ABSTRACT

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has conducted two hydrologic investigations related to the uranium enrichment facility near Piketon, in the Scioto River Valley in south-central Ohio. The Scioto is a tributary of the Ohio River, flowing into the Ohio at Portsmouth, upstream from Cincinnati.

The site and vicinity are underlain by an incised bedrock valley filled with about 70-85 feet of sand and gravel outwash, deposited by meltwater streams at the edge of an active glacier. The glacial outwash sediments are covered by a thin veneer of alluvium deposited during more recent flooding of the Scioto River and Big Beaver Creek.

The sand and gravel outwash in the Scioto River Valley is one of Ohio’s principal aquifers. Because of its high yields, it is widely used as a source of public and private water supply. One of the DOE wells at the southwest corner of the Piketon site yields as much as 1300 gallons per minute. The water table typically is about 15 feet below land surface, with fluctuations as great as 12 feet annually.

House Appropriations Chair David Obey (Dem., Wisc.) ran into woman in the hallway in Washington recently and ended up yelling at her and her friends, accusing them of "smoking something that's not legal" if they disagreed with him, and denouncing "idiot liberals."

The woman, Tina Richards, introduced herself to Obey as the mother of a Marine about to depart for his third tour of Iraq, and as someone who has tried to communicate with Obey but received no response. Then she…

Well, watch the video yourself.  It may be depressing, but it's certainly entertaining (just like network television): http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/19392

Obey claims in this video that the only way to end the war is to fund it, because

1.-They don't have the votes to stop funding it.  (Of course, they would if they voted like "idiot liberals".)

2.-Funding a withdrawal would somehow mysteriously harm "our troops."  (Will Obey say that to Richards' son?)

BBC Television had exposed 2004 voter attack scheme by appointee Griffin, a Rove aide. Black soldiers and the homeless targeted.

There's only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That's replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.

There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush's firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn't bend to political pressure.

But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.

Key voters on Griffin's hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Even by the rushed standards of these presidential jaunts, Bush's current outing to Latin America is a pell-mell affair. First it was Brazil, still smarting from De Gaulle's crack on the way back out to the airport, that "this is not a serious country." Bush got to say hello to President Lula and visit a slum. Then it was Uruguay on Saturday, with Colombia scheduled for Sunday, Guatemala on Monday, Mexico on Tuesday. It's this kind of rushed travel that prompted Bush Sr., in his presidential jaunt around Asia, to mix too many shots of sake with his Ambien and throw up into the lap of the Japanese prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa.

            At the time of his eructation in January 1992, Bush Sr. was entering his last year in the White House, and like most incumbents, including now his son, had felt the urge to get out of Dodge and hit the road. Few Americans study the travel brochures with more zeal than two-term presidents who face impeachment (Nixon and Clinton) or popular loathing (Johnson and Bush Jr.) or unpleasant suggestions in the press that they are senile and should be removed from office under the terms of the 25th Amendment (Eisenhower and Reagan).
Today my family formally purchased and took over Air America Radio. Why? Because if progressive values were a stock, now is the time to buy.

This hasn't always been true, as the cycle of politics demonstrates. In recent decades, politics seems to have been governed by physics for every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction. William F. Buckley Jr. started The National Review in the 1950s to rebut what he saw as the dominance of liberalism in the academy and opinion journals like The Nation and The New Republic. From 1970-72, Public Citizen, Common Cause and the NRDC were all created in reaction to Nixon's depredations. Similarly, People For the American Way grew out of the rise of the Religious Right under Reagan in the mid-80s.

New progressive think tanks over the past 10 years, most recently and prominently the Center for American Progress, were created to counter AEI and Heritage. And of course, the Huffington Post and Air America were born in reaction to the electronic propaganda of Drudge and Limbaugh et. al.

Next week the Governor will release his first budget and the Family Coverage Coalition and Voices for Ohio's Children and the Coalition for Affordable Healthcare in Ohio are all collaborating on finding stories of people who would benefit from raising parents' coverage to 100% of the federal poverty level, raising children's eligibility to 300% of the federal poverty level, parents and children already benefiting from Medicaid, people who are employed, but can't access coverage and the very poor, chronically ill who have been unable to enroll in Disability Medical Assistance, We need these stories as soon as possible! The media will be looking for persons in these categories when the budget is announced next week (3/15) and we will need to prepare people for legislative testimony which will start shortly after the budget is released.

Email Kathleen Gmeiner, kgmeiner@columbus.rr.com, or call her at (614) 443-2845 to receive more information and the submission form.
Anybody who thought this was going to be an "easy war," please raise your hand.

By now, the horror and scandal have exceeded the expectations of even the harshest critics of the invasion - mine, for instance - and I numbly play Count the Quagmires along with the rest of the media and general public. The latest one has burst into national awareness with a piercing "what's next, for God's sake?"

Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans. All of them bear the mark of W. And now, incredibly, we learn of a gulag of wounded and emotionally shattered returning veterans, as forgotten and abandoned as nursing home residents in the Crescent City. Support our troops!

But what we're witnessing under George Bush is not what I would call incompetent leadership, any more than we witnessed, in an earlier, happier phase of his administration - the mission-accomplished phase - "leadership." What we have instead is the guileless void of an administration that has not even tried to lead, but rather, from the get-go has concentrated on manipulating national symbols and traditions to give the American public the appearance of leadership.

Black soldiers and the homeless targeted

There's only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That's replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.

There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush's firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn't bend to political pressure.

But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.

Key voters on Griffin's hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

COLUMBUS -- The only thing Ohioans can expect to resolve on the Ohio Senate floor Tuesday, is that a majority of Ohio legislators are likely to choose political one-upmanship over an opportunity to send a message about the true toll of the war to Ohioans.

President Bush's move to escalate the war in Iraq is destined to increase the number of casualties and the cost to taxpayers, Brian Rothenberg, executive director of ProgressOhio.org, said Tuesday. "Ohio's Senate is fiddling around while Baghdad is burning."

The Ohio Senate is preparing to debate a resolution that praises President Bush and Rothenberg said, it is time for Ohio to examine the potential costs of the war and the deception used to launch it. "No price would have been too high if our nation faced an imminent threat from an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction. We now know there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we are paying a hidden cost back home that our Ohio Senate leaders seem oblivious to acknowledge.''

The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs is prepared to follow in Dick Cheney's footsteps and shoot a friend in the face. I just sat through a hearing on Iran, and there is apparently universal bipartisan agreement in the committee that Iranians feel kindly toward Americans and welcome them as friends, and that Iranians should be brutally punished by the toughest economic sanctions possible. This simple truth went unstated: sanctions kill.

Who remembers this exchange on your television a decade back?

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

--60 Minutes (5/12/96)

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