(Why is the cat pictured? Because, the dog was busy)
1. An Inconvenient SCOTUS
A really big environmental decision came down from the Supremes yesterday when the court bitch-slapped…er….ruled against the Bush administration and its insistence that the Environmental Protection Agency couldn’t regulate green house gas-causing auto emissions. Wrong, said the court. Today’s WaPo has the details.
2. Yet Another Reason To Railroad Universal Health Care:
Did you know that if you participate in even the mildest kind of “collegiate sports activity,” you are automatically ineligible for Blue Shield of California’s short term health insurance and similar policies from other carriers? I didn’t either. Here’s the ap. Check item 11.
3. Everybody’s Prisons
The April 12 edition of the New York Review of Books has this brilliant and elegantly written article on what the state of American prisons and incarceration policy really means to the rest of us.
“’If prisons affected no one except the criminals on the inside, they would matter less.’” writes Jason DeParle, “But with more than two million Americans behind bars, the impact of mass incarceration is impossible to contain….”
4. Memo to Bears: Eat the Secretary
You may already know that the U.S. Department of the Interior is contemplating weakening the 34-year old Endangered Species Act. What you may not know is that the John Bolton-esque Bush appointee in charge of the decision is Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the same fellow who tried unsuccessfully to weaken the act when he was in the Senate. He has also bragged about his plans to take the wolf off the Endangered Species list, and as Idaho governor, blocked the introduction of grizzly bears into a wilderness area up near the Montana border because he said it would expose citizens of his state to a “flesh-eating, anti-social animal.”
A copy of the document, which Kempthorne and company intended to slip into place without Congressional approval, was leaked to the press last week. So this week Democratic lawmakers seem to have snapped awake enough to try to block the move.
If they fail to do so, I say we let a flesh-eating, antisocial animal into the secretary’s office and lock the door.
5. Scoring Los Angeles
The United Way of Greater Los Angeles has just released a 152 page Quality of Life Report for Los Angeles County. Here are three random highlights (or lowlights):
***At 7.32 on a 10 point scale LA’s quality of life score is lower than the state as a whole, which had an 8.08 score.
***1 in 4 adults in Los Angeles County are obese.
***Admissions to drug abuse programs are up a rather startling 40 percent over 2000, and 30 percent of those admissions are for meth abuse (up from 10 percent in 2000).
But, it’s not all bad. Violent crime is low, so is unemployment, and there are more credentialed teachers than before. The report has lots more.
On issue one, it is an absolutely, incredible stupid ruling led by incredibly liberal (and stupid?) justices.
On issue four, I wish that James_G._WattJames Watt was still Secretary of the Interior.
On point six, more credentialed teachers just proves that being credentialed doesn’t mean that you can teach.
I messed up the link to Watt, but deal with it.
Anyone against CO2 emissions should immediately hold his breath and not exhale.