A Two-fer Week!

Our lame-duck (quack - quack) president's approval rating seems to be a boon for our environment.

Three cheers!

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is indicted on seven felony counts. Most stem from his cosy-oily connections with VECO Corporation, a oil services contractor.

Ted claims he is innocent.

Prosecutors from the Justice Department had a lot to choose from:
L.A. Times, in 2003 published accusations of influence peddling and insider trading.
He has been accused of doing favors for companies who employed his son.
His son had options to buy a share of a seafood company while Ted was working to supply millions of dollars of fish for the company.
The list goes on.
Source: SourceWatch - http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ted_Stevens#Alaska_pork

Too bad he couldn't be indicted for his pro-logging work. He proposed clear-cutting more than 2 million acres of old-growth forest and building thousands of miles of logging roads at taxpayer expense.
Or indicted for his pertinacious efforts to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

A lot will depend on the U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
One can only hope he doesn't follow the example set by District Judge William J. Martini. More on that another time.

Finally - A Victory for the Florida Everglades

A long fought battle - four years of litigation against the EPA and the State of Florida. I know there will probably be appeals, if for no other reason than to delay, delay, delay. But I'll celebrate anyway with a Smuttynose IPA and thumb my nose at the Bush administration's Environmental Prevention Agency.

Federal Judge Alan Gold today found against the EPA and Florida's Legislature in their attempt to again delay compliance with the Clean Water Act to reduce phosphorus pollution levels. A 1994 Florida law pushed out the deadline of 2002 to 2006. Then in 2003 Florida got approval from EPA to push the deadline out to 2016!

"Federal law does not authorize anything like a twenty-two year compliance schedule..."

Congratulations to the Miccosukee Tribe and the Friends of the Everglades!

Press release on their website here: http://www.everglades.org/pressrelease.html