Bush’s EPA Is Pursuing Fewer Polluters – washingtonpost.com:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third, according to Justice Department and EPA data.

The number of civil lawsuits filed against defendants who refuse to settle environmental cases was down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s, according to those same statistics.

None of this is a surprise to me, it’s pure Bush as far as I’m concerned. I’m just glad it’s being reported on the heels of Condi Rice’s dubious claim last week at a a global climate change conference.

“I want to stress that the United States takes climate change very seriously, for we are both a major economy and a major emitter.’’

Yeah, we take it so seriously that we let polluters regulate themselves. That is, after all, the real reason new investigations and prosecutions are down at the EPA. We’re following the bold leadership of the Bush administration on environmental issues.

I read an article someplace this week where the author compared setting voluntary guidelines for emissions to making speed limits on the highways voluntary. I think that’s an apt comparison. Picture the highways if we had “speed guidelines” instead of “speed limits.” How fast would you go? Would you stick to the guidelines? Think about the other limits in your life, like your budget. Do you save as much money as you should, or like most of the rest of us, do you tend to spend about 105% of what you make? The truth is, as a society, we’re pretty lousy at self-control; even when we recognize that limiting our behavior is in our best interest.

For a writer wanna-be, I’m hopelessly tethered to random infusions of rhyme, alliteration, and odd word pairings. But that’s not really what I wanted to say today; I distracted myself with a bout of whimsy following the title conception phase of this entry.

It was another fit of whimsy which prompted my fingers to grace the keyboard of the TAM this morning (I hear you, enough with the TAM already!). I was holding in my hands a piece of technological marvel: a 2 GB SD card, stamped out in mass quantities, and sold for 20 bucks on the open market. That’s just ridiculous… indistinguishable from magic just 18 years ago… when I was tooling around with my mark-one Mac at UF (which came with less RAM than a floppy and no hard drive). Now a 2 GB SD card serves to double the size of the TAM’s hard drive – an uber portable mechanism to transfer files between the home iTunes library and the TAM.

It’s important to note that OS9, and the versions of iTunes that will run on my little piece of Apple history, are not compatible with my mark-four iPod… thus the SD card and USB card reader – which I use anyway for my Palm T/X and my LG cell phone.

Damn I need me an iPhone.

I’m sure there are those of you out there who’ve probably worked on home computers (the predecessor to the mid-90’s “personal computer”) with much less processing punch than my old Mac. Heck, I remember my dad showing me some basic… well, BASIC… on our state of the art TRS-80 (of Tandy / Radio Shack fame). That was way back before even “home computers,” when we just had “microcomputers” (“micro” because they didn’t take up a room).

Sometimes I think I’m just easily impressed.

The St Pete Times reports on a New York Times article, which describes a survey by researchers Queen’s College, which finds that Pinellas County’s own Clearwater (Florida) has the highest percentage of divorced residents in the U.S.

I’ll bet you thought I was never going to get to that period.