Bush Gutting The Endangered Species Act

Washington Post:

With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Controversies have occasionally flared over Interior Department officials who regularly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists' recommendations to list new species, but internal documents also suggest that pervasive bureaucratic obstacles were erected to limit the number of species protected under one of the nation's best-known environmental laws.

Read the whole story: Washington Post

Comments

[masterymistery]

We're supposed to be smarter than other creatures, yet continue to destroy our environment. That makes us the dumbest animal of all. http://thoughtoftheday-srs.blogspot.com/2007/05/dumb-animals.html

Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels calls humankind "...little odious vermin..." http://cosmic-rapture.blogspot.com/2008/01/little-odious-vermin.html
We make a mess, but we don't clean it up. Or we try and clean it up and fail miserably.

Very sad. Tragic. We are running headlong into extinction. It won't be the end of the world---the world will get on quite nicely without us, thanks very much---but it will be the end of the species unless we wake up in time and work harder and with greater commitment than ever before

[Tumult]

Bush gutted his soul long ago, it must have been peer pressure, none of the people he surrounds himself with has one either. The slow erosion of America has sped up under the Bush Administration, undermining endangered species protection is only a very small piece. Destroy the world now, tomorrow doesn't matter.

[Quaoar]

Next up on the endangered species list, Pan troglodytes kennebunkportensis, better known as the Bush Crime Family.

[wmbear]

"EXPECT POISON FROM STANDING WATER"...

--William Blake

[MajorKong]

I hear Bald Eagle tastes a lot like Whooping Crane.

[groot]

especially when served with fava beans and a nice chianti...mmmmm,mmmmmmmmmmmm

[kfdan]

G.W. is one species of politician I would like to see disappear. When are we going to gut the corrupt politician protection act!

[wmbear]

OR AT THE VERY LEAST...

Take them off the Endangered Species list, because they sure as hell are multiplying like rabbits.

[joebaggadonuts]

Impeachable offense. Can we get started now Nancy?

[wmbear]

WE CAN PLEAD WITH THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP TILL WE'RE BLUE IN THE FACE...

And what've we got? A blue face.

[thatsitfortheotherone]

Hey PK!

[peacekitten]

hello my friend. it's been a while. hope you are well.......

i'm sure the wildlife in your neck of the woods are faring much better than ours these days.....

[peacekitten]

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

~ from "The Outermost House" by Henry Beston

the kind of wisdom we too often forget about.

[mimsnpips]

Thank you peacekitten.

[amanda85]

Conservatives raping the earth. What a novel concept!
The environmental damage produced by NAFTA borders on catastrophic.

Kharma will be a bitch...

[DixieMelody]

Would it surprise anyone to know that the Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorn, is the former Governor of Idaho? The one who barricaded off our capitol building in downtown Boise for a year after 911 "Because it looks just like the capitol in Washington, DC and the evil-doers might mistake it for that."

Many downtown businesses had to go out of business because there was no parking on any of the barricaded streets.

Such a pathetic idiot, and one who never met a mirror or camera he didn't love.

HEADS UP: I have noticed lately he (Kempthorn) is in many of Bush's photo ops, always the one immediately on Bush's right (for no apparent reason). Me thinks he aspires to national office, and the truly scary part is that he is just selfish, shallow, egocentric and hollow enough to realize that aspiration.

[thatsitfortheotherone]

Too bad. Boise was a beautiful town 20 years ago. Sans barricades.

[wmbear]

WELL, IDIOTS LIKE TO SURROUND THEMSELVES WITH OTHER IDIOTS...

Bush doesn't want appointees who'll make him look stupid, so he appoints even worse idiots than he is to positions of high responsibility.

[GullyJimson]

Begging everyone's pardon, and if I may be so bold, but isn't it true that if it weren't for the protection afforded by the Endangered Species Act, your national symbol would now be extinct?

[swift goat pet for truth]

No.
Bald eagles would survive in Canada and certain parts of Alaska.

[peacekitten]

since 1959, alaska has been part of the united states.

we're still working on canada.

canada is much more strict with its endangered species protection than the united states.

[helonias]

25 years ago there was 1 breeding pair of bald eagle in NJ.

Thanks to the Endangered Species Act there are now over 60 pairs.

But recently some idiot cut down a nest tree in Cumberland Co. Luckily the pair were able to build another nest in time for breeding.

[peacekitten]

does that mean it's going to be open season on republicans come november?

[Rumplestiltskin]

Hey Peace,
ALF (Animal Liberation Front, not the loveable TV sitcom puppet) has determined the republicans, as an endangered species, may not be hunted. They are planning several "operations" to ensure the safety of republicans. Hunt at your own risk.

[peacekitten]

hello my friend. it's been a while.

don't forget i am a peacekitten who was once diagnosed with a disorder known as "trigger finger." luckily i am a pretty good shot when it goes off randomly, and hopefully my humane society membership card, as well as my former status as a registered texas republican will be enough to save me from the ALF (whose occasional violence i DON'T condone, believe it or not....;)

[BlackWidowPilot]

Riight. Extremists protecting extremists. I thought "Repedophiles" were the gun-nut sort who didn't need others to protect them from the big, bad "liberals?"

Losing their nerve, are they?

Leland R. Erickson

Citizen

[peacekitten]

hello my friend.

i am not a hunter and never have been. i also don't condone the violence done by the ALF. however, a judicious use of duct tape might be order to keep the screaming down as the votes are tallied.

[thatsitfortheotherone]

If only they were a sub-species. Homo Page-dilectus?

Then maybe they would die out on their own like homo erectus (no intention to be naughty).

[helonias]

While Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has touted his support for the environment throughout his presidential campaign, the League of Conservation Voters gave him a zero rating Thursday on its 2007 congressional scorecard -- making him the lowest-ranking lawmaker among all 535 members of Congress.

Even worse with Miss Spoke McCain

[JohnKemp]

Perhaps McCain is in favor of people earning a livable wage & being able to afford food & fuel as opposed to total devotion to protecting the mating habits of salamanders?

Just a thought.

[BlueStateMan]

Since WHEN has ANY republican given a SHIT about ANYBODY earning a "living wage"....... having food on the table ........ and transportation?

Christ.

[surfcitysteven]

Keep wiping your rear end with the Stars and Stripes. Take our flag, throw it on the ground and piss on it. If you don't care about the bald eagle, why should you care about the flag?

[thatsitfortheotherone]

Perhaps with Senator Obama as Presifent, your mating habits, as well as those of salamanders, might be protected.

Tool.

[helonias]

John McCain would allow the cure for aids or cancer to become extinct before we discovered it.

Not not percosets

[the964kid]

We cannot get the republicans out of power soon enough. It's amazing how much damage Bush and his cohorts have done in such a short time.