Glynn Wilson

Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen speaks to a crowd of people from Blount County at the Rosa Town Hall Tuesday night about the problems they face with a proposed coal mine slated for their community on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River.

Citizens are organizing for a fight even though they missed the deadline to challenge the water discharge permit from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

According to the new group’s Website at RosaMine.Org, the Alabama Surface Mining Commission has indicated it will reschedule a public hearing announced for August 19 at 10 a.m. due to a technical difficulty with the permit. Forty acres included in the original map was apparently not actually included in the permit application.

After the previous meeting on July 27, covered here, the people organized a letter writing campaign and the Mcoal Company out of Vancouver, Canada, withdrew its application for a blasting permit to try and ease residents’ concerns.

Wathen warned people in the impacted area to document everything from the condition of their houses to any activity from the mine, including noise, air and water pollution. He said it’s possible, but not likely, that the coal mine will be done properly and cause no problems, but he warned the people not to count on it or trust the company or government agencies to protect them.

“It will be up to you,” he said. “There’s no such thing as clean coal. It’s a dirty lie.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has released thousands of pages of new documents today in its investigation of White House political manipulation of justice, including never before seen White House e-mail messages and the transcripts of two depositions with former Bush political aide Karl Rove.

We are going through the documents now and will have a full report later on, but for now, you can download and evaluate the documents at this link on the House Judiciary Committee Website.

At a glance, the documents seem to indicate Rove was involved in a conspiracy to manipulate hiring and firing at the Department of Justice.

Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary committee, says the newly released transcripts show that former Bush senior adviser Karl Rove was the “driving force” behind several of the firings of U.S. attorneys.

“After all the delay and despite all the obfuscation, lies, and spin, this basic truth can no longer be denied: Karl Rove and his cohorts at the Bush White House were the driving force behind several of these firings, which were done for improper reasons,” Conyers said in a statement.

The 6,000-plus documents show that Rove “played a critical role in the firing of the U.S. attorney in New Mexico following the 2006 elections.”

Torture is the Target

Harper’s magazine contributor Scott Horton discusses the issue with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann…

In Horton’s post on it today, he writes:

If Eric Holder decides that the appointment of a special prosecutor is warranted, then he should focus his energy on picking the best person for the job. He needs a person of unchallenged integrity who has a record of effective prosecution and can be counted on to put the law ahead of politics. Any effort by this highly compromised Justice Department to put a straightjacket on the special prosecutor or to shield certain individuals from scrutiny will delegitimize the process. Indeed, no serious prosecutor would accept an assignment that was subject to such constraints. Holder should have faith in the process to deliver a fair and just result, and he should avoid any efforts to jury-rig it. How he responds to this challenge will reveal if he is a man driven by law enforcement concerns or a politician at the helm of the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, Roger Shuler reports that Holder has corporate, Republican ties and may be conflicted when it comes to restoring justice in Alabama…

Holder’s GOP Ties Subvert Justice in Political Prosecutions?