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Executive Departments Part 2


Coconut Flan

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This is a great op-ed penned by my congressman. "Scott Pruitt’s toxic legacy comes to a backyard near you"

Spoiler

Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat, represents Virginia’s 11th Congressional District in the House.

With a stroke of a pen, acting Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler helped cement the toxic legacy of Scott Pruitt’s reign over the EPA by rolling back federal coal ash standards. For many Northern Virginia residents, Pruitt’s ethical scandals were proximate sources of outrage. But his coal ash rule will hit even closer to home: their backyards.

We are not yet 10 years removed from the catastrophic coal ash spill near Kingston, Tenn., and only four years on from the Duke Energy spill that dumped 39,000 tons of toxic coal ash into the Dan River along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Communities are still cleaning up from these disasters. Yet the Trump EPA thinks it is time to let polluters decide how they will handle coal ash. The swamp somehow just got dirtier.

There are more than 300 coal ash impoundments across the United States, including Possum Point in my Northern Virginia district, which are at high or significant hazard risk for failure. An event such as the Kingston spill, which released more than 5 million cubic yards of coal ash, covering more than 300 acres in toxic sludge and resulting in more than $1.2 billion in cleanup costs, would have devastating consequences for our region.

The lasting health consequences of such spills, some of which are still unknown, are even worse. Many residents continue to suffer from respiratory illnesses and other side effects. Hazardous chemicals such as mercury, lead, chromium, arsenic, selenium and boron can devastate even healthy individuals. And this year, lawyers filed suit in federal court alleging that more than 180 cleanup workers from the Superfund site now face severe health effects and that as many as 30 may have died. In addition, spills can cause direct harm to local properties, businesses and wildlife.

Which makes it all the more mind-boggling that the Trump EPA would jeopardize the environmental and public health of our community. But just as perverse as this decision is, so was the process Pruitt went through to come to this conclusion. The proposal was announced only four months ago, included few hearings and little outreach to the public. That’s warp speed even for Trump’s polluter-driven swamp.

The Obama-era rule was the result of years of debate, input from community and industry stakeholders, and nearly a half-million public comments. The 2015 coal ash rule was neither rushed nor onerous. It offered stringent but pragmatic federal coal ash regulations to deal with post-closure care requirements, groundwater monitoring and public reporting. In fact, some, including myself, didn’t think the rule went far enough.

But, more important, it was a compromise that made our communities safer. As a result, states, including Virginia, were working to close legacy coal ash impoundments. And they were forced to do it in a scientific and transparent process. They were required to have stringent groundwater monitoring and provide those results to the public. That is a good thing. It required stricter post-closure care requirements and more inspections. Again, a good thing. Congress even gave states additional flexibility to adopt state-specific closure plans under the Water Infrastructure for Improvements to the Nation Act so long as the plan is “as protective” as the federal rule.

The Pruitt plan reverses that progress. It would weaken groundwater monitoring and cleanup requirements without considering the widespread evidence of significant groundwater contamination recently revealed by the energy industry’s own data. Under the original rule’s reporting requirements, we already know more than 70 coal ash waste sites in eight states show evidence of contaminated groundwater. Under Pruitt’s rule, that data may not even see the light of day.

Pruitt’s alleged self-dealing and venality may have garnered all the headlines, but I fear his greatest legacy will be the toxic Superfund sites in our backyards.

 

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Nothing to see here, just the highest official of the Department of Justice  advocating for baseless imprisonment of the president's political opponents

 

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I'd love to smack the smirk off that little troll's face. I truly despise Sessions.

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The next Scotty lied about doing corruption with his former clients because of course he did.

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On 7/27/2018 at 5:11 PM, AmazonGrace said:
The next Scotty lied about doing corruption with his former clients because of course he did.

Scotty: The Next Generation. What a revolting reality show.

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"The Don and His Badfellas"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — I saw Robert De Niro at a party in New York recently and approached him gingerly. I wanted some insight into gangsters.

What did an actor who has brilliantly portrayed mobsters make of a president who was doing a two-bit imitation of a mobster?

De Niro, leaning against a wall and looking cool, took the question under advisement. I got my answer three days later when he took the stage at the Tony Awards and offered a succinct obscenity aimed at the president.

The Trumps have often been compared to a mob family. Certainly, in the White House, they have created a dark alternative universe with an inverted ethical code, where the main value is loyalty to the godfather above all else.

An anti-Trump group called Mad Dog PAC has a billboard reading: “MAGA, Mobsters Are Governing America.”

Now the treacherous arias are getting louder and the long knives are coming out. Our classy president is tweeting about Michael Cohen’s taxi medallion tomfoolery. After months of Trump distancing himself from Cohen, his ex-lawyer resorted to playing the role of Sammy the Bull. Cohen secretly taped an incriminating call with the Don featuring a staccato exchange about paying off a Playboy playmate — and an aside by Trump to someone to “Get me a Coke, please!”

As Michael Daly noted in The Daily Beast, “Traditionally, rats begin wearing a wire after they get jammed up.”

And as in “The Untouchables,” a bespectacled accountant is now at the center of the action. In the taped call, Cohen tells Trump that he has talked to the mogul’s trusted money manager and “Apprentice” guest star, Allen Weisselberg, about how to set up a company to reimburse David Pecker, the National Enquirer owner, for buying off Trump goomah Karen McDougal. Federal investigators in Manhattan now want to interview Weisselberg.

“Long term, this could be the most damaging,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me, “because it gets into Trump’s wallet.”

CNN reported that Cohen the Fixer claims Trump knew about the Russian meeting during the campaign with his son and Paul Manafort. The president hit the mattresses on Twitter, denying it all.

This could be the ballgame, says David Corn of Mother Jones, who wrote: “This ex-consigliere poses a triple threat to the godfather he once ruthlessly served.”

Given that this is Trump, however, it’s possible that there could be a twist. Rhona Graff, the Don’s capo at Trump Tower, could come sit in the back of the courtroom and stare at Cohen until the wannabe wise guy suddenly recants, “Godfather”-style: “Look, the F.B.I. guys promised me a deal. So I made up a lot of stuff about Donald Trump cause that’s what they wanted. But it was all lies.”

Rudy Giuliani has somersaulted from a RICO-happy prosecutor to a man acting like a Mafia lawyer, telling Chris Cuomo that Cohen is an “incredible liar” when only three months ago he pronounced him “an honest, honorable lawyer.”

If the White House seems more and more like “Goodfellas,” it is not an accident.

“Trump has a very cinematic sense of himself,” O’Brien said. Like many on social media, he is driven to be the star of his own movie. He even considered going to film school in L.A. before he settled into his father’s business.

O’Brien recalled that Trump told him that he thought Clint Eastwood was the greatest movie star. “He and Melania model their squints on Eastwood,” the biographer noted. Trump also remarked, while they were watching “Sunset Boulevard” on the Trump plane, that a particular scene was amazing: the one where Norma Desmond obsessively watches her silent films and cries: “Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them!”

Trump is drawn to people who know how to dominate a room and exaggerated displays of macho, citing three of his top five movies as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather.”

As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the larger-than-life figures in the V.I.P. box: George Steinbrenner, Lee Iacocca, Frank Sinatra, Roy Cohn, Rupert Murdoch, Gary Grant. He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight.

“In his first big apartment project, Trump’s father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” said Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer. “He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades.

“When Trump was a little boy, wandering around job sites with his dad — which was the only time he got to spend with him — he saw a lot of guys with broken noses and rough accents. And I think he is really enchanted by base male displays of strength. Think about ‘Goodfellas’ — people who prevail by cheating and fixing and lying. Trump doesn’t have the baseline intellect and experience to be proficient at governing. His proficiency is this mob style of bullying and tough-guy talk.”

As Steve Bannon noted approvingly, Trump has a Rat Pack air, and as O’Brien said, Trump was the sort of guy who kept gold bullion in his office.

Trump’s like a mobster, D’Antonio said, in the sense that he “does not believe that anyone is honest. He doesn’t believe that your motivations have anything to do with right and wrong and public service. It’s all about self-interest and a war of all against all. He’s turning America into Mulberry Street in the ’20s, where you meet your co-conspirators in the back of the candy store.”

Edited to add -- sorry, I posted this in the wrong thread.

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The Scottylandia has corruption to hide 

how long until Trump gets rid of FOIA altogether? You know he hates it

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2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

They want to kill bees in wildlife sanctuaries because of course they do 

 

Yes, because science is hard, and some form of voodoo or magic. I know it's really hard for them to understand, but we all know that bees pollinate are plants which produce food, and if we wipe out the bees then we're going to be hungry. I'm betting the super fun day evangelicals are all over this, thinking that they too will be provided manna from heaven by God. To these morons, bees dying off is as bogus as climate change (which we're smart enough to know that both are true).

In the words of Red from That 70s Show, "Dumbass." Sadly, that has become my favorite word under this administration.

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1 hour ago, Audrey2 said:

In the words of Red from That 70s Show, "Dumbass." Sadly, that has become my favorite word under this administration.

Although "Dumbass" rolls more easily off the tongue, in this case it's woefully inadequate and way too mild.

I find "wilfully and malevolently ignorant" to be a much better description. YMMV.

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