Yesterday, the board members of the Foothills/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency voted 12-3 to approve the $875 million Foothills South (241) extension, which will cut through both San Onofre State Beach and the Donna O'Neill Land Conservancy. But that ominous rumbling you hear in the distance isn't the sound of bulldozers starting, it's the chuckling of herds of attorneys thinking about all the billable hours this vote guarantees them. Because this vote, far from being the end of the matter
Just like breaking a leg can take your mind off a toothache, the major traumas the Bush administration has inflicted on the body politic make it easy to forget the lesser damage it's doing. Or, as Ruth Marcus puts in her column in today's Washington Post, "The tornado of disastrous headlines -- a Pentagon that can't take proper care of its wounded, a Justice Department that can't be trusted to follow the law or tell the truth to Congress, a top White House aide who lied to a grand jury-- h
The Department of Commerce has stated their interest in holding a public hearing on the Foothill-South toll road extension, disregarding the impotent raging of Transportation Corridor Agencies counsel Robert Thornton. The LA Times reported on the road's construction cost leaping from $875 million to $1.3 billion and that ridership is down on the Foothill-South by "nearly 4 percent." The Army Corps of Engineers has declared that there could still be potential alternatives to the favored route, on
Perhaps environmentally sensitive locals should withhold sending
support to the Sierra Club, the Surfrider Foundation and the Natural
Resources Defense Council and instead cut checks to the U.S. Department
of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was, after all, the NOAA that dealt what many believe to be the final death blow
to extension of the 241 Foothill South toll road through a state park
and perilously close to Trestles. Now the NOAA is sticking up for local
steel
A bulbul sings the song of freedom.Sonny Dong was walking through security at Los Angeles International Airport last month when inspectors noticed something odd: bird feathers and droppings on his socks and bird tail feathers under his pants. Upon closer examination it was discovered the 46-year-old Garden Grove resident had 14 live birds wrapped in cloth around his
legs, and a subsequent search of his pal Duc Le's Garden Grove home turned up 51 more Asian songbirds.The birds were all quarantine
