Tony Balir - He won't be back

There is something gloriously obscene in our Dear Leader hanging out playing at tree hugging with the Governator.

It was of course the Governator who convinced GM that they should get a licence from AM to build a consumer version of the military Hummer - a sort of mobile Tomb much in use in Iraq - this led to the original H1 behemoth , to be followed by the chic pocket sized H2 based on the Chevvy Tahoe chassis weighing in at 3 tons, kerbside.(not including 40 gallons (US) of gas)

These days, the Governator whose campaign to replace the bouffant haired brainless Gray Davis (who he Ed?) was masterminded by George Schwartz,(at whose modest condo the Dear Leader is resting his sun tanned forehead at present) finds it difficult to chose which of his 8 Hummers to use.

GM, in serious financial trouble, even built a hydrogen powered Hummer for him built for squillions of US$ as a "cencept", showed him off to the press ( the 50 mile limit between re-fuelling stops not being enough to get him home), he returned home in a standard heavy polluting gas-guzzler. Not forgetting no doubt to wreath himself in his own cloud of stinking pollution whilst he chomped his reeking ceegars.

Our favourite story of Hummer excess, which beats the Governator, is of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball King LeBron James. Back when James was regarded as the nation's top high school basketball player, he found himself under investigation by Ohio athletic officials who questioned his amateur status when he started driving around in a new bright canary yellow H2 equipped with three televisions. He later was cleared after his mother produced documents showing she bought the vehicle -- which had a base retail price of $50,000 -- for her son's 18th birthday.

Let's get serious now

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently plan to lay the groundwork for a new trans-Atlantic market in carbon dioxide emissions, The Associated Press has learned - Not content with imposing enormous financial burdens on European consumers of the insane EU ETS scheme for outdoor relief for bankers, lawyers, consultants and other City fraudsters our Dear Leader wants to export this nonsensical scheme to sunny CA.

One has to applaud James L. Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council for Environmental Quality and Bush's chief environmental adviser (also lawyer,avid vocal harmony singer, sailor, scuba diver, and beachcomber) for his high profile absence from the press hoopla that Blair and the Governator produced when they went to the port of Long Beach. Quite sensibly he presumably will have nothing to do with this massive financial fraud.

Where beyond the photo-call everyone was supposed to see, the way behind schedule BP, "cold ironing " project which saves pollution from discharging oil tankers by transferring the high energy load from ship board diesel power to onshore electrical power when discharging.

The scheme simply diverts pollution from the coastal cities to the massive coal fired polluting plants in the interior of CA, like the San Joaquin Valley, home to some of the nation's most polluted air which also claims the nation's highest asthma rates in children. ... or even further inland where the state buys electricity producing what they call the California Coal Shadow.(PDF alert)

So Blair might reasonably tackle the Governator about the new report detailing California's existing out-of-state coal plants which release a staggering 67 million tons of global-warming carbon dioxide and discharge ten times more smog-forming pollution and 200 times more mercury than all of the power plants in California.

Add to that the 14,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants which are under construction and development in the Interior West, designed for the California coastal market and with no measures for addressing their vast quantities of global warming pollution.

What might cheer the Dear Leader up, is that the US Energy system is as fucked up as the UK one - except that the UK is heading at terminal speed into an 89% reliance on imported energy - without the industrial base to sustain such an increase in imports.

Why should the Dear Leader worry - unlike the Governator - He won't be back.

PS They say what attracted the President to James L. Connaughton was a paper he co-authored in a 1993 law journal , Champion Magazine, a publication of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers entitled "Defending Charges of Environmental Crime -- The Growth Industry of the '90s."

Don't forget it was economist Phil Cooney Chief of Staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality who allegedly had deleted/ amended whole sections of official scientific reports on climate change. Since leaving he was hired by ExxonMobil June 2005,