We’ve talked a lot here about the conservative governors in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin and their coordinated attack on the middle class as far as work goes. Summer is almost here, so I’ve started to think about the inevitable result of conservative dogma put into practice on time away from work.
To get some idea of how this will play out, I’d like to introduce you to the person former FOX News personality and Ohio Governor John Kasich hired to manage Ohio’s state parks.
David Mustine, Director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources:
Mustine is a former Senior Vice President at Columbus-based American Electric Power (AEP) in its regulated business unit. At AEP, his responsibilities included regulatory and issues management, support services, business planning, financial management, business development and community services. He also worked for AEP in London. Since 2008, he has served as a director of Terraseis, an oil and gas services business based in Dubai.
Unsurprisingly, now that an energy industry hack is in charge of publicly owned resources, Kasich and the conservative wrecking crew intend to go full speed ahead on drilling in state parks.
Gov. John Kasich’s budget plan released this week includes a proposal to open up state parks to drilling for natural gas and oil, along with expanding timber sales.
But, not to worry:
David grew up enjoying the outdoors.
That’s nice. Having enjoyed the natural spaces that better, more far-sighted persons who came before him carefully set aside and protected from all manner of greed-heads bearing campaign donations, he now intends to set his former employers in the energy industry loose in state parks.
Use it up, burn it down, and make sure and leave it worse than you found it, Dave. After all, you got your personal childhood nature experience. It’s not like any other worthwhile twelve year old came along after you grew up and left “the outdoors” behind for a lucrative career in the oil and gas industry. Protected areas were there when you showed up and used them, and that’s all that matters, really. One and done.
I wander around on the trails in state parks in both Ohio and Michigan maybe four times a year, in all seasons. I was at this lovely Michigan state park last week. Based solely on my observations, there’s an identifiable demographic that rely on these public spaces for affordable leisure time activities: older retired people and parents with young children (year-round) and middle aged, working or middle class people on longer vacation stints (in the summer). There may also be elitist liberal hikers, campers and environmentalists, but I don’t see them, since I’m walking in circles half a mile from the parking lot among the sullen teen, toddler and oldster crowd.
The same is true in the small Ohio city where I live. Working and middle class people here rely on public spaces and public entities for entertainment, whether that means the public pool, public park, public library, or spending nearly every weekend watching public high school teams play soccer, football, basketball and baseball. It’s cheap, it’s accessible and it’s fun. It’s all entirely publicly funded.
Middle and working class leisure time enjoyed in public spaces won’t survive conservative dogma put into practice, where everything is subject to privatization and a profit incentive, and no carefully set aside public good is worth preserving or protecting. I’m wondering if the effects of radical conservative governance in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin will be immediately apparent not just in our working lives, but in our off-hours too.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
There is only one war in America. Social Justice versus the freemarket.
Its the only fight in town.
Don’t you feel foolish now? BJ hosted a freemarket boggart on the front page for a half a year.
;)
No War But The Class War!
Elizabelle
Republicans.
The Party of No (TM) and “Can’t Do” Spirit (TM).
We would never have an interstate highway system (Eisenhower) or our spectacular national parks (T Roosevelt) were today’s glibertarians at the helm.
Kay, I think you’ve got an issue that resonates. Let’s see if non-Republicans can fight this one.
(PS: would bet a LOT of Republicans who voted for Kasich like their parkland too. Set them against him.)
arguingwithsignposts
and florida, and maine, and new hampshire.
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: HGW, your M_C is peeking through.
Yutsano
@arguingwithsignposts: It was inevitable. The Scorpion and the Frog isn’t a parable for nothing.
jackmac
Another Repug who says ‘Fuck you. I got mine.’
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@arguingwithsignposts:
oops! sry. I better go hit the polyjuice potion again.
;)
kay
@Elizabelle:
It’s completely fascinating to me, because these things seem to me to be sort of institutions or ideas that most people take for granted. Public parks are for public use? Public school teachers are mostly well-intentioned? Cops and firefighters are an ordinary and expected part of the middle class and a civil society?
I feel as if the “regular American” veneer is falling off so fast with these governors, and this really radical ideology is being exposed.
I could of course be way off. I don’t know, exactly, what a “real American” is, thank God :)
Martin
Those state parks would be a lot easier to maintain if they’d just pave them all.
BHall35
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: God, are you tiresome.
kay
@arguingwithsignposts:
That’s true, but I know not one thing about New England or Florida. I can’t speculate on what the reaction will be in those places.
Yutsano
@kay:
I don’t either. And it seems like the more I hear that phrase the more grateful I am that I don’t know.
@The Dangerman: Heh. U made a funnie!
The Dangerman
This is probably incredibly naive, but if there is drilling on State owned land, there will be sufficient royalties paid back to the State to help close the budget gap, right?
Right?
rikyrah
how many of those folks who enjoy the public spaces voted for these clowns?
elections have consequences.
arguingwithsignposts
@kay:
Betty Cracker at Rumproast has been on the dipshit Fla. gov. for a while now. Not sure about NH or Maine myself, other than the TPM headlines. Apparently there’s a supermajority of assholes in the NH lege atm.
I also forgot to add Pennsylvania to the equation. Their teabagger gov. just introduced a shitty budget too.
kay
@The Dangerman: @The Dangerman:
The stated plan is the money goes back to the parks, but I’m having some trouble believing that, based on the fact that they hired a person who has no background in anything even vaguely conservation-related.
In any event, I don’t think that’s a good trade-off. The parks are a public good. They don’t have to produce revenue and use up assets. They have value in and of themselves.
mickey g
…..and the train kept a-rollin’….
Joey Maloney
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Jesus, but you’re tiresome.
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome mudblood?
kay
@arguingwithsignposts:
Florida is incredible. They hired a flat-out thief to handle public money. That ALONE….
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@kay: They are thieves cloaekd as “real Americans,” set to rob us of all that the entire public has enjoyed (and taken for granted – because it was there) for most of my life. In encouraging news, however, King John I of Ohio was met with protesters(!) lining his route to the Warren County* (!!) Lincoln Day Dinner. and even the GOP mouthpiece Enquirer had an article. No photos, but it is remarkable tat there were protesters in Warren County, the reddest of reds down this way, not that Hamilton or Butler are either one far behind, but, still. It’s a beginning of the tide turning.
* Admittedly some inside-Ohio baseball stuff, but kay and the other Ohio folks will get the significance…
@Joey Maloney: Tiresome is a wonderful description, thanks for that.
Elizabelle
OT, but here’s an LATimes story on legal scholars discussing five of the worst Supreme Court decisions on record. They stopped at 1944.
So, they haven’t added two dreadful contemporary SC decisions to the list:
Bush v Gore, and Citizens United
There are no doubt others.
Legal scholars examine the U.S. high court’s ‘Supreme Mistakes’
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-scotus-scandals-20110402,0,6171937.story
arguingwithsignposts
@kay:
Also, I think your failing here is imagining that there will be a middle class, or that they will have leisure time. that’s the teabagger future.
Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
See, what you’re missing here is that these park users are all freeloaders! They aren’t paying anything for the parks, so it’s soc¡alism. I think we can all agree that anything worth having is worth paying for. Want a park? Pay at the gate! Want fire trucks to put out your house when it burns? Then pay them when they get there, you cheap-ass moochers! You want a cop to come run down the hoodlum who stole your wallet or handbag? Then fork over the $100, and watch the police do their thing!
And don’t you dare whine about how you “already paid with your taxes,” since I don’t want to hear it. The Kochs pay a whole lot more on taxes than you do, so you’re just getting a free ride from those two hard-working paragons of capitalist hard work. You people are such fucking leeches. The Kochs paid for those parks, not you, since poor people don’t pay taxes, even if they do pay taxes, since poor people taxes don’t count. And since the Kochs bought those parks, they own them, and can do anything they want with them, or rather, their hired men can do anything they want with them.
How many jobs have you created? How many jobs have your precious parks created? The Kochs just created 5319 new jobs since I began writing this. All parks do is draw able-bodied people away from their work, where they should be producing for the Kochs. They breed laziness. They breed immorality. It’s time to burn down the parks and drill for oil instead!
Martin
@kay: Someone needs to draw up plans for Koch Industries State Park and have some Democrat introduce that in the legislature. Have the state just give them 50,000 acres to do with as they please. Make up some nice signs.
Mark S.
From one of the links
That’s all?
Boudica
@kay: Public good? Ain’t no such thing.
Here in TX, libraries (among other things) are under siege. All the talk in the cities is about ROI and sustainability. And of course, since libraries don’t bring in revenue, we will soon be on chopping blocks.
If it doesn’t bring in money, it’s not worth shit.
The Dangerman
@kay:
As a longtime Sierra Club Dude, I totally agree; my snark wasn’t very snarkalicious. Honestly, I expected the reply to be royalties, what royalties, silly rabbit, royalties are for…
Elizabelle
@kay:
We are real Americans.
We just see the danger faster than more passive real Americans.
kay
@Dangerman:
Not at all. It’s a good question. To me, it’s like when they started putting crappy food in vending machines in underfunded public schools. I don’t care if it’s a money-maker. I think it sucks, and it doesn’t belong in a school.
Can they have one place set aside where they aren’t marketed to? One place where they aren’t “consumers”?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@BHall35: I think I like this better than teenage anarchist.
Something fresh.
This is what started it all.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Joey Maloney: Its that hybrid vigor that makes me magically l33t.
I carried Harry and Ron.
You know this.
;)
Dennis SGMM
@The Dangerman:
But, but, if they charge the oil companies royalties that’s just like taxing them and if they’re taxed then we’ll all have to wear burqas or something.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@kay: its the free market in action, babe.
;)
Yutsano
@Dennis SGMM: And teh chillins! Will no one think of the chillins!
arguingwithsignposts
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Speaking of Hybrid Vigor, Webb Wilder.
wasabi gasp
FOX shrewdly tricked Ohioans with all that Hug, Baby, Hug shit.
Mark S.
@Elizabelle:
The first four were no surprise, but this one was:
I’ve usually heard Erie described as an exercise in judicial restraint. Federal judges could no longer make up a federal common law.
PurpleGirl
@The Dangerman: Nope, the whole point is to provide the forces of industry with really cheap resources. Crony capitalism forever!
kay
@wasabi gasp:
I can’t prove it, but Kasich got no media scrutiny, and my personal (sad) theory is that the locals (state and local media) were overly impressed with the Fox news connection and (incredibly) that fact that Kasich was a Lehman Brothers hack, so connected to “Wall Street!”. Ohio has a functioning press, so I can’t figure out why else they gave this absolute grifter such a pass. And they did.
Yes, I know Lehman Bros went bankrupt. That’s the pathetic part.
trollhattan
Over on the left coast, the permanent minority California Republicans are striving to ensure we shed numerous state parks. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for
goodever.And they’ll feel cheerily vindicated (i.e., “yay, we freed real estate from eternal gummint oppression”).
PeakVT
From the LAT article comments:
Spoof or not?
BGK
@arguingwithsignposts:
Work hard, rock hard, eat hard, sleep hard, grow big, wear glasses if you need ’em. As the man himself would say, “pick up on it.”
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@kay: The Ohio press failed the Ohio electorate, because he got no scrutiny whatsoever. It’s gonna be the most corrupt administration since Jim Rhodes, only nastier at the top. And that’s saying something.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@arguingwithsignposts: wtf? the last of the testasterone junkies?
I like this too.
The Raven
Have you hugged a tree today?
Me, I perch in them…
MikeJ
Over 40 comments and not one Megadeath reference?
kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
PurpleGirl
As much as I despised George Pataki (and still do), the one thing I give him credit for is that he moved to stabilize the state parks and enlarged the Adirondacks Reserve.
PeakVT
Has Daniels or LePlague canceled a railroad project yet? That seems to be a requirement for new Repuke governors.
BGK
@kay:
Sigh…
On the east coast, where there are decently-sized chunks of public beach which see a great deal of public use, probably near-riots. Then again, those are Democratic strongholds filled with shiftless coloreds and likely illegals so they don’t really count.
Here on the west coast, where public beachfront is held in tiny slivers, guarded by usurious parking meters which are all but topped by giant foam middle fingers…I think that frog is nearly boiled already. There would be the usual small, tireless but sadly-increasingly-frail group of gray-haired warriors, fighting the good fight at the inconvenient-for-working-people county commission hearings. Then there would either be a caustic charge of teh social1sms by one of the usual bomb-throwers, or some astroturf pablum about the need for fiscal responsibility. The assistant county attorney who drew short straw would then twist him- or herself into a knot on the legal justification, despite the governing land use plan pretty clearly saying “NO” in actual neon signage. Then the 4-1 vote by the commission in favor.
Not like I’ve witnessed this, or anything.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@kay: We need an anthem.
Stan of the Sawgrass
Sorry my state is getting short-shrift in the Crazy Governor competition. Let me school ya a bit: I suppose you know we elected a businessman with no public service experience to the Governorship, whose main claim to fame was being CEO of a company that paid the highest-ever fine for medicare fraud–he left just in time to be unindicted. During the campaign, he gave a deposition for an investigation into one of his current companies (Solantic) that consisted almost entirely of invocations of the 5th. He still won, though “only” by 1% He also is the 5-time winner of the Lex Luthor Look-Alike Contest.
Now that he’s ‘running the Gummint’ like a business (HIS business), he wants to mandate drug tests for the usual suspects, and privatize medicaid. Lots of new business for Solantic! He should easily recoup the $70 mil the governorship cost him.
But I digress, since we were talking about parks. Two upstate members of the White Shoes and Doubleknits party had a great idea: Let Jack Nicklaus build golf courses at state parks!! The state will pay the costs, and we’ll share the revenue!! Governor Luthor absolutely loved the idea.
Unfortunately, some backward-looking office-holders had to point out that after the recent building boom, and now bust, there are a LOT of brand-new golf courses for rent, abandoned, or deserted. Even dangling Jack Nicklaus in front of a Goper’s nose doesn’t always bring results.
(I’ll check back later, but I have to go water my pineapples. Really.)
arguingwithsignposts
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: As long as we’re talking anthems. ahem.
arguingwithsignposts
@BGK: :) my fav concert tee of all time.
Dennis SGMM
@trollhattan:
One of their big plans is to sell the rights to punch a toll road through the ocean front at San Onofre State Beach. San Onofre is one of the most pristine beaches in Southern California because it was originally a part of Camp Pendleton during the time that the real estate industry was selling off every piece of ocean front that they could get their sticky little fingers on. Now if these same Republicans hadn’t continued to block charging a royalty on oil extracted here I’d think that they might be somewhat serious.
The Republicans have managed to turn the state and federal deficits that they created into a tool for doing away with everything that they don’t like. The fact that deficits, to them, justify any damned thing in the world – except for raising taxes – suggests that this isn’t about deficits, it’s about the Republican jihad against everyone but the wealthy.
WaterGirl
@Yutsano: I believe that caring about “children” stops at birth.
kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I wanted to ask you, too, doesn’t Kasich seem dated in some way?
Like a 1990’s version of “conservative”? How he does all that nonsensical blathering in business-book-speak? Remember when they all talked like that?
Listening to him, it’s like everything that happened between Newt Gingrich’s Golden Three Years and now didn’t occur.
I bet he tells Monica Lewinsky jokes.
j
Let ’em drill all they want.
Since the working class and middle class paid for those parks, and corporations are “people” charge the corporations one million dollars per inch for the “right” to steal the working class peoples’ mineral rights.
Then the “corporation as person” can start paying taxes using a standard 1040.
Republicans are real weasels, aren’t they?
WaterGirl
@kay:
I thought that was a bug, not a feature.
Yutsano
@WaterGirl: Oh yeah. I fergot.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@kay: He’s very dated – he doesn’t even pretend to care about anything but the Benjamins; he doesn’t even try to wear the mask of a (supposedly) caring conservative. Although I was awfully young for his first terms, his final term was in my early adulthood, and Kasich has such a Jim Rhodes feel about him – nasty and corrupt. Everything is a zero sum game. But I was cheered that there were protester for the limo to drive through last Friday!! That’s really remarkable in Warren County, as you know.
Margaret Thatcher
There is no such thing as ‘society‘, there are individual men and women, and there are families.
Karen
Isn’t that like hiring a known pedophile to be in charge of Department of Child Services?
John - A Motley Moose
The Koch brothers and their ilk became jealous as they watched the Russian oligarchs plunder that country. They now intend to do the same here.
kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I can just hear him: “the blue dress! Haw haw haw”
Glory days. It’s one of the many reasons I can’t watch Joe Scarborough. I’m thinking “didn’t I hear this whole arrogant freaking thing once before? Something about how Newt Gingrich didn’t get a seat on an airplane, so they shut down the government….”
They even look 1990-ish.
Jax6655
@kay:
Lurker here, but couldn’t resist this one. Although it may SEEM that way, the Cleveland Plain Dealer for one is hardly an example of responsible journalism.
via Wikipedia
Also, too for even more goodies, keep reading the Wiki entry. Yeah, lots of Fox news-type “fair and balanced” coverage at that rag.
arguingwithsignposts
@Jax6655:
Is there an editorial page in the country that doesn’t have a conservative bent? Even the ChiTrib’s edits are glibertarian nonsense. Maybe if the actual journalists would have a vote, they wouldn’t endorse assholes so much.
ETA: and Jonah fucking Goldberg has space in the LA Times. head/desk
Dennis SGMM
@arguingwithsignposts:
You just don’t get it; if we reach out to the loonies and just conciliate them a bit more, just pull our buttcheeks open a bit wider, well then they’ll all be amenable to sweet reason.
Maude
@kay:
Back when Kasich was repulsive. NJ invested pension funds in Lehman 3 months before it went down the tubes.
When I ws a kid, I remember vending machines with red delicious apples and navel oranges. Kids bought them. I’m not sure if they were in the schools, but I think they were because it semed there were around a few places.
My parents were from Ohio and I still care what happens there.
kay
@Jax6655:
I agree with you, generally. I still think we’re absolutely doomed without city and local newspapers, so I buy them. I don’t always read them, but I buy them.
I think you have to credit the Toledo Blade with bringing down the last conservative administration in Ohio, on complete and utter corruption. They did that. Conservatives here (still) maintain that they all got thrown out because of “Bush fatigue” or some shit, but it was the corruption, and newspapers exposed it.
Jax6655
@arguingwithsignposts:
::waves hand and jumps up and down::
I can top that, Mike DeWine is now our Attorney General.
He’s likeHe is the Dan Quayle of Ohio.ETA: We are so screwed!
:)
polyorchnid octopunch
@arguingwithsignposts: Not available in Canada… what’s the tune?
artem1s
@kay:
the sad thing is they can do the job. once upon a time the Plain Dealer was a first class, award winning newspaper. but they have been in the process of becoming the voice of big business for about 30 years. The local TV stations have been trying to become Faux News to compete for market share.
the conservative hacks who inherited JD Rockefeller’s legacy have been slowly re-taking the state and are good at what they do and they have lots of money to do it. They don’t care what happens to the next generation either cause all their kids have move to Denver and Seattle and Raleigh.
as to the parks and green spaces, they only represent two things to them. The WPA and the EPA. As far as they are concerned the only green space a community needs is a golf course and if the public wants to use it they can join the club and pay dues like everyone else (provided they aren’t one of those brown or female people, cause who needs them in the club house, right?)
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
david grew up enjoying the outdoors, and he wants to make sure future generations learn from the mistakes of his capricious youth, is that so wrong?
and besides, if these so-called working class and middle class people enjoy their leisure time outside so much, why not make them into outside-citizens on a full-time basis, it’s just enabling people to do things they enjoy all the time? isn’t that working towards the pursuit of happiness?
Southern Beale
It really does always come back to the energy companies, oil companies, utilities, you name it. Any news story you hear, regardless of how benign, you can track to an energy company. I really do think everything comes back to that one thing.
And the biggest threat to these people is the idea that someone out in Bumfug, TN — or a group of someones in Nashville, TN — are generating their own electricity by the power of the sun and going off the grid. That is the biggest threat to the status quo there is.
I am not off the grid but man I love the idea of living out in the middle of nowhere without the help of any of these assholes.
arguingwithsignposts
@polyorchnid octopunch: RATM Guerilla Radio.
donnah
I wouldn’t have voted for Kasich at gunpoint, but unfortunately the slim majority did so willingly, believing in the Vote the Bums Out strategy. I knew Kasich would be a wrecking ball for Ohio and to watch him come into power like he was God instead of just a governor, well, it’s been a living nightmare.
Every day when I read the paper, I wince at what he’s doing. These crimes against the people of Ohio cannot be undone. Our school system will be decimated. The Ohio Turnpike tolls will jump, the prisons will be a disaster and now the state parks will be parted out for drilling space.
Just put a big SOLD sign on Ohio, It went to the highest bidder.
Menu
@Karen:
Oh, you should check out his Ohio EPA pick.
Cliff
I’m wondering if the effects of radical conservative governance in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin will be immediately apparent not just in our working lives, but in our off-hours too.
No need to wonder. Once the throngs of untermenschen are safely back to working sixteen hour shifts in the factories, they’ll have neither the time or the money to enjoy any sort of natural splendor.
Accordingly, all of said natural splendor can be strip mined and poisoned for the benefit of our Galtian overlords.
As for the cripples, the old folks and the children? Fuck ’em.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@donnah: Actually, it was a plurality rather than a slim majority. I’m that pedantic. But King John I was installed with 49% of the vote in Ohio, To Strickland’s 47%. Which does not stop him from implementing the policies of his reign as if he’d been elected in s landslide. The emperor has no clothes, and no nuance.
Ella in New Mexico
I’m sorry, but I am I making the wrong assumption that Kasich was elected Governor, not King? In which case there is a system for blocking his stupidity or recalling it all together?
It appears that many of these new Republicans are a bit confused as to the fact that they live in a democracy with three branches of government, and that once they’re in doesn’t mean they’re unaccountable to the people.
It also appears that given the fact that the Kasichs and Walkers of this recent election, a whole lotta people were either:
Too lazy to vote
Too lazy to figure out what the person they voted for REALLY stood for
Now that these gov’s are essentially committing fraud by attempting to implement a secret agenda withheld from the electorate, it’s the job of said electorate in these states to do everything within the legal and election system to stop them.
Stop whining and get to work. Then pay attention next time, ya buncha rubes.
Craig
You people are just not badass enough to appreciate the Ron Swanson pyramid of greatness. Expect City Halls across Ohio to be sold off and turned into deluxe gas stations.
kdaug
How much do the tickets cost to go see your kid’s middle-school football game?
Conservative paradise, indeed.
Mnemosyne (iPod Touch)
@Dennis SGMM:
Wait, you actually think the LA Times is run by liberals and they were trying to appease conservatives by hiring Goldberg?
Sorry, but all signs point to “no.” The editorial board at the LA Times is just as conservative as everywhere else. They picked Goldberg because they agree with him and think he’s a young up and comer.
Jax6655
@kay:
I don’t disagree with you either, Kay. Just that functional press thing-y because I live in Cleveland and boy do I miss having a good local news source. You’re right about the ousting of Taft, Blackwell and the other bums.
Also, while I agree that we need good local news sources, the PD isn’t it. I haven’t paid one penny for that very thin, overpriced piece of dog-doo in over 15 years. IMO–most of the “news” they do have is either out-dated or available from another source (AP). The most disturbing thing about the PD is what they DON’T cover. If you know anything about Cuyahoga County news of late, you know that of which I speak.
Only one worth her salt is Connie Schultz. Love her!
allium
@John – A Motley Moose: With trickle-down economics soon we’ll all have our own petite lap giraffe!*
* Yes it’s a viral campaign for DirecTV but it seemed apropos, and…well, that’s my sole jusfitication.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
“drilling for natural gas and oil, along with expanding timber sales.”
WTF? When did Ohio become Wyoming?
Lost in America
This is disgusting to the nth degree, and EXACTLY what you can expect from an unchecked republican majority. Here in Minnesota, I don’t think most people realize what a bullet we dodged when Dayton squeezed out victory over Emmer.
These people fundamentally disagree with the idea of ANY kind of public good. This is why I can’t even be friends with a republican any more. Their worldview is so radically different–so wrong–that just calling yourself a republican (and I’m counting TeaOP freaks as republicans) these days speaks volumes about your character…and those volumes are not flattering.
Any person disgusting enough to head the state DNR with an industry hack with the end goal of destroying the public land base in that state is so seriously fucked up that he belongs in prison, not the governorship.
TeaTopia is coming, Ohio. I am sad for all of you.
Calouste
@The Dangerman:
Fixed that for you.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@kay:
From my experiences at Michigan state parks- and I’ve had many- the overwhelming percentage of campers are people who want quick, cheap access to the beaches and boat launches. Most of our parks that are good for hiking are located in the UP, though P.J. Hoffmaster State Park, between Grand Haven and Muskegon, has both excellent beaches and some beautiful but short trails, as well as a very nice nature center.
Here’s a tip for you, in case you ever get up to the UP: On the east side of the Garden Peninsula, about 5 miles due east of the of Fayette State Park (Fayette is a rebuilt ghost town that died when the iron from the eastern UP and the Mesabi Range started shipping through the Soo Locks) is a State Parks rustic campground called, iirc, Portage Bay. There are like 10-15 big, fairly private lots just off the beach, and some really nice trails to hike- the only caveat being that you should stay on the trails, because the people who still grow Garden Green are pretty protective of their crops.
nancydarling
Kay, here in Arkansas the trucks used by the gas drilling/fracking companies are tearing up the roads. Some of their trucks are 38-wheelers. Our lege just voted to put a half cent extra sales tax (includes groceries in Arkansas) on the ballot to pay for highway repair but would not vote to increase the severance fee to the drilling companies. Estimates are that cost of repairing the highways is 500 million ( said to be a high estimate by some critics, but it is a very large amount) and to date, I believe the state has received 38 million from the Fayetteville shale. A corporate give-away, and screw the little people who are truly little people in this state where median wage is $22,000.
Cain
@BGK:
All beaches in Oregon are public access. There is only one bit of land that is private beach front and I believe that belongs to the boy scouts.
Mnemosyne
@Cain:
I think BGK’s description is slightly off. In California, all of the beaches are public, but the trick is getting to the beach because all of the beach houses surrounding it are private property and you’re not allowed to walk across their property to get to the beach. So the end result is that only a small number of beaches are actually accessible without having to hike for miles along the shore.
It’s an ongoing fight that the assholes in Malibu keep winning, unfortunately.
Wolfdaughter
@kay:
Carl Hiasson’s books are hysterically funny for a reason.
polyorchnid octopunch
@arguingwithsignposts: Thanks, dude… good tune. While you’re at it, go take a listen to some D.O.A. If you don’t know them, you’d probably like it.
No One of Consequence
I wanted to post a quick reply. This was a very nice post Kay. Well done. Struck me the right way this morning.
Thank you,
– NOoC
lou
@Stan of the Sawgrass: Yeah, just what Fla needs, more golf courses. Doesn’t it have more golf courses per capita than any other state? Can John Pennikamp state park be turned into a golf course (/sarcasm. I grew up in South Fla, and although I don’t live there anymore, still keep an eye on things.
@kay
I find it ironic this is happening just as Michigan tourist board is doing a big push on “come to Michigan, enjoy our natural beauty!”
Nellcote
@Mnemosyne:
Even so, you’re only talking about the beaches in Southern California. “Free beaches for free people” is the bumper sticker in NorCal.
Chet
@arguingwithsignposts: What do you mean, “even the ChiTrib”? Hasn’t that paper always been an unapologetic right-wing rag, going back to the Col. McCormick days?
Wally Ballou
There, fixed it for you.