Sons Of A Bitches

When will it fucking end? The mining barons kill underpaid, underprotected miners & the criminal Bu$hCo regime rewards them. Everything truly is backwards. Somehow allowing certain animals to be more easily killed mitigates against the awful mining decision is just beyond cynical. Here's from the article on the new mining rules.

The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

.....

A spokesman for the National Mining Association, Luke Popovich, said that unless mine owners were allowed to dump mine waste in streams and valleys it would be impossible to operate in mountainous regions like West Virginia....

....

“This is a parting gift to the coal industry from this administration,” said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. “What is at stake is the future of Appalachia. This is an attempt to make legal what has long been illegal.”
....

From 1985 to 2001, 724 miles of streams were buried under mining waste, according to the environmental impact statement accompanying the new rule. If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018, the report says.

& here's from the article on expanding the non-human kill zone.

"Clearly, he's catering to a constituency, because there's no biological or ecological justification," said Jamie Rappaport Clarke, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife. Clarke directed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the administration of former President Bill Clinton.

"It's selecting a group of species, only those that are hunted and fished, to give White House attention to," she said. "I would have expected some executive leadership on things like global warming and conservation of all biological diversity."

My emphasis.

NOTE: I am a hunter. I hunt upland birds, migratory waterfowl, & whitetail deer. I'm all for making more public land available for hunting, but coming from that asshole Bu$hCo, who governed a state with this much public land?

For those of my loyal four readers who are as mathematically challenged as I am, the pie pieces add up to 5.7%.

According to a Sunset Commission report,in the year 2000, approximately 23 million acres of the state's approximate 176 million acres (includes 4 million acres of submerged coastal lands) was owned or managed by a public entity....

In the U.S., as a whole, it breaks down this way:

Over 60 percent of the land in the United States is privately owned (table 10). The Federal Government is the next largest landowner with more than 28 percent, mostly in the West. State and local governments own nearly 9 percent and Indian trust land accounts for over 2 percent.

That adds up to 39%. I think any sportsman who supports the Rethugs really ought to think about those percentages. I suppose, however, that any true sportsman or woman wouldn't be a ReThug in the first place.