Corzine backing the wrong greens

Every time I turn around, the Corzine administration proves to be a disappointment. He promised to tackle the budget and ethics issues, but has taken only the smallest of steps. And now, the governor is taking a page from the Republican regulatory book, creating a task force to review the development permit process.

Lisa Jackson, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection, dismissed the attacks as she unveiled the task force proposal today. She said it may find ways to expedite and streamline DEP reviews of urban redevelopment projects, for example, that aid the state’s economic growth.

“It’s not about weakening or changing our environmental regulations or protections….First and foremost is the protection of human health, the environment and our natural resources,” Jackson said. “But the way our process is now, every permit is treated the same, and that doesn’t seem to be the smart way to go.”

Task forces like this almost always tend to back industry — a fact that environmental groups understand from their time fighting the Whitman administration’s anti-environmental agenda. Gov. Whitman eliminated the public advocate, gutted the state Department of Environmental Protection and created a business ombudsman charged with helping businesses navigate red tape — moves designed to privilege business over the state’s average residents.

The first President Bush used a similar task force, headed by Vice President Dan Quayle, to gut regulations.

Jackson says that won’t happen, but the timing of the proposal was curious, coming

two weeks after a Department of Community Affairs subcommittee report surfaced recommending environmental regulations be eased to allow the construction of affordable housing in suburban and rural areas.

That report said DEP regulations are skewed against builders and recommended giving the state Planning Commission the power to override DEP rules and local building laws.

“The DCA joined the builders in cynically blaming environmental regulation for the economy hurting, and this task force is the administration’s cover for an environmental roll-back in New Jersey,” said Bill Wolfe of the New Jersey chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Has the governor decided to place business interests above the interests of state residents? He has not done much of late to dissuade me from this fear.

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Pressuring Democrats on the war

Chris Hedges, on Truthdig, expresses a level of frustration and disgust with the presidential candidates — especially the Democrats — on the war in Iraq and militarism that I can understand. Five years in and the war still rages. Republican John McCain talks of an extended military campaign, while Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton speak of an extended presence in Iraq.

But I’m not sure that his prescription is the right one.

Those of us who oppose the war, who believe that all U.S. troops should be withdrawn and the network of permanent bases in Iraq dismantled, have only two options in the coming presidential elections—Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. A vote for any of the Republican and Democratic candidates is a vote to perpetuate the occupation of Iraq and a lengthy and futile war of attrition with the Iraqi insurgency. You can sign on for the suicidal hundred-year war with John McCain or for the nebulous open-ended war-lite with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or back those who reject the war.

He says Democratic voters need to be honest about what their votes might accomplish — i.e., that the results will change nothing on the ground in Baghdad.

But the results of this election will matter. The eight-year presidency of George W. Bush proves that a mediocre liberal is better than a conservative anytime. Basically, my concern is that voting for Nader (which I did in 1996 and 2000) or McKinney would turn the election over to McCain. And as flawed as both Obama and Clinton are as candidates, a McCain presidency would be a disaster. The Arizona senator is, as either Howard Fineman or Jonathan Alter said on Countdown (I can’t remember which), not a “detail man” and he has shown a bloodthirstiness on matters of war that should give more than pause to the folks I’ve talked with who see him as less likely to do something stupid than the Democrats.

And then there are the domestic issues, of which he has interest — especially health care and poverty.

Not that the Democrats are likely to make the kind of major changes in government needed, but at least they are talking about expanding healthcare and making some noises about the war.

I agree with Hedges that the war is a moral issue, but electoral politics requires that we temper our moral expectations with pragmatism. Allowing the Democrats to continue the war while drawing it down certainly falls far short of the goal, but given the options it is not nearly as bad as it could be. Ethics sometimes requires a balancing act. That is the case here. When I weight my difference with Obama and Clinton against my fear of what a McCain presidency might sow on the international stage, I only can come to one conclusion: to vote against McCain and hope that those of us who oppose the war can convince Obama or Clinton to do the right thing.

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There’s reality and then there’s cable news

Response to the Obama speech on race and the entire Wright affair appears more nuanced and varied than the TV shows are portaying — at least according to this CBS News poll.

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Son of a preacher….

Call it a preacher pattern, but it seems that the preachers to the presidential candidates are not exactly the shy and retiring types.

All of the attention this week was on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, but Obama is not the only presidential candidate whose spiritual guide has made some controversial comments. Well, not controversial, so much as…well….

Let’s just say that JohnMcCain’s spiritual guide — that’s what the Arizona senator calls him — has made some rough statements, comments that are far worse than anything the Rev. Wright thundered during one of his vitriolic moments.

Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio — whom Sen. John McCain hails as a spiritual adviser — has suggested on several occasions that the U.S. government was complicit in facilitating black genocide.

In speeches that have gone largely unnoticed, Parsley (who is white) compares Planned Parenthood, the reproductive care and family planning group, to the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis, and describes the American government as enablers of murder for supporting the organization.

“If I were call for the sterilization or the elimination of an entire segment of society, I’d be labeled a racists or a murderer, or at very best a Nazi,” says Parsley. “That every single year, millions of our tax dollars are funding a national organization built upon that very goal — their target: African Americans. That’s right, the death toll: nearly fifteen hundred African Americans a day. The shocking truth of black genocide.”

He goes on.

“Right now our own government is allowing organizations like Planned Parenthood to legally take the innocent lives of precious baby girls and baby boys and even footing the bill for it all with our tax dollars, turning every single one of us into accessories to murder,” he says. “You know who their biggest fans must be, that must be the Klu Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people…. African Americans were number one on Margaret Sanger’s list. So this ‘Lady MacDeath,’ as I like to call her, studied the works of Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus, and embraced his plan of eugenics.”

But because these comments were not directed at American foreign and domestic policy, because Rod Parsley’s comments stem from the fringe of the conservative movement, they are allowed to fly under the radar.

Even the comments reported last week in Mother Jones, calling the United States a Christian nation founded to destroy the false religion of Islam, failed to raise much of a storm or even much of a breeze.

Wright’s sermons, on the other hand, spread like viruses around the Web, run repeatedly on cable television and force the candidate to make the campaign’s most impressive speech. An even-handed approach to the campaign would have resulted in both preachers being vetted extensively, their comments explored and placed in context and the candidates they are associated with answering questions.

Obama, though his speech, has answered at least some of them. McCain, however, must be made to answer his own — and to rebuke his own spiritual guide for the ugly comments he has made over the years about Planned Parenthood, gays and others.

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