Uppity Wisconsin

Conservation Legislative Breakfast

Steve Hanson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:45:08 +0000

Date:

Mon, 02/15/2010 - 8:30am

CHIPPEWA VALLEY CONSERVATION LEGISLATIVE BREAKFAST, MONDAY, FEB.15, 8:30 A.M.
Altoona City Hall, Community Room, 1303 Lynn Ave.(corner of Lynn & Division Streets) www.ci.altoona.wi.us

Please join Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters and the Chippewa Valley Sierra Club at a Legislative Breakfast with Sen.Pat Kreitlow, Sen.Kathleen Vinehout, Rep.Kristin Dexter, and Rep. Jeff Smith. Share your thoughts about the four Conservation Priorities: 1) Restoring Conservation Integrity with an Independent DNR Secretary, 2) Reducing global warming with Clean Energy Jobs, 3) Protecting Wisconsin's Drinking Water, 4) Preserving Wisconsin's Groundwater. (For more information on the 2010 Conservation Priorities, visit www.conservationvoters.org)
The breakfast will kick off with a round of brief introductions, a discussion of these conservation issues and the legislators' priority issues this session. Then citizens will have an opportunity to speak.
We are very pleased to have the whole Chippewa Valley
delegation of state legislators joining us on Monday, February 15. You won't want to miss this great opportunity to have a voice in protecting Wisconsin's natural resources!

Muffins, fruit, coffee and tea provided.
Please RSVP to Eleanor Wolf
ellewolf1hotmail [dot] com
835-4829

Location

Altoona City Hall

1303 Lynn Ave. Community Room

Altoona, WI

United States

44° 48' 23.0544" N, 91° 25' 57.2916" W

See map: Google Maps

FBI wants your online activity tracked, and wants web pricing to go up

Steve Hanson — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:46:16 +0000

The FBI is again pushing to have all ISP's keep track of all web visits for the purpose of law enforcement. At a meeting Thursday arranged by the Commerce Department, FBI Director Robert Mueller again asked that all destination and source requests for web traffic would be tracked and retained for up to 2 years.

This is disturbing for multiple reasons. For one, it's a plan to track all online activity and keep it. Personally I'd be very happy to not think that all of my online activity is being retained for the purposes of some future fishing expedition by a law enforcement agency. There's precious little enough privacy on the Internet as it is (certainly my activity is already being tracked for a number of baldly commercial reasons, and I'm less than thrilled about that as well). But this plan would keep all of the online activity of everyone purely for the sake of keeping it, whether there was any suspicious activity involved or not.

Additionally this will impose a severe technical and economic burden on ISP's. I have a personal stake here, as I run a small web hosting company. If I need to track this (admittedly unclear) set of information and retain it for up to two years, that's a LOT of data. Some of which I currently don't even track. It's unclear if the FBI would be requesting merely tracking which web site was visited by which IP address, or if they really want to know which URL's on a particular site are being visited. If the requirement will be to keep track by URL, this means we would be tracking all sorts of information that we currently don't even collect on the fly -- slowing down everyone's access, and requiring us to keep a huge amount of logging for a long period of time. And making us raise our rates, of course. The general outcome will be a more expensive, slower, and less private Internet, in which your activity is always going to be subject to search and seizure.

No Thanks.

Ryan not running because his head's too small

xoff — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:00:56 +0000

"I am not going to run for president. I'm just not going to do it. My head's not that big, and my kids are too small.

- U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan to Mike Gousha. .

US Senate and Feingold Defend Doing Nothing

mal contends — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:25:30 +0000

In the United States Senate, doing nothing is protected as a point of historical pride. It is the privilege of a U.S. Senator to do nothing and the do-nothing gang does not want this august legislative body to lose its harrowed privilege.

As Gail Collins puts it this morning: "There is a stupendous lack of real enthusiasm in the Senate for doing anything as dramatic as eliminating the senators’ right to stop things."

“It’s beyond the breaking point,” said Senator Tom Harkin, referring to the U.S. Senate's obstruction-as-usual, holds on nominations, filibusters, the whole paralysis of a sick legislative body. Harkin will introduce a bill to eliminate the Senate filibuster next week.

Even reformers like Sen. Russ Feingold defend the filibuster. Maybe Feingold and the Senate will have a change a heart, feeling that the problems facing Americans are so serious that a decaying institution's relics and undemocratic rules must change for the good of the citizens of our republic.

Will Feingold's GOP opponents this year, Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake [who otherwise do not stand a chance], challenge Feingold's on his defense of doing nothing? That would be ironic as the GOP so often employs the filibuster in its attempt to see the Senate do nothing. Even more ironic as the Senate Democrats are the GOP's allies is preserving this tool of obstruction.

Nothing like arming your opponents in defense of an undemocratic body. Welcome to the Democratic Party. Maybe the Democrats will finally kill the filibuster.

And then maybe the Republican Party will come out in favor of teaching evolution, and empowering the rights of American citizens [even black people] to vote, slash the American empire and slap the military-industrial complex. Right.

-via mal contends

Yes Men and ADM

Steve Hanson — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:46:16 +0000

The Yes Men are at it again, creating a video interview with a "representative" of ADM from Davos. ADM is currently trying to have these removed from the Internet. Here's our small bit to help keep it alive.

Tommy Thompson Joins Capital Fund as Adviser, Office Run Unlikely

mal contends — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:44:34 +0000

Situation clarifies that a Tommy Thompson run is unlikely.

Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson was announced as the newest advisor to a Peak Ridge Capital Group venture capital fund.

Thompson will be relied upon at Peak Ridge for his expertise in agriculture and agribusiness. The firm is currently investing its agricultural technology fund, having announced its first investment from the vehicle. Rapid Diagnostek is a Wisconsin-based company developing a hand-held device to test for illness or disease in 60 seconds. The fund is designed to invest in agricultural technology companies providing solutions for food supply, lowering the cost of production and improving efficiencies in the supply chain. The fund also invests in clean technologies, as well as chemicals, systems and biofuels processes.

All I know is what I read in the papers

xoff — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:28:38 +0000

Or don't read in the papers, depending upon which ones you read.

If you read the Chicago Trib, you might have seen this from the AP:

MADISON, Wis. - Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold entered this election year with $3.65 million cash on hand for his re-election bid.

But if you rely on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel exclusively (and many still do), all you'd know about Feingold is that some guy wearing a Brett Favre jersey and a cheesehead might run against him. Or not.

You also know that Scott Walker has raised a fair amount of money to run for governor, because it's been reported twice, here and here.

Feingold's cash on hand is relevant when you're writing about potential challengers without a nickel in the bank.

But the folks at the JS would probably say you can't overload readers with too many numbers on the same day, and the day Feingold announced he had $3.65-million they were busy with a story about a poll on the guy who isn't running and probably won't.

Bias or ineptitude? It hardly matters, since the result is the same.

Another fly lands in the nuclear ointment

xoff — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:22:58 +0000

Darn!

Just when the nuclear industry is doing such a great job of selling its "renaissance" as the way to fight climate change, along comes another irritating little problem.

As my mother used to say, there's always something to take the joy out of life.

This time it's a tritium leak at a Vermont plant -- something that's already happened in Wisconsin at Point Beach and Kewaunee, as noted in the map above. The AP reports:

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen discovered in potentially dangerous levels in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, has now tainted at least 27 of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants...
Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts.

Is it anything to be concerned about? As is often the case when there's a lot of money at stake, it depends upon who you ask.

When tritium was found near the Kewaunee plant in August 2006, the Journal Sentinel soft-peddled it. This was the lede:

The release of tritium underneath the Kewaunee nuclear plant doesn't pose a health risk because the radioactive substance hasn't been found in drinking water, federal nuclear regulators said.
The radioactive isotope of hydrogen was found in four groundwater samples taken from narrow shafts underneath the nuclear plant, located in the Kewaunee County Town of Carlton, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a report...

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Dominion Resources Inc., which owns Kewaunee, stressed that no unsafe levels of tritium have been detected at monitoring… Both Kewaunee and Point Beach do regular testing and have been in compliance with federal standards that permit tritium to be released at low levels.

Others don't treat it so lightly.The Burlington VT Free Press reports:

Nuclear industry advocates say worries about tritium leaks can be overblown. “It depends on the level and where it gets to,” said Steve Kerekes, a Washington, D.C., spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute. “If it’s isolated, it’s not going to be an issue. Not every operating issue rises to the level of being a safety issue.”
Critics disagree. They note that tritium leaks are usually followed by the discovery of other, slower-moving but more dangerous radioactive agents like strontium-90 and cobalt-60, which have longer half-lives than tritium. Cobalt-60 was also found in the Vermont Yankee storage trench.

“It can cause damage for 120 years,” Gunter said of tritium. “If you ingest it or inhale it at close range, it can begin to saturate down to your DNA and cause cancer and birth defects.”

No radiation exposure is safe exposure, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research says"

Plant operators and the NRC initially dismissed public concerns about leaks, saying that tritium levels measured offsite by the plant operators were well below the EPA drinking water standard of 20,000 picocuries per liter4 and were “safe”5 even though all radiation protection regulations and the most recent report of the National Academies (commonly known as the BEIR VII report)6 concluded that the hypothesis that best fits the facts is that every exposure to radiation produces a corresponding cancer risk – low exposures produce low risk, and that risk increases with exposure. There is no threshold below which there is zero risk.
The EPA's method of expressing this reality is to set a Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) which corresponds to zero health risk. The EPA value for MCLG for all radionuclides, including tritium, is zero.

Here's a Nukewatch report on the Wisconsin plants:

In 1975, Point Beach Unit 1 leaked approximately 10,000 gallons of radioactively-contaminated water after a steam tube ruptured. The water flowed into a retention pond and from the pond into groundwater. In 1997, another steam tube in the same reactor spilled another 10,000 gallons of radioactively-contaminated water that ran eventually into Lake Michigan. That year, Unit 2 had a leaking discharge pipe which also contaminated a stream and Lake Michigan.
In 2006, Kewaunee workers found tritium in the groundwater below the site. The NRC said the radiation had infiltrated narrow shafts beneath two buildings. The leak rate was thought to be one gallon every five minutes.

So, as a proposal to make it much easier to build a new nuclear reactor works moves along the greased skids of the Wisconsin Legislature, it's not too late to speak up. Details here.

Act Blue and Russ Feingold

Steve Hanson — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:37:14 +0000

You may have noticed the little block to the right that cropped up a few days ago. It's your opportunity to contribute to Russ Feingold's upcoming campaign, securely, and on-line through Act Blue. We will in the coming months be adding in more progressive Wisconsin candidates that you can donate to right here. There'll be more news about that later. But in the meantime, help to keep a truly progressive senator representing our state in Congress.

And by the way, we're open to suggestions on any other candidates who deserve support.

Quote, unquote

xoff — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:53:14 +0000

Bill Richardson of Middleton, the media coordinator for the Dane County Republican Party, greeting the news that Wisconsin will get $810-million for a rail initiative linking Madison and Milwaukee:

"Trains are a 19th century wonder," Richardson said. "To offer a train in the 21st century is like offering the public a telegraph instead of an iPhone."

Richardson must not get out much -- not even as far as Chicago, let alone the northeastern US, France or Japan.

Someone is indeed living in the dark ages, but it's not the railroads.