David Ignatius
Howard Fineman
Doyle McManus
I've been reading up on the art of fracking, which sounds like it came from a children's cartoon show, but is the art of extracting natural gas trapped beneath a solid layer of rock 7000 feet below ground. What seems to bother most investigators is that the oil companies doing this fracking, or fractured extraction, don't seem to know what items are being added to the large amounts of water used to force the rock apart. Some places there have been known poisons and carcinogens added, in others there are weird items like walnut shells, sodium, and citric acid. I've come to the realization that there isn't one formula being used, the oil companies are adding old things past their due date from the food and drug industries. Instead of dumping these items on third world countries in the form of aid, they are dumping the stuff deep underground. At least that explains where all the red dye #2 went...
Doesn't it seem like we are storing way too much stuff underground? People who say that they are worried what their grandchildren will inherit are lying, they know too well what they will get and the half-life of the material they are giving them. There is an old uranium mine, closed for over 30 years, located above Denver, that is having problems with contaminating the water-table with old tailings, and nobody has come up with a solution other than offering free x-rays to the victims. And in Pueblo, they are trying to get permission to build a nuclear plant, which was OK until people realized that it's physical plans are the same as the ones currently melting down in Japan.
The current debate over how big the federal government should be is a red herring, it's not the debate we need to have. The changes that sorely need to be made in our government is about incompetent workers and regulators. Case in point, The office of Mineral Management changed directors, yet hasn't changed any of its policies regarding drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It's obvious that someone's idiot child drew up what a blowout preventer is, the design is flawed and the resulting monstrosity doesn't work. But the government has been giving out permits for deep water drilling based on the oil companies using these faulty preventers. There has been absolutely no research and development towards making something that can actually work when things go horribly wrong, so we are setting ourselves up for another major disaster in the Gulf or off the coast of Alaska. The government has been accepting emergency plans with a date of 2008 on them, and there is more pressure on them by the current batch of Republicans to speed up the permit process.
Most of the really incompetent people were hired into government work from a plan directed by Darth Vader himself. The idea was to seed the bureaus with people who would purposely or inadvertently sabotage the efficiency and reliability, giving the Republicans an excuse to get rid of large sections of the government bureaucracy, and we'd be too pissed off at the government to protest such an obvious and lame-brained ploy. But the Bush administration spent eight years hiring these incompetents, let them burrow in so they couldn't be replaced when a Democrat was elected, and we have spent two years off yelling among ourselves and making cute signs based on tea party jokes...
And the joke is on us, because we don't yell back at The Donald's idiocy in public, equating him with having some of Charlie Sheen's tiger blood and adonis comb-over dna. It can only get more fun as more GOP hopefuls announce their candidacy for president. Time for some forums, or better yet, let's start having town-hall meetings again, pretend that they were a common political practice when hardly anyone ever used them before two years ago, and none after the shooting of Ms Giffords. Suck it up punks, I want to see how Newt and Mit and Haley are gonna walk tall in the Land of the Brave while pretending it's still The Land of the Free...
Howard Fineman
Doyle McManus
"The brutal truth is that Libya doesn't matter very much. It's a desert backwater of 6 million people with little influence over the rest of the Middle East. The main reason Libya matters at all is that President Obama and his NATO allies have taken it on as a challenge" - Doyle McManus
" Ayn Rand is blazing back as an icon of the Tea Party, which overlooks her atheism, amorality in romance and vigorous support for abortion." - Maureen Dowd
"Barack Obama was supposed to be something new and different. He ran by presenting himself as a Reagan-level change agent, a new synthesis. But aside from a health-care plan that is in large measure a give away to the industry -- and aside from spending tons of money on tax cuts and two and a half wars -- he hasn't really been either a force for change or a staunch defender of the progressive heritage. Witness the budget deal he just agreed to." - Howard Fineman
Doesn't it seem like we are storing way too much stuff underground? People who say that they are worried what their grandchildren will inherit are lying, they know too well what they will get and the half-life of the material they are giving them. There is an old uranium mine, closed for over 30 years, located above Denver, that is having problems with contaminating the water-table with old tailings, and nobody has come up with a solution other than offering free x-rays to the victims. And in Pueblo, they are trying to get permission to build a nuclear plant, which was OK until people realized that it's physical plans are the same as the ones currently melting down in Japan.
The current debate over how big the federal government should be is a red herring, it's not the debate we need to have. The changes that sorely need to be made in our government is about incompetent workers and regulators. Case in point, The office of Mineral Management changed directors, yet hasn't changed any of its policies regarding drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It's obvious that someone's idiot child drew up what a blowout preventer is, the design is flawed and the resulting monstrosity doesn't work. But the government has been giving out permits for deep water drilling based on the oil companies using these faulty preventers. There has been absolutely no research and development towards making something that can actually work when things go horribly wrong, so we are setting ourselves up for another major disaster in the Gulf or off the coast of Alaska. The government has been accepting emergency plans with a date of 2008 on them, and there is more pressure on them by the current batch of Republicans to speed up the permit process.
Most of the really incompetent people were hired into government work from a plan directed by Darth Vader himself. The idea was to seed the bureaus with people who would purposely or inadvertently sabotage the efficiency and reliability, giving the Republicans an excuse to get rid of large sections of the government bureaucracy, and we'd be too pissed off at the government to protest such an obvious and lame-brained ploy. But the Bush administration spent eight years hiring these incompetents, let them burrow in so they couldn't be replaced when a Democrat was elected, and we have spent two years off yelling among ourselves and making cute signs based on tea party jokes...
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