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  • Carolina in Their Minds

    The Bush administration is unhappy about a new ad campaign attacking its plan to move some 30 tons of plutonium from Colorado to South Carolina for temporary storage. The campaign was launched last week by South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges (D), who opposes the plan, fearing that his state could become the permanent resting grounds […]

  • Mountain Mama’s Day

    A federal judge ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers yesterday to stop allowing coal companies to deposit tons of dirt and rock from their mountaintop-removal mining operations into streams and valleys. U.S. District Judge Charles Haden II in Charleston, W.Va., also said a move by the Bush administration last Friday to make the “valley […]

  • Mr. Yucca

    The U.S. House voted 306 to 117 yesterday to move forward with the Bush administration’s plan to store the nation’s nuclear waste under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The overwhelming vote — which overrode the veto of the plan by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) — was expected. Now the battle moves to the Senate, where Majority […]

  • Maybe He Makes a Good Cup of Coffee

    John Suarez, the Bush administration’s pick for the job of enforcing the nation’s environmental laws, used to work closely with U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, back when she was governor of New Jersey. Trouble is, that appears to be about his only qualification for enforcing EPA rules. That was the concern expressed by Democratic members […]

  • Septemberfest

    Now that France has re-elected President Jacques Chirac over anti-immigrant, anti-social protection, anti-environment Jean-Marie Le Pen, the attention of the European Union has shifted toward Germany, where general elections will be held in September and an equally strong rightward lurch is feared. To help prevent that shift, Germany’s Greens spent the weekend outlining policies to […]

  • The Truck Stops Here

    Speaking of the blue-green alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, plus the trucking industry, filed suit yesterday to prevent the U.S. government from allowing some 30,000 Mexican trucks onto American roads. On Friday, the Bush administration is scheduled to sign regulations that would allow Mexican trucks to cross the border for the first […]

  • Lies, Damn Lies, and Economic Analyses

    In an unprecedented act, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced yesterday that it would suspend work on about 150 congressionally approved water projects to review the economics used to justify them. The move follows last week’s decision by the Corps to suspend its deepening of the Delaware River to review the economic analysis, one […]

  • Clear As Mud

    President Bush rejected a U.S. EPA proposal that would have gone much further toward improving air quality than his pet Clean Skies Initiative, according to administration documents. To cite just one example, the EPA proposal would have limited sulfur dioxide emissions to 2 million tons per year by 2010; by contrast, the (so-called) Clear Skies […]

  • Ill Duce

    It’s one thing for lobbyists to ply governmental officials with policy requests (that’s what they do); it’s another thing for government officials to actively seek input from lobbyists when crafting national policy. But apparently, in the Bush administration, that’s what officials do: According to Energy Department documents (released following a lawsuit by the Natural Resources […]

  • Catch the spirit of the Bush administration

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