...find anything the government does that works and break it. I really never thought that we would be debating lead standards:
The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.
A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.
This administration never ceases to shock me. This is one of the more successful child-focused public health initiatives developed in the U.S. If you reduce the health standards, there will be more lead in the environment. This is bad. Do the Republicans really believe the rich will be able to buy their own bottled air?
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City vegetable gardens used to concentrate lead. It's still bad to eat things grown at the roadside.
"Do the Republicans really believe the rich will be able to buy their own bottled air?"
Maybe - but more importantly, they'll be able to avoid living next to lead-spewing industries, right? Would contamination be relatively localized, or no?
This is consistent with the conspiracy theory that these republicans, who hate government, are making government work so poorly that everyone else will begin to hate government. Oh, they hate government when it interferes with money and with them, but they love it when it tells everyone else to behave the way they want them to.
Oh, you're just a shill for Big Air Quality. Lead is in most people's paint already, and if it's safe for our walls, isn't it safe enough for our air?
[/snark (because it's almost too believable)]
It is a reflexive rejection of anything associated (fairly or not) with environmentalism or socialism. Rather than believing they can buy bottled air, they reject the evidence that air pollution is a life-threatening danger.
If you have enough willpower, you can deny any amount of evidence.
They do say W. likes to stand by his decisions and that takes incredible willpower with all the bad decisions he's made. He seems to have the most will power of anyone I've ever seen. Look at all the evidence he has ignored during his Administration.
I wonder what the lead level in Bush's blood is? Does he expect to gut such regulations before Congress can resume its oversight and start providing checks on this whackjob administration?
I seem to recall President Scroob of the Spaceballs breathing bottled air. Maybe Bush is about as serious?
I thought of President Scroob as well. I tried to write some witty comment referring to the Spaceballs Theory of Environmental Policy, but it didn't quite come out. So I started over from scratch.