Living in Pensacola has its benefits. Like hearing the bomb blasts from about 50 miles away at the Eglin Air Force base testing and practicing range. Which brings me to my wish list for Santa. I’d like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to get one of these. It’s called a Massive Ordnance Air Blast. It has also been affectionately called the Mother Of All Bombs.
Thanks to the Northwest Florida Daily News for a fine article.
Video of first test, 5 years ago.
https://youtu.be/HsQdeAeOEg4
In one day, in the same issue, and on the same pages, the editorial pages echo a story on the front page called “Troubled Waters.” The Pensacola News Journal editorial page begins with “Still a long way to go in curbing toxic emissions.” Citing problems with mercury and lead both here and across the nation, raising the impact to “the critical importance of taking stronger steps to reduce or eliminate emissions of toxic chemicals.” It’s lead paint in houses, it’s PCB’s. What would we do without a ‘crisis’ to champion? And who eats houses anyway?
In the same section comes an article from Emerald Coastkeepers, an environmental group with strong ties to BIG law and Air America Radio talk show hosts Mike Papantonio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom can lay claim to suing the pants off big corporations from Hudson Falls, NY to a mining town in West Virginia, and BIG pharm and BIG tobacco. This article says that the Coastkeepers are keeping and eye on a BIG company, Archer-Western, doing road infrastructure work for the county. Seems that all the state-required environmental precautions are no match for the occasional signature Florida rainstorm and some runoff goes into a bayou, Bayou Texar.
Curious thing about Bayou Texar is that it is lined with expensive homes with septic systems that leak raw sewage into it, rain or shine, 24-7-365, and the Coastkeepers are not concerned with stopping that. It’s about who has the deepest pockets, not who is doing the most damage.
The PNJ is just playing the responsible role in informing us of the environmental problems around us. And it is also laying the groundwork for the dynamic duo to go after those big, evil corporations again.
Digging deeper into this perfect storm shows the Independent News was the first to bring it up in their November 1st cover story. Coming off his “landmark environmental victory” in Spelter, W.Va, Papantonio says “I’m going to start doing cases like this in our area. I’m ready for it.” Papantonio sort of laid out his cards in an interview with editor Duwayne Escobedo like this . . .
“We have a generational issue here,” he says. “We had a generation of politicians, media types, businessmen, doctors and professionals who knew better but allowed the environmental devastation to happen anyway. There is going to be a backlash.”
He’s already thinking about the next environmental cases Levin Papantonio and its partners will do in Northwest Florida but he’s not ready to reveal them all yet.
Pressed about it, he does single-out lumber and paper company International Paper. Levin Papantonio filed suit last year on behalf of a handful of Cantonment residents against the company, the world’s largest paper company.
PNJ links: Still a long way to go in curbing toxic emissions
Emerald Coastkeeper monitors runoff problem
Troubled Waters
Nov 1 Independent News Cover Story: Papantonio Promises To Clean Up ‘Backyard’
related links in PNJ’s forum from an anonymous poster named hoagie. That would be me.
A Call To Harms, Slip & Fall Gone Wild | Here’s a suggestion
I have no idea what the beef is here but the video is rather amazing. I have heard it is a pro-Chavez politician who doesn’t like the media to a reporter making an insensitive comment about her dead son.
Will someone who knows Spanish interpret what happened please?
h/t Chuck Adkins
Here’s a story in today’s Washington Post that actually represents a fine tutorial on how illegal campaign contributions get to the Clinton campaign. But it could be to any-one’s campaign. The only thing missing in this article is how these ‘contributors’ who don’t have two nickels to rub together get their money back from Alonzo Cantu, a self-made multi-millionaire who literally owns McAllen, Texas, a small border town near the Rio Grande.
Well, it’s not exactly missing. Instead of checks to replace their contribution, those people do business with and get business from Cantu. There’s the quid pro quo. But try to prove that in court.
Campaign finance reform is the one thing that politicians really don’t want, but say they do. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter that congress, Bush, and the SCOTUS all had their hands in it. It needs to go.
The premise that special interests, aka money, are corrupting the politicians and that laws need to be made to limit the money, totally misses the point. If anyone is corrupt, it is the politician that does a quid pro quo or who otherwise breaks the law in money laundering and/or takes bribes like William Jefferson (D-La) did. It’s not the donor, it’s what the recipient does. Don’t re-elect a crook.
related links:
How Big Man In McAllen Bundles Big For Clinton | Way More Than The Lincoln Bedroom | Questions For John McCain and Russ Feingold