Alan Caruba: The Power Mad EPA--the threat is the EPA, not the mercury!

Barely a week goes by these days without hearing of some new demand by the Environmental Protection Agency that borders on the insane.

Increasingly, EPA regulations are being challenged and now reach the Supreme Court for a final judgment. This marks the failure of Congress to exercise any real oversight and control of an agency that everyone agrees is now totally out of control.

Recently the EPA ruled that New York City had to replace 1,300 fire hydrants because of their lead content. The ruling was based on the Drinking Water Act passed by Congress in 2011. 

As Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) pointed out while lambasting the agency, “I don’t know a single New Yorker who goes out to their fire hydrants every morning, turns it on, and brushes their teeth using the water from these hydrants. It makes no sense whatsoever.” Reportedly, the Senate is poised to consider legislation exempting fire hydrants if the EPA does not revise its ruling.

The EPA is not about making sense. It is about over-interpreting laws passed by Congress in ways that now continually lead to cases before the Supreme Court. The Court is composed of lawyers, not scientists. In an earlier case, they ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “pollutant” when it is the one gas that all vegetation requires. Without it, nothing grows and all life on Earth dies.

Continue reading.

Could the Obama Administration’s Next Scandal Be Brewing at the EPA?

May 30, 2013

With the continued Benghazi investigation, IRS political targeting and DOJ press surveillance, could a scandal at the EPA be the next shoe to droop for the Obama administration?


The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) been closely following the EPA’s misuse of private communication to conduct public business, and fees the agency has placed on conservative groups seeking information that they usual waive for media and watchdog groups. After successfully gaining access to former EPA Chief Lisa Jackson’s emails, CEI is now suing to gain access to the text messages of Gina McCarthy, the senior EPA official the President has nominated to now run the agency.

CEI’s Chris Horner joined “Wilkow” Thursday to discuss his organization’s request to access text messages sent by Jackson and McCarthy, and what they’re looking for.

“Where are these text messages? Are they really engaging in serial, coordinated, systematic document destruction in violation of criminal law?” he asked. “Because I have an affidavit in one of my lawsuits from NASA admitting that they are. OK, so this is not far-fetched, this is rather near-fetched.”

Horner noted that McCarthy is being promoted to an “enormous budget” and “enormous responsibility” and there are questions that need to be answered.

He went on: “The bigger issue the EPA is going to have to answer is: Are you just in contempt of Congress and violating the law by refusing to turn things over? Or are you really serially and systematically destroying records?”


“If so, these consequences have to go beyond people resigning to end the issue — we have to have real consequences because these are not their records, they’re ours,” Horner concluded.

CONTINUED:  http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/30/could-the-obama-administrations-next-scandal-be-brewing-at-the-epa/

EPA Defines Ditch As Navigable Waterway In Attempt to Grab Power Over Land Owners

The Environmental Protection Agency has been exercising its muscle in trying to take control of virtual all water supplies in the United States, including those on private property.

In the process, they are making it difficult to near impossible for land owners to use their property if the EPA finds as much as a bucket of water on it.

In the western US, numerous land owners and municipalities have been told they can no longer use their wells for water as they are tied into groundwater that may drain into a stream, river or lake elsewhere. Tombstone, Arizona is a prime example of how the EPA and the Obama administration have cut off the town’s main water supply.

Now the EPA is using the Clean Water Act to seize control of lands throughout the country, often in violation of law and the Supreme Court. In the early 2000’s, John Rapanos wanted to build a shopping mall on his land in Michigan. Some of the land was swampy, so he drained it and filled it in so he could build. Even though he was 20 miles away from a waterway that was designated as ‘waters of the United States’, the EPA told Rapanos that his property was navigable because it was connected to a tributary that flowed in to the waters of the US. They levied millions of dollars in fines against him and ordered him to return the land to its original state.

CONTINUED:  http://godfatherpolitics.com/5689/epa-defines-ditch-as-navigable-waterway-in-attempt-grab-power-over-land-owners/

A Massive Land and Water Grab

By Alan Caruba

Environmental Protection Agency in league with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

The tension between the states and the federal government is built into the U.S. Constitution and the Tenth Amendment stipulates that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The Constitution was written in an era of monarchies by men who were determined to preserve the rights of individual citizens and of the sovereign republics, the states, who were coming together for their common protection and welfare without ceding any powers to the federal government that would deprive them of the governance of their states. The Founding Fathers were well aware that it is the nature of all governments to seek to accrue more and more power at the expense of citizens and states or provinces within their borders. The rise of the so-called environmental movement has given ample proof that their concerns were well-grounded. I yearn for the day when we stop calling them “environmentalists” and simply the communists that they are.


CONTINUED:  http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/47281?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=b5b6195f79-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

An open letter to Congressman Walter Jones:

There is something terribly wrong in our country today, and there is no place where it is more evident than what is happening in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The inhabitants of this tiny island that consists of seven villages, are under siege by the allowances of repressive government no less than the framers of the Constitution were, who out of desperation fled from their homeland where generations of "their" families had lived. We the people of the United States are supposed to be living under the rule of law created by our founding documents, guarantying our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those fundamental rights are systematically being stripped away from us and one would wonder if there is any solution.


The simplicity of the early days of the Audubon Society, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other similar wildlife groups who saw the necessity of protecting and preserving our precious natural resources, and rightfully so, has evolved into a very radical and deliberate paradigm shift towards a sense of absolute control over the public by these agencies and special interest groups. But the most unbelievable aspect about what is happening is how all of these groups somehow trump the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They have become the puppeteers of our society and there influence affects every aspect of our daily lives, from commerce, to tourism, to recreation.

Generations of families have made their living on our beaches and the waters of the Pamlico Sound, but today many have had to leave the prosperity of the fishing and crabbing industry because of restrictions and regulations that have been imposed upon them by the Marine Fisheries since 1976. For the ones who struggle to carry on the generational tradition, it becomes more and more difficult, and less and less lucrative every year.

There are hundreds of square miles of water that make up the Pamlico Sound, but it is almost impossible to keep a sufficient ferry channel open between Hatteras Island and Ocracoke because of all the environmental hype and seasonal regulations restricting pipeline dredging, out of fear of disturbing some eel grass, a fish, or a bird. The channel that connects the two islands serves not only as the lifeline, but is also the evacuation route for the residents of Ocracoke Island during hurricane season. Within the past couple of years a million and a half dollars have been spent trying to quick fix the problem utilizing the Army Corps of Engineers sidecaster dredge. The results of that in Hatteras Inlet can best be summed up in a quote by Albert Einstein. "To keep doing the same failed thing over and over again, expecting a different result, is insanity."

CONTINUED:  http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?p=13302761