"EPA chief calls official’s remark wrong; He apologized for ‘crucify’ comment" by Mark Drajem | Bloomberg News, April 28, 2012
WASHINGTON - The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Friday that an EPA official was wrong to compare the regulator to Roman conquerors, a comment that triggered an outcry this week when a video recording surfaced on the Internet.
Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, said she has spoken to the official, Al Armendariz, and that his comments “don’t comport with our record.’’
She's right; they bend over like slaves for industry.
Armendariz, the Dallas-based head of EPA’s Region 6, apologized Thursday for what he said was a “poor choice of words’’ in saying the agency tried to make an example of polluters, the same way Romans crucified residents to quell rebellions.
You know, you would like to think that at least the alleged do-gooders staffing the environmental department wouldn't have the fascista mind-set like the rest of the government, but there ya go!
The videotaped remarks from a 2010 meeting in Dish, Texas, led Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, to say the comment showed President Obama intended to shut down US energy exploration.
Related: New application shifts oil pipeline
The American Petroleum Institute has paid for commercials to oppose Obama’s tax proposals.
Armendariz’s comments don’t reflect Obama’s “policy or the approach that the EPA has taken,’’ White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday at a briefing. “They are entirely inaccurate as a characterization of the work that EPA does.’’
Inhofe criticized Armendariz’s comment on the Senate floor this week then posted the video on his website.
The administrator, whose region includes Texas and Oklahoma, is shown answering a question about enforcing environmental laws, and talks about his “philosophy of enforcement.’’
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean,’’ Armendariz said on the video. “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.’’
When you work for an empire you think like an empire, 'eh?
Armendariz said he tried to use the same approach to get companies to obey environmental laws: “You make examples out of people who are not complying with the law,’’ he said.
Unless they are the "law."
Inhofe said that comments typify a “rogue agency’’ intent on increasing energy prices.
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Related: EPA official quits over 'crucify' comment
Finding themselves in that position:
"As Earth Day is marked, EPA in a fight for survival" Associated Press, April 23, 2012
WASHINGTON - Many obvious signs of pollution - clouds of smoke billowing from industrial chimneys, raw sewage flowing into rivers, garbage strewn over beaches and roadsides - have disappeared from the American scene.
Have they? I agree the Connecticut doesn't have garbage floating down it like it did when I was a younger man; however, it does have cancer leaking into it from the nuke plant just north. Sewage is being treated, and yet our waters are full of prescription drug residues, and garbage may not be on the beach because they are slicked with oil.
It was those images that heightened environmental awareness in the 1970s, and led to the first Earth Day and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
I'm starting to feel like that was just another part of manipulating the agenda. Either that or the thing has been hijacked since.
Such environmental consciousness caused Congress to pass almost unanimously some of the country’s bedrock environmental laws in the years that followed.
Now they only pass things unanimously if it favors Israel.
Forty-two years after the first Earth Day, the nation’s pollution
problems are not as easy to see or to photograph. Some in industry and
politics question whether environmental regulation has gone too far and
whether the risks are worth addressing, given their costs.
“To a certain extent, we are a victim of our own success,’’ said William Ruckelshaus, who headed the EPA when it came into existence under President Richard Nixon.
“Right now, EPA is under sharp criticism partially because it is not as obvious to people that pollution problems exist and that we need to deal with them,’’ he said.
Really? I should just ignore those anti-nuclear activists and protesters then, huh?
Environmental laws that passed Congress so easily in Ruckelshaus’s day are at the center of a partisan dispute between Republicans and Democrats. Dozens of bills have been introduced to limit environmental protections, and some question what the vast majority of scientists accept: that the burning of fossil fuels is causing global warming.
Maybe you guys can tell me why it's been such a cool May so far.
In an interview, Jackson said she believes that people in the United States still want to protect the environment.
Yeah, from REAL THREATS, not HOT FART MIST $PEWED for the OBVIOU$ REA$ON$.
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Is it just me, or did that article read a lot like the piece the day before?
Also see: Earth Day global picnic event attempts to set Guinness world record
I don't mean to rain on the picnic, but....
"A late-April northeaster unleashed a burst of winter in parts of New York and Pennsylvania on Monday, closing some schools and triggering power outages in communities that were basking in record warmth a month ago."
"Rare tornadoes wreck 7 Colo. homes" Associated Press, April 28, 2012
EADS, Colo. - At least seven homes and a hog farm were
destroyed after rare nighttime tornadoes reportedly ripped through
sparsely populated counties on the southeastern Colorado plains....
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Yeah, yeah, I know... global warming.
