Elbert Jovante Woods, the son of the former Cincinnati Bengals fullback Ickey Woods, died this Saturday. He was only 16. A cornerback high school football player, he’d been practicing with his varsity team on Wednesday and later collapsed at home. He was rushed to hospital with a severe asthma attack, and put on life-support, but never recovered. His doctors blamed extreme heat and poor air quality for the teen’s death. ‘We've actually had a lot of patients in the last week come in with exacerbation of asthma,’ said Dr. David Bernstein, a University of Cincinnati researcher. ‘We think it's probably related to air quality.’

All of us at C&L extend our heartfelt sympathy to Woods’ family, the loss of a talented, vibrant child a tragedy for anyone. (And aside from anything else, I’d like to note that Jovante was an organ donor, his gift of life is now helping eight other people – the kid was a star, in every sense of the word.)

Like Jovante, I and several other members of the C&L staff, have suffered from life-long asthma. Unlike Jovante, however, I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world where the air quality is so relatively clean that lichen – which are incredibly sensitive to air pollution – grows on the asphalt of roads, even in cities as big as Auckland. Jovante, on the other hand, lived in Cincinnati, one of the worst cities for air pollution, having been ranked 2nd statewide and 11th nationwide for the worst fine particle, or ‘soot,’ pollution, and ranked 5th nationwide for soot pollution.  Power plants are the largest source of fine particle pollution, which is formed when sulphur dioxide and other pollutants react in the atmosphere.  Fine particle pollution is high year-round in Cincinnati and has routinely exceeded EPA’s standard for what is safe to breathe over the long-term. 

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(h/t Heather) David Gregory asked Michael Steele for an example of the GOP being as inclusive a party as the Democrats since Kaine is pro-life. Steele uses Christie Todd Whitman as his example to show America how "Big Tent" they really are.

Gregory: Is the Republican Party open to pro-abortion right candidates in the way that Gov. Kaine has survived in the Democratic Party?

Steele: We've had wonderful pro-choice candidates. Gov. Christie Todd Whitman for example was a very successful republican Governor...

She was so happy with the GOP that she quit the Republicans in 2003 after she was picked to lead the EPA in 2001 by Bush and then refused to do their bidding.

Wikipedia: Whitman was appointed by President George W. Bush as Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, taking office on January 31, 2001.

She refused to go along with Bush and Cheney over their pollution quest and resigned from the EPA:

On June 27, 2003, after having several public conflicts with the Bush administration, Whitman resigned from her position to spend more time with her family.[31][32]

In a 2007 interview, Whitman stated that Vice President Dick Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, led to her resignation.[33] At the time, he pushed the EPA to institute a new rule allowing large polluting plants to make major alterations without installing costly new pollution controls.[33] Refusing to sign off on the new rule, Whitman announced her resignation.[33] Whitman decided that President Bush should have an EPA administrator willing to defend the new rule in court, which she could not bring herself to do.[33] Federal judges later overturned the new rule, saying it violated the Clean Air Act.[33]

She then wrote a book bashing the GOP after she left.

In early 2005, Whitman released a book entitled It's My Party, Too: Taking Back the Republican Party... And Bringing the Country Together Again in which she criticizes the policies of the George W. Bush administration and its electoral strategy, which she views as divisive.

She's the only pro-choice republican Steele could think of and she bashed Steele's party. Sean Hannity had her on his show to try and defend BushCo. and he attacked her because of her book back in 2005.

Plus, she's a former Bush cabinet member and governor of New Jersey. So why is this ex-insider taking on some members of her own Republican party in her new book "It's My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America"? Ex-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman joins us tonight!

This actually was his answer to David Gregory's question. Steele's one "big tent" politician quit his party. Tim Kaine and David Gregory had nothing to add to his statement. I'm not kidding you.

USAToday took a look at schools near toxic hot spots - something the EPA has never done, and what they found isn't reassuring:

The result: a ranking of 127,800 public, private and parochial schools based on the concentrations and health hazards of chemicals likely to be in the air outside. The model's most recent version used emissions reports filed by 20,000 industrial sites in 2005, the year Hitchens closed.

The potential problems that emerged were widespread, insidious and largely unaddressed:

• At Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in East Chicago, Ind., the model indicated levels of manganese more than a dozen times higher than what the government considers safe. The metal can cause mental and emotional problems after long exposures. Three factories within blocks of the school — located in one of the most impoverished areas of the state — combined to release more than 6 tons of it in a single year.

"When you start talking about manganese, it doesn't register with people in poverty," says Juan Anaya, superintendent of the School City of East Chicago district. "They have bigger issues to deal with."

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-Lest we forget

President Bush at the Small Business Administration's National

Small Business Week Conference: "The first essential step toward greater energy independence is to apply
technology to increase domestic production from existing energy resources. And one of the most promising sources of energy is nuclear power. (Applause.) Today's technology has made nuclear power safer,
cleaner, and more efficient than ever before. Nuclear power is now providing about 20 percent of America's electricity, with no air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear power is one of the
safest, cleanest sources of power in the world, and we need more of it here in America."

Download | play -WMP

From ABC's World News with Peter Jennings

Despite Bush Flip-Flops, Kerry Gets LabelThursday, September 23, 2004; Page A01

One of this year's candidates for president, to hear his opposition tell it, has a long history of policy reversals and rhetorical about-faces -- a zigzag trail that proves his willingness to massage positions and even switch sides when politically convenient.

The flip-flopper, Democrats say, is President Bush. Over the past four years, he abandoned positions on issues such as how to regulate air pollution or whether states should be allowed to sanction same-sex marriage. He changed his mind about the merits of creating the Homeland Security Department, and made a major exception to his stance on free trade by agreeing to tariffs on steel. After resisting, the president yielded to pressure in supporting an independent commission to study policy failures preceding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush did the same with questions about whether he would allow his national security adviser to testify, or whether he would answer commissioners' questions for only an hour, or for as long they needed.