Wolf Bytes: The Freedom To Draw Mohammed

The picture above, drawn by former Muslim Bosch Fawstin, was chosen as the winner of the Draw Mohammed contest held in Garland, Texas on 3 May 2015.

UN Reveals Horrifying Islamist Sex Markets

From Allen West's blog:

Yes, Islamists are terribly offended by pictures of Mohammed, but they don’t seem to have much problem with enslaving, raping and brutalizing women. Nope, that’s just business as usual – at least according to a report prepared by a United Nations official.

As reported by the Daily Mail, “an Islamic State terrorist group forced a sex slave to marry 20 fighters and even made her undergo surgery each time to restore her virginity, a United Nations official said.

The group paraded and traded Syrian and Iraqi girls in ‘slave markets’ before the victims were shipped to other provinces, according to Zainab Bangura, special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, who travelled to five countries and interviewed dozens of women and young girls who had survived brutal sexual abuse.

She said the girls were routinely stripped naked before being categorized and shipped off.

‘ISIL have institutionalized sexual violence and the brutalization of women as a central aspect of their ideology and operations, using it as a tactic of terrorism to advance their key strategic objectives. . . .

I am waiting for all the neo-Stalinist left, including the radical feminists in the U.S., to immediately rush to condemn these atrocities and the Salafi ideology being used to justify them in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

"PAM GELLER IS AN ISLAMAPHOBE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEATH OF TWO MUSLIM MEN (who wanted to commit mass murder)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Okay, not the condemnation I was expecting. Actually, for the most part, that has been the response from the left. But to give credit where credit is due, see the next eye-opening entry below:

Salon Author Says It Is Time Progressives Faced The Truth About Islam

After a full throated defense of Pam Geller, and in between a slander of all three monotheistic religions, Jeffrey Taylor at Salon writes:

What is it about Islam that simultaneously both motivates jihadis to kill and so many progressives to exculpate the religion, even when the killers leave no doubt about why they act? The second part of the question is easier to dispense with than the first. Progressives by nature seek common ground and believe people to be mostly rational actors – hence the desire to blame crime on social ills. Unfamiliarity with Islam’s tenets also plays a role, plus, I believe, the frightening future we would seem to be facing as more and more Muslims immigrate to the West, and the world becomes increasingly integrated. Best just to talk of poverty and the like, or a few “bad apples.” But to respond to the question’s first part, we need to put aside our p.c. reading glasses and examine Islam’s basic elements from a rationalist’s perspective. Islam as a faith would not concern progressives, except that some of its adherents choose to act as parts of its dogma ordain, which, to put it mildly, violates the social contract underpinning the lives of the rest of us. . . .

The canonical glorification of death for the sake Islam, or martyrdom, similarly belies those who would argue that the religion’s nature is pacific. . . .

All those who, à la Reza Aslan, maintain that Muslims today do not necessarily read the Quran literally have lost the argument before it begins. What counts is that there are those (ISIS, say, and al-Qaida) who do, and they are taking action based on their beliefs. To the contention, “ISIS and al-Qaida don’t represent Islam!” the proper response is, “that’s what you say. They disagree.” No single recognized Muslim clerical body exists to refute them. . . .

Islam’s doctrinaire positions on women are infamous enough to merit no repetition here. Their sum effect is to render women chattel to men, as sex objects and progenitors of offspring, and foster the most misogynistic conditions on the planet: nineteen of twenty of the worst countries for women, according to the World Economic Forum, are Muslim-majority. Some Muslim countries are deemed more progressive than others, but their progressivity varies inversely with the extent to which Islam permeates their legal codes and customary laws – the less, the better. Not liberal at all, that.

The above are the stark doctrinal and practical realities of which no honest progressive could approve, and which form the bases of the religion. Regardless of what the peaceful majority of Muslims are doing, as ISIS’s beguiling ideology spreads, we are likely to face an ever more relentless, determined Islamist assault. We can delude ourselves no longer: violence is an emergent property deriving from Islam’s inherently intolerant precepts and dogma. The rising number of ethnic Europeans mesmerized by Islam who set off to enroll in the ranks of ISIS attests to this; and may prefigure serious disruptions, especially in France, the homeland of a good number of them, once they start returning. There is nothing “phobic” about recognizing this. Recognize it we must, and steel ourselves for what’s to come.

This is no call to disrespect Muslims as people, but we should not hesitate to speak frankly about the aspects of their faith we find problematic. . . .

. . . We must stop traducing reason by branding people “Islamophobes,” and start celebrating our secularism, remembering that only it offers true freedom for the religious and non-religious alike. And we should reaffirm our humanistic values, in our conviction that we have, as Carlyle wrote, “One life – a little gleam of time between two eternities,” and need to make the most of it for ourselves and others while we can. There is nothing else.

This is not a battle we have chosen; the battle has chosen us.

It’s time to fight back, and hard.

Amen. That should be required reading for all the progs in this land, as well as, it would seem, several blowhards on the right. Yes, Congressman King and Bill O'Reilly, I'm talking to you.

Kirsten Powers & How The Left Is Killing Free Speech

Today's left can best be described as neo-Stalinist. They are enemies of freedom of speech and would much prefer to demonize rather than debate. Gone from the left are such American icons as Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But their breed is not completely extinguished. Some exemplars remain, most notably Kirsten Powers, a Fox News contributor as well as a columnist for USA Today and the Daily Beast. She and her new book, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, are the subject of very good article by Peter Berkowitz at RCP.

. . . This is not to say that all members of the left today are instinctively intolerant and bent on stifling liberty of thought and discussion. Yet all too rare is the contemporary liberal who is instinctively appalled by the contempt for speech emanating from Democratic Party politicians, the university world and elite media, and who is willing to call his or her comrades to account.

Kirsten Powers is one of these rare liberals. In "The Silencing,” she methodically documents—and exposes the hypocrisy, incoherence, and sheer contempt for evidence and argument that underlie—the delegitimization of dissent that has become the stock in trade of what she characterizes as the "illiberal left." . . .

Kirsten Powers is one of these rare liberals. In "The Silencing,” she methodically documents—and exposes the hypocrisy, incoherence, and sheer contempt for evidence and argument that underlie—the delegitimization of dissent that has become the stock in trade of what she characterizes as the "illiberal left."

Because she is intellectually honest, while I disagree with her more often than not, I always have to make sure that my disagreements are on sound footing and give due consideration to her arguments. She is a voice of reason to be taken seriously by people on both sides of the aisle.

The Regulatory Bureaucracy

Nothing pushes my hot button more than talk of our regulatory agencies and their unconstitutional abuse of power, something I bang the drum about constantly. But beyond that is their practical effect. Powerline explains here:

The regulation of low-cost competitive street retail isn’t limited just to food service where legitimate health concerns come into play; according to a report from the Institute for Justice, 45 of the nation’s 50 largest cities maintain extensive regulation of mobile vending of a wide range of products with no health risks at all (such as handmade clothing), “making it needlessly difficult or even impossible to set up shop in many cities.” Somehow the “disparate impact” these regulatory schemes have on lower-income minorities never reaches the threshold of a civil rights issue.

Bookworm Room, in a brilliant post several years ago that I cannot find at the moment, made the point that the only legitimate use of regulation was to protect us against those dangers that are not open and obvious to a reasonable person. All too often, regulations are misused to protect business from competition or to enforce ideological goals, neither of which is a legitimate use of the regulatory power. Were we ever to apply Ms. Bookworm's rule of thumb, I would imagine we could do away with upward of 75% of the regulations now crushing down upon us.

Malarial Parasites With Woodies

There is an article today at Real Clear Science, "Viagra Could Halt Malaria By 'Stiffening' Infected Cells." Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that enters the human blood stream through the bite of a mosquito. It then reproduces in vast numbers, causing debilitating, potentially even deadly illness. It is a scourge in many countries, particularly Africa, so this is big news.

If you read into the article though, you'll find that the viagra isn't affecting cells, it's affecting the parasites. It is, in essence, giving them a woody, which, it just so happens, makes it easier for the spleen to trap the parasites, stopping reproduction. There is something just so, so wrong about giving any male the gift of wood, then using said woody to entrap him. But I guess that is human nature, is it not. From humans to parasites apparently, males sporting wood oft are easily led astray.

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Obama & The Death Of Our Republic

The people of Fairfax County, Virginia are up in arms. They have every right to be. Obama's federal government has dictated that they adopt a new, controversial social policy which they never voted to approve, nor did their representatives in Congress:

A plan to add “gender identity” to a Virginia school’s nondiscrimination policy has enraged parents and preachers, but leaders of the nation’s tenth largest school district say unless they make the change, the U.S. Department of Education could withdraw federal funding.

Critics warn the Fairfax County Public School policy would allow boys who identify as girls to use the locker rooms and bathrooms of their choice – as well as participate on athletic teams of their choosing.

Martin Baker, the pastor of Burke Community Church, warned that “the damage and destruction to our children, teens and impacted adults will be incalculable.”

“Everything from locker rooms to bathrooms will be potentially open for people who simply feel that their inner sexuality does not match their outer, physical sexuality,” he wrote in an email to the 3,000-member congregation.

“This is not just shocking, it is morally and spiritually abhorrent, and that is why I am convinced this is one cultural issue where we, as a church, must speak up and out with clarity, compassion and conviction,” he added.

But the deputy superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools said they have no choice but to provide specific protections for transgender students. A vote on the issue is expected Thursday night.

“The Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education is requiring that school divisions revise their non-discrimination policies to include gender identity,” Deputy Superintendent Steven Lockard wrote in a memorandum to school board members.

He also said the federal government was requiring the district to hire a consultant to advise them on how school divisions should handle individual cases of transgender students.

“If FCPS refuses to amend its policy, OCR has the right to recommend the termination of federal funding to FCPS,” Lockard wrote.

There is not a law that has been passed through Congress providing civil rights for the transgendered. That is an issue of social policy on which the people have the Constitutional right to be heard through their elected representatives, period. So how has it come to pass that the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education has bypassed Congress and unilaterally opted to impose this new social policy on our nation and on Fairfax County, Virginia?

In 2014 the Title IX civil rights law was updated to address sex discrimination “based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity” and protect students “who do not conform to sex stereotypes.”

Title IX, when it was passed by Congress in 1972, was directed to providing equality in educational opportunities between the male and female gender. This new update is nothing more than an outrageous reinterpretation by the Obama DOJ that goes far beyond the Congressional intent of the law as passed. It is now being used to force leftist social policy on our nation.

Art. 1, Sec. 1 of the Constitution provides that Congress is the sole body with the authority to legislate. The problem posed by the DOJ's willingness to interpret laws so ridiculously divorced from their intent as to constitute new legislation is one part of the problem of our out of control federal government.

Yet a second problem is posed by President Obama himself. He has caused an existential Constitutional crisis with his plan to grant rights and a path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens. It is a legislative act for which he has no Constitutional authority. Acting without the consent of Congress, that amounts to tyranny. We fought a revolution over that to become a nation in the first place.

The third problem - the rise of agencies with the authority to pass regulations with the full force and effect of law, yet which have never been voted upon by our elected representatives. Particularly abhorrent is the FCC's recent unilateral decision to assume regulatory control over the internet based on a 1934 law that applied to monopolistic phone companies. But perhaps the most damaging of the out of control agencies at the moment is the EPA. The EPA has claimed vast powers - some of which failed to pass Congress as recently as 2009 - to regulate our energy sector. This from City Journal:

. . . [T]hough Congress refused to pass a law addressing climate change, Tribe points out, the EPA is behaving as if it has the authority Congress refused to give it, wielding the Clean Air Act in ways Congress not only didn’t authorize but also expressly forbade in the Act itself. Moreover, though Tribe doesn’t say so, it is clear that this executive-branch agency is trying to use its non-existent legislative-branch mandate to carry out a highly contentious, highly partisan policy of the Obama administration. As the New York Times quotes one anonymous former administration official, “Whether he intended it or not, Tribe has been weaponized by the Republican Party in an orchestrated takedown of the president’s climate plan.” Moreover, Tribe reports himself mystified as to how the EPA has the gall to contravene the federal government’s “promotion of coal as an energy source,” and to envision, in contravention of the Fifth and Tenth Amendments, shutting down not just a major industry, but also the way of life of whole communities and indeed a whole region of the country.

What is most important about Tribe’s involvement in this case is that he lends his considerable professional authority and impeccable liberal credentials to an increasingly loud chorus that questions the constitutionality of the Administrative State that has developed ever since the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Unlike the Founding Fathers, Progressive politicians, with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the lead, envisioned government not of, by, and for the people, but rather by highly trained, nonpartisan experts who would use the latest scientific knowledge to make better regulations for people than they could make themselves through their elected representatives.

This enterprise was unconstitutional, even un-American, in itself. But as the administrative agencies developed — as they violated the Madisonian principle of separation of powers by merging together executive with legislative power, which the legislature had no constitutional right to delegate, and with judicial power, which the legislature most certainly had no right to delegate — promulgating rules, charging people and corporations with violations of them, and exacting penalties without the benefit of grand or petit juries, in defiance not only of the American Bill of Rights but even of the Magna Carta, they evolved into an utterly unaccountable government that is nothing like the democratic republic the Founders envisioned. What’s more, with lobbyists having so much sway over them and often writing their regulations, the administrative agencies turned into the guarantors of crony capitalism, protecting giant corporations against competition from upstarts, just as the ICC protected the railroad cartel 132 years ago.

The fourth problem is perhaps the most dangerous -- unaccountable, activist judges who feel free to impose their social policy preferences on our nation under the guise of Constitutional interpretation. We've seen this in countless areas, such as with religion and abortion. The issue of the hour is "gay marriage." One federal court after another has struck down laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman using a laughable interpretation of the Equal Protection clause. No one can claim with a straight face that, when the Equal Protection clause was enacted shortly after the end of the Civil War, that the people voting for it meant it to apply to homosexuals. Homosexuality was under legal disability throughout most of the states at the time and remained so for over a century. That makes gay marriage an issue of social policy for each state to decide on its own unless and until our Constitution is amended in respect thereof. In no event is this an issue to be decided by five unelected judges sitting as a sort of politburo and dictating to our nation what they personally want our new social policy to be.

In 1787, as Ben Franklin emerged from behind the doors of the Pennsylvania State Hall, at the conclusion of secret deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

For over two centuries, we did manage to keep it, more or less. But no longer. Our Founding Fathers would not recognize our form of government today, despite the fact that there have been no substantive Constitutional Amendments to alter its design.

While our Republican form of government managed to coexist with activist courts and a parallel legislature in the regulatory bureaucracy for decades, it is only under the Obama regime that the left has truly come to warp and exploit the entire panoply of our government institutions to work non democratic fundamental changes to our nation. We have ceased to function as a republic and now function as a sort of hybrid tyrannical regulatory bureaucracy. This needs to end and the course corrected soon else we will never be able to return this nation to a republican form of government absent bloodshed. The 2016 election will be one of existential importance to our nation.

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Carly Fiorina & Crony Capitalism

Elizabeth Warren is probably most recognizable for her schtick that the deck is stacked against the average American and that our economic model is becoming ever more unfair. On that, Ms. Warren, I and the latest applicant for the republican presidential nomination, Carly Fiorina, all agree.

There is no question that the ever mounting regulation and mandated costs are making it more difficult to open and operate businesses in this country, and that is the alpha and omega of economic opportunity for all Americans. According to Carly Fiorina, it is crony capitalism that is at the heart of this huge threat to our economy:

The former Hewlett Packard CEO also claimed to have the expertise needed to reform bureaucracies, an important point in light of her belief that “the government is one giant, unaccountable, corrupt bureaucracy.” She went even further than that at times, showing signs that she might run as a sort of conservative Elizabeth Warren, flashing some of the anti-corporate sentiment that has made the Massachusetts senator a darling of the Left. “Look, crony capitalism is alive and well.

Elizabeth Warren, of course, is wrong about what to do about it,” Fiorina said. “She claims that the way to solve crony capitalism is more complexity, more regulations, more legislation, worse tax codes, and of course the more complicated government gets and it’s really complicated now, the less the small and the powerless can deal with it.” Fiorina made that point while denouncing the net neutrality regulations recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission in a 3-2 vote.

“The dirty little secret of that regulation, which is the same dirty little secret of Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or all of these other huge complicated pieces of regulation or legislation, is that they don’t get written on their own,” she said. “They get written in part by lobbyists for big companies who want to understand that the rules are going to work for them. . . . Who was in the middle of arguing for net neutrality? Verizon, Comcast, Google, I mean, all these companies were playing. They weren’t saying ‘we don’t need this;’ they were saying ‘we need it.’”

Fiorina suggested that large companies, by backing such regulations, have emerged as an enemy of the small businesses run out of people’s houses and garages. “Google started out that way too, in a dorm room, but they seem to have forgotten that,” she said. They also comprise part of a “political class” that is “disconnected” from most Americans.

“The vast majority of people . . . believe there is a political class that is totally disconnected from their lives and that’s stacking the deck against them,” Fiorina said. It’s a diagnosis of American politics that is appropriate to her biography. “It’s interesting, people out there are not at all troubled that I haven’t held elected office; in fact, the people I run into consider it a great asset,” Fiorina said.

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Wolf Bytes: The 'We're Watching You' Edition

Taking joy in one's holidays: A Rube Goldberg Passover Celebration

Indiana isn’t targeting gays; liberals are targeting religion: Indiana's RFRA & The New Intolerance

And the shameless leftie hypocrisy award has to go to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who just bashed Indiana for their RFRA: Apple Does Business In Countries That Execute Homosexuals

Perhaps some of the left's priorities are misplaced: It’s Legal to Kill Babies, But Let’s Worry About a Gay Person’s Right to Cake

Of course, religion in the west is not the penultimate target of the left: Noam Chomsky On How The Foundational Document of Western Civilization, The Magna Carta, "Messed Up The World"

Would that the left showed the same degree of concern for the ever growing e-mail scandal: Hillary, despite claiming that she set up a private e-mail account so she could use one receptor device, regularly used two devices for her e-mail

Even Nixon wasn't this shameless: Hillary Wiped Her Personal Server Clean, Quite Possibly In Violation Of Several Criminal Statutes

Meanwhile, we get to live life in a socialist regulatory bureaucracy run wild: You Are Probably Breaking The Law Right Now
While I agree with Prof. Reynold's comments about partial correction, the real correction is to reestablish the Constitutional balance. Nothing should pass with the force of legislation that has not been voted upon by our elected representatives. See Art. 1 Sec. 1 of our Constitution.

Peer review is not a measure of reliability or accuracy, nor is it in any way a substitute for the scientific method: The Peerless Pitfalls of Peer Review

And while on the subject of peer reviewed articles: Institute of Physics Accused of Corruption as Climate Change '97% Consensus' Claim is Debunked

South Korea doesn't have a welfare state: The Sea Women of South Korea

Let's round this out with the greatest hits of MSNBC:

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The FEC, The Internet & The Constitution

'FUTURE OF ENTIRE INTERNET AT STAKE'

So reads the headline at the Drudge Report today as people wring their hands over the FCC's unilateral move to take over the Internt.

Wake up. That is but a fly speck on the real issue.

The very first Section of the very first Article of the United States Constitution reads:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Yet, if the unelected members of the FCC decide today to take over the Internet, they can do so unilaterally, no vote of our elected legislators. They will be doing no more or less than the unelected members of the EPA did when they unilaterally opted to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Actually, that was even worse because it came on the heels of Congress's refusal to pass just such a law.

We fought a Revolution over this.

As I wrote in a previous post on this issue, End Tyranny, Stop Regulation Without Representation:

. . . Today, Congress does not solely wield the legislative power of our nation. Indeed, Congress is very far from even being the most important source of our legislation. Our nation now most clearly resembles the socialist regulatory bureaucracy of the EU, where mountains of regulations with the full force and effect of law are passed by unelected bureacrats. In our nation today, individuals, businesses, and private and public organizations can be fined, sanctioned, forced to close, and jailed for violating federal regulations that have never been subject to a vote by our elected representatives, nor signed into law by the President. The genius of our Constitutional system of checks and balances is wholly obliterated in the tyranny of our modern the regulatory bureaucracy.

This is a grave issue under Obama, but it is also much bigger than just his wholesale abuse of the regulatory bureaucracy. The growth and dictatorial power of the regulatory bureaucracy is a systemic toxin overlaid upon our government by FDR, and its substantial growth now threatens to wholly undermine our form of government, taking our most important legislation completely outside the purview of our elected representatives.

This has reached crisis proportions under Obama and his administration, who have utterly run amok, passing mountains of regulations drastically effecting our nation, all of which have bypassed Congress. . . .

The FCC's proposal to take control of the Internet is just the latest in the gradual extra-Constitutional collectivization of our society compliments of the left and a compliant Court system that has utterly failed in its fundamental duties. The regulatory system must be brought to heel or our nation will be unrecognizable in another half a century.

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The EPA: The Worst Of Obama's Out Of Control Regulatory Bureaucracy

As I have written before, the single greatest systemic crisis we face is a regulatory bureaucracy operating extra-constitutionally outside of Congressional control. And the worst of the worst is the EPA. Two recent stories highlight the EPA's vast overreach under Obama.

This from Reason:

In accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of trying to regulate “water itself as a pollutant,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is not showing an excess of exactitude. But his looseness is rhetorical and harmless. The EPA’s is neither.

Last week federal judge Liam O’Grady sided with Cuccinelli when he ruled that the EPA had overstepped its bounds. As a measure of just how far the EPA had overreached, note that Cuccinelli’s suit against the EPA was joined by Fairfax County, led by Board of Supervisors chairman Sharon Bulova.

Bulova, a Democrat, is nobody’s idea of an environmental menace. A longtime advocate for commuter rail and mass transit, she started a Private Sector Energy Task Force to increase energy efficiency, sustainability, and “green-collar” jobs in the county. Nevertheless, she and other county leaders objected when the EPA tried to limit the amount of stormwater runoff into the 25-mile-long Accotink Creek, which empties into the Potomac. “When people talk about federal agencies running amok, this is exactly what [that] looks like,” said GOP Supervisor John C. Cook in July. “The EPA’s overreach is so extreme that the Democrats on the board realized that, even in an election year, they had to do this for the county.”

Concerned about sediment in the Accotink, the EPA had sought to cut stormwater runoff nearly in half—a proposal that would have added perhaps $200 million to the roughly $300 million cost of addressing sediment itself.

But as O’Grady noted, while the EPA can regulate sediment, which is considered a pollutant, it has no authority to regulate stormwater—which is not.

The EPA claimed—notably, “with the support of Virginia[‘s Department of Environmental Quality]”—that it could regulate stormwater as a proxy for sediment itself, even though it had no legal authority to do so, because nothing explicitly forbids it to do so. As Cuccinelli said, “logic like that would lead the EPA to conclude that if Congress didn’t prohibit it from invading Mexico, it had the authority to invade Mexico.”

Why would the EPA insist on regulating stormwater, which it has no authority over, instead of simply regulating sediment? After all, it has written rules for sediment literally thousands of times. That insistence makes no sense. But it does look like part of a larger pattern.

Last spring, the Supreme Court ruled against the agency in the case of Mike and Chantell Sackett. The Sacketts owned a piece of land, a little larger than half an acre, in a growing lakefront development in Idaho. They were building a vacation home on the spot when the EPA declared it might be a wetland and ordered them to cease construction, and restore the land to its prior state or face fines of up to $75,000 a day. The agency decreed that the Sackettshad no right to challenge the order in court.

The Supreme Court unanimously call that bunk. It’s not easy to get Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the same page, but the EPA managed to do so. The agency also drew the wrath of The Washington Post, which editorialized that “The EPA Is Earning a Reputation for Abuse.” The editorial began by condemning the now-infamous remarks of now-former EPA administrator Al Armendariz, who compared his enforcement philosophy to Roman crucifixions: “They’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

Troubling stories about the EPA just keep piling up. In Texas, the agency went after Range Resources Corp. for allegedly polluting two wells. The company racked up more than $4 million in fees defending itself before the EPA grudgingly admitted it had no proof Range Resources had contaminated anything.

In July, the federal district court in D.C. ruled that the EPA had overstepped its bounds regarding Appalachian coal operations. That ruling followed another concluding the EPA had no business revoking a waste-disposal permit, issued by the Bush administration, for a West Virginia mine. Judge Amy Berman Jackson—an Obama appointee—called the agency’s action “a stunning power for the EPA to arrogate to itself,” and accused the agency of “magical thinking.” . . .

One of the things that makes the EPA's decision to claim the power to regulate storm water run off as a pollutant particularly outrageous is that, during 1986 amendments to the Clean Water Act, Congress considered whether to give EPA this power and opted against it. The EPA just unilaterally decided that they could claim the power under Obama. These people need to be tarred and feathered.

Moreover, one of the examples the Reason column misses in their list of recent EPA outrages is the EPA's decision to circumvent the normal process set down by law and instead, to rely on wholly hypothetical scenarios to deny a permit to the Pebble Mine in Alaska:

The Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to bypass normal regulatory procedures to stop a mining project in a remote part of Alaska could have profound implications for domestic mining across the U.S., according to Dr. Bonner Cohen in a scathing new report, "The EPA's Pebble Mine Assessment Puts Politics Above Sound Science."

The report . . . has been submitted to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for use in an investigation of the EPA related to the proposed Pebble Mine project.

"Pre-empting the permitting process, EPA issued an assessment on the possible impact of Pebble Mine on Alaska's Bristol Bay watershed before the project's developers had even submitted a formal plan to government agencies for approval," stated Dr. Cohen.

Using a "Hypothetical Mine Scenario" based on a fictional mine, the EPA created an "ecological risk assessment." According to Dr. Cohen, the EPA then drew far-reaching conclusions on the mine's impact, bypassing and preempting a permitting process that is supposed to review real plans for real mines, not imaginary ones.

. . . Charles Slaughter, a hydrologist at the University of Idaho, called the EPA process "pure hogwash."

"By circumventing the well-established permitting process, EPA undermines the trust of the entities it regulates and taxpayers who provide the agency's funding," Dr. Cohen points out. "Once the precedent is set that EPA can preemptively shut down any mining project before plans are submitted for permit review, what investor will risk time and capital in a doomed effort to win a regulatory game EPA has rigged?"

The proposed Pebble Mine has the potential to triple America's strategic reserves of copper and more than double her strategic reserves of gold. It could also nearly double America's reserves of molybdenum, allowing the U.S. to rival China as a global leader in the production of this critical metal used to harden steel for U.S. manufacturing and construction industries. Dr. Cohen's informative report details how the EPA stifles vital business activity by preempting the permitting process through the creation of imaginary, hypothetical business scenarios. . . .

The EPA is the worst of the out of control regulatory agencies under Obama. It is an organization under the control of radicals with no respect for the limitations imposed on them by law.

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