EPA investigates itself over #AnimasRiverSpill
But…”What difference does it make?”
The leak of taxpayer dollars from Washington, D.C. continues unabated with reports that the EPA is investigating itself for the Animas River spill.
The inspector general for the Environmental Protection Agency is investigating the cause of a massive spill from an abandoned Colorado gold mine that unleashed 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater into rivers that supply water to at least three states.
The inspector general’s office said the investigation also will focus on the EPA’s response to the Aug. 5 spill from the defunct Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colo.
I suspect that the results will be similar to those achieved for these gems of federal investigations, which we have all come to enjoy during the Obama Administration!
- Fast and Furious: After dramatic investigations, the only fallout was that Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting member of the Cabinet of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress. It didn’t seem to phase him much.
- IRS Targeting of Conservative Groups: Despite clear evidence that the Internal Revenue Service transformed itself into the Internal Review Service, acting to thwart the ability of conservative groups to get tax breaks as non-profit entities, nobody has been jailed. There were only three resignations of IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, who declared Republicans “evil” and “dishonest.“
- Benghazi: After many congressional hearings, with thousands of documents revealed, we still have no answers as to why the American consulate was left vulnerable to a terrorist attack despite repeated warnings. The only consequence of this investigation seems to be Hillary Clinton’s quip, “”What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?”
If the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General wants to figure out what actually triggered the spill, then the investigators should start by interviewing the professional geologist who predicted the release a week before it occurred and ask: What did the EPA know and when did it know it?
However, I suspect the questioning will be along the lines of the softball style interview EPA administrator Gina McCarthy enjoyed with MSNBC’s Al Sharpton:
SHARPTON: You know, before we get to all of that, I want to ask you about the toxic oil spill, uh, the toxic spill into that Colorado river last week. The EPA’s inspector general has started an investigation. The cleanup continues. Are you satisfied with the response and the cleanup efforts so far?
She sure is! The Animas River is restoring itself. It’s another Obama Administration success.
I sure bet private enterprises that have accidental chemical releases wish they could self-investigate and declare that nature was taking care of the problem.
Meanwhile, the EPA is working to gain even more control over Americans. The Sharpton segment featured a favorable discussion of the agency’s carbon emission control rules, which 15 states are fighting. Just as troubling, there are new regulations poised to be enacted impacting control of all American waterways:
On August 28, EPA gains the authority to regulate all U.S. waters. “Water” is defined as anywhere it’s wet, ranging from standing rain water on private property to dry places where water might flow once in 100 years. If this looks like EPA overreach for controlling more of the nation’s private and public property, it is.
It is called WOTUS, standing for “Waters of the U.S.” Recall that EPA expanded its powers by grabbing controlling authority under the Clean Water Act. A new interpretation of that law allowed further EPA overreach by redefining “navigable waters” to include “almost any piece of land that gets wet and puddles” in the words of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
WOTUS is so toxic that 31 states have filed federal-court motions to block the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers from enforcing the law.
Based on the data so far, I conclude the EPA’s investigation will have the “What difference does it make” outcome that we have come to enjoy from the Obama Administration.
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Comments
OK, Leslie, this was pretty bogus.
Inspectors General are SUPPOSED to investigate the conduct of the agencies, including the Defense Dept.
And they do a pretty good job. A lot of what we know about various Obamic scandals we know because of the work of Inspectors General, who have taken a lot of crap for their work.
This administration…bar none…has been the most hostile to its inspectors in history.
Let the EPA IG do his or her work. If it’s crap, THEN we jump him or her.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the Obamanation agencies are selling baby body parts too!
We need some graphics of the Obama scandals!
Pie charts, bar charts, line graphs…..
This is the EPA we’re talking about…shouldn’t we wait and see?
EPA – Environmental Pollution Agency
Ragspierre: I am going to have to disagree with your assessment, and I think the case I lay out indicates a great deal of skepticism is warranted. However, should the IG actual come up with meaningful findings and dole out significant consequences, then I will write a post and dedicate it to you. That the Obama Administration would hold one of Ceberus-like watchdog agencies accountable would be newsworthy, indeed.
Mrs. Clinton has said for months that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up in her house so she would not have to carry both a personal phone and a work phone. Her campaign said Friday that any government secrets found on the server had been classified after the fact.
But the inspectors general of the State Department and the nation’s intelligence agencies said the information they found was classified when it was sent and remains so now.
—NYT
And they’ve taken a rash of spit for it, too.
You may be asking your dog to spell for you, too!
IGs investigate and report. I don’t think they take direct action, like doling out consequences. But I could be mistaken.
While Clinton was SecState, State had no IG. She refused to allow it, and she got away with it. Any other secretary would have been impeached for not allowing an IG.
The IG can uncover any official mis- or malfeasance in the paper trail, and should be allowed to conduct his investigation. However, the office of the IG is not equipped to evaluate the technical field work that directly resulted in this spill. That part of the investigation will require independent, outside eyes with the technical experience to detail just how bad the errors were, and who made them.
Rags, Leslie is right to point out the pattern we have here, although your point that the IGs are not at fault, is well-taken. Also, consider that she is writing from California, where the EPA has already asserted the right to control vernal pools.
Do you know what a vernal pool is? It is a rain puddle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_National_Wildlife_Refuge_Complex#Vernal_pools
The wikipedia article exaggerates the lifetime of these pools. Yes, they form in the “rainy months,” but they do not last long. Most of the time, they do not last long enough to produce mosquitos, although they do produce sea monkeys and tadpoles. There was an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, where they asserted power over rain puddles on construction sites.
San Diego even has an inventory of its puddles. Click through it — there are pictures.
http://www.sandiego.gov/planning/programs/mscp/biomonitor/vpi/index.shtml
Contemplate, if you will, the resources expended to produce this report and many others: the meetings, the co-ordination, the salaries, the regulations, all the taxpayer money to produce a living inventory of the San Diego rain puddles.
So, she is writing from a place where out out-of-control government is out there on the bleeding edge.
Which, I hope, explains why I’ve written here betimes that the EPA…right behind the IRS…would be the second target under the Rags administration.
Under CERCLA — the Comprehensive Employment for Regulators, Consultants, and Lawyers Act, aka Superfund — EPA is responsible for investigating releases of hazardous substances. However, most state environmental agencies have entered into agreements to take the lead in such investigations under EPA oversight. Colorado should take the lead on this release given the obvious conflict of interest.
But, but, but . . . It’s an 0bamaWorld . . . and if Iran is allowed to investigate ITSELF regarding nukes, why can’t the EPA investigate itself, too?
IG’s be buggered.
Hey, if it is good enough for Iran, it’s good enough for the EPA.
And why not let illegal aliens inspect the border and let us know if it is secure? By golly. They ought to know, right?
Charles Manson is royally P.O.ed.
He says he should have been allowed to investigate himself for the Tate Murders!
And just yesterday, Hillary declared she was the self-proclaimed OFFICIAL making the decisions about which documents on her server were personal or not . . .
EPA Rough Draft
The Yellow River or Huang He is the third-longest river in Asia, and has often been called the Cradle of Chinese Civilization by elite scholars in Ivy League Schools throughout he Northeastern US. The Environmental Protection Agency, acting in solidarity with our freedom loving comrades in China, and in accordance with the President’s Mandate to transform the United States, has undertaken a Special Project designed to ensure conformity of American Rivers with leading nations worldwide as recognized by the United Nations….
http://www.tricycle.com/sites/default/files/images/blog/yellow_river.jpg
Browner, who pulled the puppet strings of then-EPA head Lisa Jackson, misled the public about the scope of the disaster by falsely claiming that 75 percent of the spill was “completely gone from the system.” Then she falsely claimed that the administration’s initial report on the disaster was “peer-reviewed.”
The Interior Department inspector general also singled out Browner for misrepresenting the White House’s blue-ribbon science panel, which opposed a six-month drilling moratorium, and exposed how she butchered their conclusions to justify the administration’s preordained policy agenda.
—
–Enabling sex predators and porn addicts. Last month, the EPA inspector general finally testified on Capitol Hill about the agency’s chronic mismanagement of alleged sexual perverts on the payroll. One employee “engaged in offensive and inappropriate behavior toward at least 16 women, most of whom were EPA co-workers,” the IG reported. Supervisors “were made aware of many of these actions and yet did nothing.”
http://michellemalkin.com/2015/08/19/obamas-toxic-environmental-pollution-agency-sexual-predators-toxic-dumps-data-stonewalls/
Now, it’s always appropriate to ask if IGs are doing enough, but you also have to be willing to give them props for what they do.
When you train anything, patting them on the head for a good thing is at least as important as bopping them on the nose when they do a bad thing.
WOTUS and the carbon emission control rules and the myriad other EPA regulations are all ways to increase fines and coerce payment from personal and corporate bank accounts-a so-called “legal” means to steal your private property and to redistribute the wealth into campaign coffers.
The EPA (and the DOJ’s) slogans: First, “Cash Fines Matter” and then “The Rule of Law: “What difference at this point does it make?””
And “the process is the punishment.”
Maybe they could get the Revolutionary Guards of Iran to help with the investigation after they finish investigating themselves over the nuke building program.
The EPA is a criminal, RICO-racketeering organization.
They need to be disbanded, and its leaders tried and, if found guilty (by a jury with NO government workers, or anyone associated with EPA-connected groups), then PUT IN PRISON!
This overreach and power-grab by this bureaucracy is an executive branch trying to fulfill Hillary’s comments to the #blacklivesmatter backstage meeting: no changed minds (or hearts) – change laws, regulations, etc. to CONTROL us – to stop opposition to their ideology-driven, Utopian schemes!!
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/the-gold-king-mine-fiasco-what-it-tells-us-about-the-epa.php
That’s an excellent follow-up on the Gold King Mine disaster for those interested.
Faze.
Perhaps the reference was to the use of a Star Trek phaser… 🙂
Yes, that’s the ticket. 😀
See, that is the lesson the EPA should learn from this episode. That accidents happen, even with the best care taken, and a company should not be destroyed for making one.