John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George Herbert Walker Bush. Hillary Rodham Clinton. William Jefferson Clinton. John Quncy Adams. Etc. Middle names convey information, why ignore free, honest, accurate information? If Cunningham had used his middle name maybe he'd still be in office?

Non-point sources of anything are a problem for laws. Look at fertilizer usage, for example. Arguably, the worst remaining pollution of the Mississippi River drainage system is ag waste. Most pollution law is devised for prevention and with remediation as a punishment. Farming in the broadest sense (from tractor driver or herder through ADM) has been extremely resistant to changes in methods. Industrialization of agriculture has increased the problem of ag waste but control of waste has not kept pace. In fact, the opposite is often the case, take swamp draining.

Swamp draining has reduced the problem of disease vectors throughout the USA. Malaria & yellow fever were once very common, especially along the eastern seaboard as far north as Philadelphia. When the role of disease vectors became known, drainage projects were undertaken over the entire eastern USA and they were marvelously effective. Most of the reason we don't have a serious annual epidemic of mosquito-vectored disease is the removal of vector breeding habitat.

The downside of removing swamp habitat is that swamps act in a roughly analogous factor to humans -- they filter water as kidneys filter blood. By removing swamps we have drastically decreased the nutrient conversion capacity of all of our waterways. Dirty water that pours into the Mississippi & tributaries stays dirty all of the way south and into the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a huge "Dead Zone" every year in the Gulf ( http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0525_050525_deadzone.html ).

So what is the easy solution? Put the clean-up problem on the back of the proximate cause: Agricultural practices. Many, many farmers are building artificial wetlands to slow the rate of run-off in retention ponds. This is in essence, re-creating the wetlands that we zealously destroyed for health reasons over the previous century. The cost of building and maintaining retention systems is sometimes offset with tax breaks, etc. It also adds to the price of the farmer's product and so, the burden is passed through indicrectly to the consumer. Also, the fed gov has enacted legislation that has encouraged farmers to set aside farmland that is more properly wetland. Same deal, really, but the cost is shared directly between the farmer and taxpayer.

Like I said previously, I am not a fanatic about user taxes. I do believe that consumer/user taxes are more honest in the sense that when you go to the gas pump, you know exactly what you pay in taxes for that item and if you have a gas guzzler, you pay a lot more than the diver of a frugal car like a Prius.

But some problems are intractable at the consumer level, like non-point source pollution. We (society) had a hand in creating the problem through swamp drainage for health reasons. And we are definitely healthier for it. But we didn't know that we would pay steep price for it. Now we do. It's a worthy area of debate, far better than whether Barak Hussein Obama should hide his middle name.