T. Boone Pickens recently visited The Eagle editorial board, touting his plan to boost wind energy in the Great Plains. It’s a good plan that would bring economic development benefits to rural Kansas.
But one part of Pickens’ vision deserves more scrutiny: He has been buying up water rights in the Texas Panhandle and hopes someday to sell and ship groundwater via pipeline to thirsty cities such as Dallas and San Antonio, along the same corridor that he uses to ship wind energy.
As this BusinessWeek article observes, “Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.”
Pickens refers to oil a “finite resource.”
Water is a finite resource, too — and Pickens sees it as just another commodity to mine and sell. Is he trying to corner the market for the region? Would his water pumping further deplete water levels in the Ogallala Aquifer and affect western Kansas, which also depends on the Ogallala?
Among the six questions on a Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ survey newly sent to candidates John McCain and Barack Obama is this: “As president, would you eliminate the Tiahrt amendment crime gun trace data restrictions in your budgets for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives?” The mayors group, led by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has been fighting to roll back a 2003 measure sponsored by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, that it says limits local and state law enforcement access to crime gun trace data. The group quotes Obama as saying he’d repeal the Tiahrt amendment and McCain as arguing that such data “is not top-secret data that jeopardizes our national security, or hinders law enforcement. We cannot have a government that operates in secret and refuses to release information that shows where criminals have obtained a gun.”
If Barack Obama intends to name Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his running mate, believing he can make the case that she “embodies the post-partisan style of governing that he wants to bring to Washington,” he’d better do so soon, argues Walter Shapiro on Salon.com: “A surprise Sebelius selection in Denver could prompt a remnant of hard-core Hillary supporters — affronted that Clinton was not the woman on the ticket — to threaten a floor fight or a walkout, which would be riveting television but risky political imagery.”
As Barack Obama prepared to vacation in his native Hawaii, a Bloomberg news story took a closer look at his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, an El Dorado native who worked on Boeing’s bomber-assembly line during World War II and went on to be one of the few women officers of the Bank of Hawaii in the 1960s. The woman Obama calls “Toot,” short for the Hawaiian word for grandmother (“tutu”), is now 85 and in delicate health in Hawaii. But “she was the grand matriarch,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-Indonesian sister. “She was the net beneath us so we could make courageous decisions in our own lives.”
