ShareThisIt's starting to feel like Moscow on the Potomac around here, and not because of what some see as a push to nationalize banks and health care.
It's due to President Obama's penchant for enlisting high-placed experts to oversee one problem or another, which could leave Washington with more czars in power than the Russians ever had.
This past week, Obama appointed a "border czar" to oversee the drug-related violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor, thus joins the ranks of czars already tapped to opine on issues including the economic-stimulus effort, drugs, energy, the auto industry, health-care reform, AIDS, Pentagon weapons, urban woes, terrorism, faith-based programs and electronic health records.
More could be on the way. Lawmakers in Congress and industry groups are lobbying hard for czars devoted to food safety, protection of intellectual property, foreign-aid development and Alzheimer's disease.
Whether the glut of czars -- most of whom do not need Senate confirmation and serve at the whim of the president -- has better results than the reign of the Romanovs remains to be seen.
The playground the Obamas installed for their girls on the White House grounds are being called a health risk. The Connecticut-based nonprofit group Environment and Human Health Inc. says the layer of mulch made from rubber tires on which the playground was assembled is hazardous, particularly to kids.
An analysis of other ground-up tires, the group says, showed they contained a carcinogen and toxic chemicals that can leach out of the rubber and pose a risk to children.
The White House isn't worried. Michelle Obama's spokesperson said the National Recreation and Park Association endorses the rubber mulch, which is used as a "safety surface" to cushion falls, and that there are no plans to remove it.
An international meeting of experts at the University of Nebraska law school next week is set to ponder what framework the world might use to decide how to deal with a near-Earth asteroid threat.
NASA and other scientists say there are about half a million space rocks that may pass close to our planet, including several dozen that are big enough and close enough to hits us with catastrophic effects. But with a growing number of nations becoming space powers capable of launching rockets that could reach an asteroid, experts say coordination is essential.
Hurricane Ike did about $32 billion in damage last September to Galveston and Houston, much of it from storm surge along the Galveston-Bolivar Peninsula. So, the estimated $2 billion to $3 billion cost of a portable storm barrier to protect the shoreline from future storms -- proposed by a Texas A&M professor on a model adopted from Dutch systems -- doesn't sound quite so stupendous.
Of course, the project has already been nicknamed the "Ike Dike."
It's curtains for a national Cold War museum, at least for now. Gary Powers Jr., the son of one of the iconic figures of that era, says fund raising and bureaucratic difficulties have frozen his plans for a $4 million museum to be built on a former antiaircraft missile site in Northern Virginia. Powers Sr.'s U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union while on a 1960 spy mission, but he survived and ultimately was allowed to return to the United States. The son said he has collected about $3 million worth of items for the museum, including a cell door from an underground interrogation room used by the KGB in the former East Berlin. Until it finds a home, the museum will exist mostly on the Web (www.coldwar.org) and in traveling exhibits.
What the ailing economy needs are more duck and goose hunters.
A new report from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says waterfowl hunters spent $900 million in 2006 -- the most recent year for which data is available -- on such things as food, transportation, guns, decoys, clothing, hunting dogs and assorted other items.
More than 1.3 million people hunted water birds that year -- amounting to about 10 percent of all hunters. The report says the bird baggers, of whom 74 percent live in the South and Midwest, are better educated and more affluent than other hunters.
(E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com. SHNS correspondent Lee Bowman contributed to this column.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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