BUSH’S SHADE OF GREEN
Chris Floyd writes: It’s no mystery why the Bush Administration engineered the ouster of Robert Watson as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in April. The White House had received an unsigned “recommendation” from ExxonMobil that Watson, who has been outspoken in the fight against global warming, had to go. But many were puzzled by the White House arm-twisting on behalf of Watson’s replacement: Indian environmentalist R.K. Pachauri, who is a strong backer of the Kyoto treaty and even voiced approval of a campaign to boycott ExxonMobil. Why embrace such a candidate? Perhaps because Pachauri is something of an oilman himself. In January 1999 he was appointed to a three-year term on the board of Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. Pachauri’s Tata Energy Research Institute has also formed a partnership with Monsanto to develop genetically modified mustard oil and collaborated with the Global Technology Strategy Project, an “environmental” group sponsored by BP Amoco, Toyota–and Mobil. Finally, as a member of a panel investigating India’s Dabhol Power Plant, he voted against setting up a judicial inquiry into alleged illegalities involving government officials and the developer–a little ol’ Texas company called Enron.
WATCH WHAT YOU SAY TO THE POST!
Schmidtgate began when mediawhoresonline.com published a link to a Susan Schmidt article in the March 20 Washington Post on special prosecutor Robert Ray’s final Monicagate report. MWO regards Schmidt as hopelessly biased against the Clintons and in favor of their prosecutors. Seeing her Ray piece as a typical example of her bias, MWO urged readers to contact Schmidt. MWO then published an e-mail from one of the letter writers, claiming Schmidt had forwarded his letter, with a snide comment, to his immediate supervisor and the president of the college that employs him. Shortly thereafter another letter writer, an attorney at a prominent New York City law firm, gave a similar account of Schmidt’s forwarding his letter to his supervisors. The Post‘s ombudsman, Michael Getler, then wrote a piece titled “Uncivil Wars” (April 21) focusing on the bad manners of some letter writers to the Post rather than on the substance of the complaints. Getler’s only reference to the Schmidt matter came at the end, where he claimed that “too much” of the e-mail sent to Schmidt “falls into the crude to obscene bracket.” So the Post has failed to take a position on the issue of one of its reporters trying to get letter writers fired because she didn’t like the tone of their criticisms. The ombudsman declined to respond to an extremely polite e-mail inquiring about his silence.
