GoldFISHER... The Waste with the Supreme Court Touch

Ok, that title is horrible.

BUT, so (seemingly) is the Supreme Court decision in Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. AND, the seeming complete LACK of analysis of this decision anywhere other than The Colbert Report. (If you can find some other good analyses, please let us at the Continuum know.)

From Colbert and quick skimming of other sources, it seems to be that a gold company in Alaska got permission from the Army Corps of Engineers to dispose of "tailings" from a gold mine but filling up a lake of a depth of 75 ft or so to a depth of 74 ft, killing (of course) everything in the lake, what with the lake becoming a "kiddie pool" and the toxic nature of the "tailings."

Apparently, the issue was: the gold mine waste is technically "fill" and "fill" is under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers, not the EPA, which only has jurisdiction of "waste". So the toxic fill could be used to fill up the lake because it wasn't toxic waste, but toxic fill. Somehow involved in this was a Bush Administration regulation (I believe they changed it so that "fill" was no longer covered by the EPA, but I could be off on that), and the Court ruled that it should give deference to the EPA's own interpretation of its regulations, such that apparently filling up a lake with toxic fill isn't the same as filling it up with toxic waste. (This seems to me to clash with Scalia's untenuous philosophy of using only the "plain sense meaning" of laws, but whatever.)

I'd really like to read more in depth analysis of this case, but it seems to be lacking. I guess we're too busy with celebrity deaths, strip-searching teenagers, and firefighters.

Actual SCOTUS decision is here.

Colbert's pithy defense of Affirmative Action (kinda)

Watching Colbert Report tonight, he was just discussing the recently-passed Lilly Ledbetter act. This act essentially provides for a return to the status quo in Equal Opportunity Employment and discrimination cases, where when an employee feels they may have been discriminated against, the statue of limitations on an anti-discrimination case starts from the moment of the last discriminatory act -- which in the case of pay inequality, would now be the last received paycheck. This is opposed to (and overturns) the Roberts' Supreme Court judgment finding that the statue of limitations begins at the *first* act of discrimination, i.e. the "first" discriminatory paycheck. (Oddly, supporters of the court's decision argued that this would reduce frivolous lawsuits -- whereas it seems this would have provided perverse incentive to sue ASAP in any POSSIBLE chance of discrimination, the all-feared frivolous lawsuits that Republicans are always tilting against.)

In any case, Colbert pointed out that because provides a corrective to potential discrimination against women, women therefore stood to gain more from it than men -- and it is therefore sexist! This is, of course, exactly the same theory apparently behind anti-Affirmative Action calls of discrimination/reverse discrimination, which I tend to think of as self-serving bunk or crazy-eyed delusion.

I'm illin' (in the literal sense) and gotta get to bed, so this is a link-free post, and I'm'a headin' off now. But remind me to tell y'all the anecdote from my Private Sector days about "discrimination" for those who have been discriminated against.