Two Republican governors one poisoned state

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Two Republican governors, one poisoned state. The administration of Michigan governor Rick Snyder did the same thing to Flint in 2015 that Bill Milliken’s administration did to the whole state in the 1970s: through bureaucratic ineptitude and moral cowardice, they let the citizens they were sworn to serve swallow poison while they dithered, protected their own asses, and worried about money. For shame!

J.P. Travis: Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976 graduate of University of Michigan, father, grandfather, husband, founder and CEO of Travelyn Publishing (http://www.travelynpublishing.com/), and passionate anti-government believer in individual liberty.

View Comments (39)

  • Come on now, Jamie Blanchard and the democrats between those two knew that water was leaded-it has been for 9 decades.

    • They didn't have a problem until they switched to the Flint River recently, which is polluted from all the GM plants so it leeches heavy metals out of the pipes... which they knew, but they didn't want to spend the money treating the water so it WOULDN'T leech heavy metals.

        • Maybe. But apparently there are cheap treatment options which would have stopped the water from leeching heavy metals out of the pipes, and the administrator declined to pay for those cheap treatment options. You see who we keep coming back to? The administrator.

          I understand that the city was bankrupt and you wanted to save money, but this is the inherent danger in placing a hired bureaucrat over elected officials. The hired gun has no loyalty to the citizens he is governing. Which is exactly what we see here. This person KNEW the citizens were being poisoned, but was only concerned about dollars and cents -- first, saving money by abandoning the contract with Detroit; then, saving money by refusing the necessary treatment of the water from the Flint River. And the governor has responsibility because you know damn well the governor is who really hired this administrator.

    • No, Flint was being run by a state administrator hired by Republicans when they decided to switch to Flint River water. Hence the headline here. You can blame the Democrats for running the city into bankruptcy in the first place, but at least the Democrats, when they were running the city, managed to avoid poisoning the residents.

      • JP, you seem to be up on this, was the water tested before the switch to Flint river water was made? I haven't been able to find out anything about it. If the river was never tested for pollutants a lot of heads should roll, right up to the governors office.

        • You can't have a city water system in the USA without regular testing, so yes. Then they switched to Flint River water downstream from a bunch of old GM plants, realized they had a problem almost immediately, but spent most of year quibbling about it, arguing about who should do what, and covering their own asses.

          The thing is, it's silly to have water problems in this state. We are surrounded by the Great Lakes! It doesn't cost that much to run pipeline from the nearest Great Lake and get yourself some of the best drinking water in the world. It's mind boggling how stupid this tragedy is. The Flint River? Idiotic.

  • The entire state of Michigan needs to be filled with liberals, fenced off and given to Canada as a gift to their new nutty Prime Minister....

      • Just imagine what the local Muslims are like after having their IQ lowered from the sixties to the forties.

          • Yes.
            Not really feeling better, no pain meds yet. Nobody bothered to tell the doctor that Vic*din doesn't work on me, so now I'm waiting for a dilaudid scrip.

          • I hope they get you something soon. Vicodyn doesn't work on me either. It seems these days that you have to take a sharpie and write instructions all over yourself to keep doctors from operating on the wrong place, or making other stupid mistakes.

            Yes, incorrectly spelled to get it past the bots.

    • Well, since lead poisoning lowers IQ, I'm sure the state created a whole bunch of new liberals in Flint...

  • I just read that the wo...er, uh...person in charge of the EPA has admitted that her...um, its bureaucrats knew about the Flint situation six months ago but remained silent because one of them was waiting for another one to decide something or other. And remember that the Flint mayor was a Democrat, so there is plenty of blame to share, even if the MSM will award it all to Republicans.

    • That is what I gathered from this entire thing. Also there is hypocrisy because Democrats refuse to go against Democrat Governors, but are stampeding to get in front of a camera to condemn this guy. The other thing is that I have a feeling that he either wasn't told everything or that it was a disaster or he was told to be discreet to avoid panic and that came to bite him in the ass later as he was probably betrayed and hanged out to dry which is easy to do because he is a Republican. That is my theory, the information on this is very bizarre and convoluted.

    • Oh yeah, I'm sure 90% of the bureaucrats involved are Democrats, because we all know how liberals gravitate into bureaucracies, but this was a Republican governor who, backed up by a Republican legislature, insisted on taking over administration of the city and hired the administrator who made the fateful decision to use the Flint River for drinking water. And then it was state bureaucrats under a Republican governor who tried to hide the embarrassing repercussions from the public. At the very least, Snyder should quit in disgrace for not managing the situation better.