Follow the Money, Always Follow the Money:

Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, the company that owned the West Virginia coal mine where 29 miners met their deaths recently and a company that consistently ignored mine safety regulations, earned a whopping $17.8 million last year. The miners who lost their lives making Blankenship rich earned $68 thousand on average. Proving once again that it pays to keep your hands clean. (See the NPR story.) Factually speaking, of course, not metaphorically:

MSHA reported this week that the Upper Big Branch Mine had "repeated significant and substantial [safety] violations" last year at 19 times the national rate. These violations prompted 48 "withdrawal orders" in which miners were immediately pulled from affected portions of the mine until the problems were corrected. MSHA characterized these as violations "the mine operator either knew, or should have known, constituted a hazard."

"Massey failed to address these violations over and over again," MSHA reported.

(NPR)

The Story of Water: Chapter Four

• The weight of China's Three Gorges Reservoir will tilt the earth's axis by nearly an inch.
• The longest water tunnel, supplying New York City, is 85 miles and leaks up to 35 million gallons a day.
• The Itaipú Dam in South America cost $18 billion and took 17 years to build.
• Dam projects have displaced up to 80 million people worldwide.

(See the April 2010 National Geographic.)

Going South:

The party of Lincoln is undergoing a further radical change. My daddy always told me that the Republican party was the party of big business, of the boss, a party meant to keep the working man in his place and poor. My daddy was an FDR Democrat, and, as the saying goes, he always voted his back pocket. He insisted that everybody else did too, no matter what they said. Maybe that's what Charlie Crist is thinking down in Florida. (See today's Washington Post story on the governor's falling star.) Oh, yeah, and the 82-year-old Crist supporter who wishes Crist hadn't hugged Obama. Guess he figures something might have rubbed off.