WASHINGTON, April 9 – Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to compel the agency to produce text messages sent by government officials, as required by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In December 2013, CEI requested the text message correspondence associated with a handful of top EPA officials and current Administrator Gina McCarthy when she was in charge of plans to regulate or tax carbon dioxide.
EPA previously acknowledged destroying all of Ms. McCarthy’s copies of her text message correspondence on her EPA-assigned account. This request sought her EPA colleagues’ copies, which EPA has stonewalled.
“This lawsuit challenges, yet another in a pattern of EPA, moves to block access to public records,” said CEI Senior Fellow Christopher Horner. “CEI’s FOIA request will reveal whether each and every one of Ms. McCarthy’s text messages to EPA colleagues were indeed ‘personal’, as the EPA has claimed to somehow excuse their wholesale destruction, or whether EPA has been destroying copies of officials’ use of this alternative to email. Under the law, there is no distinction between the two. If the latter is the case, it is unimaginable that EPA can proceed with its agenda without reconstructing the widespread document destruction and restoring the legally required record.”
Note: The core of lawsuit is EPA’s erratic application of statutorily provided fee waivers, which as Horner has documented previously, the agency has been far more likely to deny for certain right-of-center groups. (See: Congressmen demand end to EPA’s IRS-like bias against conservative, state/local FOIA requestors.)
###
richardscourtney says:
April 10, 2014 at 5:24 am
Richard,
Please reflect on your untrue assertions about capitalism, your flawed perspectives on the ‘benign’ nature of socialism, and your ‘distraction’ from admitting you were wrong. I offer my correction of your flawed statement again, in the hope that you might yet learn from your mistakes.
You are demonstrably incorrect in the definition and usage of the term ‘capitalist’. Capitalists advocate individual rights, private enterprise, small government, and laissez-faire markets. Socialists advocate collective rights, big intrusive government, and government ‘regulated’ markets, to ‘promote fairness’. They advocate market ‘subsidies’ (redistribution of wealth) to provide ‘social justice’ to producers of goods and services that are not competitive in free markets. Given that, let’s correct your misstatement above: “Many (most?) of those promoting AGW are crony socialists ‘milking’ the system for subsidies for ‘renewables’.
Although this may be ’tilting at windmills’, a paraphrase of a quote from one of our greatest Presidents applies accurately here:
“The trouble with our socialist friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Respectfully,
Mac
Mac the Knife:
your post at April 10, 2014 at 12:17 pm.
I note that you again make a list of untrue assertions which have no relationship to reality then support an untrue assertion which says
“The trouble with our socialist friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
And all this because I keep saying – and I again say –
Oppose the corruption and avoid allowing your political prejudices from hindering that opposition, or continue to promote your prejudice and fail to oppose the corruption.
I applaud the post from Barbara at April 10, 2014 at 8:45 am which says in total
Barbara is right, and your promotion of your untrue prejudice distracts from the important point she iterates.
Richard
_Jim:
Your personal questions to me at April 10, 2014 at 7:07 am have no relation to the topic of this thread and I refuse to assist your attempted distraction(s).
Richard
John Whitman:
Your post at April 10, 2014 at 7:10 am only serves to display your ignorance of an off-topic subject on which you have chosen to pontificate. It is typical of all your posts and – as usual with your posts – I refuse to waste space in the thread by discussing it.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
April 10, 2014 at 1:30 pm
Richard,
Again I say please reflect on your untrue assertions about capitalism, your flawed perspectives on the ‘benign’ nature of socialism, and your ‘distraction’ from admitting you were wrong.
Mac
– – – – – – – – – –
richardscourtney,
Understanding in politics cannot be achieved by just studying politics, in your case you are only looking at the existing socialist politics and interpreting everything else by it.
Instead consider an alternative approach. Understanding politics follows this kind of process: politics must have an ethical basis; ethics must have a basis in a view of the human condition; a view of the human condition must have a basis in a view of reality; a view of reality must have a basis in a way of knowing reality. We get to the essential determinants of politics.
Politics understood that way can be stable and relatively un-contentious because it is becomes a non-emotional discussion of reality and how we get knowledge about reality. And also it is wonderful fun.
John
Mac the Knife:
At April 10, 2014 at 1:42 pm you say to me
John Whitman:
re your post at April 10, 2014 at 3:36 pm .
You did not need to say you think it is “fun” to distract threads with irrelevant, untrue and pointless tripe: anybody who has read your posts knows that.
But you do need to learn that what you think to be “fun” is merely boorish.
Richard
Mac the Knife:
I apologise for the formatting error in my post at April 11, 2014 at 4:20 am. The “</blockquote" should have been a 'close quote'. This has distorted the entire post.
Sorry.
Richard
– – – – – – – – – – –
richardscourtney,
You have been begging the question wrt context and basis of politics (particularly your socialist politics), as I pointed out in my previous comment to you.
Fun? I have had immense fun when reasoning for my whole personal and 40 year professional life. And I loved it. I am profoundly proud of it. I continue that tradition.
Need I really provide you with countless quotes from writers, journalists, lawyers, skeptical blog owners, medical doctors, engineers, scientists, intellectuals, ancient philosophers and modern scholars who say their reasoning is fun for themselves in pursuing desires / goals / values?
I think there is good reason to presume that many of the happiest people on Earth have been (are) those who are having fun in their reasoning when using it to pursuing desires / goals / values?
On the other hand, “bending over backwards” in spirit of Feynman, sure there are those Kantian and post-Kantian supporters who might object. But even some of the Kantians and Post-Kantians could possibly accept my idea that reasoning and applied reasoning is fun.
Personal Note: Richard, it does appear to me that you are not having fun for some time now.
John