So far, so good… Have you signed on to the comments about the Keystone XL pipeline yet? Today is apparently the last day for public comments on the Keystone XL pipeline (unless Congressman Grijalva and others get their way and the comment time is extended).
While there’s been seemingly non-stop coverage of the Boston bombing, we interrupted the flow of no new information this morning to talk with Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Club, about a number of different issues they’re working on.
Chin was in Nevada over the weekend for a 16-mile “Coal to Clean Energy” Earth Day weekend walk with the Moapa Band of Paiute Native Americans. We talk about that, fracking, coal, solar, fossil fuels and much more…
After recapping the weirdness that was last week, Nicole Belle joined in from Crooks and Liars to recap the Sunday news shows in a segment we call “Fools on the Hill”… Today, she brought us this:
One would think that an Elvis impersonator attempting to assassinate the President of the United States and a US Senator would be a fairly newsworthy event to merit some discussion this week. But because we had such an terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, that wasn’t even on the radar.
While undoubtedly tragic, the Boston marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt has also tread into several hot button agenda items in today’s political dialog: terrorism, gun safety regulations, immigration, radical Islamic behavior in far-flung places around the world and the Islamophobia expressed by many in the country.
Chris Wallace surprised the C&L team by repeating a refrain first expressed by Arkansas state Rep. Nate Bell when he asked whether Bostonians would have felt safer if they had been armed. Considering how many people were incorrectly fingered as suspects in those first forty eight hours, I’d say we’re really lucky that those who were armed kept a cool head.
What was really horrifying is to whom the media turned to ask about how to prosecute this case. Like on State of the Union, when they invited former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—the same man who said we could ignore the Geneva Conventions and torture people—to ask why terrorists get radicalized.
Peter King, who was ironically a big booster of the IRA, has never shrunk away from fear mongering over terrorism, and he’s ready to lock up suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant, because he’s brought the ‘battlefield’ to the US. That pesky Constitution that King swore an oath to uphold. Lindsey Graham shares Kings belief that Tsarnaev should be declared an enemy combatant, but he also has a bone to pick with the FBI, who investigated older brother Tamerlan. Graham is convinced that they dropped the ball, and the Boston marathon bombing is their fault. Luckily, Dianne Feinstein was there to call out King’s Islamophobia and ‘hatred’.
And just because I want to offer up a counter narrative to the one gaining steam in the media, I give you ex CIA Deputy Director Phillip Mudd, who suggests that rather than all the pearl clutching of treating Tsarnaev like a terrorist, maybe we could think more of ‘Columbine than al Qaeda’.