It is entertaining to watch the Republican primary debates. They are of course nothing like debates. These are tailored opportunities to match sound bites against sound bites. Every flash of wit is greeted like droplets of water traversing a desert. During the general presidential campaign, the Republican candidate will wear his or her “reasonable hat”, hoping to reach out to swing voters, independents and Democrats. But primary “debates” are like short track stock car races. They kick up dust. You wait for the crashes. Then it is over. These are unique opportunities for aliens to ferret out (and I mean extra-terrestrials, not the illegals who would have been hog-tied and burned at the stake last night if any in the audience had raised their hand to self-identify) what is driving the United States apart.

Fox commentators continuously referred back to the debate as the “most interactive” in human history. And it had to be seen to be believed. What a pinnacle of achievement. Little pull-out moments like showing results of single phrase google searches. Questions posed to the candidates by YouTube clips from hither and yon; Ohio bikers, Virginia young Republicans. Word clouds. Online polls. (Loved that the candidates, when asked or needed to slip in a comment about which federal agency they would eliminate, all piled on the US EPA but how the Fox/Google online poll showed only 12 percent of viewers agreed.) Florida Governor Rick Scott had his moment in front of a nation-wide audience at intermission, thanking corporate sponsors Fox and Google along the lines of, “corporations create jobs and we are glad you are here. When my ratings improve, I’m going to Disneyworld!”

All the bells and whistles in the converging world of internet and television can’t add up to a reasonable debate format when there are eight or twelve men or women up on the stage, playing “badminton” (Gov. Rick Perry’s said so, to Mitt Romney) with charges and counter-charges. Swatting the imaginary birdie overhead the length of the stage is not improved with Google or Fox commentators’ darts.

I propose the answer: Charlie Rose. Well, not Charlie Rose. Maybe Charlie Sheen, who proves that once you have made it as an entertainer, you can never be too embarrassed to be redeemed. Let the candidates go two by two up the ramp to the Ark of Television and spend an hour with each other and one interlocutor. Let the test of time on camera reveal which candidates can stand on their own, outside of sound bites meant to enrage, enthuse, and otherwise stir up the popular passions. What gladiator in a Roman colosseum would have done with a 20 second rebuttal?

Overall impression: Republican candidates for president of the United States uniformly detest the federal government they will lead if elected in 2012. But we just had one of those, didn’t we? One after another, the latest crew bashed federal authority and seemed, to a man and woman, to ignore the fact that two terms of one of their own, uber conservative George W. Bush, wrecked what he could and planted ideologues in federal agency staff positions where he couldn’t knock the walls down from the outside.

If this doesn’t feel like 1931 all over again, go back to your history books. Among the enthusiastic, cheerful and cheering Orlando crowd, how many channeled what happened in the United States after the stock market crash of 1929? Pick up a book, you want to say. Turn off your TV.

I still think John Huntsman makes the best case for a Republican candidate, but the thin applause from the audience bodes poorly for the only candidate who knows first-hand how America is regarded on the other side of the fence Rick Santorum wants to erect on 1200 miles of the Texas border and the US coastline. How did Rick Santorum ever get elected to the US Senate? John Huntsman wants to bring the troops home. Me, too! Oh well.

Michelle O’Bachmann could not restrain herself from jumping in, on the issue of air flights to Cuba. No! she challenged the former Governor of New Mexico who wants to cut the federal government in half and he will do it. How pleased she looked.

I confess a soft spot for Ron Paul, who reliably lets honesty get in the way of his chances. When he makes a point, you can almost hear the red meat audience whistle a breath between their teeth before the applause. It is a breath of recognition that if you are true libertarian and abhor government, by the time you get there and pass all the signposts of the conservative right/Republican agenda; there is nothing left but to applaud the cinders of the fire. Someone said, “localize, localize, localize”. Music to the ears of the polluters, the rock miners, and the sugar barons. What Paul means is: leave us alone. He is the Candide of the Cato Institute. At one point Paul forgot he had more time to answer a question that had been posed and lost the train of his thought. So do I! Then he was talking about “that fence” that could as easily be turned to keeping Americans in, as keeping aliens out. The data to identify people is there; meaning citizens as well as aliens. And in economic hard times, money wants to leave the country. I would lean for Paul; an absentee voter living in exile in Paris.

The odd piece is that holders of the Euro are all rushing back to the dollar these days. Greece would be cheaper. Switzerland, safer. The longer the debate in Orlando last night, the more I fancied thoughts of flight.

Courtney Nash from undated photo

(Counterpunch) Better than a torrent of words, an unnecessary death can spark new legislation protecting children. Such was the case in Florida of the Ryan White Act, approved by Congress to protect children with HIV/AIDS and Megan’s Law, a Florida law meant to protect children from sex predators. In a perfect world, this would also apply to the tragic death of Courtney Nash, who died as a result of swimming in the polluted St. John’s River. The St. John’s is polluted because Florida legislators– and now the Florida GOP congressional delegation– refuse to allow the federal government to establish rules to fix severe water pollution where the Florida has utterly failed.

My idea to make converts of Republican legislators: compel their children to go swimming in Florida’s polluted waterways. Make them float down the river exactly where Courtney Nash contracted the infection that killed her. Let the mothers and fathers in the state legislature or Congress experience the consequences of pollution they knowingly refuse to stop. Florida legislators aim to cure the state’s ailing economy by killing the federal EPA. A federal judge– upheld by the 11th circuit court of appeals– ruled that EPA had succumbed to the influence of Florida’s polluters. The court compelled EPA to write and enforce pollution standards for Florida’s filthy waterways. In response, Florida Republicans passed legislation to block the EPA. In its own legal analysis, the EPA writes that the proposed legislation would “overturn almost 40 years of of Federal legislation by preventing (the agency) from protecting public health and water quality.” Unless the US Senate stops the bill, it will pass for the president’s signature.

From my point of view, clean fresh water is a right. When polluters contaminate our rivers, streams — like Big Sugar does in the Everglades– with nutrients from fertilizers or any other source, they must pay 100 percent of the clean up costs. Of course their business model is to shift the costs of their pollution to taxpayers to the maximum practical extent, even though in the case of the Everglades the Florida constitution explicitly requires the polluters to pay. Not even close. From my point of view, there should be a law, when lobbyists are caught forcing environmental agencies away from protecting public health, they should be at risk of jail for 10 to 20 years. Lobbyists like Associated Industries of Florida and Barney Bishop, its “Jack-Ass-In-Chief”, who derides citizens who want to protect our quality of life and waters as “radical left-wingers”. It is a classic Karl Rove diversionary tactic and unimaginable that 30 years after the Wise Use Movement dragged the American public through its nonsense, they are at it again.

Then, Florida’s waters were dirty. Today the state’s waters are filthy to the point of deadly. Ask Courtney Nash’s parents how they feel about the difference to their sixteen year old daughter. History is clear. Florida’s polluters succeeded in commandeering the legislature through the decades with pro’s like the late Wade Hopping, “Mr. Big Sugar”, and the whole gang in Tallahassee and in county commissions.

According to a Reuters report, the 16 year old was attacked by a microscopic amoeba while she played. The report neglected to amplify that like other forms of toxic algae contaminating Florida’s waters, the amoeba thrives in pollution fed by nutrients. It “… typically enters a swimmer’s nose and invades the brain causing an almost always fatal infection, according to Jonathan Yoder, an epidemiologist at the CDC in Atlanta.” So, whose children would be at risk under this new plan? Start with State Rep. Paige Kreegel, R-Punta Gorda, who opposes the EPA’s proposed numeric nutrient criteria. Kreegel voted for a bill, sponsored by state Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers that eventually died before being voted on by the state senate. As reported by the Florida Independent, Kreegel opposed tighter standards even though his own district had just endured a nasty bout with a toxic algae bloom on the Caloosahatchee, disrupting the small town of Alva. “Residents there say the bloom was not only noxious, but was killing dogs and making people sick.”

Include Congressman Cliff Stearns, whose district partly encompasses the St. Johns River, and who initially supported the EPA but recanted and recently chaired a field hearing in Orlando, entitled, “EPA’s Takeover of Florida’s Nutrient Water Quality Standard Setting: Impact on Communities and Job Creation”. Here is another: Republican Tom Rooney, hand-maiden to Big Sugar, who proposed H.R. 2018 to prevent EPA from enforcing the Clean Water Act in Florida.

Hopefully the US Senate will squash Rooney’s bill. Of course we need a stronger, full funded EPA to fight the polluters of Florida’s waterways and Everglades. In a recent interview, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a friend of Florida Gov. Rick Scott and GOP presidential candidate, said that “he prays for the president to “ask that his EPA back down these regulations that are causing businesses to hesitate to spend money.” What nonsense. Taxpayers may want to know, the agency’s budget comprises .3 percent of monthly federal expenditures. So let their children play in the St. Johns River. “They were having fun just like any other kid would out in the water,” her uncle told Reuters. Call it, “The Courtney Nash Act”, so one kid’s life won’t have been in vain.

Face The Nation host Bob Schaeffer led off with a question about the GOP stance on raising the debt ceiling. Rubio returned with spin: it is a problem of spending, not the debt ceiling. Spending cuts, spending cuts, spending cuts. Even rating agencies like Standard & Poors say so. Schaeffer asked the senator’s view of a compromise deal to allow the president to increase the debt ceiling without action by either party. Rubio stuck to his point: “it’s not about the debt ceiling, it’s about debt.”

Rubio used the phrase “credible solution” to the debt problem several times, including the rating agency’s emphasis on a credible solution in its recent report. When Schaeffer tried, twice– including a Rubio clip from a Fox News interview– to get the junior senator to acknowledge that not everything in the economy is President Obama’s fault, Rubio pushed back.

“People want to know when they will have a job. Until America has a credible solution to its debt problem, people will be afraid to invest in America.” Here, Schaeffer could have asked: name one investor who wouldn’t create a job in the US because of the national debt.

Businesses aren’t investing in jobs, because there is little demand. Consumers are sucking on fumes of hope, having been conned into serial asset bubbles that stripped and transferred trillions of net worth with no accountability. The first, in dot.com stocks. The second, in housing and mortgages. Marco Rubio should certainly have something to say about the failure to diversify Florida’s economy; the state now suffering in the worst throes of the crash. Rubio, after all, was a top Jeb Bush consigliere during the housing boom years when regulatory barriers were under attack in Florida, pointing the ship of state in the direction of wrecking on the reef.

As the interviewed moved into the final set piece, Rubio offered his solution to the economic crisis: “one, a decrease in spending, of 4 trillion and two, growth enhancement.” Snap.

“Growth enhancement”? Somewhere, a GOP funded focus group, observed behind a one way mirror in a sterile conference room in one of a million suburban office parks, was surveyed on that little nugget; recorded for later playback and review by message makers and pollsters. “Growth enhancement” is the trick shot to least scrutinized area of the GOP playbook, “regulatory reform”.

It is on this point that audiences, including TV talking heads, could benefit from placing Rubio in context of his political history in Miami. Rubio is scarcely 40 years old, a telegenic politician from West Miami. He didn’t grow up in the haze of Vietnam or the trauma of Watergate. He was 10 years old when the first salvos were fired in the domestic war against the environment; linking conservatives from the American West with Big Sugar farmers in Florida in a national movement to block regulations. Until this 40 Year War on the Environment is laid out for the public, there will be no way for voters to assess what role their elected officials played in its drama. Marco Rubio is a first example.

Rubio cut his political teeth in a small Hispanic municipality where local zoning and development decisions were the bread and butter of local government. As a young law school student and intern for Congresswoman Ileana Ros Lehtinen, Rubio pushed up through the Hispanic politics of growth.

Before he was thirty, he had risen to prominence in the Dade delegation to the Florida legislature and proved adept at marshalling majorities in service of the Jeb Bush “growth-at-any-cost” agenda, cultivating deep relationships with GOP campaign funders who relied on the services of government to turn speculative land investments into platted subdivisions. They used language and methodology devised from the highest level of the GOP: free market fundamentalism and conviction that self-interest achieves social progress more efficiently and better than government regulation. George Bush might have been president, but Florida was the test tube, the incubator for policies hatched by conservative think tanks and their leading lights, like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist.

The best example is the Growth Machine’s animus against environmental regulations protecting wetlands. In Florida, as shown through the outstanding investigative journalism of the St. Pete Times, during a period of federal policy (initiated by the first President Bush) of “no net loss” of wetlands, Florida lost 84,000 acres under the eyes of federal guardians: the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US EPA.

Now, the American public is still waiting for the moment the mainstream media will probe aspiring public officials along this line of inquiry, and the moment couldn’t happen soon enough. The meaning of the coded text is “growth enhancements”: the real target of the GOP is not “Obamacare” or even “debt”– it is environmental regulations that “kill jobs”.

It is a cherished goal of the GOP, today, even in the heat of the battle on the deficit, debt ceiling and raising taxes: eviscerating the regulatory capacity of a single agency that accounts for approximately .3 percent of monthly federal spending: the US EPA. Co-writer of “Paving Paradise”, Craig Pittman wrote last week, “In a historic vote late Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to yank the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over the state’s out of the Clean Water Act. The vote was 239-184, mostly along party lines, although 16 Democrats crossed party lines to support the bill while 13 Republicans voted against it. The bill, co-sponsored by Florida’s own U.S. Rep. John Mica, is part of a broader Republican assault on environmental regulations and the EPA — aka the “Job-Killer.” The bill contains a lot of “thou-shalt-nots” for the EPA. It says the EPA shalt not issue new water-quality standards for a pollutant if the EPA has already approved a state water-quality standard for the pollutant, unless the state agrees with the EPA — a swipe at the EPA’s attempt to regulate nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in Florida, even though it is only doing so as a result of settling a lawsuit with environmental groups in 2009.”

In response, a coalition of environmental groups– with whom Marco Rubio has scarcely had contact– implored the EPA to press forward, “On June 7, 2011, Lee County issued a health advisory warning the public to be cautious before “exposing themselves, pets, or livestock to the Caloosahatchee River for at least week.” The prohibition was due to the presence of a virulent strain of blue green algae in the river, a waterway that supports billions of dollars of real estate values downstream. The groups continue, “Without enforcement of nutrient standards to prevent such outbreaks in the future, the Caloosahatchee River and other water bodies throughout Florida may continue to experience algal outbreaks that deter residents and visitors from spending tourism dollars on maritime recreation.”

It is a screwball concept, that what is holding back the creation of jobs in America are regulations protecting the nation’s air and water. Florida is particular proof: what state trashes its natural resources that depends so heavily on tourism and natural attractions now that its markets for housing have collapsed? Those aren’t “job killing” regulations enforced by the EPA on water quality. Those are regulations that protect billions of dollars of equity; waterfront property and communities that depend on commercial fishing and Florida largest industry.

Rubio, emergent star in the right-wing firmament, simply glided by the point that his party’s obsession with “regulatory reforms” is destroying the economic underpinning of Florida, except for the perks and prerogatives of big GOP campaign contributors from oil, coal and mineral extraction industries, or, for the Florida homebuilders who comprise Marco Rubio’s base in Florida. Now this may be a little more than Bob Schaeffer’s briefing book could contain, but it is still important for the next round.

To be fair, the Democrats had their own prospect in the late 1990′s: a similarly telegenic Cuban American prodigal son– Alex Penelas– who as mayor of Miami-Dade County, Florida’s most politically influential, was being groomed for a national role until he disappeared during the 2000 presidential recount and forever doomed his political future. Penelas abandoned his post during the aborted recount in Miami-Dade in a fit of pique against Gore and Clinton for failing to deliver the massive project he had promised his campaign contributors (a closed military base on the edge of Everglades National Park he planned to be the resupply route to a post-Castro Cuba): a recount halted by GOP staffers and operatives flown in from DC Congressional offices helping to deliver two terms of George W. Bush as president of the United States. Some are now active in organizations funding Tea Party initiatives, like FreedomWorks and its chairman, Dick Armey, an early supporter of Marco Rubio. Rubio trained in the same playing courts as Penelas: they are cut from the same cloth which is to say, they fit in where needed.

In Florida, the Republican machinery organized to extract billions of private profit from plowing subdivisions into wetlands and the Everglades is using the economic emergency to strike while the iron is hot and while the Tea Party can agitate for ideological purity. Under the nation’s least popular governor, Rick Scott, the Florida legislature recently knee-capped forty years of growth management, eviscerating state authority in favor of the base: small communities and city commissions where the focus of energy on insider deal-making related to construction and development deformed the purposes of democracy. So if federal regulatory authority is gutted at the same time that state regulatory agencies have been killed off: what next?

These questions virtually erupt from a phrase like “growth enhancements”. To a star like Rubio, it doesn’t matter that the entire US economy has been impaled on the spike of housing and mortgages sold under the rubric of “what the market wants”. It doesn’t matter because the vast Great Recession (or, Long Emergency) has the left reeling and the right, intact and waiting for The Restoration of The Ownership Society. They are whipping up a frenzy against federal regulations protecting people, public health, and the environment at virtually the same time they have used state legislatures to achieve the same purpose. What they hunger for, is the release from regulations that they imagine in feverish and paranoid delusions will restore market demand for their chipboard housing. The doors of the granary have been thrown open. We will be left– thanks to talented GOP leaders like Marco Rubio who really do make Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman look like crazed ignoramuses– with lowest cost denominators prevailing in every county and municipality where corporations can write a campaign check.

Rubio ends his Face The Nation encounter with a sliding stop. In response to Schaeffer’s question, Rubio says, “The (Democrats) revenue proposals “kill jobs”. They use money to grow the government. If you talk to job creators they will tell you what they are looking for a fair simpler tax code and they are looking for some regulatory reform because … when Communist China is a better place to do business than America you know you are in trouble.”

But isn’t Communist China also the place that supplies the cheap drywall to major homebuilders like Lennar, based in Miami, that poisoned thousands of American dreams? In a democracy we are supposed to have protections of property value and public health; these are all benefits that adequate regulations provide in order to level the playing field. But the radical right doesn’t want a level playing field.

Later I was curious whether Rubio accurately represented the focus of Standard & Poors’ report on the need to reduce deficit spending. The senator caught Schaeffer off guard, “I’ve read the full report.” But I’ve seen a lot of tennis players call a ball out when it clearly struck inside the line.

And here is what I found: the report assumes as its baseline, “…a post-2012 phaseout of the December 2010 extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.” That is to say, eliminating the Bush tax cuts.

Senator Marco Rubio might have come from a modest house rental in Tallahassee he shared with now Congressman David Rivera, he might have zero net worth and never created a single job his entire professional life, but he is in exalted company now. Florida’s junior senator can match himself to low-brow, Tea Party theatrics and high-brow GOP strategists. He is mentored by Jeb Bush. Rubio is a contender. He did right well to get out of the CBS studio with nary a bead of sweat showing. Count on it: for Marco Rubio, there will be a next time to face the nation.

Republican brainiacs believe they can pin “this budget thing” on President Obama and the Democrats, but if there is no resolution to the budget and debt ceiling crisis, expect a stock market crash of at least 20 percent off the bat. No one thought home values could be worth only half of what they were, five years ago. Let the GOP masterminds like Karl Rove explain how it is the Democrats’ fault our savings turn out to be worth only half of what they were.

That the Republican Party turned into a party of unrecognizable extremists didn’t happen overnight. For those who thought Grover Norquist was just trying to shrink the size of government, look at the consequences of the decapitations that are working themselves out in slow motion. Turn, for example, to Florida’s GOP wrecking crew in the House of Representatives.

If you were too focused on Texas’ GOP initiative to save the incandescent light bulb, or the electric utilities’ decision to abandon investment to reduce man-made chemicals that cause global warming (because of regulatory uncertainty as a result of Republicans effort to kill environmental regulations), then you might have missed the Florida GOP delegations’ most recent tactic in the Holy War against the US EPA: to gut the Clean Water Act as revenge for the federal agency’s efforts (after decades of lawsuits and inaction) to clean up Florida’s filthy waters where the state refuses (thank you, Governor Barely Legal Rick Scott).

The GOP is ginned up by campaign contributors from polluting industries like Big Sugar and its lobbyists; Florida’s Associated Industries and its Jack-Ass-In-Chief Barney Bishop. “US EPA’s proposed nutrient criteria rules will impose ‘crushing burden’ on families, economy” is the alarmist press statement dated July 9, 2011. It is a piece of the 40 Year War Against the Environment that provides the foundation for Florida’s future: a haven for polluters.

Yesterday, a week after Associated Industries’ kick-off– followed up by a full scale lobbying press by Big Sugar in the halls of Congress– the House passed The Dirty Water Bill sponsored by Florida REp. John Mica. Sierra Club wrote of the measure (supported, naturally by the Republican delegation from coal-polluting West Virginia); “H.R. 2018 guts the Clean Water Act, severely limits the federal government’s ability to protect waterways, and seeks to return the country to an era of inconsistent and ineffective state water safety standards without a federal safety net. Representatives also voted against an amendment that would have ensured continued protection of municipal drinking water sources.”

H.R. 2018 would “prevent the Environmental Protection Agency, without state concurrence, from taking action to revise outdated state water quality standards, making it easier for companies to dump their waste and garbage into lakes and rivers.” Like Big Sugar, frantically trying to fend off paying for its pollution of Florida and the Everglades.

It is nauseating: the GOP Congress is using the budget crisis– otherwise consuming the nation’s bandwidth for political turmoil– to insert the will of big polluters and Republican campaign contributors. Call it “Particle Board Democracy” to the benefit of the Koch brothers (billionaires like the Fanjuls) whose profits derive, among other sources, from the manufacturing of formaldehyde; the binder in chip board. Chip board: a symbol of American democracy. That’s what we have come to: binding democracy to Big Sugar and carcinogenic fixatives. When you strip away “Obamacare” and the other wisps of Frank Luntz rhetorical magic tricks, the key Republican issue is protecting polluters; just look at the states where the GOP leadership comes from. In addition to Florida, the co-signer of H.R. 2018: West Virginia. Mitch McConnell, opponent of campaign finance reform and Senate minority leader, Kentucky. Big Coal, Big Sugar, then there are the Kochs.

When the EPA recently– after more than a decade of “study”– declared formaldehyde to be a carcinogen, the Koch’s frenzy added even more vigor to the funders of the Tea Party and other reactionary, revenge-seekers against the EPA. Consider U.S. EPA costs relative to other monthly expenses of the federal government: the subject of so much spent energy by the Florida GOP delegation in the context of the budget crisis.

The monthly obligations of the federal government, all-in, are approximately $307 billion. One must ask the question, if the best the GOP Congress and Florida’s extremist Republicans in Congress can find to do is beat up on the EPA, whose budget represents .3 percent of monthly federal obligations, WTF is going on? We know what is going on: the House of Representatives and its Florida GOP delegation is marching through our democracy like General Sherman through Georgia; laying waste to everything of value. In 2012 voters will have a chance to redress the shameful ploys by Republicans. But God help us, the next two weeks.

Southern Christians (I’m singling out Southern Christians, because this writer is from Florida) ought to recognize that the rights of fetuses are harmed by pollution. So why isn’t the conservative right deploying their message machinery to educate Southern Christians about the threats of environmental pollution to the unborn, especially since it is clear thatpollution is arguably a bigger threat to fetuses than abortion?

The rapid rise in autism spectrum disorders has been widely reported in the press. What is less remarked is that the percentage of children born with development disorders — some of which may be attributable to toxins in the environment– is higher per thousand than the incidence of abortion in the general population. Now, new science verifies the significant role environmental pollution is playing in autism rates.

For Southern Christians, supporting the rights of the fetus over the rights of polluters shouldn’t require scientific proof. According to the CDC, between 1997 and 2008, the number of children with a disability rose from 8.2 million to roughly 10 million, or more than 15% of all kids between the ages of 3 and 17. A more recent study indicates that 2 to 3 percent of American children suffer within the range of autism spectrum disorder. In comparisona 2008 report by the non-profit Guttmacher Institute notes that in the U.S. the abortion rate peaked in 1980 at 2.9 percent (per 1000 women) and declined to 2 percent by 2004.

Why is a polluter given a free pass by Southern Christians for imposing toxics on the public that has no choice in the matter, when a clinic that provides poor women with a choice, isn’t? Is it poverty of imagination that keeps Christians from being the nation’s conscience on the environment or is something more sinister at work? That, for example, polluting corporations and their executives like the Koch brothers have invested millions to co-opt the conservative right?

These doubts about conservatives tie back to the refusal of the Republican Congress to unite behind efforts to stop environmental pollution from harming the fetus. Instead the GOP is holding agreement on the debt ceiling hostage until President Obama agrees to sacrifice the EPA. Instead of guaranteeing the unborn will be protected from pollution, Republicans rise in the morning to defend the rights of polluters.

In Florida, a new day for conservatives could start by organizing churches and congregations to lobby Republican legislators in Florida and Governor Rick Scott so that fetuses are protected from a threat greater than abortionists: environmental polluters. Start, for example, with new laws to ensure that mercury contamination is stopped, even when it originates in the sugar fields of wealthy campaign contributors, posing threats to fetuses and killing the Everglades.

For decades in Florida, elected officials supported more growth and development and agriculture than our aquifers could reasonably sustain. It is not conjecture. It is not smarmy, feel-good ethos. Within government agencies, scientists, policy makers and attorneys treaded on the subject like walking on egg shells. Early on, it was established that standing up to the destroyers on water supply or water quality issues was the fastest way to lose one’s job. Sugar billionaires, their lobbyists, builders and developers and trade associations like Miami’s Latin Builders Association had the inside track in the inside hallways of government: from the White House to the lowliest office of the county commission. It is still going on. Last week, Florida’s Jack-Ass-In-Chief Barney Bishop– the Associated Industries leader, a self-described “life-long Democrat” (who led the successful effort to dismantle Florida’s growth management agency), appeared on Fox News, calling out the U.S. EPA for “killing jobs faster than President Obama can create them”. Bishop, a carpetbagger if there ever was one, has prevailed on Florida Governor Rick Scott to push back against federal authority to regulate nutrient pollution where the state won’t: overwhelming Florida’s valuable rivers, estuaries and coastal real estate values. To round up the disaster, after so many decades, in a pithy “killing the goose that lays the golden egg” puts an unforgivable smiley face on abject corruption.

Water managers stuck wells and routed water to serve an unsustainable volume of growth. This secret is at the heart of government in Florida and has been known within government offices in South Florida for at least 40 years.

Once drinking water wells are pumping salt, the facts will emerge. Reporters will scan the blogs, for where to start. One story worth recounting is Gary Pesnell’s. Pesnell, a retired District wildlife biologist, worked for the South Florida Water Management District in the early 1970′s. He was given a remarkable assignment; to take as much time as necessary to inventory and catalog the natural resources of Lake Okeechobee. In the course of his work, he began to expose how the Everglades would be sacrificed– willfully– for the political imperatives for growth. Scientists were fearful for their jobs then, as they are today. Now that he is retired– watching from a distance the drought disaster unfold in South Florida– Pesnell spoke out, last week, on a Sierra Club listserve. Perhaps more will speak out, a kind of chorus in a kind of Greek tragedy that is Florida.

Lake Okeechobee, locally referred to as The Lake or The Big O, is the largest freshwater lake in the state of Florida. It is the seventh largest freshwater lake in the United States and the second largest freshwater lake contained entirely within the lower 48 states. Okeechobee covers 730 square miles (1,890 km²), approximately half the size of the state of Rhode Island, and is exceptionally shallow for a lake of its size, with an average depth of only 9 feet. The lake is divided between Glades, Okeechobee, Martin, Palm Beach, and Hendry counties. Maps of Florida show that all five of these counties meet at one point near the center of the lake.

Historically, the entire southern Florida peninsula was influenced by Lake Okeechobee and seasonal flooding. It is still the sick heart of the dying Everglades. To one extent or another, water management uses Lake Okeechobee as a key determinant in canal levels for all the counties south of the lake, comprising millions of water users. Here is what Pesnell has to say:

Pesnell writes:

“I have a degree in Wildlife Management from Louisiana Tech and a masters in fisheries biology from LSU. I was hired by the district right out of graduate school. I was an Environmentalist for the South Florida Water Management District from June 1971 until November 1979. I was the district’s biologist for the Lake Okeechobee marshes and later on for various projects in Conservation Area #3 and Conservation Area #2. I covered pretty much everything from the Lake south to Tamiami Trail. For eight years I practically lived on the Lake or in CA3. I worked primarily with the ecology and taxonomy of marsh vegetation.

Shortly after I went to work with the district I landed the Lake Okeechobee project. The district published a vegetation map that Bob Brown and I put together on the marshes of Lake Okeechobee and a small publication that was primarily descriptive that we did regarding the relationship of marsh vegetation and land elevations in Lake Okeechobee. I was promised a Cadillac operation and I pretty much got it. Everyone was aware that the littoral zone of the lake was big and valuable, but it was largely unknown. I was told that Lake Okeechobee was going to have to hold more water and that the proposed increase in the regulation schedule was a foregone conclusion. However, they wanted the littoral zone documented. If it was going to be destroyed they needed to know what was being destroyed. That is why Bob Brown and I prepared the vegetation map of the lake’s marshes. Up until the end my position was one of the best research positions in the country.

The district and the corps (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) knew in the late 1970s the predicament (as in now) south Florida was facing. They were developing a water use plan. Both ran separate routings and tried to calibrate the routings by plugging in historical data to try to duplicate historical records. I do not know how close they came to duplicating what happened in the past. I do know that every biologist, engineer, hydrologist, whatever that reviewed the routings saw what they showed under the proposed higher regulation schedule with projected increases in water use. They showed higher stages during wet periods and lower stages during dry periods, the proverbial yo-yo effect at ranges far beyond anything previously seen.

The effect on the Conservation Areas and water supply in general were quite obvious. Environmentalist, yes me too, were campaigning against the higher schedule. We have no way of knowing what would have happened if the regulation schedule had not been raised in the face of increased demand. I do not recall seeing an alternative routing like that. It did not happen so the point is moot. As I remember it this water use plan was supposed to determine the mode of operation into the foreseeable future until something else was needed..

I had a source at the corps Jacksonville office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who would periodically send me copies of the Corps routing attempts so I had been following the situation long before it was made public. This was top secret stuff. This person sent them to me in mailing tubes with the address in box letters cut out of magazines. They were probably even wiped for finger prints. I managed to keep it quiet for a while. Eventually, I had to respond to what I was seeing and did so with a memo to the director of our division at the time. It was Bill Storch. He tried to fire me and would have had not Walt Dineen done some fast talking on my behalf.

The bottom line is that, the water managers knew what demand was going to do many years before it happened, not only to the environment, but to the water supply in general. They actually predicted what is happening right now. And nobody did anything.

I can tell you what happened to me. This is how the water managers thought at the time and just one small indication of why south Florida is in the mess it is in. No one wanted to face the music. I was supposed to have been supplied with a routing from which to work on the data from years of research involving water levels and marsh vegetation. It was to be a treatise for evaluating environmental impact for the water use plan and eventually go to peer review for publication. One day out of the blue I was handed a routing in a meeting of the Environmental Resources division and told I had two weeks to write an entire volume of the water use plan on the environmental impact of the plan on Lake Okeechobee. I stood up in front of 140 people, said a few choice words and walked out.

When I walked down the hall after that, most district employees walked over to the other side. When I sat down in the coffee shop, suddenly everyone had places to go and things to do. I did write the document in two 80 hour weeks. It was not a very scientific work, but I did the best I could. A number of people convinced me if I did not write it, the truth would never come out. I was accused of writing with a negative attitude and the district did not like it.

I can guarantee that same thing that happened to me happened to people all down the line. Just nobody else said anything. Everything went to hell with that water use plan.

I practically lived on the lake for several years, staying at the Clewiston Inn, camping on the islands, sometimes just sleeping on the levees. I would be out for several days at a time. After the Okeechobee project I was looking for another job when the Area 3 projects came up. I could not resist that. Again, I would be out for days at a time. At that time there were no cell phones and we had no radios. I could leave Holiday Park fish camp on Tuesday morning and no one would see or hear from me until Thursday night or Friday. I would not be missed unless I did not show up at the house when I was supposed to. Fortunately, it seldom happened and my wife had little reason to panic. That was one of the most complete, the most satisfying feelings of freedom, heading out on Holiday Park trail for the 30 or so miles to the gap in the levee where the Big Cypress was and where I would stay at a camp when working in the lower part of the pool. 45 gallons of aviation fuel and three days to roam. I think there is not a tree island or a slough or saw grass flat in Area 3, or Area 2 for that matter that I have not seen, air boated or traversed in some form or fashion. When the northern part of Area 3 got really dry and I was tearing up my airboats trying to get around, the district bought a Roll-a-gon. That roll-a-gon could go just about anywhere when there was no water. I often went alone in the airboat to keep weight down. I knew better than to try to manage the Roll-a-gon by myself and usually had a couple of people with me on that.

Needless to say, I had some very interesting experiences. I had a photographic memory for my field trips and wrote trip reports for each trip.”

Why would a enduring, severe drought wreck South Florida’s drinking water wells? It’s simple. Once salt water gets into the aquifer surrounding a well, it can’t be forced out by fresh water. Four years ago, the drinking water well in Homestead serving the entire Florida Keys came perilously close to being contaminated. Just like you don’t always hear the stories about fighter jets scrambling to meet a perceived threat of unidentified, potentially hostile aircraft; most Floridians are oblivious to the scrambling that goes on, through a persistent drought. Water managers measure the threat and meet in war rooms to plot out responses with gates, locks, and canals. They are tracking the rapid march of salt water inward as, year-by-year, the growth and water consumption of South Floridians sucks more and more water out of the aquifer.

Think of Florida’s water supply and demand as an elastic band, with the competition for water resources being stretched tighter and tighter by serial assaults on the supply by Big Sugar and developers insisting that the primary purpose of water managers is to deliver as much water as they need, whenever they need it.

These are the politics– backed by unlimited campaign contributions– a rain of toxic cash– that forced environmentalists and civic activists to the fringe over the past 40 years, in no small part because the mainstream media refused– and still refuses– to give weight to the ethical lapses that will ultimately determine whether we can afford to live in South Florida.

There is no evidence — none– that Marco Rubio was “discouraged from running for the Senate by party leaders.” The opposite is the case. In 2010, then Florida Governor Charlie Crist ran as the outsider, carrying a moderate Republican wing grafted onto the state GOP with baling wire and chewing gum. Rubio represented the core of the Florida GOP that bided its time until the dagger could be firmly inserted in the Crist Senate campaign and twisted on the way out. Crist, the anti-Bush, got what was coming to him and the US Senate got a Manchurian candidate.

There are reasons right wing strategists prefer to paint Rubio as an outsider. For one, it positions him “to the rescue” of the party. To suggest Rubio is a populist coming in from the cold is rubbish. One thing the Republicans do well is get their message frames straight: Rubio plays well to TV cameras, he delivers sound bites flawlessly (without question by the mainstream press) and can garner the short attention span of the Tea Party that is, itself, moved by the GOP like a herd of cattle to the sound of a cannon.

The best way to understand the GOP in the United States is by comparison to Russian nesting dolls. In Rubio’s case, he fits in neatly somewhere in the middle sizes where the doll he nests within would be a figurine of Jeb Bush. Outsider? Not by a long shot.