Well, I suspect that Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, must be feeling a little bit like the new village idiot.
Alaska’s Mount Redoubt, which has erupted five times since Sunday, is likely among the sites to benefit from the U.S. stimulus package, with the money going toward monitoring volcanoes, repairing facilities and mapping.
In his official Republican response to President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation last month, Mr. Jindal called volcano monitoring an unnecessary frill in the government’s stimulus package.
“While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending and includes $300-million to buy new cars for the government, $8-billion for high speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140-million for something called volcano monitoring,” Governor Jindal said. “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”
As the scientists who monitor volcanos in Alaska said:
“Without instruments in the ground, we would not have been able to tell you this was coming,” said John Power, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
Bobby Jindal is yet another pathetic Reaganite who thinks that government is the problem. Well, as we can see, in this case, government was the solution. Volcano monitoring isn’t a profit-making enterprise, and I have an incredibly difficult time imagining that a for-profit corporation would be engaging in it without government grant.
amused
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