Duty to Warn

Among the names on the apparent short list for Barack Obama's all-important choice as Secretary of Energy is that of John Bryson, former head of Southern California Edison.

As the embodiment of greenwashed corporate piracy and radioactive public bailouts, Bryson's appointment would send a terrible message.

Bryson is now being hyped as "an advocate of hybrid cars." No doubt he is reinventing his image. On a personal basis, he may be the finest of individuals.

But John Bryson will forever epitomize the bailout of the nuke power industry and the horrific catastrophe of electric utility deregulation, including the contrived energy crisis that cost Californians tens of billions of dollars and allowed them to be robbed by the disgraced Enron.

Early in his career, Bryson helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council. Under Jerry Brown he headed the California Public Utilities Commission, where he played a role in the installation of some 17,000 windmills. He also sold his soul---and much of California's---to the nuke power industry.

Women are well on the way to overtaking men in the ranks of organized labor -- and for good reason. As a new study shows, women who’ve joined unions have significantly better pay and benefits than working women who have not joined.

Although only about a fifth of women workers overall currently belong to unions, they already make up about 45 percent of all unionized workers. They’re expected to become a majority within a dozen years, according to the study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The study makes clear the advantages of union membership that have attracted increasing numbers of women. Unionized women, for instance, average 11 percent or about $2 an hour more than non-union women. Three-fourths of union women have employer-financed health care benefits, but only about half their non-union counterparts have those benefits. Three-fourths of the unionized women have pensions, less than half of those outside unions have pensions.

Like other unionized workers, they also can expect paid holidays and vacations and premium pay for overtime work.

The war regroups. What if Barack Obama, as he pursues his pragmatic strategy that so far seems to be 10 parts “reassurance” (to the defense and financial establishment) to one part “change,” is really finished with his anti-war base for the next four years?

I don’t know if this is true, but his early moves in the game are gasp-inducing in the extreme: Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel “still refuse to renounce their votes in favor of the (Iraq) war,” Jeremy Scahill writes in The Guardian U.K. And then, of course, Robert Gates, Bush’s own secretary of defense, will keep his job, and James Jones, retired commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, will become national security advisor, creating what starts to look like a serious war cabinet.

I feel a bad case of betrayal coming on.

“What ultimately ties Obama’s team together,” Scahill writes, “is their unified support for the classic U.S. foreign policy recipe: the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism to defend the America First doctrine.”

Barry Bonds is excited. “Really excited!” he exclaims. ”It’s awesome … really gets your blood pumpin’!”

Ah, he must mean how it felt blasting those record-breaking 762 homeruns during his quarter-century as a Major League Baseball superstar. No, his baseball career behind him, Barry is finding his excitement elsewhere these days. He keeps the adrenalin flowing by shooting and killing animals for fun and profit as a spokesman for Christensen Arms, a Utah company specializing in high-powered hunting rifles.

You can see Barry at work in a new seven-minute online video, shot for his employer in the woods of Saskatchewan. He seems to be enjoying himself immensely, laughing, shouting gleefully, seemingly breathless with excitement, as dramatic background music pulses loudly.

Barry’s uniformed head to foot in camouflage gear and armed with one of Christensen Arms’ very best products – “a tremendous rifle …a no-kick baby, a beautiful gun…If you ever get a chance to get one, get one.”

Seventeen years and three wars later, the ghosts of Operation Desert Storm — the cancers, the chronic headaches and dizziness, the fibromyalgia, the ALS and so much more that have stalked returning vets, whose medical claims have been denied, ignored, relegated to the paper shredder — have just gotten a reality upgrade.

“The extensive body of scientific research now available consistently indicates that Gulf War illness is real, that it is the result of neurotoxic exposures during Gulf War deployment, and that few veterans have recovered or substantially improved with time.”

Thus concludes the 452-page report of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, presented last week to Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake. Suddenly the government has several hundred thousand medical claims emanating from a few months in 1991 it has to start taking seriously — and that’s the easy part.

Statement from the Steering Committee for the Prosecution for War Crimes of President Bush and His Subordinates

Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The closest thing to this in U.S. history thus far has been Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Bush is widely expected to follow that commutation with a pardon. Not only did Libby work for the White House, but he was convicted of obstruction of justice in an investigation that was headed to the president. Evidence introduced in the trial, including a hand-written note by the vice president, implicated Bush, and former press secretary Scott McClellan has since testified that Bush authorized the exposure of an undercover agent, that being the crime that was under investigation.