Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat

ORMOC, Philippines -- Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's shoes. But there is another Marcos legacy, and it is drawing new attention at a time of high oil prices, global warming and urgent questions about the role of government in alternative energy development.
Reacting to the early 1970s oil shock, Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground. Since then, the Philippine government has championed this form of energy.
Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines. With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, this country has become the world's largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources. Billions of dollars have been saved here because of reduced need for imported oil and coal.
"Goes to show that things aren't always the way we might expect," said Roland N. Horne, a Stanford University expert on geothermal power who has visited this country more than 20 times. "The Philippines would be in hugely worse shape without geothermal as an indigenous energy source."
In installed geothermal power capacity, the country ranks No. 2 in the world, narrowly trailing the United States, which has far more geothermal potential, far more engineering talent and far greater demand for clean sustainable power.
But unlike in the Philippines, government policy in the United States has been inconsistent. In 2006, the Bush administration cut most geothermal spending -- federal programs that received as much as $100 million a year in the 1980s shrank to $5 million. Research projects were dismantled. Scientists in the field had to find other jobs.

"Most of the federal infrastructure, the laboratories and the researchers are now gone," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association in Washington.

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Parliament further marginalizes Iraqi minorities

The parliament passed a law giving provincial elections the go ahead, but scrapped a clause guaranteeing seats for minority sects.

A new decision by the Iraqi parliament leaves Iraqi minorities with no representation in the country's provincial councils as well as the legislature.
By an overwhelming majority, the parliament early this week revoked paragraph 50 from the constitution, under which Iraqi minorities were assigned a set of seats in legislative and municipal councils.
The revocation has sparked mass demonstrations in areas where these minorities live, particularly in the northern Province of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital.
Not only non-Muslim minorities are affected. The Shebeks, who are Muslim Shiites, have lost this privilege as well as the Yazidis who still pursue their secretive and traditional faith.
The decision has been a blow to the minorities who make up at least 10 per cent of the Iraqi population.
Neglected and persecuted under former leader Saddam Hussein, they hoped the new U.S.-occupied Iraq would bring good news.
On the contrary. They have borne the brunt of the upsurge in violence and insecurity that has become a characteristic of post-Saddam Iraq.
With paragraph 50 of the constitution revoked, these minorities will have no means left to air their voice.
Christians, Yazidis, and Sabeans have almost lost the religious freedom they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein in most parts of the country.
Today, these minorities make up a disproportionately high percentage of Iraqi refugees fleeing their country.
It is almost impossible for the Yazidis for example to live outside their traditional areas. And even there they are target of attacks and pressure by both Arabs and Kurds.
Certain cities like Mosul, which traditionally used to be centers of Christianity in the country, are being emptied of their Christian population.

Cleaning up of Jewish cemetery in Basra
Municipal authorities in the southern city of Basra have mounted a campaign to clean up the Jewish cemetery there.
The cemetery is seen as one of Basra’s ‘cultural landmarks’ and the authorities want to keep it clean and tidy, said Ahmad al-Yasseri who heads the cleaning-up campaign.
There are no Jews left in the city which used to house a sizeable Jewish community of tens of thousands before the creation of Israel in 1948.
They were the finest goldsmiths and the most adventurous traders of Basra, known as the Venice of the Middle East.
The lived in one of the city’s smartest quarters with spacious villas adorned with palm trees and oranges.
Yasseri said in the tumultuous post-Saddam period, 62 houses were built on the cemetery grounds illegally.
“This cemetery is one of the cultural landmarks of Basra and we are determined to remove the illegal dwellings,” he said.

Militiamen attack returning refugees in Baaquba
Many refugees who ventured to return home following reports of relative quiet in the country were forced to flee once again.
The restive Province of Diyala of which Baaquba is the capital has seen most of the violence directed at returning refugees.
Azzaman correspondent in the city says factional militias are active in the city and their attacks have even forced the heavily armed pro-U.S. Sunni militiamen to flee.
Some semblance of normalcy had returned to Diyala when Sunni tribesmen joined U.S.-financed groups of Sunni militias known as Sahwa or Awakening.
But U.S. protection of these groups is waning as Washington intends to transfer their file to the Shiite-dominated government.
Our correspondent says there has been a marked deterioration in security in Diyala, a province northeast of Baghdad extending as far as the Iranian borders.
The agricultural province is mainly Arab (93%) with a very small Kurdish minority (7%). But the Kurds are reported to be in control of about 27% of the province’s area of 17,685 square kilometers.
Tensions between Arabs and the government on the one hand and Kurdish militias on the other have been rising recently. The Arabs dislike the increasing Kurdish presence in their areas.
But the Arabs themselves are divided along sectarian lines into Sunnis and Shiites.
A senior parliamentary Arab deputy harshly criticized the military campaigns by U.S. and Iraqi troops to subdue the province.
Mohammed al-Dayni said the military forays “have practically achieved nothing”.
He said most of those detained during these operations were innocent people while those fuelling and committing violence were at large.

USA’s criticism of Iraqi government is cynical
One is bewildered by U.S. insistence that the Iraqi government should spend more of its stashed oil revenues on reconstruction.
It is absurd and cynical to see U.S. criticism of the government getting harsher and harsher at a time the government itself cannot function and survive without U.S. protection.
No one can deny that without U.S. blessings the government would not continue for long.
If the U.S. is serious it should force the government to be as transparent as possible about its revenues, budget and expenditures and at the same time compel it to publicly declare its reconstruction plans.
Six years after the implosion of the country at the hand of the U.S. occupiers and their lackey governments, Iraqis still lack basic public amenities.
Iraqis are still waiting for the prosperity U.S. President George W. Bush promised them.
When will Iraqis have efficient public transport? When will they have functioning health services? When will they have running water and continuous power supply?
It is now rare to find two Iraqis possessing the same passport and it is so difficult for other countries to know which one is authentic. Issuing passports has turned into one of the biggest scandals in U.S.-occupied Iraq and a sign of how rampant corruption is in government ranks.
Iraqis have been told that their 2009 budget may hit $80 billion and they cannot understand why so many of them are unemployed.
And security remains the biggest problem. Lack of security has made it almost impossible for some ethnic or sectarian groups of the Iraqi society to move from one city to another.
The issue today seems to be revolving around the security accords the U.S. and the Iraqi government are negotiating and the hurdles preventing the sides from coming to an agreement.
Do they really need a third party to bring them together?

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Bush Illegally Turns Army Inwards

Gitmo
What would you do if you learned that President Bush was preparing - in violation of federal law - to use the U.S. military to maintain order within our borders? I hope you would at least take one minute to help us raise awareness about the situation.

For more than 200 years, federal laws have protected the American people against the use of military forces on our own soil. Strengthened in 1878 by the Posse Comitatus Act, these laws have guaranteed that the federal government could not use the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.*

Without such protection, the federal government could use the might of our army to violate state and individual rights. Moreover, minor incursions by the military into domestic law enforcement activity could lay the foundation for the imposition of martial law at a moment's notice. This is one slippery slope we don't want to start sliding down.
That is why we should all be deeply disturbed by the news that President Bush has assigned the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team to be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army component of Northern Command (NorthCom). According to an article in Army Times, the soldiers could be called upon for a variety of tasks, including quelling "civil unrest." They are apparently engaged in training with shields and batons, beanbag bullets, and Tasers.
We need to raise awareness about this threat to our liberty immediately. The American Freedom Campaign believes the best method available at the moment is to send an email to the moderators of the next two presidential debates, urging them to ask the candidates whether they would fully enforce the Posse Comitatus Act.

Please join us in the effort by clicking on this link:

In just one minute, you can share your feelings with both Tom Brokaw at NBC and Bob Schieffer at CBS. After you do so, please spread the word by forwarding this alert widely to friends and family or by using the Tell-A-Friend option that will appear on our site after you send your email.

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Palin and Biden About the Vice Presidency of Cheney

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McCain Campaign Insinuates Biden is a Liar

"Joe Biden has always had a penchant for stretching the truth, but his made-up stories of being ‘shot at’ in Baghdad and his helicopter being ‘forced down’ in Afghanistan raise serious questions about his credibility," said McCain spox Ben Porritt. "Senator Clinton was forced to come clean after her ‘sniper fire’ remarks, and Joe Biden should hold himself to the same standard. How can Joe Biden lead if he can’t even be straight with the American people?”
Pushing for Biden to get the same scrutiny that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is currently getting, Porritt was referring to a couple incidents recently mentioned in a Fox News column suggesting that there's a double standard for Biden than there was for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY.

The first, which we covered last week, was when Biden recently told a gathering of National Guardsmen and -women, "If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are."
Biden's chopper was indeed forced down, but it was by bad weather, which may not have been the impression given.

The McCain campaign reached back to 2007 for the second incident.
At the July 2007 CNN/Youtube debate Biden said the following about Iraq:
"Number one, there is not a single military man in this audience who will tell this senator he can get those troops out in six months if the order goes today. Let's start telling the truth. Number one, you take all the troops out. You better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die, number one.
"So we can't leave them there. And it's going to take a minimum 5,000 troops to 10,000 just to protect our civilians. So while you're taking them out, Governor, take everybody out. That may be necessary. Number three, the idea that we all voted -- except for me -- for that appropriation. That man's son is dead. For all I know, it was an IED. Seventy percent of all the deaths occurred have been those roadside bombs. We have money in that bill to begin to build and send immediately mine-resistant vehicles that increase by 80 percent the likelihood none of your cadets will die, General. And they all voted against it. How in good conscience can you vote not to send those vehicles over there as long as there's one single, solitary troop there?"

At issue was Biden's reference to his being "shot at" in the Green Zone in Iraq.

The Hill's Susan Crabtree followed up and reported that "Biden described three incidents on two separate Iraq trips in which he felt that he was shot at or might have been shot at. Only one of them took place inside the Green Zone, he said, and involved a 'shot' landing outside the building where he and other senators were staying. He added that the vehicle he was traveling in the day before might also have been hit.
"Biden said the incident happened in the morning while he and at least one other senator were shaving. Although he said it shook the building, he wasn't rattled enough to duck and cover.
"'No one got up and ran from the room—it wasn't that kind of thing,' he said. '…It's not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.'
"Thinking about it now, he said, a more accurate comment would have been: 'I was near where a shot landed.'"
Crabtree reported that Biden's aides told her about an early morning in the Green Zone in December 2005 when mortars shook the trailers and buildings where Biden and his aides were getting ready for the day. "A soldier came by to explain what happened and said if the mortar fire continued, they would need to proceed to a shelter," aides said.
During the same trip, Biden's helicopter narrowly avoided a bullet as he flew to the Baghdad airport from the Green Zone.

In December 2004, Biden was on board a C-130 cargo airplane when its anti-missile system was triggered after it had been fired upon by a surface-to-air missile.
"When mortars are fired into the Green Zone or surface-to-air missiles are fired at a plane, they don't have names or addresses on them," Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander told Crabtree. "The nuance of being shot at or shot near means nothing in a war zone. The point Sen. Biden was making is that Iraq is a dangerous place — for our troops, for Iraqis, for everyone."

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FactCjheck on the VP Debate

Below: Friends and family of Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, listen, in Wasilla, Alaska Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008, to Palin debate Democratic rival, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., during the vice presidential debate in St. Louis.


Update:
We have retracted a portion of our article, "FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate," and have posted the following correction:

Correction Oct 3: This article originally faulted Biden for saying that McCain had voted "the exact same way” as Obama on a controversial troop funding bill. We said that McCain was absent for the vote and so didn't vote at all. Biden was however correct.

McCain did vote against the troop-funding bill in question, H.R. 1591, on March 29, 2007, when it originally cleared the Senate. The vote to which we referred, and which McCain missed, was a later vote on the House-Senate compromise version of the same bill, on April 26, 2007. McCain opposed the bill, which Obama supported, because it contained language calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Biden was responding to Palin's accusation that "Obama voted against funding troops." Obama voted for the bill March 29 and April 26, then on May 24, 2007, following a veto by President Bush, Obama voted against a similar troop-funding bill, H.R. 2206, that lacked any withdrawal language.

Please accept our apology for our error.

-Brooks Jackson

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Full Vice Presidential Debate with Governor Palin and Senator Biden

Analysis


Debate is a game changer for some


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