News Warp / Kelley Rouse 04/28/96

by Kelley Rouse
Ah....Earth week. With our annual tribute to thinking "Green," House Republicans scramble to clean up their environmental image. They say they really haven't been trying "to dismantle 25 years progress" in environmental protection, as EPA administrator Carol Browner charges.
House speaker Newt Gingrich, seized the Earth Day moment this week, to take issue with Browner's accusations of his party's environmental policy. It seems Gingrich doesn't believe it's the federal government's job to make sure the environment is protected any more than it is to feed poor children school lunches. Incentives over regulations is the GOP idea, and that any federal standards be BROAD, so it is left up to states, businesses or citizens to decide how standards should be met to ensure protection of natural resources as well as clean air and water.
Trusting people is fine as long as there's a way to ensure that they're trustworthy. It's never a good idea to throw away accountability, it comes in handy when the there's a dollar to be made.

It was Albert Einstein who said, "Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water." The man, in addition to being a genius, had a wickedly black sense of humor.
Ten years to the week of the disaster of Chernobyl we are reminded again of just what Einstein meant. Wild fires spread to five deserted villages within the Dead Zone, sending radioative particles sky-high spread-out by strong winds to who knows where.
A spokesman for Ukraine's nuclear regulatory agency says "We see no reason to be concerned now."
Didn't we HEAR that before?
It's difficult to worry too much about nuclear power plants in the Ukraine, until we remember Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant, which sits on the West shore of the Chesapeake Bay. It's less than 20 miles from Dorchester County.

What the heck. As long as it's an environmental, Gingrich-grumbling warp...here's some news from the feminist front.
Oh Pretty Baby.... A new California study shows two-thirds of the babies born to teen-age mothers were fathered by adult men some four to six years older than the girls, not the fellow classmates long suspected. Isn't that child abuse? Twice?

Working on the Chain Gang... "You've come a long way baby," always seems to come down to the down-side of equality.
The Alabama prison system is creating female chain gangs to keep things fair after reviving male leg-iron crews last year.
As State Corrections Commissioner Ron Jones so elegantly put it: "There's no real defense for not doing the females."

Speaking of doing females.
The Clinton administration wants the Immigration Department to recognize extreme forms of forced female genital mutilation to be recognized as a reason to grant political asylum.
This is not an uncommon practice, millions of young women face gential mutilation in African and Middle Eastern cultures.
However, a government brief on the matter of granting asylum states the mutilation must be "forced" to be considered persecution, and therefore does not apply to small children who "acquiesce" to being persecuted. Like they have a choice.

To wrap up the warp on a lighter note... cross my palms with silver.
It appears a Miami farmer was paid millions in taxpayer dollars to landscape roadways in Dade County with towering royal palms, then planted shorter, cheaper trees instead.
When questioned as to why the trees were on the average four to six feet shorter than they were suppose to be, a Diaz Farms official said, "...the trees had shrunk during transplanting."
What... did they get wet ?