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All in

By melvin

On its way out the door of the White House, the Bush administration today decided to take one last giant runny reeking dump on the carpet: The Bush Administration's Plan To Make The Endangered Species Act Extinct is nothing less than nullification of law by administrative fiat. This time even the fig leaf of congressional approval, or failure to not disapprove, has been dispensed with.

It is an imperial decree worthy of the seeming model for this administration, Caligula, in its total disregard for accepted law and practice, public opinion, any fundamental notion of fairness or equity, fact, reality itself.

This is the logical last resort of an administration that is contemptuous of law, tradition and decency equally, and in the case of the ESA in particular has consistently done everything in its power and much beyond its legal power to deny, evade, and delay compliance with the law and yet has failed in almost every attempt to change that law to suit its purpose.

It has observed the legal requirements of the ESA only when forced to by the courts, over and over and over again, and then only when every appeal is exhausted, and kicking and screaming all the way.

To that end it has attempted to weaken, coopt, corrupt, censor, and silence the FWS, NMFS, BLM, NOAA, and every agency within its reach.

This is the doozy, the one many of us have been waiting for. And yet now that it is here, I find myself in such a white hot rage that it is difficult even to collect my thoughts. I have not visited any of the environmental sites and blogs yet, but there can be no doubt, and it will become clear over the next few days that this is war, and time for those of us who care what happens to our beautiful country - the physical, tangible place itself - to go on a war footing.

Extra Credit Take your pick. Today the Bush administration declared war on 500 million years of evolution God's creation Science Our future The United States - the actual, physical place All of the above

I willl just mention this though. Had this policy been in place, or even if only the administration's prior attempted subversions had been in place since the beginning of the ESA, we would have no spotted owls, no marbled murrelets, no salmon whatsoever in the Snake River, no wolves, and certainly no American eagle soaring over anything. And that's just in my little neck of the woods.

And if Obama fails to renounce and reject and deny this abomination, then god damn him to hell with all the rest.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on August 11, 2008 (boomark / email).