Dem Rep: I Grew Up in a Time When Turds Hung from Trees

Tuesday during a debate for the congressional seat in the 8th District of Minnesota Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN) used blunt language to talk about the progress America has made on controlling pollution in our rivers and lakes.

Nolan said, “I grew up in a time when the lakes and rivers were so polluted they were catching on fire. The Mississippi River where we lived, why you go down there in the spring and there were toilet paper and condoms and turds hanging on every branch and that was the good stuff, you know. That wasn’t, that wasn’t the toxic stuff. So and you had haul drinking water into Duluth and acid rain was destroying our forests and our lakes. And everybody said ‘you gotta have jobs or environment, you can’t have both.”

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