May 02, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

BANGLADESH SEES GLOBAL WARMING IN ACTION

Bangladesh is surrounded by water and its people are seeing the devastating effects of global warming. Monsoons and greater glacier melts in the Himalayas are swelling the rivers and taking the land. This article by Laurie Goering is at www.chicagotribune.com:

Bangladesh, which has 140 million people packed into an area a little smaller than Illinois, is one of the most vulnerable places to climate change. As the sea level slowly rises, this nation that is little more than a series of low-lying delta islands amid some of Asia's mightiest rivers -- the Ganges, Jamuna-Brahmaputra and Meghna -- is seeing saltwater creep into its coastal soils and drinking water. Farmers near the Bay of Bengal who once grew rice now are raising shrimp.

Notorious for its deadly cyclones, Bangladesh is likely to face increasingly violent storms as the weather warms and see surging seas carry saltwater farther and farther up the country's rivers, ruining soils, according to scientists.

On Bangladesh's southern coast, erosion driven in part by accelerating glacier melt and unusually intense rains already has scoured away half of Bhola Island, which once covered an area nearly 20 times the size of Chicago. Land disputes, many driven by erosion, now account for 77 percent of Bangladesh's legal suits. In the dry northwest of the country, droughts are getting more severe. And if sea level rises by 3 feet by the turn of the century, as some scientists predict, a fifth of the country will disappear.

THEOLOGICAL THINKING A DISASTER

The quality of our leadership in the United States has been like evolution in reverse. When you look back at the founding of this country you see people like Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington. In the last century you saw Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. In the past two decades we've gotten stuck with Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. What distinguishes Reagan and George W. Bush is a strange religiosity. Reagan wrote in his diaries about Armageddon being imminent and George W. Bush has made the astounding claim that God wanted him to be president. Theological thinking knows no reason. It's a black and white view of the world, not subject to any conflicting evidence. This article by Larry Beinhart is at www.commondreams.org:

They were a new force. They believed completely in their cause and that they should have power. They arrived cloaked in old and familiar and reassuring rhetoric, so they encountered little resistance, and conquered rapidly and thoroughly. What is astonishing is how rapidly their ideas are being revealed as bankrupt. The war in Iraq has demolished the myth of America’s unlimited power. Iraq was the neo-cons’ great experiment in democracy and free-market capitalism. The true believers really believed that simply by having people vote for a democratic-style government and sweeping away all restrictions on free markets, a little America would instantly emerge — stable, friendly, prosperous, the envy of its neighbors. Instead, it created a hell on Earth. Anti-government government was exposed as bankrupt by Katrina. Prosecutor-gate is revealing, quite rapidly, how the quest for power, fueled by theological righteousness, tossed out all other virtues — like justice, fairness, and honesty. Economists and pundits are behind the curve, but ordinary Americans get that Bush economics do not work for them. And that what’s good for giant corporations is not necessarily what’s good for the USA.

Religion has been a sacred cow. But the excesses of Christian power and the violent madness of Islamic fundamentalism have changed that. Now atheist books are on the best-seller list. Because it is necessary, it has become respectable to genuinely question why and how and what people believe. Theological thinking, itself, has been revealed as bankrupt. It is almost impossible to overstate how disastrous the eight years of Bush are going to turn out to be for the Republican Party and for the right. It is not entirely visible yet, but this tumble downhill is going to turn out to be a fall off a cliff.