Humans, by virtue of breathing, are walking pollutants. At least, according the EPA. Who has taken to regulating us as such.
The Republicans want to roll that back — and will introduce legislation to do so — and thereby strip the EPA of some of its regulatory authority. Which makes sense, given that the left’s bureaucratic maneuverings are where they seem to do their real legislating.
Obama will veto any such legislation, naturally. But again, who cares? It’s time to start getting both the nannystate extremists and wealth redistributionists on record — and let their constituencies know what how they really feel about job creation, individual freedom, and the overweening regulatory state.
****
update: And not a moment too soon.
Wow.
(thanks to DarthLevin)
So today is a good day for the EPA to tell us that they can regulate dairy farmers now, because milk contains oil and the EPA has the rules about the oil spillages.
Really.
Yup, a milk spill is considered just as dangerous as an oil spill. If you drop a carton of milk and it bursts, you need to call a hazmat crew in to clean it up. It’s for Teh Children™!
I know the congress cannot do a lot about most of this stuff, but I agree that I want everyone on record voting time after time on what they want to keep in place and what they want to rid us of. I want a huge record of very clear votes from all of them. I want the Republican House to hammer on all this stuff. I would prefer they put the health care repeal to a vote at least every few months. I feel the same about stripping the EPA of the powers it has usurped.
It’s just slippery, downslope of the Commerce Clause rulings, ain’t it?
The silver lining is that apparently, a hoard of hungry cats is sufficient to clean up an oil spill.
the EPA is corrupt and anti-American
From here, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to having the EPA regulate avocado growers, soybean farmers, and, well, anyone that grows corn or coconuts or grapes.
Because all of those things also contain oil. There’s not many foods that don’t. Cauliflower and broccoli can go unregulated, I guess, for the nonce.
Heh.
Institutional sophistry taken to a new extreme. As Slart noted, it will be no time at all before anything with a complex carbon chain involved can be regulated by the EPA; meaning humans of course…
It’s a whole new front, a la the formerly all encompassing commerce clause.
BY extension, cotton and linen will be regulated, so that EPA can clean up the cottonseed oil and flaxseed oil spills.
Don’t even get me started on rape.
I dumped a few ounces of spoiled milk down the kitchen sink last week. I hope nobody turns me in.
“Humans, by virtue of
breathing[other things], are walking pollutants.”Light a friggin match will ya!
Come to think of it — if EPA wanted to put stricter regulations on diaper pails, I might get behind that.
Humans contain, on average, ~25% body fat by weight, which means that a guy my size could be carrying gallons of animal oil. The ramifications of this are serious: people cannot be simply permitted to die just anywhere, and of course the funerary businesses will have to be under extremely tight control.
And then there’s the weight-control vector.
Don’t know why Sowell is just cottoning on to this. The EPA’s been regulating milk like this for more than 7 months.
Apparently, Obambi has been angling for this for a LOOOONG time – like as soon as he got elected long.
From scotch’s link:
Wow, hyperbole much? Maybe they should just ban the substance altogether if it’s such a threat to the environment. “Women and children who eat breakfast cereal hardest hit!”
milk is a colloid I remember that from when I was little so that means automatically it tries to dilute itself as much as possible in a river or stream by dispersing evenly so that’s probably kinda helpful
Living on the edge of dairyland, and having family members in the business, I’ve learned a few things about Big Milk over the years. I wouldn’t be crazy about a dairy dumping their waste milk into the creek, but oil has little to do with it. Fact is, the stuff has some non-negligible nutritive content, and there’re good reasons not to fortify your local waterways with extra food for tiny critters.
That being said, one can’t help but observe that there’s a fairly significant distance between “don’t pump your wastewater into the creek” and “file these forms in triplicate and pay a zillion dollars a year and undergo annual inspections to assure that you have a plan on file for how you’ll deal with a storage tank rupture that’s realistically never going to happen.”
Once again, we’ve gone from commonsense regulations against chronic abuses to nonsense regulations against improbable, one-off possibilities. Funny how often this story is repeated when it comes to regulatory agencies. Also funny how when you’re against the latter, you’re painted as being against the former as well.
Wiki with bolding added…
In 1981, Judge Hastings was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders).
On March 23, 1987,Rep James Sensenbrenner introduced an impeachment resolution, H.R. Res. 128, againstJudge Hastings. The resolution was referred to the Judiciary Committee.[194] On March 31, 1987, the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Criminal Justice met in executive session to discuss Judge Hastings’ impeachment inquiry.[195]
In the summer of 1988, the full House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3. He was then convicted in 1989 by the United States Senate, becoming the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate. The vote on the first article was 69 for and 26 opposed, providing five votes more than the two-thirds of those present that were needed to convict. The first article accused the judge of conspiracy. Conviction on any single article was enough to remove the judge from office. The Senate vote cut across party lines, with U.S. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont voting to convict his fellow party member, and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter voting to acquit.[196]
The Senate had the option to forbid Hastings from ever seeking federal office again, but did not do so. Alleged co-conspirator, attorney William Borders went to jail again for refusing to testify in the impeachment proceedings, but was later given a full pardon by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.[197]
Hastings filed suit in federal court claiming that his impeachment trial was invalid because he was tried by a Senate committee, not in front of the full Senate, and that he had been acquitted in a criminal trial. Judge Stanley Sporkin ruled in favor of Hastings, remanding the case back to the Senate, but stayed his ruling pending the outcome of an appeal to the Supreme Court in a similar case regarding Judge Walter Nixon, who had also been impeached and removed.[198]
Sporkin found some “crucial distinctions”[199] between Nixon’s case and Hastings’, specifically, that Nixon had been convicted criminally, and that Hastings was not found guilty by two-thirds of the committee who actually “tried” his impeachment in the Senate. He further added that Hastings had a right to trial by the full Senate.
The Supreme Court, however, ruled in Nixon v. United States that the federal courts have no jurisdiction over Senate impeachment matters, so Sporkin’s ruling was vacated and Hastings’ conviction and removal were upheld.
Another reason to thank G*d that fucker Specter is out of the senate….
Of course, the problem with extra oil is that you can’t leave it around to ferment into tasty, tasty cheese.
Someone needs to tell the EPA that trees are respiring at night. Do it quickly. All those forests we’re planting are switching into pollution mode once the lights go out.