Plunderbund

I love this one. “Mr. Secretary, Halliburton on line one”. Jeff Hess pieces together a little puzzle regarding the attempts to gut the Endangered Species Act. The administration got into a bit of a space-time continuum problem by announcing they wanted to put polar bears on the endangered list (their habitat is, um, melting). Someone must have gotten the memo and woke up to realize this means they’d have to admit global warming is real. OH NO! What shall we do? I’ll let Jeff tell ya.

I did want to pull this little bit out of the Salon story:

Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That’s fewer than in any other administration in history — and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan (253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore, during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.