Tuesday, in all the hubbub over the State of the Union, the House sat down to pass another piece of toxic legislation-- literally toxic legislation-- while no one was looking. They passed H.R. 1644, a bill to block the Department of Interior’s proposed Stream Protection Rule that aims to better protect mining communities from the harmful impacts of coal mining pollution.
Last week when the Washington Post's Greg Sargent wrote that it was a good thing that the Republican presidential hopefuls are ignoring the Paris climate deal-- at their debates and at their campaign events-- it just highlighted further the GOP's inability and unwillingness to deal with reality. "[A] GOP president could do a great deal to undermine the climate deal. He could either declare that the U.S.
Elizabeth Warren relentlessly grilled a hapless Federal Housing Finance Agency Director, Mel Watt Thursday. Watch the questioning above. Clearly he was the wrong guy for the job and Obama should never have made this pathetic, political appointment-- and the Senate shouldn't have approved it. They did it as they were rushing to get home for Christmas along with half a dozen judges, the Secretary of Homeland Security, an Assistant Secretary of the State, a Deputy Secretary of State and a bunch of other administrators the Republicans had kept bottled up for partisan reasons.
Remember the old days when all Wall Street demanded personnel-wise was that they always get to name the Treasury Secretary? Well, a few weeks ago we found out that now they're demanding that they get another Wall Street whore as DCCC chair when Israel shuffles off into oblivion; their candidate is Jim Himes (New Dem-CT).
This is far more true today than it was in 1902Last week's most important story wasn't that mini-states Belgium, the U.K. and Denmark are joining in the bombing of airforceless ISIL-- or even the birth of Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky. The biggest news was broken by Ira Glass on NPR's This American Life.
I'm not certain if the report about the coal industry's latest toxic spill in West Virginia heading downstream towards Cincinnati is true or not, but I do know that when Compton educator Roland Charest saw the photo above, he could be heard saying, "I wouldn't be drinking anything that came out of those taps for at least a year."
