Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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July 12, 2010The American ShowWhen Ken Salazar, a moderate Republican from Colorado, was appointed Interior Secretary by President Obama, he encountered a "spectacularly lurid scandal at the Minerals Management Service, which oversees oil and gas drilling in federal waters." As Bradford Plumer reports in The New Republic for July 22,
Employees in the royalty-collecting wing of MMS had been taking thousands of dollars worth of gifts from the oil firms they were supposed to oversee--and allowing companies to underpay the government. Worse still, the manager of the program had been steering contracts to his outside consulting firm, all while buying cocaine from and sleeping with subordinates. Salazar dubbed the affair "one of the worst examples of corruption and abuse in government."
Salazar "referred several employees to prosecutors". But cleaning up that mess was a distraction from an even more serious problem: the agency wasn't doing its job. Applications to drill in the Gulf of Mexico were rubber-stamped, the plans and proposed procedures of BP and others apparently not even read. And after eight years of Bush/Cheney discouraging government agencies from doing their job, two letter-writers in the Wall Street Journal today accuse the Obama administration of cronyism.
To be born is to be given a ticket to a freak show. To be born in America is to be given a front row seat.