Burn the Katrina debris? Are you kdding? You haven't been allowed to burn leaves in the northeast since I was in high school. For the Bush Administration, deciding whether to pollute another huge swath of America already devastated was easy. Burning is 1) cheaper; 2) more convenient for their corporate contributors; and 3) not their problem! Only ordinary Americans who ingest the chemicals unleashed by the burning of the toxins will suffer. When you understand the cost-benefit analysis, it's so easy to understand!
Where There's Smoke, There's Fire
Well, it's begun. Whatever faint hope we might have had that this time our leaders would try to handle the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast right is fading fast. The latest outrage is a decision by Halliburton and other contractors engaged on a no-bid basis to clean up the aftermath to just get rid of debris the way we would have back in the 19th century -- by burning it. Of course, in the 19th century the debris would have been wood and bricks, not complex organic chemicals like PVC, rubber tire laced with cadmium and nickel, even dioxin waste from the DuPont DeLisle plant, which the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality claims in a press releases had "no leaks or releases" from Katrina. How they can even presume to know that before they have had time to do proper sampling?
The Corruption
The GOP is corrupt, from top to bottom. At the top, former chief procurement officer David Safarian indicted on five counts:
Former Bush Official Indicted in Probe
From my home state, the vice Chairman of the Republican Party was taped in conversations with a criminal defense client about how to hide the guy's drug profits! Our Mittwit, Governor Romney, gets laughs describing himself as a "Republican from Massachusetts" while courting conservatives in South Carolina. Here in Massachusetts, he & his party are the joke. He couldn't win an election against Billy Bulger next year. Hell, he couldn't beat Whitey Bulger.
State Republican Party's embattled vice chairman resigns
To little scumbaggy local officials, like John Gosek, Mayor of Oswego, N.Y, who was taped by FBI agents while offering $250 to have sex with a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old girl.
John Gosek, the man Oswego has known for years
The Cronyism
Ted Stevens has been siphoning money from American taxpayers' pockets into his little pet projects for years. (I've heard that you can't even get a meeting with Stevens unless you've raised $10,000 for him.) Here, money goes from Stevens, head of the powerful Appropriations Committee, to the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board -- which his son chairs. All this to paint a fish on a plane. Couldn't they have done this without taxpayer dollars? Why are we painting fish on private companies planes?
what is it about alaska and pork?
...a local nonprofit agency, the alaska fisheries marketing board, gave alaska airlines a $500,000 grant to paint the jet. the money came out of about $29 million in federal funding u.s. sen. ted stevens of alaska and his congressional colleagues have appropriated to the marketing board, created in 2003, to promote and enhance the value of alaska seafood. the senator's son, state sen. ben stevens, is chairman of the agency's board of directors. - anchorage daily news
Senator Ted Stevens, feeding at the Senate trough for 36 years.
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