Anti-Trump Hysteria and Silliness

[Septic]

You think there are winners at all in this battle?

No, I believe trump thinks it's a winnable battle.

 

[Septic]

It wasn't private citizens who pressed their elected officials?

Now granted we need some regulation but what is happening now and has been happening is government employees who are responsible to no one pile regulation upon regulation to justify their employment.

Elected officials do not represent their constituents, this should be obvious as evidenced by the whole of political history - they are beholden only to their own interest.

Telling us they represent us is different from actually doing so.

 

[theFallGuy]

which environmental regulations are "asinine and burdensome" and why? You're just spouting nonsense. You have no idea what you're talking about.

"The political nature of the EPA became clear not long after President Nixon established it in 1970. In 1972 the first administrator of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, banned the insecticide DDT after his own hearing examiner concluded, on the basis of several hundred technical documents and testimony of 150 scientists, that DDT ought not to be banned.

In 1978, the EPA tried to suppress research showing the cost of proposed air pollution standards. If Pennsylvania’s two senators at the time (John Heinz and Richard Schweiker) hadn’t intervened, the EPA would have imposed standards stringent enough to effectively shut down the U.S. steel industry.

In 1991, a panel of outside scientists brought in to review EPA practices concluded (among other things) that the EPA often tailors its science to justify what it wants to do and shields key research from peer review. EPA Administrator William Reilly acknowledged, “scientific data have not always been featured prominently in environmental efforts and have sometimes been ignored even when available.”
Recommended by Forbes

The EPA has ignored epidemiological evidence to foment false alarms about the dangers of ozone, radon, Alar (used in apple orchards), dioxins, and asbestos. The asbestos story is illustrative. Not only did the EPA, in 1989, decree an eight-year phase-out of asbestos despite studies from Oxford, Harvard, the Canadian Royal commission, New Jersey, etc. that the health risks posed by asbestos-lined buildings were miniscule, EPA's administrators even ignored the EPA’s own scientific panel, which denounced the study used to justify the ban on asbestos as “unconvincing,” “scientifically unappealing,” and “absurd.” (Thankfully, sanity returned and EPA Administrator Reilly rescinded the ban a year later.) The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals officially deep-sixed the asbestos ban in October, 1991, on the grounds that the EPA had exceeded its legislated authority—a not-uncommon finding replicated multiple times in subsequent years, such as when the EPA has used the Clean Water Act (which pertains explicitly to “navigable waters”) as a pretext to regulate lands where puddles form after heavy rains.

It seems that the most visible EPA Administrators were the most problematical. In the 1990s, under the leadership of Carol Browner, the EPA refused to divulge how it calculated cost-benefit analyses. Indeed, in 1997 Browner admitted that new research would be required to set a “scientifically defensible” standard for air quality issues that would “fill obvious and critical voids in our knowledge.” The Browner-led EPA also blatantly broke federal law by actively lobbying against legislation designed to curb some of EPA’s abuses. Browner herself broke the law by defying a federal judge’s orders and overseeing the erasure of the hard drives and the destruction of back-up email tapes that she had used as administrator.

One of the most amazing rulings to come out of Browner’s EPA was a letter sent to the city of San Diego, ordering them to stop treating the sewage pouring into the Tijuana River Valley on the grounds that human actions were disturbing the “sewage-based ecology” of the affected estuary—ignoring the fact that the sewage posed a health threat to human beings (whose “ecology” obviously wasn’t considered as important by the EPA).

In 1993, Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) wrote to Browner expressing concern that EPA hadn’t submitted a report of cost-benefit studies it was required to submit to Congress under Section 812 of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. Not only did Browner not even bother to reply, the agency still hadn’t completed a report by 1995. Meanwhile, the EPA is notorious for imposing fines on businesses that are late in submitting the piles of paperwork filings that EPA requires of them.

So bad did things get during Browner’s tenure that in 1996, a 27-year veteran microbiologist at the agency went public with his concerns about the lowering of scientific standards under Browner, alleging, for example, that the science EPA used in wastewater toxicity tests was unreliable, and that EPA had become more interested in issuing regulations than in practicing sound science. Similarly, during the summer of 1998, a dozen career employees at EPA went public about the agency’s “egregious misconduct.” These whistleblowers charged that people who work at EPA “are harassed, even fired, for protesting illegal or irresponsible behavior by managers who jeopardize the proper enforcement of the law.”

Barack Obama’s recently departed EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, also distinguished herself by placing political agendas over sound science (and also, like Browner, breaking the laws governing the computer records of public officials—in her case, by trying to hide what she was doing through use of a bogus email identity).

Jackson showed her disregard for scientific rigor by seeking to replace actual samples of air quality with computer estimations of air pollution. Considering the agency’s considerable power to act as judge and jury and bring businesses to their knees, it hardly seems like justice to empower the EPA to enter whatever data it chooses into a computer program and essentially produce evidence based on its own assumptions."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhe...-of-many-rogue-federal-agencies/#28a8e75321ad

 

[luthervol]

You think there are winners at all in this battle?

We will all lose, that's been the point all along.

 

[lawgator1]

The most pathetic part of this is that his base is going to eat it up.

 

[LouderVol]

It wasn't private citizens who pressed their elected officials?

Now granted we need some regulation but what is happening now and has been happening is government employees who are responsible to no one pile regulation upon regulation to justify their employment.

lol, they are pushing for it today too, the government is just ignoring them in this case.

your second point is a separate argument. i would 100% agree that like most government entities/actions/laws the EPA was started with good intent but morphed into something bad.

people are now against the EPA because a lot of what it was/is doing is not reactionary. People that don't deal with the issues don't care so its evil regulation. I find it is much better to be proactive and avoid the problem then run straight into it and then try to figure it out.

 

[VolsSportsFan]

 

[LouderVol]

lol

 

[Grand Vol]

No, I believe trump thinks it's a winnable battle.

For him, it is. Any time he puts out a Tweet against someone and the media reacts, it's just getting him more attention.

Your child ever throw a temper tantrum in the house? What's best? To react or ignore and let them get it out of their system?

 

[luthervol]

"The political nature of the EPA became clear not long after President Nixon established it in 1970. In 1972 the first administrator of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, banned the insecticide DDT after his own hearing examiner concluded, on the basis of several hundred technical documents and testimony of 150 scientists, that DDT ought not to be banned.

In 1978, the EPA tried to suppress research showing the cost of proposed air pollution standards. If Pennsylvania’s two senators at the time (John Heinz and Richard Schweiker) hadn’t intervened, the EPA would have imposed standards stringent enough to effectively shut down the U.S. steel industry.

In 1991, a panel of outside scientists brought in to review EPA practices concluded (among other things) that the EPA often tailors its science to justify what it wants to do and shields key research from peer review. EPA Administrator William Reilly acknowledged, “scientific data have not always been featured prominently in environmental efforts and have sometimes been ignored even when available.”
Recommended by Forbes

The EPA has ignored epidemiological evidence to foment false alarms about the dangers of ozone, radon, Alar (used in apple orchards), dioxins, and asbestos. The asbestos story is illustrative. Not only did the EPA, in 1989, decree an eight-year phase-out of asbestos despite studies from Oxford, Harvard, the Canadian Royal commission, New Jersey, etc. that the health risks posed by asbestos-lined buildings were miniscule, EPA's administrators even ignored the EPA’s own scientific panel, which denounced the study used to justify the ban on asbestos as “unconvincing,” “scientifically unappealing,” and “absurd.” (Thankfully, sanity returned and EPA Administrator Reilly rescinded the ban a year later.) The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals officially deep-sixed the asbestos ban in October, 1991, on the grounds that the EPA had exceeded its legislated authority—a not-uncommon finding replicated multiple times in subsequent years, such as when the EPA has used the Clean Water Act (which pertains explicitly to “navigable waters”) as a pretext to regulate lands where puddles form after heavy rains.

It seems that the most visible EPA Administrators were the most problematical. In the 1990s, under the leadership of Carol Browner, the EPA refused to divulge how it calculated cost-benefit analyses. Indeed, in 1997 Browner admitted that new research would be required to set a “scientifically defensible” standard for air quality issues that would “fill obvious and critical voids in our knowledge.” The Browner-led EPA also blatantly broke federal law by actively lobbying against legislation designed to curb some of EPA’s abuses. Browner herself broke the law by defying a federal judge’s orders and overseeing the erasure of the hard drives and the destruction of back-up email tapes that she had used as administrator.

One of the most amazing rulings to come out of Browner’s EPA was a letter sent to the city of San Diego, ordering them to stop treating the sewage pouring into the Tijuana River Valley on the grounds that human actions were disturbing the “sewage-based ecology” of the affected estuary—ignoring the fact that the sewage posed a health threat to human beings (whose “ecology” obviously wasn’t considered as important by the EPA).

In 1993, Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) wrote to Browner expressing concern that EPA hadn’t submitted a report of cost-benefit studies it was required to submit to Congress under Section 812 of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. Not only did Browner not even bother to reply, the agency still hadn’t completed a report by 1995. Meanwhile, the EPA is notorious for imposing fines on businesses that are late in submitting the piles of paperwork filings that EPA requires of them.

So bad did things get during Browner’s tenure that in 1996, a 27-year veteran microbiologist at the agency went public with his concerns about the lowering of scientific standards under Browner, alleging, for example, that the science EPA used in wastewater toxicity tests was unreliable, and that EPA had become more interested in issuing regulations than in practicing sound science. Similarly, during the summer of 1998, a dozen career employees at EPA went public about the agency’s “egregious misconduct.” These whistleblowers charged that people who work at EPA “are harassed, even fired, for protesting illegal or irresponsible behavior by managers who jeopardize the proper enforcement of the law.”

Barack Obama’s recently departed EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, also distinguished herself by placing political agendas over sound science (and also, like Browner, breaking the laws governing the computer records of public officials—in her case, by trying to hide what she was doing through use of a bogus email identity).

Jackson showed her disregard for scientific rigor by seeking to replace actual samples of air quality with computer estimations of air pollution. Considering the agency’s considerable power to act as judge and jury and bring businesses to their knees, it hardly seems like justice to empower the EPA to enter whatever data it chooses into a computer program and essentially produce evidence based on its own assumptions."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhe...-of-many-rogue-federal-agencies/#28a8e75321ad

I don't think anyone has ever claimed the EPA is perfect or that there are not changes and improvements that need to be made. That's true of every government agency, every corporation, every church, every marriage, and every individual. That in no way is proof that the entity is useless and should be disbanded. Bottom line is Trump places the environment far lower on his list of priorities than most people.

 

[lawgator1]

For him, it is. Any time he puts out a Tweet against someone and the media reacts, it's just getting him more attention.

Your child ever throw a temper tantrum in the house? What's best? To react or ignore and let them get it out of their system?

First, that is never going to happen.

Second, he's the President. The job carries with it a certain prestige and nobility, and how one carries oneself in that post is quite meaningful.

I just don't understand what his thought process can possibly be on these. It's just absolutely baffling.

 

[McDad]

I don't think anyone has ever claimed the EPA is perfect or that there are not changes and improvements that need to be made. That's true of every government agency, every corporation, every church, every marriage, and every individual. That in no way is proof that the entity is useless and should be disbanded.

Not necessarily. How clean is clean? At what point does regulation and enforcement exhaust its need.

Example: do we need regulation obout unleaded gasoline? The energy providers, car manufacturers, wouldn't go back to leaded fuel if it cost billions to do so.

 

[#VFL__]

Basket of....

 

[luthervol]

For him, it is. Any time he puts out a Tweet against someone and the media reacts, it's just getting him more attention.

Your child ever throw a temper tantrum in the house? What's best? To react or ignore and let them get it out of their system?

The perfect analogy!! And since the media will not ignore the tantrums we can only expect them to continue and get worse. Trump is a spoiled kid trowing tantrums, the media is the parent doing a poor job of reacting to the tantrums, and the rest of us are the people sitting in the restaurant shaking our heads and getting increasingly annoyed.

The thing is....Trump's the president, we have a right to expect better.

 

[Sandman 423]

First, that is never going to happen.

Second, he's the President. The job carries with it a certain prestige and nobility, and how one carries oneself in that post is quite meaningful.

I just don't understand what his thought process can possibly be on these. It's just absolutely baffling.

The office of the president also is given respect but that hasn't been observed either. To me the way we speak of our adversaries it says a lot about us.

 

[luthervol]

Not necessarily. How clean is clean? At what point does regulation and enforcement exhaust its need.

Example: do we need regulation obout unleaded gasoline? The energy providers, car manufacturers, wouldn't go back to leaded fuel if it cost billions to do so.

When reasonable people with appropriate priorities conclude that a regulation and its enforcement is no longer needed, then it should be eliminated.

Trump is neither reasonable, well informed, nor possessing of appropriate priorities.

 

[Grand Vol]

First, that is never going to happen.

Second, he's the President. The job carries with it a certain prestige and nobility, and how one carries oneself in that post is quite meaningful.

I just don't understand what his thought process can possibly be on these. It's just absolutely baffling.

I think nobility with the Office of the Presidency went out with Reagan.

But I don't disagree with your principle.

 

[n_huffhines]

I really hate agreeing with armchair but he is right. It wasn't private citizens and lawsuits that cleaned the nation up.

That's weird because the rate of improvement didn't change after the enactment of the clean air and water acts. If it wasn't private citizens and lawsuits cleaning things up, then what was it?

American Enterprise Institute scholars Joel Schwartz and Steven Hayward document in their 2007 book, Air Quality in America, that emissions of smoke, soot, ozone and sulfur dioxide had been falling for decades before the creation the EPA and the adoption of the Clean Air Act. For example, ambient sulfur dioxide had fallen by 58 percent in New York City during the seven years preceding the adoption of the Clean Air Act. "Air quality has indeed improved since the 1970 passage of the" Clean Air Act, they claim. "But it was improving at about the same pace for decades before the act was passed, and without the unnecessary collateral damage caused by our modern regulatory system."

They attribute a lot of the pre-EPA improvement in air quality to market-driven technological progress and increases in wealth that enabled households to switch from coal to cleaner natural gas for heating and cooking; railroads to replace coal-fired locomotives with diesels; more efficient industrial combustion that reduced the emissions of particulates; and improvements in the electrical grid that allowed power plants to be situated closer to coal mines and further from cities.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/21/relax-gutting-the-epa-wont-make-your-air

 

[sammyhagar]

Trump is no President. He's not even a leader. He's a 71-year old Fox News watcher with an unsecured phone & a Twitter account. Nothing more, never will be.

 

[McDad]

When reasonable people with appropriate priorities conclude that a regulation and its enforcement is no longer needed, then it should be eliminated.

This rules out 99% of government supported employees and 100% of politicians.

You defined a criteria which cannot be met under our SOP.

 

[McDad]

That's weird because the rate of improvement didn't change after the enactment of the clean air and water acts. If it wasn't private citizens and lawsuits cleaning things up, then what was it?
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/21/relax-gutting-the-epa-wont-make-your-air

A beautiful illustration of how insidiously we are conditioned to rey on Centralized Governance. Louder is no Socialist. He's not some granola hippie type. But his programming is to credit bureaucracy.

A good lesson for all of us.

 

[armchair]

I think nobility with the Office of the Presidency went out with Reagan.

But I don't disagree with your principle.

You don't think that Obama was a mature, well-spoken, reasonable individual? He was the very exemplar of those qualities. So your comment is silly. Nobody expects presidents to be "noble." They are supposed to be mature, respectful, intelligent, reasonable, well-spoken. Trump has NONE of those qualities. He's not a "spoiled brat"--that is far too kind. He's more like a sociopath.

The latest from our distinguished commander in chief:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...p-morning-joe-mika-brzezinski-joe-scarborough

The media criticize Trump because he's an idiot who does things like this--every day--not to mention his constant, sinister lying, which seems not to bother the southerners. We have a president who lied blatantly about illegal voting immediately after the election--and did so for days, KNOWING what he was saying was bull$****. Who does that, except some mentally ill person whose ego can't deal with the fact that he lost the popular vote? When you lie about illegal voting you are undercutting the integrity of our election system, which is an important pillar of our democracy. And yet a PRESIDENT does this? The man is a disgrace to the presidency, and dangerous.

Trump spends half his day lying and doing stupid things--there are a thousand examples, but how about appointing his family's party planner as head of Housing and Urban Development's largest regional division--a party planner with zero housing experience who also lied on her CV, claiming fraudulently that she'd earned a law degree---and then spends the other half tweeting insults at the various people who call attention to his lies and stupidity. WHAT A MAN!

 

[volfanjustin]

You don't think that Obama was a mature, well-spoken, reasonable individual? He was the very exemplar of those qualities. So your comment is silly. Nobody expects presidents to be "noble." They are supposed to be mature, respectful, intelligent, reasonable, well-spoken. Trump has NONE of those qualities. He's not a "spoiled brat"--that is far too kind. He's more like a sociopath.

The latest from our distinguished commander in chief:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...p-morning-joe-mika-brzezinski-joe-scarborough

The media criticize Trump because he's an idiot who does things like this--every day--not to mention his constant, sinister lying, which seems not to bother the southerners. We have a president who lied blatantly about illegal voting immediately after the election--and did so for days, KNOWING what he was saying was bull$****. Who does that, except some mentally ill person whose ego can't deal with the fact that he lost the popular vote? When you lie about illegal voting you are undercutting the integrity of our election system, which is an important pillar of our democracy. And yet a PRESIDENT does this? The man is a disgrace to the presidency, and dangerous.

Trump spends half his day lying and doing stupid things--there are a thousand examples, but how about appointing his family's party planner as head of Housing and Urban Development's largest regional division--a party planner with zero housing experience who also lied on her CV, claiming fraudulently that she'd earned a law degree---and then spends the other half tweeting insults at the various people who call attention to his lies and stupidity. WHAT A MAN!

No

 

[volfanjustin]

well spoken: if if if if if if if if

 

[Grand Vol]

I'll be interested in seeing what he does with North Korea. Especially in light of yesterdays comments from McMaster. Personally, I don't see any military action that doesn't result in further escalation.

Hopefully China would do something to shut NK down before that happens, but it still concerns me.

Forgot about this post I wanted to address.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/0...a-being-prepared-for-trump-mcmaster-says.html

The Trump administration is considering a wider range of strategies on how to deal with North Korea, including the military option, Trump's national security adviser said Wednesday.

“The threat is much more immediate now and so it’s clear that we can’t repeat the same approach – failed approach of the past,” H.R. McMaster, the adviser, said during a security conference with Homeland Security Chief John Kelly.

He said it would be insanity to continue to do the same thing the U.S. has done for years and expect a different result.

McMaster’s comments come a day before Trump is scheduled to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. South Korea’s new leader vowed to stand firmly with Trump against North Korea, downplaying his past advocacy for a softer approach toward the isolated regime.

McMasters does have a point to an extent. Insanity defined is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.