by Bob Schildgen
Published on December 27, 2004 By sunshinedaydream In Politics
Bush's 7 Deadly Sins

1. Turning Mom Into a Superfund Site
A Bush proposal to weaken clean-air rules would put three times more mercury into our air and water than existing rules would allow. One in six women has enough mercury in her system to risk her kid having brain damage, mental retardation, blindness, seizures, and speech impediments. Not exactly friendly to the rights of the unborn, is it, George?

2. Belly Flop in a Cesspool
Nobody much likes sewage, except maybe sewer rats or those albino mutant lizards they say inhabit the pipes. So why did Bush, on his inauguration day, rescind a rule to cut down on sewage dumping? And then he goes from belly flop to flip-flop. First, Bush whacked a new regulation to reduce the arsenic in drinking water. A few months later--after a public outcry--he agreed to cut arsenic down to the same limits they have in Old Europe.

3. Playing With Fire
Bush touted his "Healthy Forests Initiative" as a way to stop catastrophic wildfires, but it actually allows more logging on 190 million acres--which could lead to bigger fires, because it lets timber companies cut the large trees that resist burning. He also claimed this would protect family homes, even when these trees are dozens of miles away, and when fire experts say the best way to keep a building from burning is to make a clearing around it, not in the next county.

Speaking of combustion, the United States burns through 20 million barrels of oil every day. But Bush's global-warming energy plan called for opening almost 70 million more acres to oil exploration.

4. Lying, Denying, Censoring, Cheating, and Other Misundemocratic Behavior
If global warming makes you nervous, well, ignore it. That's exactly what Bush's EPA did when it sliced a whole chapter on climate change from its 2002 annual report on pollution.

There was plenty of practice for denial and deletion, the most notorious case being just after the attack on the World Trade Center. The EPA found levels of asbestos and other pollution thousands of times above normal around the disaster site. But the White House ordered the agency to announce that it was safe.

Then Dick Cheney's energy task force refused to reveal what went on in its meetings--until the courts forced the Energy Department to cough up some of the records. The department even swiped $136,000 from its solar, renewable energy, and energy conservation budgets to produce 10,000 copies of the task force's drill-America-first report.

5. Coddling Criminals
A Texas-tough law-and-order guy, Bush executed 152 people while he was governor, and the state's prison population jumped 60 percent. Yet the first year he ran America, clean-air inspections fell off 30 percent, clean-water and clean-air criminal referrals declined by 50 percent, and criminal referrals for violations of rules controlling toxic substances dropped 80 percent.

6. Putting Polluters on Welfare
At the very heart of conservatism, compassionate or otherwise, is sturdy, all-American, bootstrap-grabbing self-reliance and responsibility. Therefore, you'd expect Bush to make big-time polluters shell out to fix their messes, also known as Superfund sites. (That's how the notorious Love Canal got cleaned up.) But Bush policy exempts the polluters from paying, so taxpayers will now foot the Superfund bill by themselves.

7. Flattening Teddy's Bears and Twain's Frogs
The Bush administration has weakened environmental protection on 234 million acres--as much as Teddy Roosevelt set aside. This means more logging, roadbuilding, mining, oil drilling--and the manly art of snowmobiling. To make it easier for snowmobilers, Bush's Forest Service proposed building a bridge to roar deeper into grizzly territory in Montana's Flathead National Forest. This was after he snuffed a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

Bush even went after Mark Twain's celebrated jumping frog, yanking protection from 4 million acres of the California red-legged's habitat. He did protect 33,000 acres in Southern California for the kangaroo rat. But since these rodents are marvelously adapted to arid environments, it may be that he's just saving them for a role in desert warfare.


Comments (Page 1)
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on Dec 27, 2004
vERY WELL DONE.
Bush even went after Mark Twain's celebrated jumping frog, yanking protection from 4 million acres of the California red-legged's habitat. He did protect 33,000 acres in Southern California for the kangaroo rat. But since these rodents are marvelously adapted to arid environments, it may be that he's just saving them for a role in desert warfare.

There's a very good laugh.
on Dec 27, 2004
Rhetoric is funny in its irony. Bush, the boogey man conservative, does not want to conserve the envoirment in its pristine state in order to make room for progress- to use the resources of the land to stimulate economic growth, creating jobs, among other things. Progressives, on the other hand, seek to conserve the land. They do not want to see it used even though job creation and economic growth- progress- would result. How's that for a fip flop?


I'd like to hear how allowing dumping of sewage, and allowing fatal levels of mercury to go uncheck is allowing economic growth. You have a polluted cesspool and nothing can live or work there. Care to check land prices near love canal?
on Dec 27, 2004
deborah
on Dec 27, 2004
deborah
on Dec 27, 2004
Rhetoric is funny in its irony. Bush, the boogey man conservative, does not want to conserve the envoirment in its pristine state in order to make room for progress- to use the resources of the land to stimulate economic growth, creating jobs, among other things. Progressives, on the other hand, seek to conserve the land. They do not want to see it used even though job creation and economic growth- progress- would result. How's that for a fip flop?
on Dec 27, 2004
BTW, I would be interested to hear your view on the subject of over populatation and how it figures into the urgent issues that humankind faces.
on Dec 27, 2004
andr3ww provides 30 cases of 'Brawny' paper-towel to clean up the mess left behind by the horde of bleeding hearts
on Dec 27, 2004

"I'd like to hear how allowing dumping of sewage, and allowing fatal levels of mercury to go uncheck is allowing economic growth. You have a polluted cesspool and nothing can live or work there. Care to check land prices near love canal?"

Your point suggests that the rich care very little for the average Joe. While I don't think capitalists are monsters, I do suspect that at times they think of the bottom line first & foremost. Without waiting four years to vote out a republican (some would say substituting tweedle Dee for the no different twiddle dumb), what immediate act could you suggest that you & I do to stop getting shitted on? As for oil, I say we all agree to ride bicycles instead of driving in cars. A grassroots petition circulated among the Howard Dean supporters seems like a good starting point. No? I wonder how many of the affluent liberals are willing to walk?
on Dec 27, 2004

Reply #6 By: whoman69 - 12/27/2004 1:44:26 PM
Rhetoric is funny in its irony. Bush, the boogey man conservative, does not want to conserve the envoirment in its pristine state in order to make room for progress- to use the resources of the land to stimulate economic growth, creating jobs, among other things. Progressives, on the other hand, seek to conserve the land. They do not want to see it used even though job creation and economic growth- progress- would result. How's that for a fip flop?


I'd like to hear how allowing dumping of sewage, and allowing fatal levels of mercury to go uncheck is allowing economic growth. You have a polluted cesspool and nothing can live or work there. Care to check land prices near love canal?


And I'd like to see proof that Bush is letting this happen on his watch, not supposition. And just what does Love Canal have to do with Bush?




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The Love Canal Tragedy
by Eckardt C. Beck
[EPA Journal - January 1979]

If you get there before I do
Tell 'em I'm a comin' too
To see the things so wondrous true
At Love's new Model City
(From a turn-of-the-century advertising jingle promoting the development of Love Canal)



Give me Liberty. I've Already Got Death.
(From a sign displayed by a Love Canal resident, 1978)



Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history.

But that's not the most disturbing fact.

What is worse is that it cannot be regarded as an isolated event. It could happen again--anywhere in this country--unless we move expeditiously to prevent it.

It is a cruel irony that Love Canal was originally meant to be a dream community. That vision belonged to the man for whom the three-block tract of land on the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, New York, was named--William T. Love.

Love felt that by digging a short canal between the upper and lower Niagara Rivers, power could be generated cheaply to fuel the industry and homes of his would-be model city.

But despite considerable backing, Love's project was unable to endure the one-two punch of fluctuations in the economy and Louis Tesla's discovery of how to economically transmit electricity over great distances by means of an alternating current.

By 1910, the dream was shattered. All that was left to commemorate Love's hope was a partial ditch where construction of the canal had begun.

In the 1920s the seeds of a genuine nightmare were planted. The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite.

Landfills can of course be an environmentally acceptable method of hazardous waste disposal, assuming they are properly sited, managed, and regulated. Love Canal will always remain a perfect historical example of how not to run such an operation.

In 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, then the owners and operators of the property, covered the canal with earth and sold it to the city for one dollar.

It was a bad buy.

In the late '50s, about 100 homes and a school were built at the site. Perhaps it wasn't William T. Love's model city, but it was a solid, working-class community. For a while.

On the first day of August, 1978, the lead paragraph of a front-page story in the New York Times read:

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y.--Twenty five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school built on the banks of the canal.
In an article prepared for the February, 1978 EPA Journal, I wrote, regarding chemical dumpsites in general, that "even though some of these landfills have been closed down, they may stand like ticking time bombs." Just months later, Love Canal exploded.

The explosion was triggered by a record amount of rainfall. Shortly thereafter, the leaching began.

I visited the canal area at that time. Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.

And then there were the birth defects. The New York State Health Department is continuing an investigation into a disturbingly high rate of miscarriages, along with five birth-defect cases detected thus far in the area.

I recall talking with the father of one the children with birth defects. "I heard someone from the press saying that there were only five cases of birth defects here," he told me. "When you go back to your people at EPA, please don't use the phrase 'only five cases.' People must realize that this is a tiny community. Five birth defect cases here is terrifying."

A large percentage of people in Love Canal are also being closely observed because of detected high white-blood-cell counts, a possible precursor of leukemia.

When the citizens of Love Canal were finally evacuated from their homes and their neighborhood, pregnant women and infants were deliberately among the first to be taken out.

"We knew they put chemicals into the canal and filled it over," said one woman, a long-time resident of the Canal area., "but we had no idea the chemicals would invade our homes. We're worried sick about the grandchildren and their children."

Two of this woman's four grandchildren have birth defects. The children were born and raised in the Love Canal community. A granddaughter was born deaf with a cleft palate, an extra row of teeth, and slight retardation. A grandson was born with an eye defect.

Of the chemicals which comprise the brew seeping through the ground and into homes at Love Canal, one of the most prevalent is benzene -- a known human carcinogen, and one detected in high concentrations. But the residents characterize things more simply.

"I've got this slop everywhere," said another man who lives at Love Canal. His daughter also suffers from a congenital defect.

On August 7, New York Governor Hugh Carey announced to the residents of the Canal that the State Government wold purchase the homes affected by chemicals.

On that same day, President Carter approved emergency financial aid for the Love Canal area (the first emergency funds ever to be approved for something other than a "natural" disaster), and the U.S. Senate approved a "sense of Congress" amendment saying that Federal aid should be forthcoming to relieve the serious environmental disaster which had occurred.

By the month's end, 98 families had already been evacuated. Another46 had found temporary housing. Soon after, all families would be gone from the most contaminated areas -- a total of 221 families have moved or agreed to be moved.

State figures show more than 200 purchase offers for homes have been made, totaling nearly $7 million.

A plan is being set in motion now to implement technical procedures designed to meet the seemingly impossible job of detoxifying the Canal area. The plan calls for a trench system to drain chemicals from the Canal. It is a difficult procedure, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it will yield some degree of success.

I have been very pleased with the high degree of cooperation in this case among local, State, and Federal governments, and with the swiftness by which the Congress and the President have acted to make funds available.

But this is not really where the story ends.

Quite the contrary.

We suspect that there are hundreds of such chemical dumpsites across this Nation.

Unlike Love Canal, few are situated so close to human settlements. But without a doubt, many of these old dumpsites are time bombs with burning fuses -- their contents slowly leaching out. And the next victim cold be a water supply, or a sensitive wetland.

The presence of various types of toxic substances in our environment has become increasingly widespread -- a fact that President Carter has called "one of the grimmest discoveries of the modern era."

Chemical sales in the United States now exceed a mind-boggling $112 billion per year, with as many as 70,000 chemical substances in commerce.

Love Canal can now be added to a growing list of environmental disasters involving toxics, ranging from industrial workers stricken by nervous disorders and cancers to the discovery of toxic materials in the milk of nursing mothers.

Through the national environmental program it administers, the Environmental Protection Agency is attempting to draw a chain of Congressional acts around the toxics problem.

The Clean Air and Water Acts, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Pesticide Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act -- each is an essential link.

Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, EPA is making grants available to States to help them establish programs to assure the safe handling and disposal of hazardous wastes. As guidance for such programs, we are working to make sure that State inventories of industrial waste disposal sites include full assessments of any potential dangers created by these sites.

Also, EPA recently proposed a system to ensure that the more than 35 million tons of hazardous wastes produced in the U.S. each year, including most chemical wastes, are disposed of safely. Hazardous wastes will be controlled from point of generation to their ultimate disposal, and dangerous pratices now resulting in serious threats to health and environment will not be allowed.

Although we are taking these aggressive strides to make sure that hazardous waste is safely managed, there remains the question of liability regarding accidents occurring from wastes disposed of previously. This is a missing link. But no doubt this question will be addressed effectively in the future.

Regarding the missing link of liability, if health-related dangers are detected, what are we as s people willing to spend to correct the situation? How much risk are we willing to accept? Who's going to pick up the tab?

One of the chief problems we are up against is that ownership of these sites frequently shifts over the years, making liability difficult to determine in cases of an accident. And no secure mechanisms are in effect for determining such liability.

It is within our power to exercise intelligent and effective controls designed to significantly cut such environmental risks. A tragedy, unfortunately, has now called upon us to decide on the overall level of commitment we desire for defusing future Love Canals. And it is not forgotten that no one has paid more dearly already than the residents of Love Canal.





Since we are talking about something that started in 1910 and ended by 1978 that is.
Link

on Dec 27, 2004


And I'd like to see proof that Bush is letting this happen on his watch, not supposition. And just what does Love Canal have to do with Bush?


geeee drmiler dont cha know Bush was responsible for the civil war....... the nukeing of japan., the murder of abe lincon {spelling}

He personally over saw the killing of both kennedy brothers....... Any thing bad thats happened in the last 250 years bush junior is the bad guy...... Now the good things are all done by the lunitic left..... ya know things like 2.5 million jobs since aug last year..... lowest unemployment rate forever including bill clintons heyday.... let it go dr and let the left whine and cry in peace. its what THEY do best ok??
on Dec 27, 2004
Yes, I know. We just love to whine about the environment. I mean, clean air to breath and clean water to drink are such silly things to worry about.

Nixon created the EPA and there have been plenty of conservative conservationists. Why are you two saying this is just a liberal issue?
on Dec 27, 2004
Hey "sunshinedaydream" you can go on and dream that "GOLBAL WARMING??" is accually real while the rest of us know that there have been countless scientists that have deemed it imposssible. Those Liberals who started this whole golbal warming "idea" are holding out a spoon of poison and just bitt right into it. Its amazing how gullible and quick you are to judge another human being. Your list of "Bush's seven deadly sins" is more of your own opinion that acual fact. How many deadly sins to you have" Could even count them? I doubt it.
on Dec 27, 2004
I wonder how much of the information sunshine believes came from the likes of the Sierra Club or Earth First - filtered through the media giants of associated press. We all know they have no agenda.

I'm still waiting for the explanation of the other ice ages that have occurred prior to the dominance of the evil humans and their destructive ways. Or why there are no more dinosaurs? How can it be possible to predict climate change accurately 50 or 100 years in the future and not be able to predict with certainty what the weather will be like in 2 weeks.

I also know first hand that oil companies pay and pay and pay for cleanup of polluted sites (and rightfully so). These companies are paying for their sins from fifty years ago and the process to cleanup can take twenty years. I've seen cases where an oil company has scientific evidence to support the claim that there is no pollution level great enough to harm humans and yet a jury awards millions to the plaintiffs - this happened in Texas and Jesse Jackson got involved, need I say more.
on Dec 27, 2004
No serious thinkers come from the left anymore. Liberals simply bash Bush and call that policy, debate - discourse. Liberals point the finger of blame without offering ideas of their own; it is not criticism that liberals offer (certainly not constructive criticism), but rather condemnation based on a presumed moral superiority that says I’m better than someone who believes that … without offering alternatives. Of course even as a conservative I desire clean air & water. I indeed most certainly expect these things at the very least. I wonder how the Chinese will help in the pursuit of such things?
on Dec 27, 2004
Reply By: hitparadePosted: Monday, December 27, 2004No serious thinkers come from the left anymore. Liberals simply bash Bush and call that policy, debate - discourse. Liberals point the finger of blame without offering ideas of their own; it is not criticism that liberals offer (certainly not constructive criticism), but rather condemnation based on a presumed moral superiority that says I’m better than someone who believes that … without offering alternatives. Of course even as a conservative I desire clean air & water. I indeed most certainly expect these things at the very least. I wonder how the Chinese will help in the pursuit of such things?


ya think? lol
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