“Creating an AIDS-free generation has never been a policy priority for the United States government — until today,” Clinton said in a speech at the U.S. National Institutes of Health outside Washington.

“This goal would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” she said. “While the finish line is not yet in sight, we know we can get there because now we know the route we need to take.”

In her speech, Clinton called for the use of scientific evidence in stopping the spread of the virus. To do that, she laid out three policy objectives based on recent research, according to a press release from the White House:

1) Prevention of mother-to-child transmission: Today, 1 in 7 new infections worldwide occur through mother-to-child transmission. In 2010, PEPFAR helped prevent 114,000 babies from being born with HIV. In June, PEPFAR and UNAIDS launched a global plan for eliminating new infections among children by 2015.

2) Voluntary medical male circumcision: This low-cost procedure reduces the risk of female-to-male transmission by more than 60 percent. It is a one-time intervention with a lifelong benefit. PEPFAR has financed three-fourths of the one million male circumcisions for HIV prevention around the world since 2007.

3) Treatment as prevention: Once people do become HIV-positive, recent science has shown that treatment with anti-retroviral drugs helps prevent the transmission of the virus to others. Effective treatment of a person living with HIV reduces the risk of transmission to a partner by 96%.

In addition to the policy announcements, which also included a call for other countries, particularly those impacted by the pandemic, to contribute funding to the battle against the virus as well as calling for an increase in international funding to the international fund for AIDS, Malaria and TB, Clinton also announced she was appointing talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as Special Envoy for Global AIDS awareness.

“I’m honored to have been chosen by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as Special Envoy for Global AIDS awareness. The fight against AIDS is something that has always been close to my heart. And I’m happy that I can use my platform to educate people and spread hope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look up what ‘envoy’ means,” said DeGeneres.

Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch don’t often see eye to eye with youngest brother Bill.

They forced him out of their father’s oil company, Koch Industries, in 1982 after an epic power struggle that saw Bill sue his brothers and reportedly walk away with a $260 million settlement. Several years later, he sued them again, accusing them of skirting federal regulations, and he won millions more.

The brothers’ political tastes are also at odds. Whereas Charles and David funnel tens of millions of dollars to the coffers of Republican and Tea Party conservatives, Bill’s politics are harder to pin down. While he too breaks off bits of his fortune for influential leaders in the Grand Old Party, he has also bankrolled Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy and other Democrats that make him a bona fide black sheep.

Still, the brothers share many common interests. They love to spend time in Colorado and gobble up its gorgeous real estate, and they all appear to have taken a shine to U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton. The freshman congressman could be in for the fight of his political life in 2012, as state House minority leader Sal Pace is a formidable candidate in the vast and politically diverse 3rd Congressional District. Bill’s energy empire, Florida-based Oxbow Carbon & Minerals Holdings, recently gave Tipton $3,500. Last year, Charles and David’s Kansas-based Koch Industries contributed the same amount to Tipton.

The battle over coal

Oxbow Carbon is a player in the fossil fuels industry with ventures across the United States and around the world. The conglomerate specializes in mining and marketing of energy and commodities such as coal, natural gas, petroleum, metallurgical and calcined coke. Oxbow and its two affiliated companies — Gunnison Energy and Oxbow Steel International — have yearly sales in excess of $4 billion and employ $2 billion in assets, and over 1,100 highly trained workers, according to its corporate website.

One of its moneymakers is Elk Creek Mine in Somerset, Colo., which produces about 5 million tons of low-sulfur coal a year thanks to underground, state-of-the-art longwall mining technology. Trains transport the fuel to electricity generation plants and industrial applications across America.

But federal regulations that protect air, land and water are slowing the locomotives down.

Five years ago, Oxbow applied for a lease in East Elk Creek to mine 3.9 million tons of coal but its environmental review was pulled back three times to address concerns over greenhouse gas emissions. The Bureau of Land Management recently approved the project but now WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club are appealing the decision, resulting in headaches and marketplace uncertainty for Oxbow.

Tipton, who has been tirelessly working to undermine the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency since taking office in January, sympathizes with Oxbow. As chairman of the U.S. House Small Business Subcommittee on Agriculture, Energy and Trade, Tipton organized a hearing in Grand Junction on Monday to examine federal laws that the energy industry is finding burdensome.

“In my 30-plus years of working in the Colorado coal mining industry, at both surface and underground mines, I have never before seen such a concerted emphasis by numerous federal agencies to create additional head winds for the coal industry across such a broad spectrum of coal industry activities,” Oxbow Carbon’s environmental manager James A. Kiger testified (PDF) in Monday’s hearing.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has expressed views that, to us, indicate its desire to discontinue the use of coal as a fuel for electricity generation,” Kiger told the assembly. “The regulatory agenda appears to be pursuing this goal. Recently at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is reported as saying that natural gas is the fuel that will help transition away from coal in power plants. EPA’s regulatory agenda supports that intent.”

He stressed that if current trends continue, valuable jobs in Colorado could be lost.

“Oxbow has recently announced our intent to explore un-leased federal coal reserves in the Oak Mesa project located in the North Fork Valley of Colorado. We are hopeful we can open a new mine in less than 10 years of exploration, permitting and leasing activities,” Kiger said. “The mine could employ approximately 450 miners for over 20 years, creating millions in value to western Colorado and the nation. Meanwhile, our parent company, Oxbow Carbon has purchased an interest in a coal mine located in Columbia, South America. We are hopeful that we will not have to increasingly turn to foreign countries in our search for energy business opportunities because America has either closed its doors or made it too difficult for domestic energy development.”

A ‘bogus’ hearing?

The Checks and Balances Project contends the perils of energy regulation are overstated.

Oil and gas companies receive $15 billion in special tax breaks and Coloradans contribute over $251 million annually to such subsidies, according to the Checks and Balances Project. About 57 percent of lands leased to oil and gas companies for development are sitting idle, and the industry has yet to act on roughly 7,000 of its permits, Checks and Balances Project reported. It also pointed out that the BLM is clearing the backlog of permits not processed during the Bush administration and that for the last two years, the BLM has approved more drilling permits than applications it has received.

Meanwhile, business is booming — the top five oil and gas companies raked in $562 million in profits the first half of this year — and oil and gas activity is back to pre-recession levels, even nearing a 20-year high. Checks and Balances also says energy jobs are at a two-decade high, with 5,100 new ones in Colorado.

“While it may sound unbelievable, over the last six months the United States has exported more petroleum products than it’s imported. That includes the crude oil we import abroad and the refined gasoline and diesel we sell to neighboring countries. Experts attribute this to reduced demand for oil in the United States due to the economic downturn and increasingly fuel-efficient cars on the road,” reads a press release from the Checks and Balances Project questioning Tipton’s premise for Monday’s hearing.

Tom Kenworthy, a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, called Tipton’s hearing “bogus.”

“Another day, another bogus House GOP hearing on how ‘excessive’ regulation of the energy industry is killing jobs and hurting consumers,” Kenworthy wrote. “If Tipton was really concerned about his Colorado constituents and their relation to the energy industry, he’d be holding a hearing based on a new investigative report by the non-profit journalism organization ProPublica, called ‘Science Lags as Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields,’” which includes the case of Susan Wallace-Babb, a rancher in western Colorado who says a natural gas well and liquid hydrocarbon storage tanks made her so sick that she has rashes and lesions and has to wear a respirator and goggles just to go outside.

Nothing gets the hackles up of environmentalists these days quite like a visit by Tipton.

One progressive group took out a half-page full color advertisement in the Grand Junction Sentinel over the weekend asking Tipton to justify tax breaks for oil companies while supporting cuts to Medicare. The ad calls on Tipton to return the estimated $86,000 in campaign contributions he has received from the oil and gas industry.

A spokesman for Tipton, whom Pace recently assailed as a threat to recreation-based economies, defended the congressman’s environmental record in an email to The Colorado Independent this week.

“Rep. Tipton is proud of his record of balanced conservation and responsible development of our natural resources,” Tipton press secretary Joshua Green wrote. “He has received praise for his bipartisan conservation efforts including his work on Chimney Rock. Rep. Tipton continues to work closely with Colorado’s sportsmen groups, recreationalists, water districts, and other conservationists to protect Colorado’s scenic natural beauty and ensure that future generations have access to clean air and water.”

Bear of a ranch

One little slice of heaven in Colorado the congressman may try to save is Bear Ranch.

It is the 5,000-acre paradise where Bill Koch has one of his mega homes. Situated about a dozen miles upstream from the Elk Creek Mine, it boasts spectacular views and borders the Ragged Range. There is a strip of land that runs through Koch’s property that has a public right of way. He has proposed a land swap in which he’d give the public 991 acres of land in Dinosaur National Monument and in Curecanti National Recreation Area in exchange for the 1,840 acres that bisects his property. The Crested Butte News recently reported that Koch has sweetened his offer, throwing in access to Jumbo Mountain, just outside of Paonia. Local hearings are ongoing in Delta and Gunnison counties and if an agreement is worked out, it will require an act of Congress to seal the deal.

Despite local and loud protests over lost public access, Tipton’s predecessor John Salazar, a Democrat, introduced a bill last year to get the land exchange done. But it never made it out of committee. As it turns out, Koch and Oxbow’s employees were Salazar’s biggest boosters. Collectively Koch, his wife and Oxbow donated a total of nearly $70,000 to the then-congressman’s political war chest. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, co-sponsored the land exchange bill. Like Salazar, the senators also benefited from Oxbow’s generosity, although not to the same extent as Salazar.

Within weeks of taking office, Tipton pledged Bear Ranch will be on his radar.

“I know it is on our agenda to look into the federal land exchange for Bear Ranch in Gunnison County,” Tipton’s spokesperson Chris Montana told the Delta County Independent on Jan. 27. “We are going to research it a little bit more, and when we decide to move forward it’s going to be a more transparent process with more public input.”

Gunnison County isn’t the only place where Bill Koch lives the billionaire lifestyle. His primary pad is in Palm Beach, Fla., and he also owns a 15,500-square-foot spread in Aspen that used to be a lodge. It has 17 bedrooms.

His brothers Charles and David also own exclusive properties in Aspen, where they have been holding strategy meetings and fundraisers with Republican hotshots like presidential candidate Rick Perry.

The Koch brothers certainly have their differences.

But they share a zip code, and support for Tipton.

The Center for Responsive Politics revealed Thursday that corporate campaign spending has skyrocketed since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission decision in January 2010. The report comes at the same time as the first major state-level challenge to the controversial ruling.

In the run-up to the 2008 election, Citizens United, a conservative organization that has since aligned itself with the tea party, produced an attack film with the on-the-nose title Hillary: The Movie. When a D.C. court ruled that advertising and widely screening Hillary would be a violation of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, Citizens United took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Court ultimately determined that corporate expenditures on “electioneering” constitute a form of protected free speech, and that neither state nor federal law can bar corporations or non-profits from using general treasury funds to support or oppose a candidate. At the time, former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who lost his re-election bid in 2010 to tea partier Daniel Webster, called Citizens United “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case.”

The Center for Responsive Politics now finds that, following the Citizens United decision, midterm spending on campaign ads and electioneering efforts by outside interest groups (including corporations, nonprofit interest groups and unions) has quadrupled. Moreover, 72 percent of spending for ads around the 2010 election came from groups that were legally barred from such spending before the Court made its decision. Although unions and liberal nonprofits have taken advantage of the ruling, outside spending from conservative groups is where the true growth has occurred. In 2010, election spending from conservative groups without direct party connections was up nearly 10 times what it was during the last midterm election cycle. At $190.5 million, it was also nearly double the $98.6 million that non-party-affiliated liberal groups spent on the 2010 election.

A slideshow of some of the Center’s findings is below:

The deluge of corporate money that rushed into the election process once the Supreme Court opened the floodgates has now prompted at least one group to challenge the ruling directly. Free Speech for People is a non-partisan organization dedicated to the idea that constitutional free speech protections intended for individuals don’t extend to corporate spending, nor should they. The group points out [PDF] that, according to polling done by Hart Research, fewer than 14 percent of Americans agree with the Court’s decision, and that 82 percent of Americans believe Congress should step in to place limits on corporate campaign spending.

Now, Free Speech for People is standing by Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock as he works to appeal state Judge Jeffrey Sherlock’s October ruling that Citizens United made Montana’s 1912 Corrupt Practices Act unconstitutional. The Corrupt Practices Act was passed nearly 100 years ago, Free Speech for People co-founder and General Counsel Jeffrey Clements tells The American Independent, because of the undue influence the copper industry had on Montana politics at the turn of the century. Now, a century on, corporate influence has been restored to its place in the political process; Clements and Free Speech for People co-founder John Bonifaz hope to change that.

To that end, Free Speech for People has filed an Amicus Curiae brief [PDF] (a document that an outside party can submit to provide information to a court) with the Montana Supreme Court, which will be hearing Attorney General Bullock’s appeal of Sherlock’s decision.

Bullock and Free Speech for People, however, now face an uphill battle. Western Tradition Partnership (WTP) is an anti-environmental regulation organization that, along with two local businesses, brought the suit that Bullock is now appealing. If WTP and its partners win in the Montana Supreme Court, the state of Montana can take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court; if the state wins, WTP can do the same.

Either way, the case has a very real possibility of ending up under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. But with very recent precedent weighing in favor of corporate expenditures and no significant ideological shifts on the Court since the decision, the future of the Montana case seems all but sealed.

Tara Malloy, associate legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit dedicated to campaign reform, says that Montana’s best option now is to gather as much evidence as it can to show that unchecked corporate spending is a path to quid pro quos and bribery. “It would be very interesting if Montana could come with a good record—or terrible record, if you will—of corruption,” she says. “But even then, the Supreme Court does not have to accept that.”

Free Speech for People’s Clements has the same take. He says that the onus will now be on Montana to show that the state’s political process is inherently compromised without the Corrupt Practices Act. The fact that all the evidence goes back 100 years, though, might weaken the case. “Will this lead to a reversal of Citizens United?” he says. “Probably not. But it’s important that states do stand up against Citizens United like this, because otherwise, we don’t have democracy anymore.”

Clements stresses that he’s not defying the Supreme Court or arguing that it has created an illegal or unconstitutional political atmosphere. But he hopes that Montana’s case could at least prompt other states to consider taking on the Citizens United decision and alert the Supreme Court to how it has played out across the country. “Corporations aren’t people,” he says. “Multinational corporate money has no place in our elections.”

As the WikiLeaks endless U.S. diplomatic document dump continues, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is battling back calls to resign for a UN espionage scheme, she’s leading the government’s de facto public relations campaign against WikiLeaks and she’s battening down the hatches at the State Department. She is, in effect, in a war against the future the internet is promising to deliver as WikiLeaks incrementally posts all of the 250,000 State Department cables it is alleged to possess. On Wednesday, the internet also attacked her from the past. Web-culture agenda-setting site Boing Boing posted Clinton’s January celebration of internet freedom.

“We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship,” she said. “…Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom. We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights.”

As anyone following the WikiLeaks versus Superpower battle knows, the U.S. government is not only trying to plug the leak, it’s attempting to prevent Americans from reading about and exchanging information with each other about the leak and pressuring businesses to limit access to WikiLeaks. In other words, it’s trying to take the tools out of the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights!

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Ellsberg told Friedman that he disagrees with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that Secretary of State Clinton should resign for apparently encouraging diplomats and staff to spy on members of the United Nations. He also praised Assange as well as the suspected source of the leak, PFC Bradley Manning, who have been called respectively a terrorist and a traitor, with many prominent figures calling for the assassination of Assange and the execution of Manning. Ellsberg called Manning a patriot and a hero.

Ellsberg also talked at length about revelations from the cable dump of covert bombing and assassinations by the U.S. in Yemen, covered up by Yemeni officials, the kind of serious policy action Ellsberg says the government is undertaking on behalf of the American people who have been unconstitutionally kept in the dark.

Friedman posted the transcript of the interview at the BradBlog.

Here’s Ellsberg on Manning:

ELLSBERG: I’m very impressed that Bradley Manning, the suspect in this, who has not been proven to be the source yet by the Army but if the Army’s –I should say the Pentagon and Army’s suspicions are correct then I admire what he did and I feel a great affinity for it, because he did say, allegedly, to the person who turned him in, Adrian Lamo, in a chatlog, that he was prepared, he was ready to go to prison for life or even be executed, he said, in order to share this information with the American people who needed to have it. And that’s the statement I said I’ve waited, in a way, for 40 years to hear someone make. I think it’s an appropriate choice for somebody to make. It’s not that they’re obliged to be willing to do that so much. That’s something a person has to decide for themselves very much. But I certainly think that when so many lives are at stake as in these wars or the new wars that may be coming at us, as in Yemen or even Pakistan, that to try to avert those is appropriate and to shorten them when they’re clearly hopeless and dangerous, as in Afghanistan.

[...]

Bradley Manning is not a traitor any more than I was. I’m sure from what I’ve read that he in fact is very patriotic, as I was. And indeed the charge of treason in our country, in our Constitution, requires aid and comfort to an enemy with whom you adhere. And adherence to an enemy to the disadvantage of the United States. I don’t think Bradley Manning or I intended at all to be disadvantageous to the United States. Quite the contrary. To do things, as I’ve said, to reveal truths that would reduce the danger that our policies are subjecting Americans to. And Bradley Manning, I’m sure, does not adhere to the Taliban or to al-Qaeda any more than I adhered to the Viet Cong, which was zero. So that charge is ignorant, let’s say, of what the term means in America.

And on Yemen:

ELLSBERG: One of these cases, of course, reveals that the Yemeni leaders, Saleh and his deputy and so forth, are assuring Petraeus that they were lying for us and lying to keep it from their own people that Yemen was being bombed by a foreign power, namely us. And of course that’s keeping it from the American people as well. We weren’t admitting that. And not only to keep it from the Yemeni people but to keep it from Americans because Americans, I think, do have a right to know who we’re bombing, who we’re at war with. Certainly Congress should be making that decision and has not been. Certainly. So our Constitution is being absolutely flouted on that, as is true in Iraq, for example. Or in Vietnam. So there have been some significant revelations, although on the whole these latest releases, large as they are in scale, haven’t yet proven as informative as the earlier ones on Afghan and Iraq. And they’re not, as I say, at the level of the Pentagon Papers. I wish they were. And yet there have been a number of significant revelations there. I mentioned one, that we were bombing …

FRIEDMAN: Yemen, certainly. Yeah.

ELLSBERG: … and that that was being concealed for us by lies to the Yemeni Parliament, which amount to lies by us, as well, to our own people. But another example, for instance, which is rather like some of the things in the Pentagon Papers, were the warnings by our former or recent ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, that our policy there of bombing, drone attacks and other attacks in Pakistan was, as she put it, counterproductive and dangerous. Meaning that it’s endangering a regime that, with all its faults, Pakistan, is less bad for us in the world and for Pakistan than what might well follow it if we destabilize it. And what we’re doing is destabilizing that regime. What that also means is that our policies are endan- in both Yemen and Pakistan, and Afghanistan– are endangering Americans at home.

The idea that these releases are dangerous I think conceals a very misleading and basically dangerous attitude. And that is that the only risks to Americans lie in telling the truth or exposing these operations, or in any degree of transparency. Now, there may be some risks, in some cases. There are risks in democracy, and there’s risks in openness. It’s not without any risk. Our Constitution, on the whole, relies on our taking those risks in order to be a democracy and to have, to avoid debacles like the ones we’ve just been mentioning. But what these critics don’t seem to recognize is that our current debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, all these places, do not result from too much openness or too much transparency. They reflect the risks which were realized risks having to do with secrecy and silence and lies.

The silence about the lies that got us into Iraq, for example, or, and in general the decision-making that is getting us into these. Now, the case of Yemen, for example. Probably there are, there’s an argument to be made about whether we should be attacking supposedly Al-Qaeda cells in Yemen. At the same time, many people in the government, it has been leaked now, actually believe that those attacks will mainly be targeted with the help of Saleh, the ruler in Yemen, against people who have no relation to Al-Qaeda, people are opposing his regime for various good or bad reasons.

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It is worth noting that none of those companies is named Nestle Waters North America, currently raising eyebrows in Colorado by pumping water from a spring near Buena Vista and trucking it to Denver for bottling under the Arrowhead label.

The water companies in question: Pepsi, Coke and Fiji were cited for their work in disaster relief, water conservation and local education and employment efforts.

Some, though, think the bad things these companies do outweigh the good. Here is a letter from Food and Water Watch to supporters, asking them to write to their Congress person or to Clinton herself to protest Clinton’s action.

Dear——–,

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Fiji Water Don’t Deserve Awards from Secretary Clinton!

Tell Secretary Clinton that She Shouldn’t be Rewarding Bad Water Corporations.

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Fiji Water take water from communities all over the world, bottle it, and make huge profits selling it back to us. Should they get an award for this? We don’t think so.

As communities fight to keep control of this basic human right, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office is considering these water bottlers for “corporate excellence” awards. Tell Secretary Clinton that she shouldn’t reward bad corporate behavior.

We’ve been fighting water bottling plants in Maine and Oregon, and recently helped stop plans for a bottled water facility in Florida. Water is a precious resource that we can’t live without, and across the country, and the world, communities don’t want multinational corporations taking water from their communities to make a profit.

We couldn’t believe it when we found out that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is considering these big three multinational corporations as finalists for her “corporate excellence” award. These companies are more likely to be on our “corporate greed” award finalist list.

Can you help us send a message to Secretary Clinton that corporate greed and bad behavior doesn’t deserve awards? Take Action:

Thanks for taking action,

Sarah Alexander
Outreach Director
Food & Water Watch

The twelve finalists were selected from a field of 78 nominees. The State Department did not return an email asking for more details. In past years, the winner has been selected in early December.

Here is what the State Department had to say about three water companies:

Coca-Cola in Swaziland – for the beverage company’s work to improve local communities’ water, education, and health; promote entrepreneurship; foster local science and technology initiatives; and demonstrate exemplary employment practices

Fiji Water in Fiji – for the bottled water company’s disaster relief efforts; volunteerism; partnerships that focus on local health, education, and provision of water; and “carbon negative” approach to product lifecycle and conservation efforts

PepsiCo in India – for the beverage company’s fostering of environmental sustainability through water conservation efforts, which has benefited small and marginal farmers; supporting the health and well-being of local communities; and providing important employment opportunities through training with a focus on diversity and inclusion.

When it comes to honoring Fiji Water in particular, the protests become rather more pointed.

This, from www.Change.org:

As for Fiji Water, well, it’s hard to imagine a more laughable company (co-owned by the Resnicks) when it comes to corporate social responsibility. A story in Mother Jones revealed that while the company gets rich off selling and shipping water across the globe, locals in Fiji suffer from typhoid due to bad water supplies on the island, which is run by controversial military junta. Fiji Water owners have set up Cayman tax havens, Anna Lenzer reports. As for the product itself, well, it’s made with “Chinese plastic in a diesel-fueled plant and hauled thousands of miles to its eco-conscious consumers.” So yeah, you can ponder the environmental impact of that.

And, from Mother Jones itself:

UPDATE: News broke in Fiji today (11/18/10) that Fiji Water’s top official on the island, Director of External Affairs David Roth, was the reason for the abrupt resignation of the country’s acting prime minister, Ratu Epeli Ganilau. Ganilau shocked the island nation, which has been under martial law since 2009, by emailing his resignation to Prime Minister Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama, who is traveling in China. Fiji Water is a huge economic force on the island, and the company has been criticized for tolerating Bainimarama’s military regime; see my in-depth report, below.”We had some differences over the David Roth issue,” Ganilau told the site FijiLive, without elaborating. Reports from Fiji indicate that a deportation order had been issued for Roth, and Ganilau resigned in protest. (Fiji Water has not yet responded to our request for comment.)

The fight comes at a potentially awkward moment for Fiji Water, which has just been nominated by the US State Department for its 2010 Corporate Excellence Award. The US Ambassador in Fiji has also been making “surprise” visits to Fiji Water’s charity events,”touting Roth’s work. US relations with Fiji have been cool, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced during her Asia tour that the US will be re-engaging with Bainimarama’s regime by locating a $21 million USAID climate change office in Fiji—a step some consider an attempt to counter China’s rising influence there. “We are going to be working together with Australia to persuade the military government in Suva to meet its commitment to bring democracy back to Fiji,” Clinton said.

To see video of a State Department official talking about the awards, click here.

Key races to watch include the Democratic and Republican U.S. Senate contests.

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet faces a primary challenge from popular former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. GOP front-runner Jane Norton is battling to put distance between herself and Weld County D.A. Ken Buck and former state Sen. Tom Wiens.

GOP candidate for governor Scott McInnis has struggled for months to win solid grassroots activist support. Challenger Dan Maes will be looking to score a major boost tonight from Tea Party voters.

In the swing Fourth Congressional district, four Republicans have been jockeying for the chance to run against Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey, they are Yuma state Rep. Cory Gardner, CU Regent Tom Lucero, National Guardsman Diggs Brown, and regular guy Tea Partier Dean Madere.

Apart from the informal straw polls taken at candidate rallies over the past half year, the caucuses will be the first real test of candidate electoral strength.

In 2008, the presidential primary contests brought Republicans out in force to caucus for Mitt Romney while Democrats mobbed meeting places to weigh in on the neck-and-neck tooth-and-nail wrestling match between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.

This year, the energetic Tea Party movement has already mobilized thousands of Coloradans on the right and left, as have intense national debates over health reform and the stimulus package and bank bailouts, for example.

In 2008, roughly 120,000 Democrats and 70,000 Republicans turned out to caucus. As the Colorado Statesman reports, though, average attendance at caucuses has been closer to 15,000 for each party.

An interesting note: In Larimer County, at least, the vast majority of Democratic caucuses will be held in public schools while the vast majority of Republican caucuses will be held in churches.

Join Our Live Colorado Caucus Coverage

The Colorado Independent and other Colorado blogs have teamed with the Colorado Political Institute to post live coverage from all around the state. Readers can add their voice to tonight’s coverage by tweeting updates from your precinct and interacting with the caucus live feed. 

Contributors can begin adding their blow-by-blow coverage to the feed beginning at 6pm Mountain Time. Updates will be aggregated into our caucus stream and will include input from politicos, elected officials, and activists. Our coverage will include updates directly from party headquarters, meaning we will be the first to report statewide results. 

Help us leverage the power of social media by tweeting from your caucus location and by including the hash tag #caucusCO. 

If you are not caucusing, our live coverage will keep you informed. 

How to contribute

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On the Colorado Independent, the live feed will appear in the spot below this main feature.

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The influential Republican released a statement this afternoon with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

We strongly urge Senate passage of the Defense Appropriations Bill today, prior to expiration of the current continuing resolution. Passage today will provide important support for our foreign policy and national security priorities and ensure continuity of funding for our troops in combat and for all of the Department of Defense.

Gates has had it with the Party of No.

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Palin’s book is just the latest addition to the the right-wing bestseller industry, where wingnut web-giveaways and bulk pre-publication sales inflate purchase rates and shoot titles up the lists, leading stores to further promote and discount them. It’s part of what Hillary Clinton, also author of a bestselling memoir, might call the vast right-wing publishing conspiracy, where the marketing of conservative titles as bestsellers is meant to push a right-wing agenda and bolster arguments that the majority of the country really thinks like Rush– or Palin or like attack writer Jerome Corsi, author of election-season bestseller The Obama Nation, a “nonfiction bestseller” that was neither, as Prof. Peter Drier put it.

Progressive or lefty or leftwing or radical leftist site Buzzflash (What do the words mean anymore?) will be selling a parody comic book version of Palin’s memoir entitled “Going Rouge.” (But shouldn’t that be “Goin’ Rouge”?) Look for it behind a big promotional campaign with lifesize cardboard cutouts and so on at all your favorite chain bookstores!

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HEALTH REFORM TERROR: The risky scary healthcare reform experiment Pres Obama would subject the nation to will end in themurder of old people. Or it will formalize steps already being taken by smart and lucky Americans unafraid to make their last hour golden.

IT HURTS: Young men across the state are signing up for medical marijuana treatments. “This dramatic increase in an age group that is not expected to suffer from a chronic debilitating condition is concerning,” Colorado’s Chief Medical officer Dr. Ned Calonge said in a news release yesterday.

SUPERBAD: Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank caused a Colorado Politics kerfuffle last week by basically slandering U.S. Sens Udall and Bennet with imaginary observations of the two of them dealmaking in favor of gun rights on the Senate floor. Today Milbank took a sophomoric woman-hater swipe at Hillary Clinton in a video segment of his terribly unfunny “Mouthpiece Theater” satirical video blog-thing. The Washington Post quickly took the video offline. In this economy, how does this man still have work?

REALLY? Either Gov. Ritter stood up and told medical industry people that healthcare reform presented a “tremendous challenge” or the Denver Post just made that up so it could report it because it’s the kind of story the editors there just love. Look, they worked the master-of-the-obvious bit into the headline and into the first paragraph!

NEW DIRECTION CSU: Because, you know, maybe that billboard in Times Square probably wasn’t the best way to go.

Written and compiled by John Tomasic and David O Williams.

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