March 13, 2007

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Filed under: Katrina,Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 7:12 am

Have they learned nothing from New Orleans?

The Bush administration will allow some development in flood plains without formal environmental reviews.

Predictably (and rightly), the move has enraged environmentalists, who have been advocating for the disappearing wetlands for decades now, mostly in vain. This move allows developers to build on small tracts of land, and it places minimal restrictions on what can be built. Types of buildings to be permitted include residential homes, shopping venues, hospitals, prisons, and schools.

If you were a resident of low-lying Louisiana who had experienced Hurricane Katrina (or evacuated and returned to find your community in ruins), wouldn’t it make you feel nice and cozy to know that your kids’ new school could be built on a filled-in marshland that had flooded before–as long as the school was small and the entire development didn’t take up over half an acre? (In some parts of rural Louisiana, that’s not out of the question.)

(Oh, and is due to be reclaimed by the sea in a few decades because of global warming-induced rising seas, another problem that is not being addressed in the coastal “recovery.”)

And if you were, perhaps, a researcher of endangered species–maybe even the elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker–wouldn’t you be pleased to know that developers could pull the same sort of stunt that the timber industry did in the 1940s, when it completely stripped clear the last confirmed habitat of Ivorybills?

Oh, sure, the Endangered Species Act would provide protection for areas where the birds are known to roost. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? They are hard to find, and with recent potential sightings in Arkansas and Florida, there’s a possibility that they might be in pockets all over the Gulf states. However, those two sightings are increasingly being called into question since the scientists involved have not produced good video or photography yet. If other potential areas are wiped out before the birds could even be found, it opens the floodgates for the areas in Arkansas and especially Florida to be given similar treatment.

And, from the same article, this is just disgusting:

Another part of the regulations, approved in coordination with other federal agencies and the White House, waives the formal environmental reviews entirely for coal companies when they bury or reroute streams with their mining wastes.

So okay, if your friendly neighborhood coal company decides to dump waste product in a stream, completely cutting off the flow of water with the trash, no one has to run it through any sort of review process.

I’ll make sure to drink bottled water when I am in Louisiana.

This bit of news was certainly a very unwelcome addition to my e-mail inbox this morning.

I have made this blog mostly about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, yes, but frankly, I’m tired of having so much material to write about.

March 5, 2007

Another Offensive Remark Made at CPAC

Filed under: Katrina,Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 8:22 am

Why does the Conservative Political Action Conference have any credibility in Republican political circles? It’s apparently little more than a hate-fest in which the speakers run a race to the bottom.

By this time anyone who follows politics has heard about the ugly rantings of Ann Coulter, and her homophobic slur against John Edwards. The condemnation from all sides has been absolutely justified. This woman has been allowed to get away with spewing verbal vomit for far too long without being held to account for it in a meaningful way. She’s the one who, if you’ll recall, made nasty remarks about the 9/11 widows because they held politics other than her own. Now, I’m all for free speech. However, when I say “allowed to get away with” what she does, I simply mean that her brand of political “commentary” should disqualify her from the pundit’s seat that she has occupied for a long time. She has the right to say it, but what she has to say adds no value to the political system and shouldn’t be given airtime.

However, there was another remark made that is, arguably, equally offensive, if not more so. This remark has had very little coverage except on the blogs. I only discovered it myself from the Blog for Our Future coverage, via Crooks and Liars.

For your reading pleasure, Newt Gingrich on Hurricane Katrina victims:

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.

Failure of citizenship? Uneducated and unprepared? OK, unprepared, maybe, although that is really glossing over the truth about the 9th Ward. But it doesn’t take an education to know that a monster hurricane is bearing down on your city, especially when the television coverage is about virtually nothing else. (And I am reasonably sure that, despite poverty, most households did have televisions. About 99% of U.S. households do.) They were simply unable to leave because they didn’t have the means to get out.

The financial means. Evacuation is not cost-free.

So, knowing that the hurricane was coming, they went to the Superdome, went to the Convention Center, barricaded themselves in their homes, and waited it out. It was the best they could do with what they had.

As a Southern politician, Gingrich ought to know better. Even Haley Barbour, as much as I dislike him, wouldn’t make a remark like that–if only because he’s too slick a politician to do it. Newt Gingrich apparently has been out of politics for long enough that he’s lost his touch, and now he’s just spouting the right-wing Social Darwinist line without even attempting to gloss it over. “You suffered and died in a tragedy that didn’t have to happen, so it’s your fault for being ‘uneducated’ and poor.” The Social Darwinist part of the American political system really does not comprehend poverty. It doesn’t compute. To them, all the problems in someone’s life that are caused by money can be solved with a quick fix, and it’s the fault of the individual for not taking advantage of this imaginary quick fix.

To return to the beginning of this piece, I think it’s time for respectable Republican politicians to stay away from CPAC. If this is the level of commentary there, then it does no one any credit who attends it.

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