Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin wants President Barack Obama to appoint a carp czar just for the halibut…
Although Obama has come under criticism from critics on the right who claim he has appointed more czars then ruled old Russia, Durbin seems hooked on the idea. But this wouldn’t be a czar that would handle the kind of carping that you can find 24/7 on talk radio or the blogosphere. This is the reel thing:
As concerns mount about the presence of Asian carp near Lake Michigan, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin today urged President Obama to appoint a carp czar to oversee efforts to keep the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.
“We need to have one person who coordinates the efforts of the federal, state and local agencies that are doing everything they can to keep the Asian carp out of Lake Michigan,” Durbin said during a news conference at the Shedd Aquarium. “We believe it’s absolutely essential.”
Durbin was responding to the discovery of a bighead carp, a variety of Asian carp, during routine sampling this week in Lake Calumet, just six miles from Lake Michigan. Standing beside environmental advocates who have championed closing Chicago-area locks as a way to prevent carp from entering Lake Michigan, Durbin called the finding a possible “game changer” and said “we have to take it very seriously.”
Durbin said scientists will try to determine where the carp came from, whether it was likely dumped there or whether it reached the lake by swimming up the Chicago water system. That’s a critical question as biologists try to figure out how many Asian carp may be lurking below the water’s surface.
The question would be: how much would this cost? What would you pay a carp czar? Would he work for scale?
Others will think his idea is a lot of carp (or some variation on those same four letters.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.