What does selenium taste like?

Californians first learned about the effects of selenium in their water when Lloyd Carter was writing about death of the wildlife at the Kesterson Reservoir. That was back in the 1980's when Lloyd was a reporter. He was still writing about this in 2007, as mentioned in this Badlands Journal post. The entire story, long version, can be found in Carter's 2009 paper for Golden Gate University's Environmental Law Review: Reaping riches in a wretched region: Subsidized industrial farming and its link to perpetual poverty.

I suggest that you read enough of the items above to understand what is heading for Los Angeles.

The situation is really untenable right now. Westland Water District farmers need to irrigate, but along with the irrigation comes the accumulation of salts, borax and selenium in the groundwater. Eventually, it ruins the land. Since they can no longer dump the drainage into Kesterson, their new plan is to drill wells to pump out the contaminate groundwater and run it through the California Aqueduct. The overview of this plan is posted on the Westland Water District Web site. Even the project name seems to be designed to make it look benign, or to confuse the reader, or both. The "Conveyance of Nonproject Groundwater from the Canalside Project using the California Aqueduct" Project

One key question is that of what happens to the Nonproject contaminated Groundwater. The project description would make you believe that they will just use it elsewhere.

WWD is proposing to pump groundwater from land near the California Aqueduct and convey it through the aqueduct for distribution on other land within the district.

Yet, the aqueduct does not stop here. It is 444 miles long and the Edmonson Pumping Station lifts it over the Tehachapi Mountains to LA. I guess that Westlands assumes it will all be so mixed out with other water that no one individual will get very much of it.

There is an announced plan to have an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and Westlands is soliciting public input.

Public comment is an integral part of the EIR process. The “scoping” process, which we are currently conducting, is a period in which WWD asks the public to recommend additions to the scope of the document by identifying problems that may arise as a result of the project or resources that may be significantly affected. The scoping period for this project lasts from February 1, 2010 to 5 p.m. on March 5, 2010. You can send your comment letters to:

Westlands Water District
Attn: Russ Freeman
3130 North Fresno Street
Fresno, CA 93703

Before you do, as I hope you will, you might also want to ready what Restore the Delta says about this: A little salt will bring out the flavor. (2nd topic).

If this has not yet gotten you motivated to do something, take a little more time to read this letter directed to Tom Birmingham (Head of Westlands and the lawyer who defended the Metropolitan Water District's use of Mono Lake Water) and Congressmen Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, both Democrats. The important fact to note here is that these farmers, the ones who went on 60 Minutes to bemoan their plight and had Sean Hannity do a full segment about farmers vs. fish, those same farmers are going to make an additional $140,000,000 this year from increase water supply and have more what then they know what to do with. That is our money. Ours, the tax payers of CA. Time for action folks. But then, I always knew that these Westlands farmers were the salt of the earth.

Getting it right....er, correct?

I have more than once urged readers to contact their congress critters and request some action regarding a piece of legislation, normally one that was inspired by 19th Century Republicans or Dubya himself. This time, however, I want to turn that around. It is time to contact our President and ask him to veto a bill that passed Congress, one which is making true conservatives and true progressives nauseous just to think about it. I am talking of the current Farm Bill, a pork laden attack on our pocket books and common sense.

Before you do, you should read Carolyn Lockhead's story in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.

It is the rarest of moments: President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are on a collision course over a giant farm bill, but it is Bush who is broadly aligned with liberal Bay Area activists pushing for reform, while the San Francisco Democrat is protecting billions of dollars in subsidies to the richest farmers.

The rest of Lockhead's story is a text book example of how nothing gets done in Washington for the needs of the people and everything happens in the way that it happens purely for the political advantage of one party or the other. Things are packaged together is such a way as to obscure what is really happening.

Pelosi touted a ban on payments to farm couples earning more than $2 million, 10 times higher than Bush's $200,000 income limit.

At the same time, she backed a 50 percent increase in the actual amount of money each farmer could get. The Senate added a new $3.8 billion "permanent disaster" program to bail out farmers of drought-prone land, intensifying the push to plow fragile prairie.

Probably nothing is as sneaky as putting an increase in food stamp programs in this package of pork and then threatening to blast the President over his treatment of the poor if he dared to veto it. Pure Pelosi playbook.

Pelosi threatened to blast Bush for killing the food-stamp increase if he vetoes the bill, issuing a statement urging Bush to sign the legislation to "ensure that 38 million Americans - especially children - have improved access to basic nutrition."

I have never seen a better reason to vote for Cindy Sheehan, since she is running.

If you want to make your voices heard, there is some possibility through the Conference Committee that is resolving difference between House and Senate Versions. There is a full list here. California members are Dennis Cardoza, Joe Baca and George Miller. All Democrats and all from areas with a vested interest in getting their own pork. It may help to comment on Lockhead's story at the Chronicle.

If you want to send a message to Bush, then I would ask you to call and leave comments. Here are the numbers:

• Comments: 202-456-1111
• Switchboard: 202-456-1414
• FAX: 202-456-2461

Parsing the 110 Congress Part II.

The second part of what could be a series. In the first post, we had a glimpse of how our Congress exposes incompetence in other branches of government rather like a George Foreman slowly grilling whole hog and enjoying every minute of it. But it is rare that they would turn such a spotlight on themselves, as that would threaten retribution in the form of not getting their own appropriations appropriated.

Maybe we should turn a little attention on Rep. Dennis Cardoza, CA-18. Cardoza was the Chief of Staff to Gary Condit when Condit was still in the California State Assembly. If you go to Cardoza's bio on his congressional web site, you find a long and varied political career detailed for you to see, but nary a mention of Condit. It seems that forgetfulness is a Washington convenience.

What you do see is a very opportunistic politician, using Condit's support, getting appointed to a position and then winning re-election with the name recognition of an incumbent. He is always one to stay close to the center, being a blue dog Democrat, and always delivering some benefit for the special interests in his constituency.

This year, he has delivered a pork filled farm bill, one in which he understood that it was not politic to fight the special subsidies in the bill so he worked to get more, but this time for the farmers in his district, those who provided not for commodities, but rather for "specialty crops".

As Carolyn Lockhead reports in the San Francisco Chronicle...

Prominent Los Altos developer John Vidovich and various family members in the Sandridge Partnership of Sunnyvale were the nation's biggest recipients of automatic government payments to farmers last year, receiving more than $1 million, according to a new analysis of federal data by Environmental Working Group.

Known as direct payments, the subsidies go mainly to big farms growing a handful of crops. In the Sandridge case, that is mostly cotton, wheat and peanuts grown on farms controlled by the partnership in the Central Valley.

To put this in perspective, we have a member of the Congressional Portuguese Caucus (all of whose members, Cardoza, Nunes, Costa, used to be Pombo, are Central Valley agribusiness / developers) who wants to buy his continues support by larding up a Farm Bill that continues to give commodity subsides to while the prices we pay for food skyrocket.

This makes political sense when trying to buy votes but makes absolutely no economic sense.

Unfortunately, about the only journalist telling the real story these days is Lockhead and she does not work for a Central Valley newspaper.

If there is one area of this state where we all need a great Green Party presence, it is in the Central Valley. The issues of Community Based Economics, of sustainable agriculture, of urbanization and growth are all issues where the Green Party has the right answers and yet, we are not there, not making noise, not getting attention.

If Cardoza is the best that a Democratic Congress is going to deliver, we are all going to be in greater trouble after we elect an even larger Democratic majority in the fall. I hope that Green voices do not stay silent on this issue.