Video: The valley hope forgot. POSTED AT 3:35 PM ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2009 BY ED MORRISSEY

That would be the San Joaquin Valley in California, one of the most prolific agricultural areas in the country — or at least it was, until environmentalists turned off the water. Did they need it for people in response to the drought? No, because the water that would normally flow to the SJV is getting directed out to sea instead. Environmentalists have chosen to bankrupt an entire ecosystem of farms in favor of protecting the Delta smelt, a three-inch fish that neither feeds people nor eliminates pests from the water system. LINK


Actually, the problem for Central Valley farmers is that their water got taken from them by a federal judge, who put a baitfish ahead of human beings. Central Valley’s water-management system was designed to deal with droughts that last as long as five years, but the reservoirs that held its lifeblood got emptied into the ocean to rescue the Delta smelt.....

In fact, Obama threatened to veto a bill that would have resolved this situation almost exactly two years ago. Instead, Obama insisted that the environmentalists needed to keep channeling water away from this rich agricultural resource and from the farmers who had worked it for generations, thanks to their own engineering genius at defeating droughts, to pour that water into the Pacific Ocean instead. LINK