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Senate Confirms Former Coal Lobbyist Andrew Wheeler To Lead EPA (cnn.com)
The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Andrew Wheeler as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, ratifying President Trump's choice of a former advocate for business interests to lead the agency. From a report: Wheeler, also a former Republican Senate aide on environmental issues, has been acting administrator since July, when former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned amid a host of ethics controversies. Since Wheeler began leading the agency, he has continued work on many of the same priorities as his predecessor, including looking to roll back Obama-era air and water pollution regulations. But Wheeler has brought a level of stability to the agency that didn't exist under Pruitt, keeping a relatively low profile while continuing to make progress towards meeting the Trump administration's policy goals for the agency. He has met often with industry representatives. Wheeler attended or held more than 50 meetings with representatives of companies or industry groups regulated by the EPA between April and August of 2018, a CNN review of his internal schedules found.
Joseph Goebbels has been named Ambassador to Israel, and Karl Marx has been named an FCC commissioner.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Environmental Pillaging Agency
hen house
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Actually, Cohen said exactly the opposite. He had no direct evidence or knowledge of any Russian collusion during the campaign and said so under questioning yesterday.
Cohen said a lot of nasty things about Trump, but on that specific point he clearly has no direct evidence to provide. If he had, I doubt he'd be heading to jail right now, but would have been charged by Mueller and given a immunity deal for his testimony.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
if you want coal to come back you'll need somebody in charge who wants it to come back and wants it at any cost. Natural gas is just too competitive (let alone Solar and Wind). You're gonna have to start loosening environmental regs around coal.
One of the key reasons for the "Green New Deal" (the "New Deal" part) is jobs for ex coal miners. These folks are clustered in critical voting districts where there is literally no work outside of Walmart, the mines and a handful of service jobs (doctors to treat black lung, police to lock up the occasional drunk miner, etc).
Folks are confused why these guys would fight so hard to mine coal given the health and safety risks. Folks who wonder that have never been without a job for 12 months and counting....
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Senate = non representative corrupt dictators. They don't represent the people.
You are a moron. Senators are representatives of their state. If you want representatives of the people you go to the House.
This is by design, for good reason.
I propose a novel approach to fight global warming. We'll remove all the filters from coal power stations and emit all that marvelous dust into the atmosphere so we can block out the sun's rays and hence reduce global temperature.
Andrew Wheeler is helping Make America Great Again by bringing back those glory days when rivers routinely caught fire.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Tell us again how great your democracy is , how wonderful your freedom is.
Because countries with real democracies and greater freedoms are laughing hard at you.
Its obvious to the rest of us that your politicians are bought and paid for by industry, it is industry that actually runs the USA now, and you can NOT vote them out.
It might help if we went back to having the state legislatures appoint the senators, rather than having them elected by the general vote.
This would make them more answerable to the state (the state legislatures voted in by the state people)....and it would take out all the $$$$$ involved in buying general senate elections, and end the influence of lobbying.
I think they had it right the first time around.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In the same way that a lobbyist for buggywhip manufacturers might "know" about cars when crafting regulations. He'll have a skewed view that will favor old, out of date technology because that's what makes his former employers rich and will work against newer, cleaner technologies because those take business away from his old employers.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I see "clueless" is still cool in come circles. A "lobbyist" is not an "engineer" or a "scientist". (You may want to look these words up....) His expertise is pushing what he gets told to push, not to understand anything except the pushing itself.
I once heard a talk by a US lobbyist about his work given to an expert audience. (Don't ask me how they got the guy to do that, but there were some pretty high-powered people in the audience...) Extremely interesting, extremely smart and capable guy, extremely disillusioning about the mental capabilities of politicians. Lobbyists do not explain things or create understanding in their targets, they use every trick in the book to create the illusion of understanding. That is why they do not actually need any facts or any expert knowledge to do their work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, you know as in the unofficial US motto: "Maintaining world LEADership." I see Trump is finally starting to make good on his promises.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hearsay is when the person testifying wasn't in the room and is relying on 3rd party info. He was in the room, he heard what he heard, he testified under oath. That's evidence, it's testimony. Fact. You're a moron.
ALSO... IF you are talking about the "Trump Tower Meeting" during the campaign, it is FAR from established that anything unseemly or unethical took place at that meeting, in fact, everybody who was at that meeting says that the topic being discussed was some obscure adoption rules and had nothing to do with coordinating electioneering activities. But don't let the lack of actual evidence dissuade you from believing something else happened.
The US passed the Magnitsky Act December 14, 2012. This applied financial sanctions to Russia, particularly some Russian billionaires and high level officials. As a direct response, on December 19, 2012, Russia voted to ban the adoption of Russian children by US citizens. Russia has publicly stated that they would only lift the ban on adoptions if the Magnitsky sanctions were lifted. So when the say the 2016 meeting was about "adoptions", that directly translates to "sanctions" as the two are directly linked and you can't talk about one without the other.
Don Jr has publicly admitted that the meeting between the campaign and with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya took place. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the sanctions (using the codeword adoptions). And Veselnitskaya was offereing damaging information on Clinton as incentive, which from emails we have was described as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” An email to which Don Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.”.
The Trump campaign knowingly met with Russians about a quid pro quo deal exchanging dirt on Clinton for lifting sanctions on Russia.
I listened to the whole testimony yesterday and I have got to say, I keep seeing some QUALITY cherry picking going on today.
Comey testifies that a convicted russian mobster had a rent free office basically across the hall from Trump's, nothing.
He says he has no evidence that Trump colluded, but basically everything Trump ever said or did points in that direction, and all of the MAGA crowd start shouting "See, no collusion!"
And even better, the spin is, "He's a liar, you can't trust anything he said, except that no collusion thing."
Ya gotta laugh at it to keep from crying.
Nobody cares about Hillary Clinton except failing right-wing talk show hosts.
Most of the states with the most meth labs are Republican, and the state with the most meth labs is Vice-President Pence's very own Indiana.
https://www.realclearpolitics....
You are welcome on my lawn.
I assume he's talking about the power grabs the state senates did in those two states. When the Republican governors lost their elections, the Republican state senates passed a bunch laws transferring a bunch of power from the governor to the senate. The outgoing governors were happy to sign the bills into law on their last days in office.
And fuck coal miners. Leave that poison in the ground.
Let me remind you Hillary Clinton said the same thing and she was left in the dust. No pun intended.
No, she did not say "the same thing."
She said that the coal industry was dying (true) and that she wanted to offer opportunities for coal workers to train and transfer to other industries. That does not sound like "fucking" coal miners.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I find that you have two classes of people: Those that want to learn and those that do not. The second class is lost anyways, no way to reach them. May at least get some entertainment out of them. The first class is something else and I either do not insult them or apologize when I realize the mistake. That approach is working pretty well, thank you.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I take your point, but shouldn't that same standard apply to Trump, given how frequent and well documented his lying is? How do you dismiss liars while believing whole heartedly their king?
(I'm using the impersonal you of course, it doesn't seem like you are defending him.)
Indeed. Of course not paying for going green now will just be incredibly more expensive later. But humans as a group are stupid that way. I guess pretending to listening to them was probably the winning move for Trump overall, people are suckers for anyone with power pretending to take them seriously.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is also the ongoing controversy over absentee ballot fraud in NC. Some ex-con was paid for his super duper skills at turning out votes via absentee ballots. Turns out he had people illegally collecting ballots, illegally filling in votes in races which hadn't been marked yet on the ballots, witnessing the ballots illegally, and then sealing the ballots and mailing them in from different post offices to deliberately conceal the illegal activities. Only one race so far has been announced as needing a redo, however more may follow.
You just made that that up she did not say that. She said "We're gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies outta business". I'll translate that for you "Fuck coal miners.". What a lying prick you are.
Here's the full context, from this article.
Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around politics that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these under-served poor communities. So, for example, I’m the only candidate who has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim [Ryan (D-OH)]?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce energy that we relied on.
Per the article, Clinton regretted the way she said the above. (From her book What Happened: “The point I had wanted to make was the exact opposite of how it came out. ... [I] felt absolutely sick about the whole thing.” But the full context shows she was not trying to "fuck" coal miners. Quite the opposite.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.