In a December 2006 Newsday article (link below), Ingred Redman, a Polytech librarian, wrote about the the Environmental Protection Agency quietly shutting down its 35-year-old national library with unwarranted haste. The library supposedly is being shut down to save a whopping $2 million.

"...In 2005, EPA libraries provided some 41,000 reference checks to EPA staff alone. Despite such heavy usage, the agency recently closed its headquarters library in Washington and three regional libraries serving 15 states. The regional library serving New York was spared, but with only one librarian remaining on staff it has reduced access to EPA employees and will soon no longer welcome walk-ins from the public or buy books or journals.

To aggravate matters, EPA closed the specialized Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances Library in October without notice, which is required by federal policy when "significant information dissemination products" are to be terminated. The unique collection of this library, which contained studies on the potential effects of chemicals on children and extensive literature on emergency planning, is being stored in a basement cafeteria in Washington, says the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Even more shocking, many materials were directed to be tossed out..."

The notion that we should not dwell on the past is pure bullshit.

A lot of people need to go, and a lot of damage needs to be undone.

Don't forget what she did to the poor sage grouse:

http://www.muskratnews.com/200401LOTD/1206.html

These are evil people. Not just bad people but evil people. They have no conscience. They only care about themselves.
Security code word- profit

We'll see if she gets a scolding or a pat on the head.

Umm I'd say more likely she'll get a promotion. I hear there are some positions open at the DOJ these days. Plus I hear prezdential medals of freedom are for more high profile Loyal Bush Lackeys)

The way the Bush Crime Family operates in the Department of the Interior, Julie will no doubt get a pat on the head, a time-off award for exceptional performance, and a promotion.

"He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future."

Other commentators are absolutely correct. The public may have a short attention span and Congress a limited budget, but the acts and omissions of this administration have spread throughout all federal agencies. They need to be documented, undone, and where appropriate, charges need to be pursued.

Harder to deal with and potentially more damaging than short-term political appointees is Mr. Bush's practice of replacing talented career bureaucrats - skilfully hounded out of their careers - with new civil servants who are as poisonously committed to favoring private interests and derailing their agencies as any political appointee.

Mr. Bush thinks that any action is excusable if he can characterize it as "just politics". That rationalization may go unchallenged in his private life, or in failed businesses successively bankrolled by his father's cronies. It does not hold true for a public servant and government employee. Mr. Bush, after all, has at least legally been out of the private sector and on the public dole for six years and counting. Time he learned that in public employment, his "accountability moment" is not once every four years; it's every day.

It's just one heckuva job after another in this administration.
DiIulio nailed it back in 2002 when he said "What you've got is everything-and I mean everything-being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
There was a lot more in his letter to Ron Suskind about the way things worked in this White House. The only requirement for employment in BushWorld is loyalty, often demonstrated by willingness to give large amounts of cash to campaigns.
Since then, we have seen the consequences of Bush's choices.

The USSR had Lysencko, and the Bushies (short for Bolsheviks) have MacDonald. One perverted biology to serve the State, the other perverted biology to serve the Corporations. Same difference.

It's like a trainwreck. I can't stop watching.
B

These second- and third-tier appointees are largely in control of government policy and the people you put in those positions are absolutely critical to the government function. We see this time and again with Bush. Brownie, Steven Griles, the Walter Reed operations, Douglas Feith, even Gale Norton to a large extent. He appoints people with open disdain for the agencies they run and the jobs they are supposed to do.

Yet it is impossible really impossible to run an effective campaign on who you will appoint to oversee an agency in a particular department. For example, do you think Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would choose a better head of the Fish and Wildlife Service? Personally I think that would be Hillary, but we really have no way of knowing.

I guess prior to this administration you had to have faith that even if you disagreed with a particular appointee, they were at least competent and somewhat interested in running the agency they were appointed to. Bush has really changed the rules on that. It takes us all the way back to the Grant administration when the Federal Bureaucracy was just getting its legs and most of the people involved saw it as an opportunity to pay back their brother-in-law rather than a legitimate office with a specific mission.

I've often wondered if the Netroots community should hold virtual primaries for these second and third-tier agency positions and come up with a list of acceptable candidates. Then if we do finally get a Dem Prez, we may have some leverage to influence how the government actually works.

"Family ranch"?! I think we have a winner in the corruption sweepstakes here. I mean, plenty of people are industry shills, but it takes a certain special something to take that extra "family" step.

Paul, Keep looking into this, there's LOTS to find.

There are stories of the woman showing up at an Atlantic Salmon meeting and telling the assembled world-renowned experts that they knew nothing about salmon biology, but she knew what had to be done.

She is also good at calling field biologists directly to intimidate them. She has been out of control for years and it's about time the media exposed the abuse and corruption.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the seemingly surprised reactions here to Ms McDonald's behavior or of that of any GOP political appointee. And as for "1984," that is the playbook for the GOP. Totalarianism is the very basis of conservatism. As George Seldes told us over 70 years ago, conservatism is the precursor of fascism and fascism is the goal of ever conservative. While our European brothers and sisters learned the hard lessons of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, we have not. Had it not been for FDR, the United States would have partnered with Hitler. Until real Americans come to understand that conservatives hate democracy, hate the U.S. Constitution, and are dedicated to to desctruction of democracy, we are at great peril. Further, we are in error if we think Dubya is an anomaly. He is the personfication of the perfect conservative, Republican. We are in error when we, true Americans, do not identify the real enemy: conservatives, aka, Republicans. There is no such thing as a good conservative. There is no such thing as a good Republican. The threat of Al Qaeda pales before the threat of conservatives, Republicans. While Osama bin Laden is an enemy of the United States, he is nothing compared to the GOP.

Oops. And the URL:

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/jump.jsp?origID=pdf-982

Ditto the questions above about what school McDonald went to, and what her CV looks like.

There is absolutely NO excuse for a civil engineer not to have a better grasp of science; all engineers graduating from solid schools here in the States have essentially the same core science and math classes, before they specialize in their field. I say this as a former engineering student, whose father and husband both have master's degrees in engineering and a brother with a bachelor's in engineering. Each of them have different fields of specialization, from electrical to civil to mechanical, and all of them have a strong grasp on fundamental math and science.

Cripes, imagine shaving off more than 26% off any calculation required as a electrical, structural (branch of civil) or mechanical engineering in the same cavalier fashion that McDonald demanded 26% be shaved off the flycatcher's nesting range area...the results would be catastrophic. The math here is so simple that a grade school student could calculate it: Nesting range area = (pi)x(radius squared) -- rough approximation, mind you.

McDonald is both a hack and corrupt. Period.

I should get her to measure my penis

We're going to need to do something about property rights before we get any meaningful progress on species protection. Habitat destruction is the leading cause of species extinction, we now know.

Too many people are claiming absolute right to do whatever they damn well please with their piece of the pie, even if it means turning it into a smoking cinder, along with everything else around it. All in the name of constitutionally granted property rights.

Additionally, we've spent 40 years looking through the soda straw at wetlands, particularly down here in Florida, to the detriment of the uplands and the species that inhabit them.

I'm convinced this is because developers didn't view wetlands as valueable when environmental laws began appearing, and so they cried "uncle", which environmentalists saw as a victory. Little did we know it was a loss leader.

Now those wetlands are increasing being eyeballed by developers, land banks are being used so they can develop previously protected wetlands, and wetland boundaries are being shifted ever so gradually farther into the everglades.

The old joke about selling you a piece of Florida swampland ain't a joke any more.

I threw out my flight suit a few years back. I had assumed this thing was all wrapped up in in 2004.

Chris Mooney's book The Republican War on Science has lots of info on the hackery at the FWS under Bush.

Rayne: It has nothing to do with your actual education and everything to do with what your political and religious beliefs tell you to do with that education.

Here in the Bible Belt, engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers and PhD scientists who will tell you to your face that evolution is bunk or condoms don't work or climate change is a hoax are a dime a dozen.

When I find one whose actions and words reflect actual reality, I want to bundle her up and hide her in the basement until the end of the Interregnum.

Security code: meat

McDonald, from the CV listed above held her first government job in 1979, she is hardly a "youngster." If she were hired right out of college, with a masters as the CV states, she would be in her 50's.

Do the math: 1979- 6 (years to get a masters) = 1973, year she would have graduated from high school, at about 18 years old. 1973-18= 1955,or year she was born, making her 52, or something near that.

I think there is a naive comfort for critics of this administration to write off the transgressions to underqualified "youngsters." That is not true, most are boomers, and they certainly knew exactly what they were doing. I don't thnk the pat on the head image is relevant.

@eyesonthestreet

I agree, while the young age of these high level characters looks very strange, we don't need to let them cop on the age/lack of experience plea.

They knew what they were doing and they were doing it as hard and as fast as they could before the cat could get out of the bag.

workday joe talks about the second and third tier political appointments and the influence they have, the damage they have done (like Brownie, Feith, etc.). You can add to this name those knuckleheads who dismissed the Iranian message shuttled through Switzerland, seeking to work with the Administration in the fight against terror, Afgahnistan and Iraq. I think George Tennet, John Bolton, Condi Rice and Mr. Woo can be mentioned with infamy...

I am not surprised, and read about the EPZA closings months back. Outrageous, and nobody in
congress did a thing. The only qualification required to work for this administration is to be a corporate hack completely loyal to Bush, nothing else matters.
Experience, education, knowledge, are all irrelavent. So long as you swear loyalty to the Decider, you're good as gold.
If anyone wonders why we are so screwed up, there's the answer. In the last six years, we've been run by totally unqualified unquestioning robots, who don't have a clue about running a country, but are expert at ruining a country. The power of the Republican Party was the end game, not the American people.

Wrong hitnrun--as someone who farms in a remote area and would like it to remain remote, not paved and polluted, so there will still be air and water left to live on--there are not vast tracts of land left to cordon off, roadless areas are minuscule compared to what they used to be, the forests are depleted, the wolves dead, the lakes polluted with lead, and the only ones that benefitted are the mining and logging interests whose money mostly goes out of state, the developers (ditto) and the party hacks who get contributions from them. These folks seem to think if they or their buddies can't make money off of, or rip across killing things, land is of no use. Well---my neighbot's got a devastatingly ugly yard full of junk that's sat there for years, and some photogenic animals. Does that mean I get to rev up my tractor and rip up his yard--tear down his house--(I'm not making money off that land while he's living on it--)?

We westerners did not fall for the specious developer-from-out-of-state funded "property rights" laws they tried to pass last year, seeing the land grab for what it was.

You also display a remarkable inferiority complex regarding women, minorities, "heyzeus" and science.
Keeping rural areas rural enough for us farmers to grow the food the country needs to live on is not some politically correct plot, it's good common sense.

So now the Depts. are sort of working for the people? Seems like for the last two decades, the country has been driven by junk science and socialist environmental dip shits.
If McDonald has taken the unheard of direction of actually working for the people who are forced to fund all the environmental BS that comes down the Pike,
I'd like the honor of presenting her with a medal of freedom or even her next pay check.....sounds like she might be one of the very few who is actually earning hers.

hello

There were some interesting and thought-provoking comments regarding DOI and personnel. Some comments sounded like and were drivel from mindless idiots.

I read about the Dept of Interior's tactics in the May 9, 2007 edition of the Jackson Hole (WY)News & Guide. I was interested in seeing the name, "Julie MacDonald", the former Dept of Interior employee whose underhanded tactics were revealed.

The Rock Springs, WY BLM Field Office recently issued a contract to place a gravel pit on the top of Pine Mtn in southwest Sweetwater County, WY. The location for the pit is in crucial elk winter range, and an elk parturition (birthing)area and is home to antelope, moose, black bear, mule deer and sage grouse. Apparently, the BLM
Assistant Field Manager sat with his staff in the office, talked about excavating a 10 acre gravel pit with the attendant impacts such as widening 15' wide wilderness roads so that 60 foot long belly dumps carrying 27 tons/load could travel in and out 16 times/day. The gravel is first excavated by bulldozers, then crushed and screened before being stockpiled and loaded into belly dumps (unload from the bottom of a dump) on the top of this pristine alpine mountain. Incredibly, the BLM Manager wrote his own environmental report and gave it a "FONSI" (Finding of No Significant Impact) designation. There was NO public input - no input of state Game & Fish folks, no notice to the public, no chance for people who want to picnic/hunt/ recreate to say a word. You can read about it at www.greenriverstar.com.

The BLM manager's name is John MacDonald - anyone know if any relation to Julie???

Protect Pine Mountain

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