Pensacola Utility Director: "What, Me Worry?"

Pensacola's water utility director has gone national with his technical defense explaining why Pensacola's drinking water ranks as the worst in all of the U.S.:

“If it doesn’t violate the law, I don’t really pay much attention to it,” said Stephen Sorrell, executive director of Emerald Coast Utilities Authority, which serves Pensacola, Fla. Data show that his system has delivered water containing multiple chemicals at concentrations that research indicates are associated with health risks.

He doesn't pay attention to health risks, as long as they are 'legal'? How embarrassing! How incompetent!

NYT reporter Charles Duhigg today exposes that defense for the humbuggery it is ["That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy"]. "The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal."

The article is long and detailed, but it comes down to this un-surprising point: the law can't keep up with science. Neither can a utility director who "doesn't pay much attention."

The Gospel Truth

When some anonymous blogger somewhere, such as Pensacola Beach, harbors the suspicion the Obama White House secretly has been undermining the public option in its own health care reform initiative, we tend to dismiss that thought as just a stray synapse of paranoia. When veteran congressmen John Conyers (D-MI), David Obey (D-WI), and Anthony Weiner (D-NY) say it, you know it has to be true.

Take it to the bank -- if you can find one that isn't hiding from its customers. No one knows the inside story in D.C. better than John Conyers. And there isn't a smarter, more thoughtful guy in all of Washington than David Obey. Unless it's Anthony Weiner.

If they said it, then it's as good as gospel.

Pensacola: "Don't Go Near the Water"

Judging from their published comments, local utility and tourist-promotion big-wigs might have some pretty snappy suggestions for promoting Pensacola as a safe place to live and visit. Just don't go near the drinking water:

• Dale Perkins, veteran ECUA director: 'Yes, we have no enviro-liberal wacko safe water.'
• Lois Benson, ECUA board member and former state senator: 'Safe water is our second priority.'
• Stephen Sorrell, ECUA Executive Director: 'We have a legal defense to our bad water. Move here and learn the details.'
• Laura Lee, Chamber of Commerce spokes-woman: 'It ain't our fault.'
• Shawn Hamilton, Tallahassee's EPA outcast to Pensacola: 'We serve minimally legal water!'
  

In all fairness, Lois Benson at least is willing "to take this information and see how it can make us a better utility." And, everybody knows Dale Perkins is a genial idiot; for years people have voted for him mainly because (1) he rarely has opposition on the ballot; and (2) we want to keep him from clogging the unemployment lines.

What going on here? Our most charitable guess is selective amnesia, brought on by public officials drinking the Kool-Aid made from local tap water.

• In 1998, a local grand jury "issued a report finding 'widespread' groundwater contamination in the county, and blaming the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and local authorities for failing to prevent or clean up the pollution."
• In 1999, EPA release its annual Toxic Release Inventory showing Escambia County had 23 industries that released over 52 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the local environment in one year -- qualifying Escambia County as the eighteenth worst-polluted county in the entire nation.
• In 2000, James Studnicki and Partnership for a Healthy Community released data showing that all cancer rates as well as new-born infant death rates are higher in Escambia County [pay for download] than in any other Florida county and the state as a whole. The death rate here is nearly twenty percent higher than the state average.

ECUA hasn't made matters better with its official statement in response to the latest news. Says the utility, "Our water is absolutely safe and meets every water quality standard from the environmental agencies. If the standards change, we will also meet the new requirements."

That's infuriating. What ECUA is saying, in effect, is that it can do better. It just doesn't want to. And, as long as the water quality is "legal" it won't do a damn thing.

Pensacola Eyewash

About that "100" score for Pensacola's dirty water, Louis Cooper for the PNJ dutifully transcribes the greenwash from local officials and academics looking for research grants. It translates to, "Buy a filter."

Buy a freakin' filter?! And, hey, while you're at it why not build your own highway, arm your own police force, build your own electrical plant, and park your own fire engine in the drive?

But the Grand Eyewash Prize for Environmental Stupidity goes to some academic dick named Snyder at the University of West Florida. We're told he actually gets paid to work as a professor at the "UWF Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation."

"We live in an industrial society," Snyder acutely observes. "There are chemicals everywhere. There's no way we're going to avoid that."

"That? That being, what? Industrial waste leaching into the water supply of one of the least industrial locales in all of America and not being cleaned up before home delivery? Consistently scoring worse on clean water than any other community in the nation? Worse than Pittsburgh and Cleveland, for goodness' sake?

At least as Louis Cooper transcribes it, Snyder's "diagnosis" seems to be, "So what?" And his "bioremediation" is, "Live with it."

Bejeebus. There's a guy who's been drinking too much Pensacola water.

Pensacola Water Flunks Nationwide Test - Big Time

On a national survey of drinking water quality in 47,667 cities and towns across America, released late today, Pensacola received a grade of 100!! Isn't that great? the local real estate agents will be saying tomorrow. Why, that's the equivalent of an A+ in every school of higher education in the country.

Not, however, on the grading scale used by the Environmental Working Group. Their "100" means Pensacola has the most polluted drinking water in the nation. The absolute worst out of nearly 50,000 cities tested.

This was no one-off, either. The local water quality problem is chronic and desperate. Between 2004 and 2009, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection conducted 74,897 tests of our drinking water. They found 45 different pollutants (compared with a nationwide average of 4 per community) and 21 chemicals (anywhere else, the average was 8) that exceed federal and state health agencies guidelines.

The excuse of the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA) doubtless will be that while Pensacola water certainly exceeds every known health limit, ECUA hasn't broken the law. At least they haven't been caught, yet.

But when a city's drinking water finishes dead last in a nationwide, multi-year water quality study in which local and state officials played a significant part, you know something is seriously, seriously wrong.

Care to drink to that? We wouldn't. Not with anything that comes out of a local tap, anyway.

Holy Joe Lieberman Flip-Flops Again

After a YouTube video surfaced today showing Holy Joe Lieberman -- just three months ago -- endorsing an expansion of Medicare which he now opposes, Sam Stein writes,"The simplest explanation for Lieberman's pirouette is that he is in the pocket of the insurance industry."

That's really all you have to know. Yes, Joe Lieberman is vain, hypocritical, and intellectually dishonest. But, he's also corrupt.

My Left Nutmeg has the latest position statement of the "Senator from Aetna."

Dept. of Amplification

12-14 pm

Jordan Fabian of The Hill is reporting that "81 percent of Democratic voters polled in a recent Research 2000 survey said they would like Lieberman to lose his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee."

What to Do on a Rainy Sunday

You could sleep in and remain stupid but refreshed. Or, you could (at last!) understand what's been happening with our political economy by reading Matt Taibbi's superb piece about --

Obama's Big Sellout

The president has packed his economic team with
Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into
an all-out giveaway

"And there's more....!" as the hucksters like to say on late night Tee-Vee. Namely, the criticisms of Taibbi's article by Tim Fernholz. About Fernholz, it should be said that he can't plug in a keyboard for Taibbi's word processor. He authored a goofy, boring, and completely unconvincing attempt to refute Taibbi's criticisms:

The Errors of Matt Taibbi

Even the fact-checkers at Reuters find Fernholz' article "weaker than it looks." Fernholz' article, however, has had the welcome result of attracting even more readers to Taibbi's piece -- and giving him the opportunity for a second swipe --

On Obama's Sellout

Taibbi ends the present exchange with this:

It is my job to point out that many of the same people who bear direct responsibility for the financial crisis were given positions of great power in the Obama White House, and that in many important ways the Obama appointments represented a resounding reaffirmation of the status quo (I didn’t even mention the renomination of Ben Bernanke), and the exact opposite of “change.” One can argue about the extent to which this is true, but I don’t think the facts are really in question.

One cannot read all four of these articles without concluding, among other things, that the Teabagger crowd and today's Republican Party really are missing the boat. Obama is a smart guy, no question about that. But liberal? Not when it comes to economics. Outside the Beltway, he looks suspiciously like a captive of Wall Street bankers, being held for a ransom roughly equivalent to the nation's GDP.

Certainly, Bush and the G.O.P. brought this financial crisis on us, themselves, by sinking to their knees and enacting every greedy bit of Wall Street friendly legislation they could think of to spur the speculators on -- after first showering them with budget-busting tax breaks for the richest two percent of the nation. They can't blow the whistle, now, on Obama-the-Wall-Street-Enabler when they have so much guilty knowledge themselves.

But just imagine how it might have been if we still had the old Republican Party back -- the one from days of yore when it was home to such progressive voices as Ed Brooke, Jacob Javitts, Mark Hatfield, and (for awhile) Wayne Morse -- to mention just a few who would not be welcome in the G.O.P. today. Instead, the present-day Republican Party is uniformly reactionary, much smaller, and acting very stupidly.

If on this rainy day in Pensacola you'd like to take in a movie, consider this one: Matt Taibbi on Obama's Economy. You won't be any richer for it, but now you can know why.

Hurricane Odds Makers On Strike

The Klotzbach-Gray team of Colorado State fortune tellers and weather bookies has issued its hurricane forecast for 2010. "For the first time, the CSU team is issuing a range for the number of forecast storms instead of a specific number. This is more in line with the forecasts that the National Hurricane Center issues."

Bottom line: even they don't believe in their "new early December forecast scheme." "We issue these forecasts to pander to satisfy the curiosity of the general public and to bring attention to our department's need for more insurance corporation donations the hurricane problem. "

If you want to waste your time and read the whole thing, click here.

Senate and Sensibility

The U.S. Senate is completely dysfunctional. Only Jon Stewart can make sense of it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Highway to Health - Senate Fight '09
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Like Medicare? Not for You, Then

Medicare for All (55 and over)!?

Senate Democrats are discussing the idea of expanding Medicare by lowering the age at which the elderly could enter the government-run insurance program, Democratic sources on the Hill tell the Huffington Post.

The proposal would lower the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 55, though an age limit of 60 has also been suggested. Crucial details -- such as the timing of the implementation of such a reform -- were not provided due to the sensitivity and ongoing nature of the deliberations. A high-ranking Democratic source off the Hill confirmed that such discussions are taking place.

Of course, as Atrios implies, this is just a strategy to shut up the "DF hippies" who think senators and congressman ought to go through life without scamming money from the drug manufacturers and health insurers. How naive that is!

So, Digby's amended statement makes sense to us. Medicare for all 55 and over --

is a terrible idea that only a centrist, moderate, corporate lackey, right wing teabagging villager could love and I will fight it with my last breath! Betrayal!

Lowering it year by year until it reaches everyone would be even worse. The reason, of course, is that if we said we liked it, Blue Dog Crooks like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and that thorough-going idiot, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, would jerk it away immediately.

Aetna Doesn't Want You Anymore

Via Daily Kos and Suburban Guerrilla:

Aetna is already planning to kick off over 600,000 Americans who're unprofitable since they get sick and require that claims get paid, right before the health "insurance reform" plan would take effect.
* * *
If you're an Aetna customer, be careful with which claims you submit as that could raise a red flag in their investigative teams. They'll deny your claims, raise your premiums, drop your policy based on some claim of fraud, and give you the ol' administrative runaround in order to discourage you from staying on with Aetna.

As Slinkerwink says, this is why we need a true, effective public option in any health reform bill.

Be sure to kick a Blue Dog for ruining the public option. With Democrats like Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who needs Republicans?

We Have a Winner!

Famed Colorado State hurricane forecasters Dr. William Gray and Philip J. Klotzbach consider themselves "successful" in the 2009 Annual Tropical Weather Forecast Derby. They're winners!

This is very good news. By the standards they use, we must have won the Florida Lottery.

Gray and Klotzbach's first forecast for the just-ended hurricane season, issued a year ago this week, only missed the mark by 57 percent ( 4 hurricanes too many). They also cleaned up on the undercard with Named Storms (35 percent wrong)... Named Storm Days (61 percent wrong)... Hurricane Days (62 percent wrong)... Major Hurricanes (33 percent wrong)... and Major Hurricane Days (53 percent wrong).

With a record like that, it's a wonder Gray and Klotzbach didn't lose the shirt they take turns wearing by investing in General Motors, C.I.T., Chrysler, and General Growth Properties. (Oops! Maybe they did!)

In case anyone's wondering, Dr. William Gray generously shares all the credit for the team's performance this year with his understudy: "Phil is now devoting much more time to the improvement of these forecasts than I am," he writes modestly. "I am now giving more of my efforts to the global warming issue."

We know how that's going. Another "winner"!

Investment Advice

Via TPM:

[T]he next time you see CNBC star-struck by the glamorous lifestyle of some high-living master of the universe, it might be worth taking a close look at his company's finances. Because the nation's most prominent business network probably didn't.

No, no! The next time you see CNBC featuring "some high-living master of the universe," sell his company short -- and then call the cops.

Thanks for Stopping By

The First Thanksgiving Reenacted