Why @SenAngusKing Voted For The Keystone XL Pipeline But Pretended He Didn't

Source: Daily Kos

Senator Angus King put on quite a show at the University of Maine in Farmington Jan. 23 where he was speaking on foreign policy at a Fulbright Association event.

Angus used to hang with the hippies in my neighborhood back in the day, smoking pot and railing against the system. Now Angus has become the system, making millions off of industrial wind and serving in the U.S. Senate with his new BFF Susan Collins (a point he saw fit to make several times in the course of his remarks).

After a sycophant stroked the great man's ego by noting that media pundits refer to him as "King of Maine" my husband Mark Roman led off his question with a reference to another King of Maine, the best selling author who lives in Bangor. This got a laugh and helped Mark in his quest not to sound angry, a goal he had for communicating with the audience feeling so warmly toward their senator.

What my husband asked Sen. King was, why did you vote in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline project? King's disingenuous reply was the he didn't vote to move the Keystone XL pipeline project forward, he voted for open debate in the Senate.

Right. As if none of us understood parliamentary procedure and the fact that moving to bring an item to the floor is a more significant "yes" vote than the promised vote against the project at the end of the process.

I was reminded of how Mike Michaud used to tell us when we'd visit him to complain about the Pentagon budget that, if Chellie Pingree really wanted to kill the defense spending bill like she said she did, she wouldn't vote yes in committee to move it to the floor.

King's most significant performance of the day was establishing once and for all that he, like Collins, is in AIPAC's back pocket. (CODEPINK's Ridgely Fuller demanded that King let a woman ask a question following two men, and her question on U.S. support for Israel's war machine created the opportunity for a performance by King that is sure to have Netanyahu beaming. More on that later.) Note King's reference to being a talking head guest of Bill Maher, notorious Zionist hack, in this video clip of his looooong answer to the question of whether he would vote no on the Keystone XL pipeline in the future:

Because, really, why settle for being King of Maine when you could be the next Al Gore?

@SenAngusKing Sticks Up For The Constitution

Candidate Angus King meets Mark Roman of the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign in Bath, Maine July 4, 2012.

In hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, May 16, 2013, freshman Senator Angus King dared to state that the emperor has no clothes.

As Pentagon officials presented justification for making war on anyone, anywhere, by any means, anytime they feel like it, Maine's ex-governor -- who runs as an independent -- objected. Noting that he is "just a little lawyer from Brunswick, Maine" he nonetheless waded into constitutional law over the expansion being proposed of the Authorization for Use of Military Force rushed through Congress following the drama of September 11, 2001.

Focusing on the term "associated forces," which he noted was found nowhere the original AUMF, Angus contended at length that the Pentagon was usurping the power of Congress to declare war.

"This is the most astounding and astoundingly disturbing hearing I have been to since I have been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today."

Here's video of what preceded his remarks, and the remarks themselves, shared by Democracy Now!:



One of the shocking -- though not surprising -- statements made by the Pentagon's team was that the entire world is now a battlefield "from Boston to Pakistan" citing an attack in the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors in Yemen in October, 2000 as evidence of this. The team also predicted that the current war on "associated forces" of those who mounted the  September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. would last another 10 to 20 years.

That day loomed large in Sen. King's remarks as well, as he noted that the AUMF was based on taking military action against the groups responsible for events on that specific date.

What do you want to bet that the next AUMF Congress passes will include the Boston Marathon bombing? Yesterday also brought news of the contents of a note found in the boat where the surviving suspect hid, justifying the terrorist attack in Boston as a response to U.S. policies. CBS News reported the note asserted that:

• The bombings were retribution for what the U.S. did to Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq

• The Boston victims were collateral damage, like Muslims are in U.S. wars

Damn if the military contractors haven't found the perfect mechanism for endless "war on terror" -- which war Sen. King, by the way, says he wholeheartedly supports. So maybe the emperor just needs a freshly tailored set of clothes? Stay tuned.

CODEPINK Maine delegation visits Sen. Angus King's senior policy advisor Marge Kilkenny in Augusta, Maine February 21, 2013.

Get The Word Out: #Drones Kill, Generate Terrorists

Source: Carter F. McCall | Bangor Daily News

Lisa Savage gives a presentation on "wielding the mighty pen to make the world a better place." She used her protest of the United States military's use of drone warfare as an example. Hope Festival attendees were asked to write down one thing they will do to make the world a more peaceful, sustainable place and encourage to give presentations on what they wrote.

Maine's newest senator Angus King was reached by Yemeni writer Farea Al-Muslimi's testimony in the historic public hearings on drones this week. King reportedly said in an interview with Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg:

By using armed drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas, the U.S. runs the risk of generating more terrorists, King said. 

“That’s the dilemma,” he said. “I saw a story last night of a guy from Yemen who basically said the drones radicalized his village, and they were always pro-American. That’s a tough call because the drone program has been very effective in essentially decimating al-Qaida.”

It's not a tough call because the contradiction he identifies -- that drones both "generate" and "decimate" terrorists -- exists mostly for people who believe Pentagon briefings tell the truth about al-Qaida and other aspects of the endless "war on terror." And Angus did not even dignify Farea with a name. But at least he listened to the testimony and spoke out about it to a journalist.

The 19th annual HOPE festival was yesterday. This event is organized by the vibrant community presence, the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine. It's a chance to get together with people you know and new people, especially college students. A woman I used to teach with turned up as the mother of Eric, one of the leading lights of the University of Maine at Orono on campus Peace Action group, and the friend of another young organizer, Shannon Brenner, with whom I shared the podium.

While tabling we got a lot of signatures on the Free Bradley Manning petition also, and that was even before my speech about how we all need to be information workers now, and my shout out to Bradley and the information he shared with us all. Farea Al-Muslimi is in the same category as I place myself, Bradley Manning, and many readers of this blog: information worker.

Earlier in the day, a young woman who came to the CODEPINK table asked if we knew of any resources like books on "how to talk to military wives." She was an ex-military wife herself and she said it was hard to find the words to share an anti-war perspective from within that "brainwashed" world. 

Her current male friend, a National Guard member, agreed. "I don't believe in war but I needed the paycheck and I didn't think the Guard would be fighting other countries, " he explained.

Does anyone know of books, websites, articles that I might share with this woman? If so, please respond in a comment and I will pass it along.

I'm not going to go into an analysis of how this "brainwashing" works because I find it too dispiriting. Suffice it to say that I cringe when my nieces and great-nieces share sentimental dreck on facebook like photos of young boys in camo saluting combat veterans in an airport with the giant word GRATITUDE underneath. 

The young women doing the posting are not even in military families. They are just drinking the brand USA Koolaid from the always overflowing propaganda fountains.

That is why our job as information workers is critically important in the 21st century. You keep it up and I will, too.

Stand On The Side Of The Planet And Free Speech

When we become aware of a great moral issue, it's good for the soul to decide which side we will stand on: with the riot police, or with the defenders of the coral reefs? This anonymous woman visiting South Korea from Hawaii was honored by villagers of Gangeong village on Jeju Island. They gifted her with the traditional Korean robe she wears so beautifully here, and she responded by playing a concert to lift the spirits of the activists. They have been standing firm for years now against the entombment of their beloved coastline and fisheries, against the destruction of the natural resources that gave them life for so many generations.

The photo above was posted by one of the bravest of many brave activists, Sung Hee-Choi, who has been arrested as well as physically attacked for putting himself between the UN World Heritage Site and the trucks that the Samsung corporation is using to destroy it. 

Source: http://www.iied.org/iucn-world-conservation-congress-begins

South Korea has been required by the U.S. to build a deep water port from which to menace the South China Sea. It needs to be big enough to handle ships like Aegis destroyers.

Aegis nuclear-equipped destroyers are ships which are built far away, at Bath Iron Works in Maine. Maine's newest Senator Angus King visited the General Dynamics facility this week to pay homage to his campaign contributors, and to vow to fight cuts to the Pentagon's budget (currently at 57% of total discretionary spending) to save the 5,500 jobs there. "Jobs" being a mythically powerful word that is repeated like an incantation by politicians looking to deliver on the favors that corporations purchase at election time.

Angus was once a hippie who hung around in the north woods smoking pot and building geodesic domes. Somewhere along the line he succumbed to either greed (he became quite wealthy on industrial wind investments) or the lust for fame. Possibly both. 

Now Angus favors fracking because his aide told me "it can be done safely" and anyway we must do it because heating oil is too expensive and we need natural gas as a "transition fuel."

Source: 8020 Vision -- Use their inteactive diagram to see what fracking does to ground water.

The inspiring example of the Jeju Island resistance will be useful when Mainers are resisting the planned corporate looting of our own wealth of natural resources. Tar sands pipelines, an East-West Corridor with mining rights and hundreds of feet wide right of way, private-public partnerships to cash in on eminent domain, a mammoth (13 stories high) LP gas tank on the Penobscot Bay, mountain top removal open pit mining, and expansion beyond the seven already existing wells to pump out the spectacular Maine aquifer are all planned.

Hearings where you can stand on the side of Mother Earth include Searsport High School on Monday, Feb 25 at 6pm with Thanks but no tank, and Fryeburg.

SAVE THE DATE - Mark your calendars! There will be a PUBLIC HEARING in Fryeburg, Maine on Thursday, March 7, 6pm at the Fryeburg Legion Hall on Bradley Street across from the Fryeburg Academy gym next to the baseball field about Nestle having an unprecedented long term contract with the Fryeburg Water Company, a public utility.

Source: Defending Water For Life in Maine

Indigenous people of Hawaii have lived for generations with corporate degradation and pollution of their island paradise. Jeju Islanders have called on international solidarity in their struggle. Idle No More has connected the First Nations of Canada with earth defenders all over the planet.

Which side will you be on? I'm happy to say I will be on the side that has the best culture workers -- the artists and musicians and dancers and writers who lift our hearts while we struggle on in the face of the obscene wealth and greed of corporations who think they own the Earth.

Today I'll be standing in Portland, Maine for information hero Bradley Manning. February 23 is his 1,000th day in jail for sharing news of war crimes and U.S. State Department complicity in corporate hijacking of resources all over the planet. Here's the poster that Kansas artist/activist Marc Saviano made specially for the occasion:

Angus Favors Fracking + No Photos Of Guards Allowed

We arrived a few minutes early for our staff meeting at Maine's new senator Angus King's office in Augusta, the state capital. The federal building has a metal detector and about seven middle aged guards at the door, and it took us considerably longer than we had planned to pass through security.

My friend Abby Shahn had to remove her belt, shoes, and get wanded by a metal detector.

I had to drink the water from my water bottle in front of the one female guard, to prove that it was actually water. No, she was not kidding.

Marge Kilkelly -- who was a Democratic legislator in Maine before becoming senior policy advisor to Angus -- was in state for the congressional recess week, and she said it took her a really long time to get through security, too.

Apparently the guards at the federal building have been told to give the order that no one is supposed to photograph "a guard doing his (sic) work." An aggressive older man ordered me to erase the photo I took of Abby getting wanded, and I did it because 1) I wanted to get to my appointment and 2) apparently the guards did not realize that when someone holds a pink rectangle up in the air, she is also taking a picture. So we still got the clandestine photos above.

We did our meeting, which we had requested soon after Angus got elected in November, by presenting a lot of information we thought might lead Angus to conclude that riding the "stop war spending, it's bankrupting the Treasury" platform might be a path to public acclaim. 

Some info was to show that the will of the people of Maine is overwhelmingly in favor of low spending on "defense"( Penny Poll article  from the Kennebec Journal). National Priorities project trade offs and charts showed that the federal government is seriously out of whack, currently spending 57% of the discretionary budget on military. We also left behind a case study of Bring Our War $$ Home campaign as a coalition effort in Maine and in many other parts of the U.S. and articles about the U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution pleading with the federal government to spend less on wars, and more investing in the cities where people live.

We had printed a copy of the Pollin & Pelletier report "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending," which refutes the claim that military spending is a good jobs program. I consider this the clincher because it refutes the b.s. that is always trotted out when there are threatened cuts to the Pentagon budget: But we will lose jobs locally if this funding is cut! Read the report to find out why investment in several other ways produces far more jobs -- more than twice as many, in some cases.

It fell to Codepink associate Pat Taub to get down to business on drones. Since Angus had made a splash in the news asking a few pointed questions about drones of John Brennan, nominee for CIA director. He had also suggested a special court to review the extrajudicial assassination plans, but only those targeting Americans, so Pat had brought Desmond Tutu's op-ed calling for a respect for all the humans on the planet. She had much documentation of the effects of drone strikes, including photographs, and a copy of Medea Benjamin's book Drone Warfare, which is well-researched and current. 

Buy one for your senator.

We also shared a copy of NYU/Stanford law school report "Living Under Drones" a most substantial refutation of the claim that drones are in Angus' words a "humane" weapon as currently used by the U.S. 

Abby, going as usual to the heart of the matter, wanted to ask: How can the people's voices can be heard in government? She observed that this has consistently failed to happen. She has a long memory so she started back at Vietnam naming all the wars people haven't wanted that the U.S. has waged anyway. (A large campaign contribution would no doubt amplify the people's voices just like it does for corporations.) I wondered aloud who Angus would be representing in Congress: the people of Maine, or General Dynamics?


Then we all talked about energy policy and we found out that because Maine is so dependent on heating oil, Angus favors natural gas as a "transitional fuel" and that he favors FRACKING!!!!!

Objections to the folly of polluting ground water were waved away by Marge with the mantra "transitional fuel." 

We pointed out that we had been in "transition" since Jimmy Carter wore that cardigan and turned down the thermostat in the White House, which was so long ago it was the first presidential election where I was old enough to vote. Also that there is vast hydropower leaving the state on long distance lines, leaking energy as it goes, for the profit of wealthy people, while the Mainers whose rivers were dammed to make the electricity do not benefit from it. Also that many of us heat with renewables, use solar energy, and want to see sustainable sources like tidal and geothermal and wind explored.

As we were leaving I thanked Marge because she had supported all middle school kids and teachers in Maine getting laptops through a learning technology grant when she was in the state legislature and Angus was governor. Amazingly enough, this program is still in place years later, and it did revolutionize middle school. (It didn't solve the equity problem, though, because the local school districts were supposed to fund the high school end of the program, and if they were poor, fagedaboudit.)

In the absence of meaningful congressional oversight of the executive branch waging wars both overt and covert, it is hard to justify teaching kids about checks and balances as if they actually existed. I probably shouldn't have said that because it's one more black mark in my file.

I know many will think we were fools to waste our time and probably get iris scanned and who knows what else to meet with a representative of a broken government that no longer represents the people. We are all grandmothers and idealistic and we did once believe in the democracy we supposedly lived in. We're worried about the future for our grandchildren, like pretty much everybody is nowadays. So we visit our senators. But since money equals political speech, and we don't leave behind a big fat check, it mostly amounts to going through the motions.

We do it because you still can. That is, if you can get past Homeland Security.

Codepink associates with Angus King's senior policy advisor Marge Kilkelly in Augusta today.

@SenAngusKing, Are Drones "Creepy" Or "Humane"?

Candidate Angus King already heard from CODEPINK associate Mark Roman last July 4th in Bath, Maine. Mark asked Angus, "If you are elected will you help to bring our war dollars home to fund human needs like education and health care?" and Angus answered, "It sounds like a good idea."

Our U.S. Senators have been coining some interesting terms this week as they consider whether to make torture apologist and drone czar John Brennan head of the "CIA death squad." That's what Medea Benjamin called our national intelligence gathering agency in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! citing the thousands killed or maimed and the multiple thousands terrorized by living with the possibility of death-by-robot hovering noisily overhead.

Medea was one of the eight "CODEPINK Associates" whom Senate Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein called out and finally kicked out for staging a sequence of disruptions. They were arrested for loudly calling on the committee -- which allegedly represents the interests of U.S. citizens -- to reject Brennan on the basis that he has been responsible for the deaths of so many innocents, including numerous children in various parts of the world. They repeatedly interrupted Brennan's recitation of his own family members ("my 91 year-old mother" and so on) to present lists of children killed by drones under his regime. Feinstein finally stopped the proceedings and cleared the room.

You can call Feinstein's office and let her know you want her to ask Capitol police to drop the charges against these citizens for exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech: 202-224-3841.

A network news correspondent covering the hearing tweeted:

Which term did one of the two Maine senators on the Intelligence committee coin? Angus got right on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show to parade a feeble understanding of U.S. imperial history and make that claim that drones are "a more humane weapon" and "a lot more civilized," though he didn't offer much support for this claim beyond positing that they are not like firebombing entire cities. Here's the entire quote:

To be honest, I believe that drones are a lot more civilized than what we used to do. You know, when Sherman shelled Atlanta or when the Allies firebombed Dresden in World War II, it was all collateral damage. It was virtually all civilians. And that's the way -- that was the way of war until very recently. 

The drone, although there is some collateral damage, basically is a very smart artillery shell. And we've been shooting artillery shells over miles and iles for many years and hoping they hit the right target. I think there's just something creepy about drones that they can be controlled and people are uneasy about it. But if you put it in a context of 1,000 years of war, I think it's actually a more humane weapon because it can be targeted to specific enemies and specific people. (Source where you can see the entire clip: The Daily Caller.)

I think the unspoken reasons he and other deluded imperialists think drones are humane is that they don't put the warriors for our side at risk. This retreat to remote control killing would have been seen as cowardly by most soldiers in times gone by. And in fact until the U.S. got into the show of deadly force game, warfare mostly resulted in the death of warriors. Angus apparently needs to do some homework. He might start by reading scholarly studies like the NYU and Stanford Law School report "Living Under Drones" which documents extensive civilian deaths and civilian terror in the border region of Pakistan near Afghanistan. He also might want to extend his understanding of the word "history" back to, say, 1,000 years ago -- rather than myopically limiting it to the relatively brief, very bloody few hundred years reign of the U.S.

I also think that Angus asked a few pointed questions (with no follow-up, causing Wired for War author Jeremy Scahill to coin yet another term when he dubbed this display "Kabuki oversight") and suggested a "secret court like the intelligence court that has already been set up" to review the president's kill list because Angus is a newbie in the Senate and hopes to make a name for himself at the national level. Also, he has a lot of progressive constituents in Maine and it's important to fool some of the people some of the time. He's counting on them caring as much as he does about the distinction between targeting a U.S. citizen under the Fifth Amendment, and about the check the Senate is supposed to exercise over a policy he described as "whatever the executive decides is ok" which he says he thinks is a problem.

Source: Excellent article by Nicola Abé "Dreams In Infrared: The Woes Of An American Drone Operator".                Photo credit: Gilles Mingasson / DER SPIEGEL

If a sniper can sell a lot of books bragging about all the people he has personally killed because "I'm not over there looking at these people as people" will a joystick operator soon be writing his memoir about how tough he is for sitting in an air conditioned trailer in the Nevada desert sending hellfire missiles down on little children and grandparents in Yemen?

All of this is progress in the sense that mainstream media have now discovered the killer drones story and the general public is now hearing dissenting voices. Unfortunately almost no one asked the questions Medea, who last year authored the book Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control, posed in her article on Common Dreams last week.

Here are the questions I am going to ask Angus as soon as we get to meet with him again:

What is the profit motive for Maine weapons manufacturers if the CIA and the Pentagon continue buying and using drones?

Source: Glenn Greenwald writing in The Guardian, Tariq Aziz (centre, second row) attending a meeting about drones strikes in Waziristan, held in Islamabad, Pakistan oin 28 October 2011. Three days later, the 16 year old was reported killed by a drone-launched missile. Photograph: Pratap Chatterjee/BIJ

Why are drones are only used to kill people with dark skin? People in countries with large Muslim populations?

What do you think of such inhumane practices as "double tap" which targets those who go to the rescue of the humans whose bodies are crushed and burnt by drone bombings?

Source: "Drones: Instruments of State Terror" by Steven Lendman on the blog Another World Is Possible.

How could terrorizing entire civilian populations with a death machine that makes a distinctive noise and is overhead 24/7 be called "humane"? What is your definition of "humane"?

What did you think that you swore to do when you took your oath of office?

Where do you think this kind of death-dealing by the CIA, which is supposed to be a civilian organization, will lead?

How much safer are you making your constituents in Maine by supporting a program that even Gen. Stanley McChrystal admitted stirs a "visceral hatred" among victims toward the U.S. and its people?

Source: The Guardian which ran this photo with the caption,  A protest against US drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal regions. Photograph: SS MirzaAFP/Getty Images