This piece via the HuffPost on the devastation caused to by the DuPont chemical company on the people of Parkersburg is your must read of the day:
The Tennant clan farmed the fertile patch of soil around the home place for more than a century. In the 1950s, Jim’s father ran off, leaving his wife to look after nine cows, two mules, one hog and five children. But the family got by, eating turtle and muskrat and peddling anything it could grow or forage—wild watercress and elderberries in the spring; ginseng and lima beans in the summer; hay and apples in the fall. Their West Virginia farm eventually grew into a 700-acre operation, with more than 200 head of cattle and enough corn to pack a 35-foot silo. Jim and his wife Della bought a house on an adjoining plot of land and swapped the outhouse for an indoor toilet.
Then, in the early 1980s, DuPont, which ran a sprawling chemical plant called Washington Works in nearby Parkersburg, approached the family about buying some acreage for a landfill. The Tennants were wary of having a waste dump so close to the farm. But DuPont assured them it would only dispose of non-toxic material like ash and scrap metal, and so they agreed to sell.
Shortly after the deal closed, Jim and Della, whose home abutted the new landfill, say their two young daughters started wheezing and hacking. Worried about the girls’ health, they moved to a house in town. But most of their relatives stayed, and Jim and Della continued hunting game and eating beef grazed on the farm.
Della took her daughters’ Girl Scout troop there to catch tadpoles in the creek and make plaster molds of deer tracks. Then, at some point in the mid-1990s, the water in the creek turned black and foamy, and the family began finding dead deer tangled in the brambles. The cattle started going blind, sprouting tumors, vomiting blood.
“One time this cow was coming down the road and it was just bellowing, the awfulest bellow you ever heard,” Della told me. “And every time it would bellow, blood would gush from its mouth and its nose. It just bellowed and bellowed and blood just kept flying, and then it would fall down, and it would try to get up … We didn’t have anything to shoot it with, so we just had to watch it until finally the cow bled to death.”
It got worse, and the people were helpless until the lawyers and EPA stepped in, and that was after decades. The state DEP was worthless as they were paid off by DuPont.
This is what is going to happen to the entire country under Pruitt’s stewardship.
TenguPhule
ELF, the last best hope for breathable air and drinkable water.
JPL
Moral of the story is that the clan voted for Trump, because those were the good old days.
Right?
rikyrah
That’s why he was hired, Cole.
That’s why he was hired.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 7/12/17
Trump camp tries to turn narrative as Russia scrutiny intensifies
Rachel Maddow explores the latest reporting in the investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russia as the investigation expands and Trump supporters struggle to recast the Trump Jr. collusion scandal
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 7/12/17
Intel cites Trump Russia timeline starting in spring 2015: WSJ
Rachel Maddow looks at revelations in a new report from the Wall Street Journal that Russian officials were heard discussing Donald Trump in the spring of 2015. A year later European intel warned of Russian money flowing into the US election.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 7/12/17
Trump Jr. collusion mails spark reassessment of older intel
Shane Harris, senior national security writer for the Wall Street Journal, talks with Rachel Maddow about his reporting on new perspectives on some of the earliest indications of interactions between Russia and Donald Trump associates.
rikyrah
HE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 7/12/17
Russian cyber propaganda attack eyed for US helpers
Greg Gordon, investigative reporter for McClatchy DC, talks with Rachel Maddow about how investigators are looking into whether Russians had assistance from Americans in strategizing where to direct their online propaganda.
Timurid
“Today will be partly sunny with a high of 88 degrees and an air quality index of MOPP 4.”
sukabi
Ryan and McCarthy knew in real time about Russian / Drumpf collusion.
kindness
I have to say I don’t live in W. Virginia, and haven’t ever been there. I don’t understand the locals who have to have seen how all these companies crap all over them, yet they still defend the company and not themselves. How does that work, day after day, year after year? After everything the coal companies did to your state John, how is the locals keep voting for Republicans?
LesGS
Well, *there’s* some images for nightmares.
Another Scott
Horrible.
But after the national attention that the 2014 Elk River poisoning and its aftermath nobody should have any illusions about what will happen at facilities that use large quantities of chemicals unless there is adequate oversight.
People who want to throw out “regulations” know what will happen. They just figure it will happen somewhere else and not affect their beautiful subdivision and their perfect 2.3 kids. Whoops…
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
TenguPhule
@Timurid: “Water quality will vary between toxic and polonium.”
Steve in the ATL
Confidential to Dallas area juicers: your weather sucks!
Hal
I have a conservative friend who is forever posting on Facebook about the evils of big government. This poisoning of land and water is something that he simply does not believe is a concern at all. Free market capitalism will save him. Of course he also believe in the rapture, so I’m sure part of his firm belief in the Corporation All Mighty is that he thinks he’ll be off in heaven with Jeebus when everything really goes to shit.
RP
Democracy has failed, so a benevolent dictator is our last hope.
John, are you avail?
Another Scott
@kindness: The people who live there remember (or have heard stories) of thousands of people working in the coal mines and related industry. It was hard, dangerous, deadly work, but they got paid a decent wage (or at least more than they could make doing something else locally).
Then the jobs went away due to automation, mountain-top removal, competition from mines in the western US, Australia, China, etc., etc. But there weren’t thousands and thousands of good-paying jobs to replace the jobs that were lost.
It’s easy to blame other politicians for “job killing regulations” when industries change and federal, state, and local governments can’t or won’t help people cope with that change. It’s an easy story. It shifts the blame to outsiders in Washington.
The reality is that economies change and will continue to change. Mineral extraction is never a long-term strategy for a region – eventually the minerals play out, become too expensive, get replaced by other things, etc. Sometimes the best solution is for people to leave their land and move elsewhere, even when they have ties to the place going back hundreds of years. Sometimes the best solution is to invest in new industries and new employment ventures. Like Robert Byrd did:
It’s not inevitable that WV turns into an economic trash heap. It’s beautiful and has lots of advantages. It just needs help to transition.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kenneth Kohl
An acquaintance on mine works at the Parkersburg plant. And his family has ongoing, profound health issues…
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Cesspools in Eden:
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: plus, you have to keep in mind that these industries do bring jobs to jobless areas. People are often loyal to whatever they associate with the first improvement in their situation, even if there’s an obviously better solution out there.
The Moar You Know
@kindness: Coal gave West Virginians jobs.
Nobody else did anything for those folks at all. And nobody plans to in the future, either.
They vote for the people who gave them a pittance, because a pittance is better than nothing at all.
narya
here’s the part I do NOT understand, and perhaps never will. How can people who know these things are wrong and bad–the DuPont chemists and lawyers and so on–live with themselves? On what planet can they possibly conclude that what they’re doing is acceptable? yes, I know, profit, the invisible hand, whateverthefuck. But how do you convince yourself that it’s okay to poison people–and if it was inadvertent to start, to CONTINUE doing it, and not make any attempt to fix what you broke? How the FUCK is that possibly okay? I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with them, individually, and ask that question. It’s monstrous.
StringOnAStick
I grew up as the kid of a (rabid right wing, like most of them) mining engineer; we moved, a lot. Mine closes? You move on to the next one. No new place to move to because the whole industry is in a slump? Time to get creative, which in my dad’s case included relying on my mom’s income while becoming a depressed and conspiracy-minded mess.
I was forced into that field (geology) by my controlling and emotionally violent parents; what a waste of my time. Every time I graduated (one BS, one MS) it was right into the teeth of a recession. After limping along with on again, off again jobs in the early 1990’s, I changed careers and was basically exiled by my father for the sin of leaving geology/groundwater work. I’m glad I did that now, but at the time it was pretty wrenching both in terms of heavy family disapproval and figuring out how to get by. Luckily I never had much debt and was able to ride it out; when I think back now on how I had to rely on crap catastrophic insurance like Cruz wants to make available again, I am lucky nothing serious happened. I have one friend left in that field and I’m glad I didn’t sign up for the much more than 40 hour work weeks he’s done ever since I worked with him, plus the inherent job insecurity.
Nicole
@Hal: Yeah, I have a friend I finally cut off contact with, who lives in Florida, who has spent years hoping that the Rapture happens in her lifetime. I just… I can’t fathom being so unhappy in my life that I spend years clinging to a daydream that the end of the world happens on my watch.
She voted for Trump because she thought it would a fun “roller coaster.” In her words.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@The Moar You Know: Fuck them still. They’re ignorant fucking morons who deserve to live in poverty for voting against their own interests
eric
@The Moar You Know: Not true. These are people that refused to DEMAND that their government do more for them. They have demanded that their government do less for others, not realizing that they, too, are the others. This is playing out in Kentucky as well.
Major Major Major Major
I actually do sort of imagine a future where it’s even more polluted than in present China… You wake up in the morning in a small, climate-controlled apartment, possibly made of a shipping container. You shower in unsanitary water, careful not to swallow any, brush your teeth with bottled water, and boil some for tea. It’s almost time for work at the big multinational corporation/cult, so you put on an insulated under-layer, and a t-shirt and blue jeans, and get a clean Tyvek environment suit out of the pack. Then you pull on your respirator and go outside, hop on your electric scooter (not because electric is clean, it’s just cheaper and more efficient), and make your way through Vietnam/China-level scooter traffic to the third-hand skyscraper that your satellite office is in. As you go into the airlock, you can still faintly see the outline of the name of the government agency it used to house before the government sold all their buildings.
You throw away the Tyvek suit, decontaminate your respirator and backpack and shoes, and go through the back hallway to your locker, where you keep your office clothes. You change and head to your workstation.
Of course, a lot of people don’t even have jobs, and many of the ones who do can’t afford respirators.
Major Major Major Major
@The Moar You Know:
This is kind of exactly how Communism happened, too. The least-bad system on offer tends to take hold and stick around for a while.
ruemara
@The Moar You Know: But that’s not true. They get rural health programs, electricity programs, jobs retraining programs. HRC’s campaign had multiple items for them. Obama did not ignore them, that’s the other main population that benefited from the ACA. They choose to believe the fiction that only the company and each other care.
@StringOnAStick: So it’s about preserving traditions over family and even life.
germy
(via Naked Capitalism)
Dupe70
@Steve in the ATL: Too hot for you?
Steve in the ATL
@Dupe70: damn skippy. It’s like an oven.
Dupe70
@Steve in the ATL: Heh. Come here in August when we are having a heat wave.
Roger Moore
@kindness:
I think it’s the same fundamental logic that leads people to farm on active volcanoes or build metropolises in active earthquake zones. Future disaster is in the future, but they need something to eat today.
ruemara
@Nicole: Is she having fun now?
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@germy:
But that’s why he nominated her. A woman after his own black, decrepit heart
gene108
@narya:
I think there is a certain group of people, who look at you and wonder why you care what happens to strangers.
And they somehow often wind up in charge of things.
Ohio Mom
In answer to the question, Why didn’t people leave the coal towns: Lots of people DID leave Appalachia. Millions and millions of them. It was a huge internal migration.
They migrated to places like Cincinnati, Dayton, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland — mid-western cities where there were factory jobs, mostly. Some of them kept identifying as Appalachian but there wasn’t much stopping anyone from assimilating out (I had a neighbor once whose grandfather was from Appalachia, but No, not him, he was not Appalachian).
I always wonder, what does it say about the families that left? For a culture that prizes the idea of home, leaving is a big deal. Even more, what does it say about the families who stayed behind? That was a choice, too.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@narya:
Out of sight, out of mind. That and being blacklisted from the industry if you’re called to testify in court if you’re not exposed as a whistleblower first
TenguPhule
@germy:
What could possibly go wrong with her in charge of a federal government division?
J R in WV
WV was solidly Democratic for decades, from the election of 1932 until not very long ago at all. It is obviously pretty red now, but not by a landslide locally.
I worked phones in the election when Shelly Moore Capito was elected over Natalie Tennant, who was Sec of State. I was pretty shocked to hear a number of people of both sexes who told me that the Bible tells them that women can’t be set above men, and so they weren’t going to vote in the Senate race as both candidates were women.
I wondered how mothers were able to teach their sons to be civilized for a moment, then realized that’s part of the problem, no one was teaching lots of male children how to be civilized. Just read the Bible and do what you want, I guess.
Anyway, that was part of the problem with Hillary running against a famous rich Man’s Man like Trumpette. It’s really hard to fight religious-based ingrained insanity.
When I was a kid, many people had pictures on their living room walls of Jesus (a white guy, natch!) and FDR, and John L Lewis, long time president of the UMWA, and after the early 1960s, JFK. How those folks can have moved from FDR and JFK to Trump, I will never figure out.
Coal jobs crashed in the 1950s, when I was small, and strong young men would knock on our door and ask Mom if there was any work around the place they could do for groceries for their kids. Hard to turn that down, she always had them work a couple of hours and gave them a packed-full bag of good groceries. I was a single-digit aged person, and it was confusing to me.
They automated the mines, and employment dropped from hundreds of thousands down to 50,000 or 60,000 as fast as they could ship the machinery. Jobs changed from pick and shovel work to mechanic and electrician overnight. People, families were living in abandoned coke ovens, talk about a hazardous environment!!
Environmental damage is really common anywhere there is industry and lots of places where there isn’t much industry any more. There really are people who don’t believe the advice they get from Genesis, when God told them to care for the world he made for them. You can find a verse that contradicts any other verse in the Bible, because it’s a large complicated and self-contradictory book. Which makes it pretty useless as a guide to daily living.
But it has to be wrong to poison people in the course of your work. It has to be wrong to kill workers, poison neighbors, create toxic dumps that can’t be cleaned up because they have leeched into water aquifers. People who do that, and the management that bend them into that, should be forced to live in their own mess, if they can, for however long they can.
DuPont, FMC, Monsanto, Bayer, they all poison people for money. And that’s just a few local poisoners off the top of my head. Grrrr.
James Powell
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
@narya:
The behavior of tobacco industry employees was the worst example of this.
narya
@J R in WV: Exactly right. I firmly believe that the best sentence for these folks is to have to drink the water they poisoned, and eat food produced around those poisons. Until they die.
jl
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise, but funding in new Cruz improved Senate tax cut pretending to be health care bill is a total fraud.
Good excuse to call local senators again.
And here, I suppose, the genius of having Cruz mess up the bill even more becomes apparent, Collins has a look of real joy on her face calling out the fraud. (Edit: don’t mean she won’t vote for it, though. Should call her office and ask if she is going to just announce the fraudulence of the bill to the whole country and then vote for it, or maybe she’ll actually do something for once. She’s a moderate GOP Senator, so the mechanics of ‘doing something’ might have to be explained in some detail. Be polite, though)
Uh Oh: O’Care Repeal Bill Counts The Same Pot Of Money Multiple Times
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/senate-republicans-double-dip-obamacare-repeal
Edit: oops, linked article is a pic of Cruz. Must have seen the pic of a seemingly very maliciously happy Collins in another one.
ThresherK
@germy: Stanton’s fast-tracking herself for the GOP Nomination in 2028, ain’t she?
germy
germy
@ThresherK:
I think Martin Shkreli has that sewn up.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@ThresherK: Sorry, but no. President-For-Life Trump will be the nominee in 2028. ;p
The only one.
bystander
@RP:
Baud’s feelings will be hurt.
schrodingers_cat
Daily bath in despair has begun, time for me to take your leave.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: You can’t take my leave, that’s my job!
TenguPhule
Once again, Fiscal Alarms Code Black Five Alarm Fire. FUCK!!!
I am seriously making plans to take a vacation out of the country on that date.
I may have to factor in a possible plea for asylum.
Tuna
Watch the south. There are some 30+ year old coal ash pits. Major hurricane and they will burst and poison drinking water in major southern cities.
Patricia Kayden
Republican Congressman defends Donny Jr’s meeting with Russians to get “oppos research” on Secretary Clinton and says that he would have done the same thing. But of course. And Democrats are about to vote for Comey’s replacement. And life goes on.
Mike in DC
Trump changed his story vis a vis awareness of the Russia meeting last June. Said he was told about it, but not told it was about Clinton dirt (obvious lie noted). Gonna need a new thread for that and for Kasowitz threatening a random emailer.
Sab
My response to John’s whole post. These people were not idiots. They had the technical knowledge to understand what was happening. And yet, when they voted, in a democracy, they voted to have this stuff continue.
I live in Ohio, which , contrary to my fellow state citizens, ain’t that different from W Va.
These people are consciously voting to have their homes and counties and countries destroyed. I do not understand their thought processes. They know better, but they do not care.
I just don’t understand them.
jl
@Mike in DC: Sooner or later the Trump administration is going to go Dub in a big way. And, scary to say, Trump does not have the ways and means at presidenting that even poor Dub had. Not by a few hundred miles. Then we’ll long for the Dub old days.
Edit: I guess I don’t need to say ‘go Dub’ means produce a frank and patent, in-your-face disaster.
Diana
@narya: I have a secret suspicion that successful Republicans from the hinterland actually *hate* the relatives they are poisoning. Let me explain.
I’m from an old Pennsylvania family but my brother and I got out via an Ivy league education. After our mother died, my father married again, because he was of a generation where “wife” was more of job description than a relationship and he couldn’t/wouldn’t cook or clean or do laundry. (He was also opposed to gay marriage BTW because he’d say he’d never heard of such a thing in 80 years and didn’t see why anyone needed it now. He’s dead, of course, along with most of that generation.) So at 70 he married a woman as uneducated as our mother (but without her smarts or willingness to pick up information via magazines) and she hated my brother and me. She took the first opportunity she could to throw out anything of ours in the old house, and made it clear we were not welcome for holidays because, when her family came to visit, as they invariable did, there was simply no room for us to stay.
If in my job I had the option to poison her family and her children whose families were keeping me from spending time with my father over Christmas and advance my career at the same time? Please do not tempt me.
What makes me wonder more, frankly, is Republican’s hatred of the non-human natural world. While poisoning their rural poor relatives may be a guilty pleasure, destroying the planet ought to give even them some pause. Here I blame television, with its advertisements invariably showing happy families cavorting over some product while they go camping or skiing or whatever. That or maybe a few horrible hunting trips they were forced to endure as children must make them grow up to hate nature. Otherwise I am a bit mystified.
TenguPhule
@jl:
Never. It will be part of the Evil Regime Days with the brief break of the Last President In between.
Honus
@Another Scott: you are correct about the advantages. WV should have transitioned decades ago, like Pittsburgh did. But coal has always, and even still, because of its money, controlled the legislature.
Just read up on Billy Marland sometime.
BTW, I’m a native. I swam in the Ohio river near that plant. And a half a dozen others.
Sab
@Diana: Interesting take on life and changes, but a lot of collateral damage. I have family in that range, so the damage doesn’t feel so collateral to me. It just feels like my government hates my family.
Honus
@ruemara: also, the coal operators are white men.
Timurid
@Mike in DC:
This little number also deserves a post of its own…
Honus
@Ohio Mom: this. WV has been losing population for 60 years. And it’s the best that leave for the most part.
TriassicSands
@Timurid:
I think we’re going to need MOPP 5, 6, and beyond. The top MOPP rating will require you to remain in your underground protective bunker for a minimum of six months or until the “all clear” is sounded.
Pruitt is a disaster, but he’s just the environmental version of Tom Price or Betsy DeVos.* It’s amazing to me that for a man as inept as Trump he actually managed to find the very worst people available for major cabinet positions. If your goal was to destroy this country, you’d have to give Trump top marks.
* In the interest of fairness, I shouldn’t neglect to mention Carson, Zinke, and Manuchin. I could go on, but I need to pull out the anti-depressants.
Uncle Cosmo
@Ohio Mom: Dad’s two older brothers both left Fayette County, PA; one went to Detroit & worked for Ford, the other to Cleveland & then to Baltimore as a machinist. My future parents met in Grant Town, WV, where he was employed by the local coal mine[1] & she at the dry-cleaners. In the fall of 1940, when the mine’s management wanted to send him down into the shaft to dig coal[2], he sent Mom home to her folks & crashed on his brother’s sofa in Baltimore till he found work, & (except for his time in the Army) our family’s been here ever since.
I grew up in one of the world’s largest HRCs (Hillbilly Resettlement Camps), a row-house suburb just outside the city lines called Dundalk (1950 pop. 82,000). And even though the pay was good, many of those couples who’d had the gumption to pick up stakes & move to where there were jobs pushed their kids hard to get an education (we had good public schools then) so they could get jobs where they wouldn’t have to be scrubbing up with Lava soap after every shift.[3]
—-notes—–
[1] He worked above ground, a relatively cushy job – because he also played shortstop for the mine’s semipro baseball team, which won the state championship & went to a national semipro tournament in Michigan 2 years in a row during his time with them.
[2] Which told him they weren’t planning on keeping him on the team next season. So long, suckers!
[3] The family history in J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is similar except it skips a generation: his grandparents (my folks’ generation) moved from eastern KY to southern OH to find work in the steel mills & his grandmother effectively raised & pushed him when his mother went off the rails.
TriassicSands
In more cheerful news, the Party of Health Care, aka the GOP, has brought us a new health care plan. The Cassidy-Graham Plan, offered in lieu of the BCRA, is new and, not surprisingly, ridiculous.
Cassidy said:
So, let’s see. A blue state thing would be to use the money for health care. And a red state thing would be? I dunno. They say the money has to be spent on health care, so what creative “laboratory of democracy” type gimmicks could Republican governors and legislatures come up with to use the money in accordance with the law, while providing absolutely no benefit to the state’s residents? Or would they simply lavish the money on the state’s haves and in keeping with long Republican orthodoxy ignore those most in need?
It is my hope that this plan causes at least a few Republicans to give up on the BCRA and then, with it dead, the party starts bickering about the details of the Cassidy-Graham Plan being too generous or too Obamacaresy or whatever. Anything that keeps them from passing their own health care plan. Anything. Even having DuPont install a landfill on the Republican side of the “aisle.” Anything at all.
StringOnAStick
@ruemara: Yep, traditions matter more than family life, at least in the family I grew up in. Mining can be odd that way, the people who work in it see it as more than a job, it is an identity; my dad sees it as a higher calling and has said he would happily live on the border of an active mine. It reminds me of how prison guards (excuse me, they prefer to be called corrections officers) have that same tribal thing going on.. I’ve heard miners say how they are so much better than those oil field people, who just rape and run, whereas miners rape and stay…
Honus
@J R in WV: you forgot union Carbide and PPG. Also, Allied chemical.
TriassicSands
EXTRA! EXTRA! Trump approval soars to 40%.
Amazing. On July 3 Trump’s Daily Approval rating from Gallup was 37%; today, with all the positive news about Trump and the Trumps streaming out of DC, his approval has risen to 40%. I can only hope that these small fluctuations are really just variations around a core approval rating and they really don’t reflect a response to the news. The bad thing about that is it means that Trump supporters are completely impervious to events concerning Trump. Worse, Trump’s disapproval hit an all-time high of 60% on 6/12, but today it’s down to 55%. What could possibly have caused people to disapprove of him less? I’d say maybe it was his gross comments about the appearance of Mrs. Macron, but that just happened and can’t be behind it.
In a rational world, Trump’s disapproval should be steadily climbing — there are no bright spots on the administration’s record. And, while his approval should be falling, we know that anyone who approves of Trump is not rational. Of course, the upper boundary of disapproval has to collide with the approval end of things. If approval is at 40%, which is the number Trump continually flirts with, then disapproval can’t be more than 60%. But my mind simply can’t come to grips with a full 40% of Americans approving of what the idiot clown is doing.
WaterGirl
@TriassicSands: Wow, that is seriously depressing. In the face of evidence against Trump and his gang of traitors, his supporters only dig in more, and the ones that were bolting or returned to the fold. That’s completely fucked up.
Ladyraxterinok
It’s hard to understsnd corporation owners, managers, etc, pursuing policies that harm people. Especially once they realize the results of those policies.
But we know that happens.
What I REALLY do not understand – how can they believe that they themselves are immune from the effects of their policies?!?
It simply makes no sense.
Lavocat
Nothing quite says “Nothing to see here, folks!” like cows bellowing down the road, vomiting blood.
Holy fucking shit. The stuff of nightmares.
mere mortal
Mr. Cole:
I will never, ever forgive you for pointing me to this story.
I want to vomit. I need to vomit.
someofparts
Our leaders won’t stop at leaving us at the mercy of local polluters. We will live to see them sell the right to dump toxins to the Chinese.