43 Obama Era EPA scandals the Media ignored

A subpoena was issued after McCarthy deleted nearly 6,000 text messages	03/26/2015	The Washington Times
Articles of impeachment were introduced against McCarthy after she was caught repeatedly lying to Congress	09/09/2015	Rep. Paul Gosar
The EPA inspector general said McCarthy was lying when she said Michigan deserved blame for the Flint crisis	10/20/2016	The Washington Post
After the Colo. mine disaster, the EPA covered up incriminating evidence to shield its agents from prosecution	08/15/2017	The Daily Signal
The EPA knew risk of a "blowout" before the Colorado mine disaster, and then later covered up this evidence	08/22/2015	NBC News
The EPA allowed a known, convicted child molester to remain on the payroll for years, putting him in a position to interact with the public.	05/18/2016	American Greatness
McCarthy was accused of permitting a workplace hostile to women, including letting workers download porn (even child porn)	04/30/2015	The House Oversight Committee
Gina McCarthy spent $630,000 on international travel from 2013-2016	03/21/2018	The Washington Free Beacon
Obama's EPA hid experimental data debunking the 2015 ozone rule	09/12/2017	JunkScience
Obama EPA employees earned overtime without justification	08/14/2017	The Washington Free Beacon
The EPA warned Alaskans to stop burning wood to keep warm.	01/01/2017	Townhall
While conducting water tests in Alaska, EPA agents treated locals like enemy combatants, even pointing a shotgun at a septuagenarian.	09/29/2016	Alaska Daily News
After committing one of the worst environmental atrocities in Colorado history with the Gold King Mine disaster, the EPA still insisted it should have control over the nearby Animas River.	02/23/2016	The Daily Caller
Even as the Obama Administration portrayed the Flint, Mich., water crisis as a failure of Michigan's Republican governor, records show his EPA knew about the issue but didn't tell anyone.	01/12/2016	The Detroit News
The EPA threatened a Wyoming man with millions of dollars in fines for creating an ecologically beneficial pond for his farm livestock.	08/27/2015	The Pacific Legal Foundation
The EPA's WaterSense program urged kids not to take too many baths.	04/19/2015	Front Page Mag
The EPA is creating a wireless system to track how long hotel guests spend in the shower as part of an effort to "modify their behavior."	03/17/2015	The Washington Free Beacon
The EPA exposed the elderly and other people with health issues to lethal pollutants as part of a study hoping to show the need for new EPA rules.	04/02/2014	The Daily Caller
A Bloomberg reporter was detained after attempting to ask the EPA administrator a question.	03/28/2014	The Daily Caller
A former EPA adviser pleaded guilty to $900,000 in pay fraud; administrator McCarthy blamed a colleague not acting.	09/04/2013	The Washington Post
The EPA gave an ethics award to a fake employee, "Richard Windsor," which was actually an alias the EPA administrator used to avoid federal record keeping laws.	06/10/2013	HotAir
The EPA leaked private information on farmers to radical environmental groups.	06/07/2013	Townhall
EPA workers at a Landover warehouse turned the space into a personal rec room/gym.	06/05/2013	The Washington Post
An inspector general's report found that conditions at an EPA warehouse included mold, rot, vermin feces, and "generally deplorable conditions."	06/04/2013	Reason
An EPA mandated vehicle emissions reduction device forced an ambulance to shut down on the way to the hospital; the patient died.	05/31/2013	The Daily Caller
A study found the EPA routinely waives fees for environmental groups seeking informatiom from the agency (more than 90 percent), while the media and watchdog groups received no such favors.	05/14/2013	The Washington Examiner
The EPA conducted a study in which children were intentionally exposed to diesel exhaust; when asked about it, they deleted all records of it from their website.	02/25/2013	JunkScience
Emails from EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's secret account reveal her contempt for congressional oversight, the Wall Street Journal, and attempts to borrow art work from the Smithsonian for the EPA's office.	02/20/2013	The Washington Free Beacon
The EPA mandated gasoline blenders use a fuel ... that doesn't exist.	02/05/2013	The Christian Science Monitor
The EPA's mandated ethanol blend E15 has been discovered to destroy engines -- but the rule has not been repealed.	01/31/2013	The Blaze
The EPA mandate that cars in 2025 get 54.5 miles per gallon will effectively outlaw cars under $15,000, and will increase the average price of a car by $3,000.	12/26/2012	The Daily Signal
To avoid federal laws governing electronic record keeping, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used "alias" email accounts.	11/20/2012	NewsBusters
The EPA celebrated "Children Health Month" by encouraging schools to create "energy patrols" aimed at making students feel guilty for using electricity.	10/05/2012	CNS News
Obama's coal regulations led to Alpha Natural Resources to cut 1,200 jobs and close 8 mines.	09/18/2012	Associated Press
The EPA honored Hispanic Heritage Month with a poster of Che Guevara "and a bit of plagiarism."	09/13/2012	BuzzFeed
The EPA funneled money to a newspaper that largely focused on covering the EPA.	09/12/2012	The Washington Guardian
Obama's coal regulations led to PBS Coals to lay off 225 works, about 30 percent of its workforce.	07/23/2012	The Washington Examiner
The EPA ruled that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant -- as a means to enact global warming regulations -- even though life on earth could not exist without it.	06/26/2012	The Daily Signal
Under Obama, the EPA ordained that "environmental justice" must govern their every decision; one effect was that people could sue a polluter, claiming racism.	05/17/2012	Breitbart
Obama's EPA imposed burdensome regulations instructing how to put canoes in the water in Canton, Conn.	01/13/2012	Patch
After Obama's EPA enacted new rules on greenhouse gases, political ally General Electric received an exemption.	02/04/2011	The Blaze
After a Democrat-led Senate rejects his global warming emissions law, Obama uses the EPA to impose them anyway	01/20/2010	The Heritage Foundation

HOUSE APPROVES BILL TO FORCE PUBLIC RELEASE OF EPA SCIENCE

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans are taking aim at the Environmental Protection Agency, targeting the way officials use science to develop new regulations.

A bill approved Wednesday by the GOP-controlled House would require that data used to support new regulations to protect human health and the environment be released to the public.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said "the days of 'trust me' science are over," adding that the House bill would restore confidence in the EPA's decision-making process.

Democrats approve of government agencies making rules based on data they want to keep secret from you.

The EPA spill in Colorado was not a bug but a feature.

The EPA's long range plan was to build a Superfund Site at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  They needed a spill to make that happen.  They got it.

Guess what's going to happen next?



Meanwhile Democrats and environmentalists are rushing to the EPA's defense and pointing the fingers everywhere else.

The EPA says they're sorry and it won't happen again ... so that's allright.

Bud Norman

All those companies that have been heavily fined and whose executives have gone to jail for lesser contaminations surely didn’t intend to despoil the environment, after all, and we can reasonably assume that they also felt awful about it. The EPA’s apologists will likely argue that it was acting for the greater good, rather than than greed that motivates those nasty old miners, but we would note that mining industry also serves an essential and arguably more important service than the EPA and that the EPA’s employees are at least as well compensated and as a typical Colorado miner. The consequences of of governmental incompetence can be just as devastating as those of corporate incompetence, although usually more so, and deserve even harsher condemnation.

When a corporation encounters one of those unfortunate things that can happen when you’re moving heavy machinery around toxic materials, there’s an EPA and a Justice Department and a Federal Bureau of Investigation and an environmental left around to make so those responsible are held to account, but if it’s the EPA and the federal government that’s spilling three million gallons of toxic waste into a river and turning it a sickly orange and the environmental left is rallying to its defense there’s no real incentive for them to avoid such screw-ups in the future.

Did we mention that the mine closed in 1923? And that when a private company pollutes the ground with toxic chemicals, heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, lead and arsenic the EPA and the environmentalist run around with their hair on fire? The EPA has assured us that even everything's fine now:

Only one of 108 fish died after being placed in cages in the Animas River, and wildlife officials have said there appears to be no danger to animals drinking from the river.

And the EPA doesn't have to worry about the government going after them; they ARE the government.

Unlike BP, which was fined $5.5 billion for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the EPA will pay nothing in fines for unleashing the Animas River spill.

“Sovereign immunity. The government doesn’t fine itself,” said Thomas L. Sansonetti, former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s division of environment and natural resources.

 

Liberal calls for attack on Israel

I think it was Yogi Berra who said that "you can observe a lot by just watching."   With that I found out that some Liberals are seriously thinking that a nuclear attack on Israel by, among others, France, should be under consideration. 

I was reading Netanyahu’s Victory, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal when I ran across this gem by a commenter named Marc Jones:

Here is something for you to consider Mr. Perlman. There are a number of nuclear states which are dependent on Middle East oil. They include China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and France. There are several other states which have all the components and capabilities to construct nuclear weapons very quickly, that are also dependent on Middle East oil. They include Japan, Taiwan, South Africa, and South Korea. Do you really think they will allow their economies to be wrecked by a conflict between Iran and Israel? Is it Israel or Iran who's elimination would lead to greater stability for their economies? It is not just Israel that can be expected to act in its own best interests. Israelis should spend some time pondering that fact.

When someone pointed out that if Israel believed that nuclear armed nations could decide to destroy  Israel to protect Arab oil it would be a very good reason for them to attack Iran first, Marc Jones said this:

...you are off by a full 180 degrees regarding my scenario. Let me be more clear. A first [sic] against Iran by Israel is a recipe for disaster. They don't have sufficient convention capability to eliminate the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. If they decide to use their nukes, it is quite likely they will face a pre-emptive first strike by any of a number of nuclear powers dependent on Mid-east oil. Charging into a box canyon, guns blazing is generally a very bad idea and that would be exactly what a first strike would entail. The result could be existential tragedy for Israel, a truly God-awful outcome.

He decides to double down in a follow-up:

Nations act in their own best interests. Think about that. What is in the best interests of those countries? Israeli security? Not by any stretch of imagination. They will protect their own economies.

...all of the countries listed have active and effective foreign intelligence services. Several have extensive spy satellite systems. If they think events in the Middle East are beginning to risk their wellbeing, they will be watching. If they see Israel making pre-launch preparations and it makes sense to do so, they will act.

Marc Jones sees an attack, not by Arabs, but by nations depending on Mid-East oil as a real possibility.  

Outrageous? 

Perhaps. But we once thought that an American president ruling by decree executive order was outrageous.  We once thought that free speech was sacrosanct, especially on college campuses.  We once thought that we could buy a cup of coffee without getting lectured on race.  We once thought that how long you showered was none of the government's business.  We once thought that helping Israel - the only democracy in the Middle East - defend itself was as American as apple pie.  It helps to observe what the Left is thinking in its unguarded moments, because their agenda is on the march.  And nuking Israel to protect access to Arab oil is definitely on their radar screen. 

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism

Daniel Hannan - in case we need another reminder - explains that Hitler was a socialist.

You can't accuse the NSDAP of downplaying the "Socialist" bit

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

The Left, of course, smears the Right with the term Nazi and the "authoritarian" label:

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.

Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.

You want to see what authoritarian looks like? Check out Barack Hussein Obama proudly proclaiming he has a pen and a phone. Proudly changing the immigration law with a memo to this Gauleiter at Homeland Security. Check out the EPA issuing rules for the rest of us to live by without even a cursory glance at Congress.  Little Hitlers all.

The Dutch Nazi Party was equally explicit: "With Germany Against Capitalism"

The National Socialist German worker stands against capitalism

New York may seek to reduce power for 3rd straight day

Biggest city in US joins the Third World.

New York State's power grid operator said it might ask some of its customers in its power reduction programs to limit electricity use for a third day as people crank up air conditioners to escape the brutal heat wave.

All the while the EPA and Team Obama demand the end of coal fired power plants.

Scandalanche; why the President's enablers in the press are desperately trying to change the subject.

Having lunch yesterday, the couple in the next booth were talking about the NSA spying on us. It's replaced a lot of the talk about the Kardashians, or baseball. But the NSA snooping has been going on a long time and the recent revelations should not have been a surprise to anyone. What's giving it importance is the evidence that this administration has crossed the red line that Americans have set up in their own minds. They no longer trust the government to stay within the boundaries required to keep the people of this nation free.

Michael A. Walsh

What makes the news scary are the revelations of what else Team Obama’s been up to. Follow the bouncing scandal ball:

* On Benghazi, the administration has simply clammed up, keeping suspicions alive that there’s much more to this story. A handful of intrepid reporters have bucked the tide, but others have stopped asking why no help was sent and where President Obama was that night. Because . . .

* In clear violation of the First Amendment, the administration — allegedly angered about national-security leaks — seized phone records from the AP and Fox News in a what looks like a transparent attempt to put the fear of God into them and keep others incuriously toeing the party line, which mostly amount to: Trust us. But can we? Consider . . .

* The strange goings-on at the Environmental Protection Agency, where recently-departed chief Lisa Jackson was using a fictitious e-mail account in order to communicate privately without all those pesky “transparency” requirements. How widespread is this practice? What to make of word that Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was also using “secondary” e-mail accounts?

* Then came the IRS bombshell — something every taxpaying American can relate to. That a supposedly neutral collection agency with powers far beyond what we entrust to law enforcement would cheerfully target Tea Party and other righty groups for special scrutiny is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares. And although the IRS has tried to blame “rogue elements” in its Cincinnati office, whistleblowers are coming out of the woodwork to point the finger directly at the White House.

All this adds up to a perfect storm of mistrust, now exacerbated by the fears of the surveillance state that has mushroomed since the panicky post-9/11 “reforms.” Thus Americans now fear a culture of suspicion among top law-enforcement officials, who treat more than 300 million overwhelmingly law-abiding Americans as potential criminals, subject to snoops and pat-downs.

And when that leviathan falls down on the job — as it did in failing to spot the Tsarnaev brothers — then the trade-off between liberty and security becomes a very bad bargain indeed.

FOUR, Count Them, Four Separate EPA Scandals

1) The EPA gave an ethics award to fake employee, “Richard Windsor,” who was already just an unethically created e-mail alias for the agency’s former head, Lisa P. Jackson.

2) The EPA makes conservatives pay a fortune for FOIAs to be granted while waiving fees for liberal groups.

3) EPA contractors are basically Gym, Tan, Laundrying in new, swanky rec rooms thanks to your tax money.

4) The EPA leaked confidential information on farmers and cattle facilities to environmental groups. No bigs.

We can trust our phone and Internet records to this government.  Suuure we can.

EPA 'Mistakenly' Gives Names of Farmers to Radical Groups

According to the report, the information on livestock and produce farmers was sought through a Freedom of Information Act request by the groups Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pew Charitable Trust. They were given information on roughly 80,000 farmers and ranchers, though the EPA later said it made a mistake by releasing the information.

So the EPA sent them the names, addresses, phone numbers and other private personal information so that they could be harassed more effectively.

Richard Windsor Resigns as Head of EPA

Or is the name Lisa Jackson? I'm so confused.

EPA chief’s secret ‘alias’ email account revealed



Meet "Richard Windsor"

The name Richard Windsor may sound innocuous, but it is allegedly one of the secret “alias” email accounts used by Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

“That is the name — sorry, one of the alias names — used by Obama’s radical EPA chief to keep her email from those who ask for it,” Chris Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the new book “The Liberal War on on Transparency,” told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an email.

In his book, Horner revealed the existence of “alias” email accounts used by EPA administrators. The first such transparency dodge, he writes, came from Carol Browner, former director of the Obama White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator.

 

Keep in mind that this is the "most transparent administration in history."  If you don't believe them, just ask them.  Use e-mail.

The EPA is earning a reputation for abuse

When you've lost the Washington Post (and you're a Democrat) you've lost America.

The Environmental Fifth Column

Doug Ross @ Journal lists the ways the Obama EPA, extremists are

...using their positions to damage nearly every industry in America. That is their intention. That is their goal.

Including this (read the whole thing).

• Energy Secretary Chu Embraces High Gas Prices, Again: "This weekend, Energy Secretary Steven Chu appeared on Fox News Sunday and host Chris Wallace asked him about his desire in 2008 for Americans to punitively pay more at the pump in order to wean them off of gasoline. Shockingly, Chu did not walk back his comments as he has attempted to do in the past. In fact, he embraced the strategy noting that his focus is to ease the pain felt by his energy policies by forcing automakers to make more fuel-efficient automobiles."

Seeing that their policies are making is increasingly leas likely that Obama will serve a second term, I'm working on the theory that they are trying to do as much damage as they can while they are in power.

States Start Realizing that the Obama EPA is Threatening Their Economies

Virginia is already seeing the impact.  And the bozos at the Virginian Pilot keep standing in the way of new energy development.