Could feel myself getting dumber listening, but a RWer made a statement I wish I could have

[zbdent]

countered immediately. Unfortunately, I was in a car, listening to a Youngstown RW talk show host, and didn't have the radio's phone number.

The statement by the RW caller was about the drilling industry operating in Youngstown. He said that he trusted the business (the one doing the highly lucrative and profitable business) to make an honest assessment of the effects of drilling. Namely, the study of the fact that, since the drilling started (11 months ago), there have been 18 earthquakes in an area which they had been extremely rare.

I wanted to ask the caller if he felt that, if he feels that a business can do a study of what it's doing and, unfortunately for the company, report that their business IS CAUSING MAJOR PROBLEMS (health and environmental) ...

Would he have trusted Bill Clinton to investigate his own "indiscretions"?

Would he have trusted ACORN to study their own tactics and find them illegal?

Would he have trusted James Traficant to investigate his actions to see if they were breaking rules? (Bad example ... Traficant has been embraced by the TEAhadists ...)

Edited to add:

As I think about it now, the RW caller pointed out "Hey, there are always aftershocks from an earthquake. Didn't we have an earthquake about 6 months ago in Virginia? That would explain the aftershocks felt in Youngstown." (not verbatim, but the gist of his "proof" of the fact that the "quakes" in Youngstown were not due to the drilling).

Never mind the fact that the earthquakes in Youngstown were apparently happening BEFORE the Virginia earthquake (which was in August, I believe), and the quakes had started shortly after the drilling started, well before August ...

[A777]

1. You are correct. This does seem like a conflict of interests.

But for the record, you shouldn't trust ACORN or any other organization to study their own tactics. Same reason why you wouldn't trust a student to grade his own test. If an organization is to be inspected, it should be inspected by an outside party.