Democrat Blanche Lincoln Helps Gut the Clean Air Act

Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) recently signed on to the resolution introduced by her Senate colleague, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases and, in the process, gut the Clean Air Act protections that have served us in good stead for several decades now.

Lincoln's staff apparently decided to celebrate by posting a congratulatory tweet, reading: “Chairman Lincoln is to be congratulated for her forthright stand for Arkansas in a poisonous Washington climate.”

That’s right folks, signing on to an anti-environmental resolution that was not-so-secretly written by lobbyists for polluting industries is what passes as "a forthright stand" in Lincoln-land. One has to wonder whether the reference to the poisonous climate wasn't some kind of Freudian slip.

There is nothing "forthright" about what Senators Lincoln and Murkowski are trying to do — quite the opposite. It’s a shady attempt to undermine democratic processes in an effort to represent not people but industries that are profiting hand over foot while actively harming people with their pollution.

Now if you want to see a real forthright stand, look no further than Lisa Jackson, who "went toe to toe" with Senate Republicans to defend the EPA's endangerment finding, according to the New York Times.

U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson today defended the science underpinning pending climate regulations despite Senate Republicans' claims that global warming data has been thrown into doubt.

"The science behind climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming," Jackson told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "That conclusion is not a partisan one."

Meanwhile, Antarctica's ice shelves are steadily melting away thanks to climate change. I guess the Senate Republicans and global warming deniers everywhere forgot to tell the ice shelves that a few emails from a single research institution have proven once and for all that the theory human-caused climate change is untenable.

Oh wait, that’s right, the crass political tactics of big polluters and their allies in Congress don’t change the facts, and global warming will continue apace no matter how many excuses industry's pet lawmakers find to delay acting.