cheney....Leaving No Tracks

[spanone]

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House."

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge's desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/leaving_no_tracks/

[WhiteTara]

1. and the salmon have not

recovered to this day. Another reason to condemn this man to the deepest dungeon on earth.

[gateley]

2. K&R. nt

[handmade34]

3. the struggles continue

May 29, 2010
“The head of the nation’s largest irrigation district said Friday that recent court decisions confirm his contention that federal regulators have overly focused on Delta pumping rates as the cause of the estuary’s decline. “These decisions are a complete vindication of the direction we’ve been headed, that the decisions concerning implementation of the Endangered Species Act have not been based on good science,” said Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District.

“The species are never going to recover until these agencies start to base their decisions on science “… as opposed to their preconceived beliefs,” Birmingham added.

http://aquafornia.com/

If I had any hair I would be pulling it out over the frustration at many people's lack of any real concern for the environment