountaintop removal operations, which have destroyed over 500 mountains—what are the WVU “Mountaineers” going to be called if they lose their mountains?–poisoned 2,000 miles of streams, left communities in ruin and poverty, and led to the largest forced removal of American citizens in a century, is one of the most offensive images in years.

Nike needs to pull the ads. More importantly, the company owes the mountaineers and coal miners more respect—if not a contribution, as their company representative claimed last week, toward a clean energy future.

At the turn of the 20^th Century, smoke meant jobs. When noxious fumes spewed from factory stacks, workers brought home paychecks. Industries hired. The future was bright as molten iron flowing from a blast furnace.

In industrial Pittsburgh’s heyday, the smoke was so dense streetlights remained lit at noon. White collar workers changed soot-covered shirts mid-day. The region’s residents suffered high rates of asthma and emphysema. In 1948, an inversion trapped industrial pollution in a small town south of Pittsburgh, killing 20.

Smoke also meant death and disease.

Now, however, good-paying industrial jobs need not exact untimely death from workers and their families. In fact, it’s the opposite. Development of clean renewable energy generators – the likes of wind turbines, solar cells, biomass – would create family-supporting industrial jobs in America and would reinforce traditional manufacturing jobs in the U.S., including those in steel mills, solar cell fabrication plants and wind turbine factories, such as those built by Gamesa in Pennsylvania.

Labor unions and environmental groups are pressing for passage of policies like a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and comprehensive climate change legislation that would promote transition to a clean energy economy.

To prod lawmakers to act, the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of those labor unions and enviromentalists, conducted a three-week, 17-state, 30-city barnstorm during August in an energy-efficient, American-made, carbon-neutral bus. At events in each city, BlueGreen activists told attendees, “The Job’s Not Done,” and urged them to tell their U.S. Senators it’s not a choice between clean air and jobs. The choice is leaving a legacy of environmental hell or bequeathing climate unchanged.

In an 1868 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, writer James Parton described with awe the atmosphere created by industrial Pittsburgh’s iron and glass works, its foundries and its coke ovens:

“On the evening of this dark day, we were conducted to the edge of the abyss, and looked over the iron railing upon the most striking spectacle we ever beheld. The entire space lying between the hills was filled with blackest smoke, from out of which the hidden chimneys sent forth tongues of flame, while from the depths of the abyss came up the noise of hundreds of steam-hammers. There would be moments when no flames were visible; but soon the wind would force the smoky curtains aside, and the whole black expanse would be dimly lighted with dull wreaths of fire. It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting; but if any one would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into–hell with the lid taken off.”

Beautiful as he found it, Parton added this:

“The first feeling of the stranger is one of compassion for the people who are compelled to live in such an atmosphere. When hard pressed, a son of Pittsburg will not deny that the smoke has its inconveniences.”

Pittsburgh took measures to clean its air. Smoke no longer turns the city’s days to night. But the town, like every other, still suffers the effect of pollution. It is the greenhouse gas pollution causing global climate change, which is associated with extreme weather events like the Katrina hurricane that killed 1,800 five years ago, floods this summer that killed 1,600 in Pakistan and 1,100 in China and unprecedented heat and uncontrolled wildfires that killed thousands this year in Russia.

Even former Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce concede climate change is real. They’re just towing the usual Republican party line of “no” to anything proposed by Democrats or the Environmental Protection Agency to correct it. The Chamber, for example says it supports strong action on climate change, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but it opposed legislation that would cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Chamber, at one point, called for the EPA to hold “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” to debate whether climate change is man-made.

The Chamber’s position prompted high-profile members to quit, including Apple and public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon.

Another big name company, Nike, resigned from the Chamber board of directors. It explained the defection:

“Nike believes that climate change is an urgent issue affecting the world today and that businesses and their representative associations need to take an active role to invest in sustainable business practices and innovative solutions to address the issue. It is not a time for debate but instead a time for action and we believe the Chamber’s recent petition sets back important work currently being undertaken by EPA on this issue.”

Like Nike, Senators should do what’s right – pass a Renewable Electricity Standard and a comprehensive climate change bill.

They need to stop thinking about their re-election and start thinking about their grandchildren. They need to pass climate legislation that would support American jobs and avert hell.

Candidates have been in their districts, making nice to likely mid-term voters. They’re more scarce than general election voters, and typically a more polarized bunch. What if there were more of them and more low-income people, particularly women, were in the mix?

In a country where 131 million people voted in the 2008 presidential election, a few million more voters sprinkled across the states, just might make a difference. In a handful of swing states, voting rights groups have sued and won voting rights for hundreds of thousands of low-income people, two-thirds of them women, in the last few years.

The results are impressive. In Missouri, where John McCain beat Barack Obama by less than 4,000 votes, nearly a quarter-million voter registration applications have been filed by people applying for state public assistance since August ‘08. In Ohio, where George W. Bush beat John Kerry by nearly 119,000 votes in 2004, low-income Ohioans filed 100,000 voter applications in just the first six months of 2010.

Project Vote, Demos, The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the local civil rights groups who sued these states and won have been waging a lonely fight to implement the National Voter Registration Act. The 1993 law requires a range of state agencies, not just motor vehicles, to offer voter registration services.

That fight became a little less lonely in June, when, for the first time, the Justice Department announced it would start enforcing the NVRA’s voter registration mandate. This isn’t rocket science. This April, 40 million Americans applied for food stamps. If even 10 percent of those people registered to vote – the nation’s voter rolls would get a millions-strong boost.

The numbers from from Missouri and Ohio dwarf the size of the largest Tea Party rallies and already, right-wingers fear these voters and NVRA compliance, commenting on websites that poor people should not vote for any number of ugly reasons. Now it’s up to other candidates to pay attention to voters who’ve until now been overlooked. Instead of obsessing about the Tea Partiers — give those newest voters some good reason to use that vote!

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Support us by signing up for our podcast, and follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

The CBC Foundation does more to help itself than the disadvantaged.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson has broken the rules of ethics.

I have tried to reserve judgment on the many ethics violations facing members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Two, at least, seem a bit suspect. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), a high-ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, is being investigated because she helped set up a meeting for OneUnited Bank. Her husband owns stock in the bank. But OneUnited is one of the only primarily black-owned banks in the country, and you could argue that she was there to support black-owned businesses in California, as that is a personal and professional passion of hers.

Another investigation into Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA), another CBC member, seems just silly. Her Sacramento home is apparently in foreclosure and the ethics panel claims that mowing and gardening done to her property by her neighbors constituted “improper gifts.” This probe seems to be completely def when it comes to how foreclosed properties affect the assessed value of neighboring homes, not to mention the potential for increased vandalism they pose for neighboring homes. Her neighbors were likely just being “good neighbors” or they may have been looking out for themselves. In any case, it looks like nit-picking.

Just as I was about to go along with CBC’s cries of racism and targeted investigations, in walks Texas Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. This woman is absolutely shameless. She has admitted to steering 23 scholarships to her own relatives. Scholarships that were meant to go to needy students. Then, she turns around and claims it was a mistake. Oh, you forgot they were your grandchildren and not disadvantaged kids from the hood?

Read More:

• Thousands dead in Iraq, a trillion spent, it’s time to move on
• Segregated schools, proms … when will Mississippi join the 21st century?
• Is overheated talk-show rhetoric to blame for attacks on Muslims, Latinos?

According to Federal Tax records, the CBC Foundation spent more on the caterer for its signature dinner and conference — roughly $700,000 — than it gave out in scholarships in 2008. The CBC has been using its “Foundation” for years to accept corporate donations denied to other legislative bodies, and they have been allowed to do so because they make these altruistic claims about the intent of the foundation.

But in my opinion, it’s the money that really does the talking here. Between 2004 and 2008, the CBC received at least $55 million in corporate and union donations (and from some real winners like cigarette companies, Internet poker operators, beer brewers and the rent-to-own industry).

It spent only $1 million on its Political Action Committees. The rest of the money was essentially laundered through various nonprofits by way of the CBC Foundation. Annual spending on the events like its prayer breakfast sponsored by Coca-Cola and several dozen policy workshops typically sponsored by other corporations, has more than doubled since 2001, costing $3.9 million in 2008. More than $350,000 went to the official decorator and nearly $400,000 to contractors for lighting and show production. By comparison, the caucus spent $372,000 on internships in 2008.

Now digest that, then consider that seven of its 42 members are under investigation. Then, consider former Jesse Jackson Jr. and the fact that he was embroiled in the scandal surrounding President Obama’s senate seat. Think about and remember that jigging Charlie Rangel did at this birthday party, while facing 13 ethics violations.

Think about that, and recall that trip the CBC took to St. Martin, the one they claimed was paid for by a nonprofit foundation run by a newspaper. But as it turns out was bankrolled by Citigroup, Pfizer and AT&T.

I will continue to withhold judgment on Waters and I am pretty sure that Richardson is innocent. But the CBC is dirty. It spends the bulk of its money, much of which is received by questionable sources, lavishing itself. Then when the few pennies slip between the cracks of Caribbean trips and high-priced decorators to its scholarship program, then Eddie Bernice Johnson manages to find a way to divert even that for her own benefit?

I’m done.

Read the story.

It’s limiting to see the billionaire Koch Brothers’ funding of arguments against big government and socialism as hypocritical in light of their pursuit of big government money and ties to socialism. “Hypocritical” is a rational conclusion, but in cases where you’re talking about business-funded ideology, it strikes me as a perspective that doesn’t generate any kind of serious economic outrage, doesn’t lead anywhere, except to say that there’s an inconsistency there.

When a business interest funds an ideology the point is to use it to get richer and more powerful. Along the way, there is a visionary dimension as well; the person might actually believe in what they are funding and not make the connection that their income isn’t in sync, they might knowingly fund a cause in spite of their business that they may personally have come to detest, or sometimes it’s an interesting way to project a defense of your own sins; much in the way that slave owners of the past frequently talked about their moral duty to teach their slaves not to be so lazy using corporal punishment. Looking at the Kochs’ approach, my sense is that it’s mostly to get rich and powerful, with a dash of sin projection tossed in, and a sprinkle or two of genuine belief.

So now for the juice promised in the headline: my colleague Yasha Levine has penned a very devastating article for the New York Observer on 7 ways the Kochs make their money that really doesn’t jibe with the ideology that they pour tens of millions into every year (to further their power and wealth). More devastating than Jane Mayer, whose only real punch in her New Yorker feature on the Koch brothers I thought was to link to David Koch being on the National Cancer Advisory Board while his company lobbyied to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde as a carcinogen. The Kochs produce 2.2 billion pounds of it a year. (Most folks are going to miss that, because in typical East Coast elite journalism fashion, it was buried deep near the end of the article).

Levine’s article lands real punches. Thanks to Levine, here’s what we know:

1.  — “In 1998, Koch Industries entered into a lucrative partnership with two state-owned companies-one Venezuelan, the other Italian-to open a massive $1 billion nitrogen-based fertilizer plant in Venezuela called Fertinitro. … For Koch Industries, whose role in the partnership is to unload half of the 6 million tons of fertilizer produced by Fertinitro every year on the American market, that equals up to $123.6 million in subsidies every year.” Get that? A billion-dollar double partnership with two state-owned companies.

2. – “Two years before founding the influential Cato Institute, Charles Koch bought a supertanker from a communist regime.”

3. — “For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador … has something in the neighborhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit.”

4. — “In 2006, Koch Industries acquired pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific for a $21-billion cash payment, allowing the Koch brothers to tap into a whole new area of government largesse: the ability to log public forests for private gain and have taxpayers cover the operating costs.”

5. — “Just two weeks ago, Koch Industries got into the ethanol business by buying two ethanol plants in Iowa. Other than defense, ethanol is possibly the most subsidized industry in America.”

6. — “As far as libertarians are concerned, eminent domain is a socialist tyranny straight out of the Leninist playbook, as it recognizes the government as the real owner of all land and vests it with the power to expropriate private property for alleged public good. … Charles Koch is clear on this. “Countries that clearly define and protect individual private property rights stimulate investment and grow,” he writes in his book The Science of Success. “Those that threaten and confiscate private property lose capital and decline. .. Koch Industries oil pipeline recently built in Minnesota shows that Charles Koch does not see an is anything wrong with the government confiscating private property, as long as he stands to make a profit. Completed in 2008, the 304-mile line now carries crude oil from the Canadian border to a Koch Industries refinery near the Twin Cities area via a two-foot-wide pipe. ….  “1,000-plus landowners who were forced to handover their private property so that Koch Industries could run its pipeline…”

7. — “Before Fredrick Koch suddenly developed a pinko paranoia and helped start up the John Birch Society, he was making piles of cash laying the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure in the 1920s and early 1930s.”

Well done, Yasha. Bravo New York Observer for having the guts to say this in the New York media market. (Will it appear in print?) Compare what New York Magazine did for the Kochs: Uber-investigative journalist Charles Lewis casually told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman last week that the “fawning” profile on David Koch they published was essentially “planted” as a kind of prebuttal to soften the blows of Mayer’s profile. Levine and his partner Mark Ames were there to document the birth moment of the Tea Party, when no one else was paying attention, and the first to tie it to… the Koch-funded Freedom Works. Credit to them both on this.

Levine’s case is lock-tight — the Kochs make a fortune through state government welfare — American and Venezuelan — in all kinds of ways. Forget “hypocrisy” — I want to cut off the Kochs’ access to our money, common wealth and private property, which they in turn use to fund an ideology that makes it harder for normal people to get their own fair share and enjoy on some kind of human, as opposed to billionaire-inhuman, scale.