| The delta versus 'manifest destiny'
I remember when I was a young boy, we had a camp out in the marsh," said Don Griffin, a grocer and seafood dealer in the delta town of Leeville, which was an oil-drilling center for decades. "The same places you used to have to get around with a pirogue and a push pole now you can go with a 25-foot outboard. There's no more marsh, which is your first barrier of defense for hurricanes." In Katrina's wake, the Army Corps of Engineers has gotten the brunt of the criticism for the disaster. Besides building suspect levees, the Corps' mission to control waterways with spillways, floodgates and other measures has played havoc with nature by restricting the Mississippi's sediment and fresh upriver water from replenishing the delta's wetlands. There are other reasons for the disastrous wetlands loss: human development, cypress logging, ill-advised farming on the coast, hurricanes, slipping-and-sliding geologic faults and even a South American semi-aquatic rodent called nutria imported to Louisiana in the 1930s.
What would Jesus do? Tear down the wall between Jerusalem & Bethlehem!
But why John McCain?" you might well ask. Because of who he is and what he does. I'm currently reading Terry Pratchett's latest novel, "Making Money," and it is about the actual physical act of MAKING money -- wherein our hero, Moist Von Lipwig, goes off to work at the Ankh-Morpork mint. And said money is being turned out by golems, those ceaseless hard workers who never stop working for their masters. Well. John McCain is a hard-working golem too -- working tirelessly night and day to turn out money for the weapons industry. And from sad past experience with the elections of 2000 and 2004, we have all learned the hard way that corporations like General Electric, Lockheed, Raytheon and Halliburton get to pick the next President. Not us. Ergo. Thus. Here's my conclusion: In 2008, somehow or other, John McCain will get shoved down our throats.
Yeltsin, Bhutto Among Notable '07 Deaths
Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto arrives to address to her last public rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in this Dec. 27, 2007 file photo. In an Oct. 26 email sent to CNN's Wolf Blitzer through an intermediary, Bhutto complained about her security, stating that if anything happened to her, "I would hold (Pakistani President Pervez) Musharraf responsible." (AP Photo/Mohammad Javed, File) .
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