Brunner Island in the Susquehanna River, where they burn a few hundred thousand tons of coal each week.The Inquirer had one of the nation's very best investigative reporting departments, as recently as twenty years ago. These days the 'Inky' does investigative journalism maybe once in a blue moon. Must be a blue moon on the horizon.
Smoke and Mirrors is a four part series about how Bush subverted the EPA. It's long but it is worth the time. Check it out.
Most people assume the Bushmen were just terribly incompetent and that was often the case. But they set out from the very start to subvert all aspects of government at every possible level. Much of what passed for ordinary incompetence was intentional and cleverly designed to produce chaos, disaster, fear, and mayhem -- conditions which in turn allowed the Bush Crowd to fleece every last one of us and leave our republic in ruins. That remains the goal of many conservatives of the Grover Norquist school who want to "reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The 'shrink the government' crowd also brought us "Disaster capitalism" and it will take more than a generation to clean up the mess.
Unspoken in that "drown it in the bathtub" credo is that conservatives really want to drown you and me in the bathtub; that's if you still believe in the quaint "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Lincoln's famous line from the Gettysburg Address sounds positively socialist today.
Iraq, Katrina, the economic meltdown and the constitutional crisis all have that common thread as the handiwork of our venal, greedy, devious rulers. Hey - they're burning the midnight oil to do all the damage they can as you read this - it ain't over yet. Hope may be on the horizon, but dastardly deeds are still being done and will be committed right up until midnight on January 19, and beyond if you consider all the land mines that are being planted for 'O'.
What's this got to do with rivers you ask? Everything has to do with rivers.The aforementioned series includes an article ("EPA Court follies") that tells a story about federal air quality regs and how the Bushmen craftily gamed the system to the detriment of the entire planet and all whom dwell therein. It cites the specific point that led Christy Whitman to resign. It's difficult for me to feel any sympathy for her despite our special relationship while she served as governor. That's a story for another post that will be told if someone will volunteer to digitize my special videotape and convert it to a ewetube thingy.
Some folks are itching to go canoeing with all the rain coming this week. It's a crazy weather pattern coming up and I have a feeling the creeks and rivers will be running high this coming winter so as to allow maximum opportunities to grab a paddle when the mild day presents itself. Not many days left in 2008, but hoping to carve the water with the paddle at least once more before the year expires. SYOTW!
Posts
