Can I call you Sarah? I know you like to do the Just Folks thing, so I assume you'll allow me to call you Sarah, right? I mean, it's not like you ever took that whole governor gig all that seriously, anyway. I mean, other than the fun publicity and photo ops and stuff! But the work stuff, not so much. Granted, you didn't fly off to Argentina to hike the Appalachian trail, but other than using positions of power to harass your enemies or reward your family and friends, that daily grind of holding public office was a bit too much of a daily grind, right? Well, at least the daily grind of holding such a lowly office as governor of Alaska. Which is not yet an independent nation, much to your husband's consternation!

But Sarah, I just want you to know that I support you. I know you lust madly to be president. It's hard not to laugh at the idea, and I appreciate your sense of humor, or at least your delusions of sanity, but gee, gosh, if Nancy Reagan could fill a wing of the Smithsonian with her First Lady outfits, imagine the wardrobe you'd get being president! And I support you in your aspirations! Not to mention your hallucinations! I'm a very liberal Democrat, but I'm behind you all the way! I want you to tout that to your stenographers and biographers, and sing it to the wind, as often as you can. Which is a lot more fun than doing something else in the wind. Even though you're very good at that!

But this liberal Democrat does hope you'll run for president. Maybe you can even wear your cute running outfit! You can primp and preen and wink and smile and drop your g's, and give extremely pathetic right wing propagandists the vapors. And you even have a few more years to memorize the names of newspapers and magazines, so the next time a cruel and nasty interviewer asks what you read, you can be more plausible in your claim of even knowing how to! And you can win! Your primary primary opponents are dropping like flies in sweltering summer. Dropping like flies in sweltering summer in a rancid, stinking barn, which is pretty much what your party has become. That's the Republican Party, Sarah, not the other one. The one that really stole your husband's heart, but that isn't considered acceptable even among the cognitively challenged base of the only party that is your only hope of winning you the presidency.

Winning you the presidency...

You...

Okay, sorry. It's hard to write that without laughing out loud. I'm really trying, here, Sarah, so please bear with me...

Bear...

These jokes just write themselves...

So, anyway, I do hope you'll run for president, in three years. Hell, I hope you'll run for president in seven years, too! And why not eleven years?! You're young! You can run every four years for decades! And I hope you do! And you can tout your bipartisan appeal, because liberal Democrats such as myself will be behind you, all the way! Well, at least part of the way. Hoping you run! Hoping you win the nomination! Hoping to see you on stage, debating actual political issues with President Obama! Showing us all what you can do! Gosh, it's fun watching you showing us all what you can do! It's inspiring! In a sort of side-splitting kind of way!

So, good luck to you, Sarah! Keep up the good work!

Work...

Okay, I again apologize. But no one in the Republican Party ever claimed work was a prerequisite for becoming president. For getting food stamps and health care, maybe, but certainly not for becoming president!

So, I just want to say that I hope you'll keep doing whatever it is that you do. Posing for puff piece photo ops in deeply profound political magazines such as Runners World. Things like that. Things that prove you qualified to be the Republican presidential nominee. Things that enable us to learn so much about you. Because the more we learn, the more we love you. Go for it, Sarah! Please run! Please be nominated!

With seriously profound admiration,

Turkana

From a January article in Scientific American:

Most of us are aware that our cars, our coal-generated electric power and even our cement factories adversely affect the environment. Until recently, however, the foods we eat had gotten a pass in the discussion. Yet according to a 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), our diets and, specifically, the meat in them cause more greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, and the like to spew into the atmosphere than either transportation or industry.

More specifically:

In 1999 Susan Subak, an ecological economist then at the University of East Anglia in England, found that, depending on the production method, cows emit between 2.5 and 4.7 ounces of methane for each pound of beef they produce. Because methane has roughly 23 times the global-warming potential of CO2, those emissions are the equivalent of releasing between 3.6 and 6.8 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere for each pound of beef produced.

Raising animals also requires a large amount of feed per unit of body weight. In 2003 Lucas Reijnders of the University of Amsterdam and Sam Soret of Loma Linda University estimated that producing a pound of beef protein for the table requires more than 10 pounds of plant protein with all the emissions of greenhouse gases that grain farming entails. Finally, farms for raising animals produce numerous wastes that give rise to greenhouse gases.

In February, Science News added this:

How big?

For instance, roughly half of the GHG emissions due to human diets come from meat even though beef, pork and chicken together account for only about 14 percent of what people eat.

From a climate perspective, beef is in a class by itself. It takes a lot of energy and other natural resources to produce cattle feed, manage the animals’ manure (a major emitter of methane, a potent GHG), get the livestock to market, slaughter the animals, process and package the meat, dispose of the greater part of the carcass that won’t be human food, market the retail cuts, transport them home from the store, refrigerate them until dinner time, and then cook the beef.

Tally the GHG emissions associated with all of those activities, Sonesson says, and you’ll find it’s the global-warming equivalent to spewing 19 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kg of beef served. Swine are more environmentally friendly. It only takes about 4.25 kg of CO2 to produce and fry each kg of pork. At the other end of the spectrum are veggies. The climate costs associated with growing, marketing, peeling and boiling up a kg of potatoes, by contrast, is just 280 grams, Sonesson reported.

The article explains that the process of producing grass-fed beef cattle is actually worse than that of producing corn-fed beef cattle. There's no good answer other than reducing consumption of beef. Replacing all beef production with chicken production would reduce the carbon footprint by seventy percent. Reducing the developed world's beef consumption by less than half, to a level the U.S. Department of Agriculture says still is healthy, would reduce the associated emissions by about forty-four percent.

Simply put, if you're a meat-eater, and you want to make a personal contribution to the effort to ameliorate climate stress, reducing or eliminating your consumption of beef would be a great step. But there's another reason to reduce your beef intake, and it's also a very personal one. Your health.

The BBC is reporting on a new study published in the British Journal of Cancer, which found that vegetarians and pescetarians are less likely than meat eaters to get certain types of cancer. The study followed 61,566 people.

The researchers said they found marked differences between meat-eaters and vegetarians in the propensity to cancers of the lymph and the blood, with vegetarians just over half as likely to develop these forms of the disease.

In the case of multiple myeloma, a relatively rare cancer of the bone marrow, vegetarians were 75% less likely to develop the disease than meat-eaters.

The reduction was less notable for fish-eaters with these cancers. The reasons, researchers said, were unclear, but potential mechanisms could include viruses and mutation-causing compounds in meat - or alternatively that vegetables confer special protection.

There were also striking differences in rates of stomach cancer. Although the numbers of cases were small, fish-eaters and vegetarians were about a third as likely to develop the disease as meat-eaters.

The study is free, online, and opens with this explanation:

Vegetarians do not eat meat or fish. Meat has been suspected of influencing the risk for several types of cancer. For example, in the systematic review by the WCRF/AICR (World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute for Cancer Research), an expert panel concluded that both red meat and processed meat are convincing causes of colorectal cancer, and that there was some evidence suggesting that high intakes of red or processed meat increased the risk for cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, pancreas, lung, endometrium and prostate (WCRF/AICR, 2007).

A few prospective studies have been established with the aim of studying the long-term health of vegetarians, and have used recruitment methods designed to ensure that a substantial number of the participants were vegetarians. Some findings on cancer incidence rates in vegetarians have been reported from the Adventist Health Study in California (Fraser, 1999), the Oxford Vegetarian Study (Sanjoaquin et al, 2004), the UK Women's Cohort Study (Taylor et al, 2007) and EPIC-Oxford (Key et al, 2009). These reports included data for only a few cancer sites. To provide more information on cancer incidence in vegetarians, in this study, we report on the incidence of malignant cancer at 20 sites or groups of sites, plus all incident malignant cancers combined, in a pooled analysis of data from two prospective studies in the United Kingdom, namely the Oxford Vegetarian Study (Appleby et al, 1999) and the EPIC-Oxford cohort (Davey et al, 2003).

And the Guardian adds:

Co-author Naomi Allen, from the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, said: "Previous research has found that processed meat may increase the risk of stomach cancer, so our findings that vegetarians and fish eaters are at lower risk is plausible. But we do not know why cancer of the blood is lower in vegetarians."

She said the differences in cancer risks were independent of other lifestyle factors including smoking, alcohol intake and obesity.

However, Allen urged caution over the interpretation of the findings. "It is a significant difference, but we should be a bit cautious since it is the first study showing that the risk of cancer of the blood is lower in vegetarians. We need to know what aspect of a fish and vegetarian diet is protecting against cancer. Is it the higher fibre intake, higher intake of fruit and vegetables, is it just meat per se?"

The study also reported that the total cancer incidence was significantly lower among both the fish eaters and the vegetarians compared with meat eaters.

The article says that in 2007, the World Cancer Research Fund found a link between red and processed meat and cancer of the bowel, and that a 2005 study funded by the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that eating two portions of red meat a day raised the risk of bowel cancer by 35%.

In the BBC report, the study's lead author, Tim Key, says it's too early to be able to ask for dramatic changes in people's eating habits, as it's only one study; but it certainly calls for more research. The numbers are striking, but exact causality has yet to be determined. As the study itself concludes:

Total cancer incidence was significantly lower among both fish eaters and vegetarians than among meat eaters. This difference in total cancer incidence between meat eaters and non-meat eaters could not be ascribed to any one of the major cancer sites examined. We are unaware of other data comparing total cancer incidence in meat eaters and non-meat eaters, and the reason for this small difference is not known. More data are needed to further our understanding of this observation, which if confirmed is likely to be due to differences for specific cancer sites.

The results presented in this study are simply descriptive of the incidence of cancer in fish eaters and vegetarians relative to meat eaters. More detailed analyses of individual cancer sites are needed to explore, for example, whether the differences observed might be linked to particular types of meat or to other dietary or lifestyle characteristics of non-meat eaters that were not adjusted for in the current analysis.

A potential weakness of this type of study is the accuracy of the assessment of vegetarian status. The diet group was assigned on the basis of the answer to four questions, asking specifically about whether participants ever ate meat, fish, dairy products and eggs. When the diet group in EPIC-Oxford was assigned on the basis of answers to the same four questions in a follow-up questionnaire 5 years later, 85% of the vegetarians were allocated to the same diet group as at the time of recruitment (Key et al, 2009), suggesting that the assessment of vegetarian status is accurate and stable over at least several years, and may be a substantially more stable dietary characteristic than epidemiological estimates of nutrient intakes.

In conclusion, this study suggests that the incidence of all malignant neoplasms combined may be lower among both fish eaters and vegetarians than among meat eaters. The most striking finding was the relatively low risk for cancers of the lymphatic and haematopoietic tissues among vegetarians.

In conclusion, what to eat is about as personal a choice as any of us can make. None of us are pure. None of us are perfect. But it is always important that our choices be informed.

If you are interested in environmental issues, please join DK GreenRoots, a new environmental advocacy group created by Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily. DK GreenRoots comprises bloggers at Daily Kos and eco-advocates from other sites. We focus on a broad range of issues and are always open to new ones. Over the coming weeks and months, DK Greenroots will initiate a variety of environmental projects, some political and some having nothing directly to do with politics at all. Some projects may involve the creation of eco working groups that can be used for a variety of actions, including implementing political action or drafting proposed legislation. We are in exciting times now because for the first time in decades, significant environmental legislation will be passed by Congress. It is far easier to achieve real change if our proposal is on the table rather than fighting rearguard actions. We alert each other to important eco-stories in the mainstream media and on the Internet, promote bloggers at one site to readers at other sites, connect bloggers of similar interests to each other and discuss crucial eco-issues. Come help us put these projects together. Bring ideas of your own. There is no limit on what we can accomplish together.

Please have a wonderful Fourth of July, everyone. I’ll check in when I can.

"Alaska would be hard to give up because it is such a part of who I am. So much of my life revolves around the great outdoors that that would be kind of tough," Palin said. "But on the other hand, I think of being in D.C. and in a position to promote physical fitness and the benefits of making good decisions health-wise and being an example to others, and I know that could do some good for our country."

It's hard to argue with that, right?

Shocking Update: Sarah Palin to resign as Alaskan governor.

An answer from the most excellent Mahablog is not an inability of the Executive to perform, but the inherent intended structure of Congress allowing a minority to obstruct. A better answer from the excellent O’Brien is not the current Republican ability to obstruct real progress, but that Congress itself is busted.

It should have been screamingly obvious that this blatant electoral failure posed extreme risks to the Democracy, if in fact the Democracy exists at all after that electoral failure. Not surprisingly the national Democracy has been smashed to shit, what a shock that Bush, stealer of the election, would be the worst of all time. We just can’t believe it here that Arnie, foul usurper to a perfectly good election, is a terrible monster doing everything he can to smash our parks, children, most vulnerable among us and our State workers. No one saw this coming, no way.

I seem to be very much in the minority in this stance, it seems. After Bush and Arnie I truly wonder if we even have a Democracy, while everyone else seems to insist of course we do, we horribly failed twice in a row even to hold elections but never mind! America is America, don’t you know that? We can’t hold valid elections but we’re a Democracy, I tell you, just look around, it is so. Okay.

Anyway, if in fact we’re a Democracy without the ability to hold elections consistently the current national results, as O’Brien says, are nothing but god damn failure anyway. We seem to be used to it, but for outsiders the sight of a Republican rep bought and paid for by the oil companies ranting on the floor of the House (it happened many times last week) that global warming was a hoax—to applause!—was a glaring, vivid example of total American political system failure, not just minority Republican power.

Another way to look at it comes from an excellent comment I saw recently at Hullabaloo: the United States is now a one-Party system. We have the Democrats, who are timid, right-leaning centrists who somehow forgot the horrors of war and military spending, and then we have the Republicans, who have gone stark raving mad and twisted themselves to oblivion. After watching the Republican performance on climate change last week, how is that not an accurate thesis?

We’re supposed to be a two-party system, but the Republicans aren’t protecting minority rights, they’re blowing the place up. Hmm.

I’d feel a lot better agreeing with the mountainous audacity of that statement if in fact I felt we had gotten out of the Bush woods, so to speak, on a road of real political, economic and environmental recovery out of the gross failure initiated by the Supreme Court in 2000. It’s scary how desperately some cling to the concept of “green shoots” in this utter flaming economic debacle that could easily get a lot worse if California and other states bring the ghost of Hoover alive—assuming everything else goes all right, like the GM bankruptcy, which is no given at all.

Have the Republicans—Arnie, Bush, Greenspan, Scalia, Cheney—really inflicted so much damage that for decades we’ll have to live in a sad political and economic shell of what we should have been, with much like the old sad pathetic political games and charades of the 20th century Soviets? Global warming is a hoax, tax cuts produce revenue, Sarah Palin is our leader. We’re certainly trying, aren’t we?

I’m reminded how ordinary things seemed in the very civilized, pretty Berlin in the 1930’s, the clean parks, brilliant operas, stately museums and orchestras. Seasons passed so normally as one year the books burned, the next year more Jews were hounded and gone. Total political failure seemed so ordinary, plain and slow, with much of everything else appearing exactly the same.

Is that what where going through now, watching some insane Republican rant global warming is a hoax while Arnie the Hoover god smashes California? I don’t know, of course not. It’s extremely upsetting and terrible for the country the question has to be asked at all.

The news itself was bad enough in many elements with the predictably atrocious journalism from the Washington Post, but most of all I grieved for Pam and hope she’s all right (her blog still hums along this morning). I don’t know her personally, of course, but this issue is obviously extremely personal to her and the knife of betrayal hurts for her in a way I can’t understand, and it will take a long time to heal.

"They know the consequences of '94. It looms," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said of the legislative debacles in President Bill Clinton's early tenure that produced the 1994 Republican landslide. "That division led to failure. . . .”

This is horseshit. Clinton promised to end the ban on gays in the military and it was no big deal at all in the campaign, I precisely remember Jim Lehrer asking why the uproar had occurred in February and not in the Fall. The answer what that Bush couldn’t campaign, which is bull too, it was a classic Republican hissy fit, the Pentagon going along because any Democrat who de-funded their toys had to be hated.

There wasn’t an internet to fight back with then and Clinton folded with this foolish, odious and insulting DADT. It wasn’t division that led to DADT failure, it was weak leadership coupled with a horrendous press. There’s many, many reasons Democrats lost in 1994, and for Emanuel to pin it on DADT divisions is an obnoxious, incorrect, and foolish conclusion.

This is about laying low, not rocking the boat, saving a fight for another day. Why Emanuel insults our intelligence and disseminates this let-us-be-one bullshit is beyond me.

The ultimate delivery of the message is crystal clear and leaves no doubt at all: fuck you and your rights and that silly campaign promise, we changed our minds. We don’t think you can do Jack to us and we’ll take whatever hits you can muster right now. Bring it on, we’ll get it out of the way so we can deal with 2010.

That’s the bitter truth, and although I am dismayed as I said before I’m much more worried about how our brothers and sisters in the LGBT are going to take the news. I’m sorry. We were supposed to be a lot better than this, and I desperately wish there was more I could do.

Before I go the terrible propaganda in the Washington Post delivering this story bears note, even for that paper this is bad, and a huge reason I rarely read anything from that fishwrap anymore.

“After a series of early and relatively easy victories on Capitol Hill, the White House appears certain to face a more difficult road…”

Easy? Who said that? Oh it’s relative, the base logic of the entire thesis of the horrendous piece rests upon whatever the reader decides, which of course could be anything, it’s “relative.” Obama has won legislative victories because Democrats control Executive and Congress, because the public loathes George Bush and Republicans and voted the Democrats in.

Oh but now it’s going to be tough. Why? Obama keeps introducing new bills to solve other problems. Heavens. Of course all the new Democrats force the Party to be “centrists” and screw the liberals. Of course, doesn’t everyone know that? Take our word for it, and this notorious not-liberal Senator Schumner will back us up.

“For the White House, the trick is to keep a firm grip without appearing overly meddlesome.”

You call this reporting, Murray and Balz? Ugh, I call it screamingly obvious propaganda, where in the hell is this universal truth written that you so reverently passed along? From your screw-the-Democrats pointy heads, take off, the entire piece is full of outrageous premises like this.

Obama to be tested. No free pass for Obama, say the titles. Okay, WaPo, we freaking get it. It’s a major reason our leaders keep selling us out, your obvious propaganda, and it continues to grievously hurt my people very much.

As this National Science Foundation report shows, jellyfish swarms can be quite disruptive. In fact, in 1999 a jellyfish swarm shut down a nuclear power plant in the Philippines by clogging the intake pipes.

You can track jellyfish blooms in the United States by using a data feed provided by the US government.

For all the foregoing reasons, we affirm the decision of the trial court that Al Franken received the highest number of votes legally cast and is entitled under Minn. Stat. 204C.40 (2008) to receive the certificate of election as United States Senator from Minnesota.

The ruling does not appear to specifically order the governor to sign the election certificate, but hopefully there won't be any more drama. Congratulations, Senator Franken!

UPDATE: Coleman will hold a press conference at 3:00 Central, Franken will have one at 4:15.
UPDATE 2: Coleman concedes!

My amused disdain was never in the sincere attempt at something “new” by Obama, it was in the ancient political knowledge that opposition parties will…not…let…you pull it off, it seals their fate to oblivion. When Obama proclaims a new way forward free of all the old rancor of the past he’s telling the Republicans: come with me, brothers, as I build one of the greatest Presidency’s of all time that buries you politically for two generations.

Not for a long time, I guess, but they still won’t go happily along with any Obama initiative, it’s in their political DNA to obstruct. They haven’t helped on the stimulus or energy, they’re trying everything they can to blow up health care, and they won’t even help with unwanted pregnancies. As with Atrios, I’m shocked, just shocked, I tell you, at this awful behavior. Terrible.

Anonymous Liberal has the very common reaction of wanting to tear his hair out watching all this, any liberal would, but I’m confident Axelrod, Emanuel and Obama will learn quickly after a year’s worth of stinging failure, any way forward will be hewn as it always has in politics, a fight with those who do not want change.

Nothing wrong and no shame in that, most Americans will of course understand it and accept it, it’s just the sooner the Obama administration aggressively takes on the Republicans the old fashioned way the better.

Congress is currently in recess, what’s done is done, but our great leaders on The Hill have yet to pass health care. They get back to work July 6th, and since naturally no Republicans are helping in any sense the evolution boils down to yanking out real reform from Senate Democrats. Bayh, Baucus, Lieberman, Feinstein…Jesus save us.

One Senate Democrat, even, spent a week espousing failure and capitulation because compromise was necessary for 60 votes. The guy can’t even comprehend a filibuster isn’t possible on the health care vote, let alone that it’s a ridiculous idea anyway. This is why having Republican political opposition in diapers whining about their constant failure is bad for the Democratic Party, it breeds lazy mental habits and dangerous over-confidence.

No, of course not, there won’t be any “new” politics when we get health care reform in July or August—if we get it. Increasingly it becomes clear just to get public option our recalcitrant, obtusely stubborn, ego-besotted Democratic Senators must be brought into line, only they stand in the way.

Dianne Feinstein, heckled and berated into actually representing her constituents, snapped back she could give a whit yesterday, those god damn liberals never meant a thing to her. It’s hard to tell if she’s defensive or sincere, whatever, she better get used to it, because the White House wants health care with a public option and isn’t calling off the dogs to get it.

One supposes whipping and dragging fossilized obnoxious stupid Blue Dog Democrats (Feinstein is my Senator and I took the day off yesterday; after her latest grossly obscene outburst she wasn’t worth ruining my day) isn’t the New Way Forward proclaimed and envisioned by Obama Administration, but it’s where we are, it’s not that bad. Hey it’s new for this century, guys, there’s that at least.

In light of today's ruling, it's a bit difficult -- actually, impossible -- for a rational person to argue that Sotomayor's Ricci decision places her outside the judicial mainstream when: (a) she was affirming the decision of the federal district court judge; (b) she was joined in her decision by the two other Second Circuit judges who, along with her, comprised a unanimous panel; (c) a majority of Second Circuit judges refused to reverse that panel's ruling; and now: (d) four out of the nine Supreme Court Justices -- including the ones she is to replace -- agree with her.

Put another way, 11 out of the 21 federal judges to rule on Ricci ruled as Sotomayor did.  It's perfectly reasonable to argue that she ruled erroneously, but it's definitively unreasonable to claim that her Ricci ruling places her on some sort of judicial fringe.

As for counteracting the ramifications of today's ruling, Big Tent Democrat says the Obama Administration can play a very valuable role.

General Romeo Vasquez, the head of the armed forces who led the military coup against the democratically elected president Zelaya, is a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas (SOA).

What is the SOA?

As explained by this site, jointly operated by the Center for International Policy, the Latin American Working Group, and the Washington Office on Latin America:

The School of the Americas had been questioned for years, as it trained many military personnel before and during the years of the "national security doctrine" -- the dirty war years in the Southern Cone and the civil war years in Central America -- in which Latin American militaries ruled or had disproportionate government influence and committed serious human rights violations. Training manuals used at the SOA and elsewhere from the early 1980s through 1991 promoted techniques that violated human rights and democratic standards. SOA graduates continue to surface in news reports regarding both current human rights cases and new reports on past cases.

And according to Global Security:

Critics have labeled the School of the Americas a "school for dictators." The ten former Latin American heads of state who attended the School of the Americas include General Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama, military ruler from 1983 until his ouster from power by U.S. forces in December 1989. In 1992, Noriega was convicted and sentenced in a U.S. Federal court to 40 years in prison on drug trafficking charges, while subsequently he was sentenced in Panama for the 1985 murder of a Panamanian opposition leader and for the October 1989 murder of a Panamanian military officer who led an unsuccessful coup against him. Another Panamanian leader who attended the School of the Americas is General Omar Torrijos who emerged as Panama's de facto political leader after the National Guard overthrew the elected civilian government of Arnulfo Arias in 1968, and ruled either as official head of government or de facto political leader until his death in a plane crash in 1981. While many observers would label Torrijos a populist leader, others criticize the general for his repression of opposition sectors.

Two additional School alumni who overthrew elected civilian governments are Major General Guillermo Rodriguez (1972-76), who overthrew Ecuadorian President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, and Major General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975), who overthrew Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry. Breaking with the pattern of previous military leaders in these two countries, Rodriguez and Alvarado initiated extensive periods of direct military rule, seven years in Ecuador and twelve years in Peru.

The six remaining Latin American military rulers who attended the School of the Americas consist of two each from Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras, all of whom succeeded military rulers.

According to the New York Times:

The military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”

But there seems to be a little problem. Beyond even the whole idea of a coup against an elected president. From the Honduran Constitution:

ARTICULO 238.- Para ser Presidente de la República o Designado a la Presidencia, se requiere:

1. Ser hondureño por nacimiento;

2. Ser mayor de treinta años;

3. Estar en el goce de los derechos del ciudadano; y,

4. Ser del estado seglar.

In English, that first requirement is that the president be someone who was born in Honduras. But according to this website, the man installed by the coup, Roberto Micheletti, was born in Lombardy! If true, not only can Micheletti not be installed as president, he can't even be elected to be president!

Update: The English Wiki is wrong, and Micheletti appears to be native born, of Italian descent. The US/SOA link stands. (h/t Geekesque)

[UPDATE] Betson08 links the OAS statement, condemning the coup.

I've posted the relevant section of the transcript from the sustainability program below the fold.

See also this analysis which provides some of the pluses and minuses for the process.

There are some obvious, big-time emitters of greenhouse gas that you can probably name off the top of your head, but here’s one you probably DIDN’T know of. It’s estimated that concrete accounts for close to 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Michael Prather from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explains why.

PRATHER: Concrete manufacturer basically involves taking calcium carbonate rock and driving the CO2 off it.

In the cement manufacturing process, about a ton of carbon dioxide gets put off into the atmosphere for every ton of cement that’s made. But now engineers are looking at ways to change that. Liv Haselbach (Leev HOSS el bock) is an Environmental Engineering professor at Washington State University. She’s an expert on concrete. You can tell she is, because she likes telling jokes like this

HASELBACH: Concrete isn’t really concrete in that sense, it’s a funny thing to say.

Well, no it’s not. But anyways, Liv was given about 35-thousand dollars by the National Science Foundation to find ways of making the concrete manufacturing process more carbon-neutral. She’s seized on an idea that’s basic to the chemistry of concrete.

HASELBACH: Concrete itself can reabsorb the CO2 fairly rapidly.

And not only can it absorb it, but when carbon dioxide gets inside concrete,

HASELBACH: It actually turns back into limestone.

Liv Haselbach’s grant, among other things, is designed to look into ways of using that natural process to reduce global warming.

HASELBACH: There is potential for us to build sidewalks where -- yes -- these sidewalks will suck CO2 out of the air.

And while that’s exciting enough – and who ever thought they’d hear the words “Concrete” and “Exciting” in the same sentence – that’s only part of it.

CONSTANTZ: Well what we are going to do is -- we are putting on our hard hats right now and a we are going to head out and hop in the Land Rover.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Brent Constantz is one of those people you read about in business magazines. He makes things that make life better and that make him very, very rich. Brent invented a type of concrete for orthopedic surgeons. Doctors loved it. Brent cashed in and sold the company. Then he got involved with the Woods Institute Of The Environment at Stanford, where, he came to the conclusion that

CONSTANTZ: The only way to address climate change is to do carbon capture and sequestration.

That means grabbing CO2 out of the air and putting it someplace where it can’t do any harm. Brent started a new company called Calera (suh LAIR uh), that does just that. They’ve invented a process whose impact is stunning. Potentially a total game-changer when it come to global warming. Basically, what they do is set up a cement plant next to an emitter of CO2.

CONSTANTZ: The main ones are power plants -- principally coal-fired power plants, gas-fired power plants, oil plants etc.

They grab the CO2 out of the plant, before it gets into the atmosphere and then

CONSTANTZ: Our green cements actually takes the carbon dioxide from the emissions from the power plant and converts that carbon dioxide into carbonate mineral. Maybe a simpler way to say it is: it turns the carbon dioxide into a solid, by converting the carbon dioxide to carbonate, which then becomes essentially limestone.

The carbon dioxide never reaches the atmosphere. They turn it back into rock before it ever hits the air. Right now Calera has one plant, which they set up next to a major greenhouse gas polluter.

CONSTANTZ: The power plant here at Moss Landing produces about 3.42 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. And that is equivalent to about 700,000 cars.

The work Liv Haselbach is doing would take the concrete industry and move it from being a greenhouse gas polluter to being, basically neutral. The Calera process takes it that one step farther.

CONSTANTZ: This gives the material itself a negative carbon footprint. So it is not just less bad, it is actually taking us into the negative zone.

America used 2.35 billion tons of cement in 2007. China made 1.4 billion tons. Remember; a ton of carbon dioxide gets put into the air for every ton of cement. If the Calera process was in wide use, that’s 4 billion tons of CO2 that would never reach the air. Think what that could do for global warming.