Canada Budget 2012: Economy Will Feel Drag From Cuts, Analysts Say

OTTAWA -- Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's austere budget Thursday will place speed bumps on -- but not derail -- Canada's economic recovery, economists say.

Sources have told The Canadian Press that Flaherty's cuts will build to $7 billion in annual savings over the next three years, in addition to the $17.7 billion in cuts announced by Ontario this week for the same period.

Asked Wednesday morning about the $7-billion figure reported by The Canadian Press, Flaherty declined comment.

As well, Flaherty is expected to announce measures to restrain growth in elderly benefits by pushing public pension eligibility to 67 years from 65, and require public servants to pay a greater share of their gold-plated pensions.

Ottawa has already dealt with fast-rising health care costs by tying future transfers to the growth of the economy.

Paul Ryan's Class Warfare

"Class warfare may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics."

That's what House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) told Fox News Sunday last September.

I would argue it makes for both rotten politics and rotten economics. And there is no greater example of that than Chairman Ryan's own budget.

That's right...the Ryan budget...the one that ends Medicare but continues tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires...is back.

It's like a bad horror movie.

So what is different this time around? The answer is not much.

It still does nothing to create jobs. It still eviscerates the social safety net. It still fails to invest in education, infrastructure, and clean energy.

FBI Muslim Scandal: Documents Show San Francisco FBI Office Illegally Collected Information On Local Muslims

WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday released records it obtained from the FBI that it said showed the bureau's San Francisco division used its Muslim outreach efforts to collect intelligence on religious activities protected by the Constitution.

Under the U.S. Privacy Act, the FBI is generally prohibited from maintaining records on how people practice their religion unless there is a clear law enforcement purpose. ACLU lawyers said the documents, which the organization obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, showed violations of that law.

After reviewing the ACLU documents, the FBI said the reports that contained notes about religious activity were appropriate because the agents were meeting with members of the Muslim community for law enforcement purposes.

The documents are from 2004 through 2008, before the FBI established a formal community outreach program and before it put in place sweeping new rules governing the collection of intelligence.

Kathryn Lehman, Republican Lesbian Who Helped Write DOMA, Is Now Lobbying To Repeal It

WASHINGTON -- It has been 16 years since Kathryn Lehman was a Republican Hill staffer working on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the federal law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

Now Lehman's back on Capitol Hill, in a new capacity: as a lesbian GOP lobbyist trying to repeal the law she helped write.

Things were pretty different in Lehman's world in 1996. She was engaged to a man. Same-sex marriage wasn't legal anywhere. And the public perception of what it meant to be gay wasn't anything like it is now, she says.

"There was nobody married, it wasn’t allowed anywhere," Lehman recalls. "The view of gay people ... it wasn't Ellen [DeGeneres]. It wasn't Neil Patrick Harris. It was kinky sex and women riding around on motorcycles without shirts on. That was sort of the view that the community projected as well."

"It wasn't people that you know, people that you work with, people just like everybody else."

Trayvon Martin: What It's Like to Be a Problem

Trayvon Martin was not innocent. He was guilty of being black in presumably restricted public space. For decades, Jim Crow laws made this crime statutory. They codified the spaces into which black bodies could not pass without encountering legal punishment. They made public blackness a punishable offense. The 1964 Civil Rights Act removed the legal barriers but not the social sanctions and potentially violent consequences of this “crime.” George Zimmerman’s slaying of Trayvon Martin—and the subsequent campaign to smear Martin—is the latest and most jarring reminder that it is often impossible for a black body to be innocent.

Black communities in the United States spent much of late March expressing outrage about Zimmerman’s actions and the Sanford, Florida, police department’s inaction. But the anger and grief are not exclusively about this single act. They are prompted by the ways the case reveals the continuing subordination of full citizenship for black Americans.

And You Thought That Heat Wave Was Bad?

Purdue University climatologist Matthew Huber gets plenty of death threats, but that hasn't stopped him from exploring the outer limits of just how much global warming human beings can tolerate. Whatever our recent Great American Heat Wave may or may not portend, most credible climate scientists agree that human-caused global warming is real—oh yes they do!—and most of the research out there, Huber says, predicts dire consequences for people (and other mammals) if average global temperatures rise by 6° Celsius or more.

That could well happen this century: By 2100, Huber points out, the mid-range estimates predict a rise of 3°C to 4°C in average global temperatures based on current economic activities, but those studies ignore accelerating factors like the release of vast quantities of methane—a potent greenhouse gas—now trapped beneath permafrost and sea ice that's becoming less and less permanent. Other models foresee rises in the 10°C range this century; at the outer fringe, predictions range as high as 20°C. Truth is, we simply don't know exactly when we'll reach these milestones or what they will cost us. And thanks to the uncertainty, it's been hard to get nations to agree on limits.

No New Coal Plants! Great, But What About the Old Ones?

The Environmental Protection Agency made a huge step forward on Tuesday with the announcement of rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants—the first rules for power plants, ever. The rules are the beginning of the end of conventional coal-fired power plants, and have been cheered by environmental and public health groups.

Here's what the proposed rule states, from the National Journal:

The agency is proposing that new fossil-fuel power plants—namely those fired by coal and natural gas—emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour of energy produced. That's about the same amount of carbon emissions produced by today's natural gas-plants and about half the amount of produced by coal plants.

This basically means that going forward, anyone proposing new power plants has two options: build a natural-gas powered plant, or build a coal plant that has carbon-capture-and-sequestration (CCS) technology to significantly reduce the emissions from that plant.

Massive Gas Leak Could Be the North Sea's Deepwater Horizon

A natural gas well in the North Sea 150 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, sprung a massive methane leak on March 25. The 238 workers were all safely evacuated. But the situation is so explosive that an exclusion zone for ships and aircraft has been set up around the rig, reports the Mail Online. And nearby rigs have been evacuated, reports the New York Times:

    Royal Dutch Shell said it closed its Shearwater field, about four miles away, withdrawing 52 of the 90 workers there; it also suspended work and evacuated 68 workers from a drilling rig working nearby, the Hans Deul.

But that's not the worst of it. The platform lies less than 100 yards/meters from a flare that workers left burning as crew evacuated. The French super-major oil company owner of the rig, Total, dismissed the risk, while the British government claimed the flame needs to burn to prevent gas pressure from building up. But Reuters reports:

    [O]ne energy industry consultant said Elgin could become "an explosion waiting to happen" if the oil major did not rapidly stop the leak which is above the water at the wellhead.

Canada Drug Laws: Public Health Leaders Attack Ottawa's Ideology-Based Drug Policies

TORONTO - A number of leading figures in Canadian public health are criticizing the federal government's approach to drug policy, suggesting political ideology is trumping scientific evidence.

In a two-pronged attack, the chief medical officers of health for British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia are publishing a commentary in the journal Open Medicine today that calls on the government to rethink strategies like minimum mandatory sentences for minor drug-related offences.

And the Urban Public Health Network, a group that represents the chief public health officers in Canada's 18 largest municipalities, has announced its endorsement of the Vienna Declaration, which calls on governments to draft drug policies based on evidence of what works.

"Basically what we're saying is that we don't think that the model we're using is particularly effective," said Dr. Perry Kendall, British Columbia's chief medical officer of health.

Bob Rae says Liberals won’t abandon airways to right-wing “jerks” after Conservative attack ad

More than a week after the Conservatives began running ads attacking interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, Rae himself came out swinging Wednesday, saying the Liberals will soon respond in-kind to defend him and the party against right-wing “jerks.”

“You can’t abandon the airways to the jerks on the right hand side of the spectrum,” Rae told reporters in Ottawa after a caucus meeting.

There was a momentary pause as everyone took in the quote. Rae started to walk away from the microphone in the foyer of the Commons.

“Did you say ‘jerks’?” a reporter asked.

Rae stopped, took a step back and leaned back into the microphone.

“Yes,” he said succinctly with a smile.

There you go. We all heard correctly.