I was thinking about the Jindal speech last night...it made me think of a former CD 6 candidate...
Anyway, his rant on volcano monitoring made little sense to me.
I lived in Washington State for nearly 5 years and have visited Mt. St. Helens on numerous occasions. I am always amazed at the beauty of the mountain. Each time I visited, I became more and more fascinated.
Mt. Rainier is a stratovolcano about an hour away from Seattle. Mt. Rainier always loomed large on the horizon for those of us in the Seattle/Tacoma area. Places like Puyallup and other places located along the rivers that run from Mt. Rainer are adorned with "Volcano Evacuation Route" signs.
I've seen books and other sources that describe what would happen if a Mt. St. Helens type volcanic explosion would occur at Mt. Rainier. The pyroclastic flow would quickly envelop Seattle. Mud flows would virtually wipe out large portions of the downtown area. Millions of people would be impacted by a Mt. Rainier eruption.
So, Jindal doesn't really care about $140 million for volcano monitoring. But the risk is real.
Perhaps we should cut funding for hurricane monitoring.
JINDAL: While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government. $8 billion for high speed rail projects such as magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disney Land. And $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’And Jindal did nothing during his time in Congress to curb spending in Washington.
Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.
So, last night was a eye opener of sorts. It's clear that Jindal simply read the speech given to him, poorly at that. It's also clear that 34 months before the first 2012 primaries and caucuses, Jindal is done.
2 comments:
The worst part is how he tried to spin mass transit to sound like the monorail at the zoo.
Jindal's lucky I don't get to spend that fat stimulus check, I would blow every last penny on rail!
Of course I would have taken that trillion dollars we flushed away in Iraq and built a space elevator...
Fort Lewis?
Exercises in Eastern Washington, Yakima Proving Grounds, for those bound to Afghanistan?
On a cloudy day tourists don't believe you when you say a big, humongo mountain fifty miles away dominates the skyline.
On clear days, sunrise and sunset, that thing really lit up.
Mt. Baker, Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta are other West Coast volcanic peaks.
And St. Helens - I was in Seattle and heard it, and saw the ash plume. I still have a small vial of St. Helens ash.
If the wind had been different the ashfall damage would have been greater, for Portland or Seattle.
As it was, it all blew east, and by the time it hit Yakima most of the ash had fallen.
Still, it was quite something. I knew someone who'd climbed St. Helens the year before it blew, when nobody had any idea it was set to go, except perhaps the monitoring scientists.
Yellowstone has an interesting past and in geologic time, an interesting future.
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