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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.
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.
You could make the same argument for crystal meth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It would be nice if no matter who got elected, things basically stayed the same. But if we can't have that, don't complain when the guys you don't like do things you don't like when elected.
Don't complain? In a democracy, it's a citizen's right (perhaps even her/his duty) to complain.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Well, let's see: In one year alone (2012), the DEA raided and closed 11,210 meth labs in the US. Now, let's assume that the DEA shuts down maybe one in four meth labs (I would bet that it's much less than that). So, we can say that there are probably about 50,000 meth labs operating at any given time in the US. Let's also assume that not all of those meth labs are one-man operations, so we have at least 50,000 jobs for Americans.
Let's further assume that the guys running the labs are not the same as the guys dealing the meth on the street. Even if we assume that for every meth lab, there is one person who actually deals the drugs, we're up to over 100,000 jobs.
That 100,000 jobs. Not counting the thousands of law enforcement jobs for people to try to stop the meth labs. The lawyers like Saul Goodman who represent the meth chemists, and on and on.
In 2013, there were 80,209 coal jobs in the US. So we can easily say that more people are working in the crystal meth industry than in the coal industry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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 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.)