The Top 40

This supercilious cocksucker should be flipping a burger somewhere.

I would laugh my ass off if someone would jump up out of the audience with a 2x4 and make an example out of him. That is one self-satisfied little piss ant.

I remember during the Clinton Administration some EPA flunky said he couldn't wait for the day that people would dread the visit of an EPA inspector in the same way that they do the arrival of an IRS auditor. Maybe it was this same obnoxious little putz. But it's for our own good, the Dems are fond of telling us.

Chilling! This kind of philosophy underlines their lust for power. Don't forget this. Carry the memory into the voting booth in November.

Umm, this is standard Federal MO. Justice is not dispensed equally. It's been this way for a very long time. Just like IRS audits. It's fear that will keep the citizens in line. Fear of this Justice Department.

When so many things are against the law, the prosecutors have great discretion. So what they do is go after big splashy targets, that get their names in the papers.

And for a citizen to fight back, is to bring even greater forces to bear, for the Feds cannot be seen to be a paper tiger. Nor can the bureaucrats lose an expensive litigation, lest they lose their cushy Federal sinecures.

Every Federal Deputy Assistant Under Secretary imagines themselves as a Grand Moff, And they're all looking for an Alderaan.

How did it get this way? Every time you idiots screamed/begged/pleaded for the Federals to do something! Something to help rectify an injustice, clean up the environment, alleviate poverty, improve the education of our kids. Look in the mirror you saps, you have enslaved yourselves.

Once you let the Federals in to bring Order to your little corner of the Republic, you will never be able to get rid of them. Never!

The only way to get rid of them is to zero their budgets and rescind the laws that give them power, and lay them all off. And you won't allow that, and you won't elect politicians who will do that. Every single one of you has Federal programs and organizations that you absolutely will not let go of.

Who among you will allow the Education Department, that nest of Marxists, to be outright cancelled? Who among you will say of the EPA, you guys have done a great job, so good that right now we don't need you and can't afford you? Maybe sometime in the future, we'll look at restarting you. Who among you has the courage to call for every single political patronage (oops, discretionary funding) line item in the Federal Budget to be zeroed? No one. And that's why you are slaves now, and slaves you will remain, addicted to the money picked from your neighbors pockets. Until it runs out, after you have spent your parents' money, your own, and your childrens'. And then, with your nation enervated and bankrupt, you will soon become slaves of some other ruthless nation.

Good luck chumps, I don't know where you're going to find the courage to do what needs to be done.

EPA was a response to even worse excesses on the other side. Rivers catching fire, air in several major cities that was more like dilute tear gas than anything breathable, rivers in which nothing lived, soil so contaminated that anything that grew in it was poisonous...

It's quite possible that the pendulum has swung too far, but something like the EPA is necessary. We in the UK found that out, when 4000 people died of smoke inhalation in a week of London smog and out of that the Clean Air Act was born.

Essentially, EPA and similar organisations are about making people clean up their own mess. Something wrong with that?

It is kind of the Obama administration to write the opposition's campaign ads for them.

Fletcher Chritian, on closer inspection it's usually found that things were getting better, then the government stepped in. There may be odd examples otherwise, but that's the general rule. It certainly is not the case any more that these mission-creeping bureaucracies are necessary.

Fletcher, England took the ride down the Insano and missed the water at the bottom. England defines the word mess.

Every single one of you has Federal programs and organizations that you absolutely will not let go of.

Not me. Get rid of all of them. ALL. Social Security, Medicare, everything. If people want welfare, let the states and churches provide it. No amount of inspected meat or national parks is worth the tyranny represented by this man.

ALL.

Reminds me of the time maxine waters threatened to nationalize the oil industry.

Professor Armendariz is on loan from the Environmental and Civil Engineering Dept of SMU -Lyle School of Engineering. Note his doctorate is from the UNC-School of Public Health. So when this EPA thing gets stale, he can become an Obamacare apparatchik.

Muther.

In the Bible, the son of Solomon, Rehoboam, became king. The people came and said, "We think the taxes are excessive. Could you cut back a little?" He went to his advisers. The older men agreed with the people -- let's ease the burden and appease the folks that do the work. Rehoboam's contemporaries said, "No, tell the people that your little finger is thicker than your father's waist." This is what Rehoboam did -- intending to increase the burden on his kingdom. Ten tribes rebelled and formed a new nation, leaving Rehoboam with only Judah and Benjamin -- the ones who were closest to Jerusalem and benefited most from the government.

You can only push a liberty-loving, war-like people so far. The bureaucrats and elitists keep thinking we are too fat and complacent to turn on them. Maybe they are right. Then again, maybe the overpasses in DC are going to be decorated with hanging peckerwoods like that one.

Fletch. You have a good point. But now that things are much, much better (and they truly are), shouldn't the government watchdogs ease up a bit?

What seems to have happened is that people who were once regarded as disturbed for being excessively anal have now taken over the machinery of public policy.

These fuckers don't know what a crucifixion is. They will...they will.

You said it Jewel. All we have to do is play back their own words.

@John A. Fleming. I AM THE ONE YOU HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR, but your point is well taken, and well made. Furthermore, here in Texas' 31st congressional district I've been working like hell to defeat five term incumbent statist/RINO John Carter, reportedly the sixth most powerful member of the house. My time, my money, my body, my voice. And, I told him to his face his time was up; that was two years ago. We may not win, Eric Klingemann is the primary challenger, but I'll tell you for sure Carter is running scared. And, here's a news flash for you, he ain't the only one in incumbantistan that is feeling the ire of the electorate.

Companies that pollute can be taken to court by citizens. Local and state laws and regulations can be enforced where necessary. Federal bureaucrats and bureaucracies run amok and are accountable -- most of the time, to no one. At best, after years, you might get a court to hear your case, if you have not been bankrupted by that time.

William Briggs offers a couple of analogies that are illuminating.

This is not about dirty air or dirty water. It is about control, manipulation, and domination.

This little EPA twit will be lucky if someone doesn't hunt him down and nail his scrawny ass to a cross.

Just sayin'

He should have to ride a bike or walk for all transportation needs. Nothing that uses oil, natural gas or electricity.

I posted this in the wrong thread, sorry Gerard. But I'll repost it here, as well.

If you read only one book and all of the glorious footnotes hidden like sapphires within its pages, you must read Gulag Archipelago. When you come to this footnote, you will have struck mind gold.

Memorize it. Let the words pulse through your veins with your blood to the very chambers of your heart and back out into your hands and feet:

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur -- what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

I would like to second Jewel's post. It truly is an amazing and profound book.

I wonder how many "lists" this guy is on now.

If being an EPA field agent became as dangerous as being, say, a DEA agent, how likely is it that the EPA will be able to enforce their edicts?

You have a differrent breed of people at EPA than at DEA, and with different expectations.

Related:

http://www.imao.us/index.php/2012/04/epa-apologizes-for-threatening-to-crucify-oil-companies/

I've not had the opportunity to ask a lawyer, but it doesn't stop me from wondering this:

Given that it is permissable -- even laudable and in some cases mandatory -- to use force, even lethal force, to prevent the commission of a felony in progress, what level of force is permissable, laudable, or mandatory to prevent the commission of an anti-constitutional crime?

And can this principle be applied to such as our pal Al, here?

what level of force is permissable, laudable, or mandatory to prevent the commission of an anti-constitutional crime

That's the Army's job.

Too bad they won't do it.

Don Rodrigo - I have a little story that I found God only knows where, that illustrates by example a possible method of reining in the worst excesses of the polluters. (One ought to note in passing that externalising costs due to pollution is not only desirable in a capitalist society, but is compulsory by law if not otherwise prevented. A corporation is obliged to maximise its profits, and thus to minimise its expenses.)

Apparently, 30 years back or so Czechoslovakia had a problem with extremely severe pollution of the Danube. No means of reducing this worked; draconian penalties, frequent inspections, whatever - probably because of various forms of corruption. Someone had a brainwave. One fine day, a law was passed requiring the intake pipe for factories using Danube water to be downstream of the outlet.

Pollution decreased by over 50% within a year. Why? Because most industrial processes require reasonably clean water - and the new regulation meant that any factory using river water would have to clean up its own mess, at its own expense, or shut down.