Barton bullshits while the Earth burns

How can you hope to counter the far-right and the corporados when you're struggling to put bread on the table? I s'pose that's a very old question, one that constantly arose in the history of the labor movement and any other number of struggles for social justice. That question plagues me this morning 'cuz i should be on my way to the job, yet this page has lingered for weeks unattended (not that anyone's reading it anyway!).

In any case, while i've been pounding away on someone's roof, power-crazed rightwing nuts like Rep. Joe Barton from Texas have been using U.S. tax dollars to spread the gospel for Big Oil. Barton's a real piece of work, btw. Given to all sorts of over-the-top hyperbole, he recently went after a local UMass, Amherst professor over the guy's work on climate change. Being a toady for Big Oil, Barton spends a good bit of time trying to trash all the science behind global warming. Nevermind that the vast majority of the world's scientists now agree that human-caused climate change is a given, Barton continues to pursue a flat-earth mentality. In his lame-ass schemes to stop the tide of sensible change, Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has demanded that UMass prof, Raymond Bradley and other academics document all funding and sources for hundreds of studies on climate change within the next three weeks.

In the interchange between the two, Barton implied that the professor was trying to avoid the congressman's witchhunt by stating, "I would be surprised if a scientist decided to react to our request by taking the Fifth or going on the lam." Of course Bradley gave absolutely no indication that he would do either, but that's not the point. Barton is all about inflammatory rhetoric. He's like the Bill O'Reilly of the House.

The most recent example of Barton's bullshit came out yesterday in his comments over the utterly disastrous House Energy Bill. Barton said on NPR that the only real opposition to the legislation will "come from the far-left", as if the corporate giveaway he helped engineer through congress was anything other than another death sentence for the planet and a grab bag of greed for his masters.

So, what's a simple worker/activist to do? Bitch away on his blog i s'pose.