The EPA reports that fracking has not "led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources" in America, though it has found instances of fracking-caused contamination. But that's a change from the EPA's 2004 report, which asserted that fracking "poses minimal threat" to underground drinking water sources and which found no incidents of contamination, and the EPA also instructs us that fracking pollution could happen -- to a large degree through the incompetence of gas drillers, and when does that ever happen? Also, we learn that oil and gas drillers cooperated very little with the EPA on their study, which might explain how they (more or less) got the results they wanted. In other words, it would be premature, at the least, to say "the science supports fracking" now.
In a stunning coincidence, Scott Walker's budget would cut $250 million from the state university system, and he wants to spend $250 million on building a new stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks! When Mr. Walker raises the awful spectre of the Bucks moving somewhere else, of course, you'll release this as a classic hostage situation -- you better let me throw away a crapload of taxpayer money on corporate welfare for my cronies, or the basketball team gets it! The Bucks have been in Milwaukee as long as I've been alive (they won an NBA title back in 1971, with a fellow named Lew Alcindor at center), but enough with the sports-stadium hostage crises already.
Ho hum, Gov. Sam Brownback is now looking to hike taxes on the poorest Kansans to get out of the budget hell he's put the state in with his massive tax cuts for the rich. I do recall predicting that he'd ultimately raise taxes just like Tax Cutting Saint Ronald Reagan did, and where President Reagan hiked payroll taxes, Gov. Brownback would hike sales taxes, which (like payroll taxes) hit working families much harder than the rich. I sure hope he's happy with what he's done -- and I sure hope his 2014 Democratic opponent Paul Davis is happy he didn't have the guts to call for a repeal of all the Brownback tax cuts, thus cementing his loss.
Former Microsoft employee, after spending years trying to bring computers to classrooms across the world, has decided that technology in the classroom doesn't do as much good as good teachers and administrators do, and could even make bad situations worse. Admittedly, you could make a similar argument about almost technology's interaction with almost anything -- technology is only any good if it helps us become closer as people.
Finally, in case you were wondering who would win the Tom Coburn primary, the incorrigible former Republican Senator from Oklahoma runs down the list of Republican Presidential candidates, and I do mean "runs down." Jeb Bush is named Bush and won't win, Rick Perry isn't "capable" enough, Rand Paul "scares me to death" on foreign policy, and Ted Cruz and Scott Walker are "not ready for prime time" -- plus Scott Walker didn't really win his 2012 recall so much as "Republicans around the country did it for him" OOOH SNAP! He likes that Chris Christie "answers questions directly" just like the famously prickly Tom Coburn does, and thinks Mike Huckabee could "attract votes from both sides," which was more true in 2008 than it is now. The winner's Marco Rubio, by the way, which perhaps says more about the others than it does about him.
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