Florida's "Treasure Coast" Is A Disgusting Goop Of Toxic Algae

The gross algae bloom in Florida. Photo
by Terry Spencer/AP 

Nobody's going in the water and everybody's pointing fingers of blame in Florida for something truly disgusting:

A soupy, icky, possibly toxic algae bloom is gumming up the shoreline at the peak and heat of summer.

As if alligators and unrelenting humidity weren't enough, now you can't go in the water.

Or even near it.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency because of the blue in southeast parts of the state.

And everybody's pointing fingers at each other in blame for the ickiness.

The algae is there because of polluted, phosphorus-laden water coming from Lake Okeechobee, about 35 miles away from the affected areas.

The governor says it's the federal government's fault for neglecting repairs to the lake's old dike system.

He could have a point, since the Army Corps of Engineers is inadequately funded for this type of thing. Plus, there was tons of rain in Florida this past winter and spring, so with their inadequate system, they had to release more tainted water from the lake than usual.

But lots of state officials have looked the other way as farming and other interests have dumped pollution and phosphorus in the Lake Okeechobee. Had they cracked down on that, this not have been such an issue.

As local public radio station WQCS noted, there was a deal in the works back in 2011 for the Florida Legislature to buy more land around Lake Okeechobee for water storage, but Governor Scott's administration came in and put an end to that idea.

So yeah, this might be Scott's fault, too.

Area residents say the algae smells so bad that they  have to stay indoors, and when they do go outside, some of them get watery eyes and respiratory problems.

Plus, wildlife is suffering, too, and some marine animals are probably dying because of the algae.

This kind of thing happens elsewhere due to poor pollution controls, mostly from agricultural, sewage treatment plant and industrial runoff.

There was a big algae bloom on Lake Erie last summer, which threatened Toledo, Ohio's drinking water supply.

Here where I live in Vermont, toxic and thick algae have lately made appearances in and around St. Albans Bay, which I  can see from my hillsice home, in the past few summers. That has caused swimming bans and warnings to keep children and pets away from the algae-slimed water.  It could hurt or kill them.

Of course, it's expensive to enact pollution controls that would prevent all this phosphorus and other bad stuff from getting into waters around Florida, the Great Lakes, Vermont and elsewhere.

But do we really want to spend our summers holding our noses and worried about our health because of all this algae in the water?

Heres an aerial view of the algae in Florida to give you an idea of the scope of the Algae From Hell



And he's a sad video of a manatee trapped in the algae goop and a family trying to hose it off to give it some relief. It's unclear if the manatee made it out of the algae and survived or not:

Michigan City, State Officials Thought Giving Children Lead Poisoning Is OK If It Saves Money

The nation's worst scandal, lead poisoning due
to Michigan government ineptitude or worse,
is not getting enough attention

UPDATE:

Under mounting pressure MIchigan Gov. Rick Snyder requested the Obama administration declare a federal state of emergency in Flint over the poisoned water crisis.

Obama quickly made that declaration Saturday.

Of course, it was the Snyder administration's actions that ultimately led to the mass lead poisoning of Flint's children because of the bad water, as Snyder and his minions were trying to save money.

Of course, "saving money" led to this tragic and expensive disaster.

The emergency declaration will free up $5 million to federal aid, which would go toward trucking clean water into town and distributing water filters in the hopes that will help.

Obama was forced to deny Snyder's request for a disaster declaration which would have freed up more money to rescue Flint from its bad water.

However, disaster declarations can only be made if there was a natural disaster. This was man made. Flint would have been better off, in one sense, had a big tornado trashed the city. Instead, conservative politics trashed the city, with Ma Nature havng nothing to do with it

I'm all for Obama's decision to declare a federal emergency in Flint, The people there need all the help they can get. But as a taxpayer, I resent the politicians who, in trying to demonstrate how "fiscally conservative " there are, ended up costing taxpayers like me and you all this money to help Fiint.

Meanwhile, Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders said Snyder should resign from his position as governor because of the Flint Water Crisis.

Said Sanders in a statement: "There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint's water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign."

The nationwide anger at Snyder is really - finally - building now. This has become a national story, and the pressure on the Snyder administration is intensifying, which is great.

Saturday, when Sanders first Tweeted his desire for Snyder to resign, I retweeted and responded. "...or face criminal charges."

I don't think I've ever gotten so many retweets and likes from any comment I've ever made on Twitter.  This is out of about 17,500 Tweets I've posted since June, 2011.

I do think there will be a lot of investigations into Snyder and the managers he appointed to ruin run Flint.

I hope justice is served, and if there was indeed criminal wrongdoing by Snyder or anyone in his administration, they go to jail for a long, long time.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION FROM JAN. 7:

There's been an unfolding scandal in Flint, Michigan that I can't believe hasn't gotten more attention than it has.

An unknown number of children have suffered lead poisoning due to apparent incompetence and a potentional cover up by the ironically named Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

This bad acting might go up all the way to the Michigan Governor's office.

Luckily, the media - and the nation - are finally paying more and more attention to this crisis and scandal, but still not enough is being done.

They were involved in what was to be a money saving move to stop buying expensive drinking water from Detroit and take the water from the Flint River instead.

The only problem is the Flint River is wicked polluted and those pollutants are corrosive. So the corrosive water wore down lead pipes in the Flint water system, and people were drinking water heavily laced with lead for months.

The basic questions are: Did politicians know that kids and families in Flint, Michigan were being poisoned by high levels of lead in drinking water? And did they do nothing because it would have cost money to fix the problem? And would spending money ruin their conservative bonafides? And were those conservative bonafides more important than the health of Flint's children?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder finally apologized for the fiasco over the New Year's holiday, but was he culpable in this, too?

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into this, and Dan Wyant, the head of the Michigan Department of Environment Quality (MDEQ) has resigned. The federal Environmental Protetion agency is also investigating.

The MDEQ continuously denied there was a problem for most of 2015 even as evidence mounted that there was a dangerous problem with Flint's drinking water.

None of this would have come to light had it not been for some dogged heroes. One was the Flint Journal and its parent media company, MLive, which pursued the story relentlessly. (Pulitzer Prize for them?)

MLive has a handy dandy chart that cuts through the complexity of this thing and gives you a flow chart of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys here.

There were major heroes to this story as well.  Michigan Public Radio kept at this, too.

A huge assist came from ACLU of Michigan, which kept hammering away to get documents proving the problem. Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards got involved and proved there was indeed a crisis with lead and contaminated water.

Other hereoes include Erin Brockovich, who used her fame to try to broadcast the problem to a larger audience. There were Flint residents like Melissa Mays who would talk about this to anyone who would listen.

Unfortunately, there were also a large number of villians here that covered up the problem as long as they could.

From 2011 to April, 2015, Flint city government was under the control of an emergency manager appointed by Snyder, rather than local government. This was because Flint's city budget had ballooned to $19 million.

No matter what the reason for the budget deficit - local incompetence, circumstances beyond anyone's control or a combination - the emergency managers were pretty undemocratic.

The managers reported directly to the governor, and not the people of Flint. The voters of Flint basically couldn't hold anybody accountable for their actions, since the mayor and city council were essentially just there for window dressing.

That lack of accountability helped lead to the debacle, many observers believe, since Flint residents had little ability to demand change or create change in leadership through the ballot box.

Potential villians, then, in this case include Snyder, who only belated came on board to say Flint's water was dangerous. There's Darnell Early, who advocated to switch the water source to the Flint River. He also says it's the Flint City Council's fault, but there's no record of that council deciding to take water fron the Flint River.

Then there's the guy who just resigned from his directorship at MDEQ, who kept saying for months Flint's water was safe, even as evidence mounted that it wasn't. The MDEQ spokesman, Bradley Wurfel, who also recently resigned, kept attacking the credibility of Edwards and his fellow Virginia Tech researchers, even though it turns out they were exactly right.

Were these potential villians just in denial, sticking to their original proposals because they made them and they "had" to be right?  Or was this an attempt at a coverup, trying to prevent word from getting out that the water was unsafe?  Preventing, that is, until they could come up with a Plan B, or figure out a way to shift blame to somebody else?

In any event, documents uncovered showed indications of high levels of lead in the drinking water by July. Yet, this information was suppressed until at least September, and people kept drinking the dangerous water.  Officials tried to poo-poo the situation as a harmless "seasonal change" whatever that is.

Was this situation a "missed opportunity" to release information as one state official said, or was it a coverup?

"Everyting they looked at, they found a problem, and they never told anyone," Edwards said of the MDEQ, according to MLive.

It's certainly not over for soe of Michigan's leaders who might be culpable in this fiasco.

Even celebrities have gotten involved. Filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore is asking U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate Gov. Snyder. 

Cher actually Tweeted that Gov. Snyder should be executed over this, which definitely seems a little over the top.

What's way, WAY more over the top is how elected leaders could know something is wrong with the water, that children were being permanently damaged by lead and possibly other contaminants in the drinking water, and still drag their heels.

Again,  it smells like elected officials, including Snyder, might have made their political futures with a fiscal conservative brand more important than the children of Flint, Michigan.

Snyder is refusing to say what he knew and when he knew it in regards to Flint's water, says NBC News. 

If this isn't a scandal of immense proportions, I don't know what is.

Let's hope the Justice Department investigation actually gets some answers, and here's hoping that MLive, Michigan Public Radio and other media outlets- local, national and international - keep the pressure on to get completely to the bottom of this.

Even worse than all this, Flint's water is still dangerous and nobody is really doing anything about it.

True, they're not taking water from the Flint River. They've switched back to Detroit. But the corrosion in the pipes from the previous Flint River water is still very likely leaching lead into the drinking water supply.

You'd think with an emergency declared, you'd get something like big National Guard tankers full of water in Flint to distribute clean water, Red Cross and other big volunteer groups helping, and people going door to door making sure people were drinking safe water.

But, nope. Flint is full of people who are in and near poverty. The economy has been very rough on Flint. In this nation's political world, poor people don't matter, so the residents of Flint, and their children, are still drinking dangerous water that is injuring them.

It's not like they can afford to drive to a suburban Big Box store and buy cases of bottled water. They have no cars and no money to do this.

I guess Snyder's administration's message to Flint is go screw yourselves.

The World's Scariest Bakery Forced to Close

This was probably the easiest decision any heatlh office could make.

In Britain, the health office has closed a Meads Bakery Ltd.  for picky little details, like dead mice on the floor, lots of fruit flies, thick spider webs, paint chipping off walls and ceilings onto prep areas, and, of course, black mold that covered all the walls.

The lovely scene inside the now closed bakery
in Britain

At least the bakery was able to save money on interior signs. Rather than buy a sign saying "Office" for the office door, somebody just scratched that word into the black mold covering the door. Problem solved!

And they were into recycling. They kept "mopping:" the floor, according to authorities, with the same dirty water. They were saving on water and detergent. How environmentally friendly!

You wonder how they got away with being such a mess for so long. But I suppose excuses and little lies got them through

Why are the sesame seeds on my muffins moving?
It's a new treat. They're Mexican jumping sesame seeds.

Why are the walls in this bakery black and fuzzy?
Sound proofing. The neighbors were annoyed by the noise from the bakery equipment and so we installed the sound proofing.

Why is there a dead rat on the floor?
That's a new breed of cat. He's just sleeping.

Then why are there flies all over "the cat?"
The cat attracts them for us, and swats them dead. Keeps things clean.

Why all the paint chips on everything.
Don't worry. It's decorative.

I'm OK with the itsy bitsy spider thing going on, but isn't 9,482,345,190 spider webs hanging from the ceiling too much?
Naw. It's shoplifting prevention. If somebody tries to hurry out with stolen goods, they get tangled up in the webs.

In any event, if you're planning a trip to Britain, stay away from Meads Bakery. Even if it is closed.

$3,000 For a 75-Foot Ambulance Ride?

An 84 year old guy in California went to the doctor, saying he had a dizzy spell. His doctor figured the man needed an MRI, which was available in a hospital just 75 feet away from the doctor's office.

The elderly man didn't feel too bad, so he said he's walk next door to the hospital. Makes sense, right?

Uh-uh! The requirement was he needed to ride an ambulance to the hospital, and the trip would cost him $3,000.

The news is worse than the headline. It's not an isolated case of somebody trying to spectacularly rip off an old guy, but instead a bad example of the state of health care in the Grand Old US of A.

Would you pay $3,000 to be driven next door in this?

I don't have any answers here on how to solve this, but the whole set of circumstances is ridiculous.

They didn't want the guy to walk the 75 feet to the hospital because if he had another dizzy spell and keeled over, it might have been, in some lawyers' minds, the doctor's and the hospital's fault. They would have been sued, and that would be bad.

Also, the doctor said he didn't want to put his patient at risk.

The people responsible for the $3,000 ambulance bill say they know damn well a 75-foot ambulance trip did not set them back Three Grand. The problem is, a lot of people who get carted off to the hospital can't pay the subsequent ambulance bill. The money has to come from somewhere, so essentially, people who can afford ambulance trips subsidize the whole thing.

The guy's insurance paid for part of the ambulance ride, but he was still on the hook for more than half of it.

Once this whole thing caught the attention of the local media, the hospital waived the pricey hospital ride.

But this make me wonder. How much more are we paying extra for medical care than would normally be fair?  And how do we know if the price we pay is the going rate or inflated?  You can't easily comparison shop for say, emergency room treatment for car crash injuries.

I guess the only solution is to never get sick or hurt, and ignore any aches and pains. It's pretty clear to me why people avoid going to the doctor when they're sick, and wait until things get way out of control. They hope the problem goes away, rather than deal with the expense.

What's worse? Illness or bankruptcy? Seems like nowadays, we often have to choose between health and financial solvency. You can't have both.

Guy With Cocaine Nose Makes Headlines

Given the fact that I never snort cocaine, I was unaware the drug could practically wipe your nose right off your face. 

Some millionaire from Britain blew most of his money on blow -- snorting coke every day. His nose collapsed, Leading to a very embarrassing mug shots, to say the least, and an awesome headline from the Daily Mail:

The resulting disaster to the guy's face has been all over this Internet thingy for a couple weeks now.  .

Apparently, cocaine eats away at the cartilage in the septum, which causes one's nose to collapse. Well, if this guy hasn't managed to lose all his money on drugs, I wonder if plastic surgery will help.

If this guy keeps snoring coke, will his entire face collapse?

It's amazing so many people abuse drugs that wreck your looks, not to mention your mind and your legal record. To wit: There's a famous series of photographs that shows how meth ages people damn quickly. The photos use mug shots taken of meth addicts. Not much time has elapsed between each set of photos.

The say crack is whack. I guess almost every popular drug has its drawbacks.

The only drug of choice that I consume is beer. Too much could lead to a beer belly, of course, so I'll need to stay moderate on my consumption, definitely.

Host Faints, but QVC Sales Must, MUST Continue!

QVC, the network whose existence is all about merchandising and selling, selling, selling! proved again there's nothing more important than, well, making the sale.

Not even a medical emergency.

They were selling some kids' Android gizmo or something recently when one of the hosts, Cassie Slane, fainted, live on the air.

But co-host Dan Wheeler was there to save the day! Well, sort of. He did ask Slane if she was OK as she was collapsing to the floor. But the quick thinking cameraman quickly cut to an image of the product while Wheeler kept singing the praises of the gizmo and why you should buy it at its low, low, price.

As he's talking, you could hear the clunk and bang of Slane hitting the floor. Hey, sales have got to continue, even if part of the sales force dies, right. Commerce and capitalism above all else!

On the bright side, Slane is fine. She collapsed because she was suffering from low blood sugar but has reportedly recovered. But Russell could not have known that when she fell. She could have died of a heart attack for all he knew.

But, maybe they would have given him a bigger sales commission if Slane was out of the picture, who knows?

Anyway, here's the disturbing video so you can see for yourself:

Christie Too Round For the Oval?

The fat police are probably happy New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie decided not to run for president.

There were a few people out there who had said Christie is unqualified to be president because he is rather portly. An example was a column by Gene Robinson that raised the question of Christie's weight and the wisdom of running for president. Robinson's column wasn't too bad until he ended with the snarky unsolicited advice for Christie: "Eat a salad and take a walk."

I don't know if Chris Christie is qualified to be president or not,
but is his weight the deciding factor?

That made me run for the cupboard to scarf down some Twinkies.

Is that really the thing to focus on? He's fat? So skinny people are automatically qualified to be president? And fat people should just go off in the corner and eat their Doritos and shut up? If skinny means you're smart and disciplined, how to you explain skinny dumb slackers?

The beef with the beefy Christie, at least among some of those critics, is the fact that he is fat means that he is undisciplined. Um, Christie was somehow disciplined enough to become governor of New Jersey. He didn't get that far swilling Pabst Blue Ribbon and stuffings Cheetos into his cheeks.

Besides, most people have undisciplined corners of their lives even when they manage to focus on other things. President Obama struggled with cigarettes. Rick Perry says he was a lackluster college student, and he actually seems proud of that. We won't even get into the otherwise smart and hard working Bill Clinton's lapses into, um, extracurricular activities during his presidency.

Aren't there other, more important things to consider when evaluating Christie?  Little things, like his political positions, his demeanor, whether he is able to work with others. Can he negotiate? Be firm when need be? Understand complex policy?

I won't offer an opinion here on whether or not I like Christie's politics. But are looks the best way to judge who would make the best leader? I thought we're electing presidents, not studs and fashion models.   Vin Diesel for president?

While we're at it, why do some people think Hillary Clinton ought not be in public service because she wears pant suits? Must a woman look like a Playboy Bunny to run things? Do you really want a ditz to determine whether we, say, drop bombs on Pakistan? Can you picture it? "Oh, I thought Pakistan was my ex's last name. I thought we were bombing my ex's house, not a whole country. Me bad. (giggle)"

As for Christie, he's pretty P.O'd with the pundits talking about his weight. But he does make the distinction between pundits and comedians. Christie says he's a public figure, so he's fair game for the comedians. As long as they're funny, he said.

You know what? After this, maybe we should elect somebody who is very ugly for president. Physically, I mean. Could be the start of a brand new political trend









I dunno. That seems like discrimination to me. There's lots of legitimate ways