Posted on 06/11/2012 8:00:11 PM PDT by STARWISE
An Asheville, N.C. man has enlisted the aid of North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr to investigate a visit he received from two armed Environmental Protection Agency officials and a local police officer.
Burr has been in touch with the man and started an inquiry into the incident with EPA.
According to the Ashville Citizen-Times, Larry Keller claims the EPA targeted him after he sent an email on April 27 to former EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz, who resigned on April 30 over comments he made comparing the administration’s enforcement policy to Roman crucifixions. (RELATED: Complete coverage of the Al Armendariz scandal)
The letter to an EPA external affairs director read simply, “Do you have Mr. Armendariz’s contact information so we can say hello? – Regards- Larry Keller.”
“I wanted to know why someone in his position would say what he did. I wanted to question his reasoning and principles. It’s all about freedom of speech,” Keller told The Carolina Journal.
The agents visited Keller on May 2, two days after Armendariz resigned.
Keller is not convinced the matter is over, and he wants a full explanation. But the Journal reported that Patrick Sullivan, the EPA’s assistant inspector general, does not believe there was “any unprofessional behavior” by Office of Inspector General personnel, and that Keller “answered the questions and the suspicious nature of the email was resolved.”
Fox News Channel reported that the EPA has invited Keller to come to Washington. The Asheville man, however, is unwilling until he has a full understanding of what the EPA wants to discuss.
“The charter of the EPA is to protect the environment and public, not to act as a quasi federal police department,” Keller told Fox News on Saturday.
In late April on the Senate floor, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe highlighted video of Armendariz, then the Region 6 Administrator, explaining EPA’s heavy-handed approach to enforcement. That video brought about Armendariz’s resignation just days later.
“I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said,” Armendariz said in the video footage.
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years
The Brown Shirts , ah , I mean Green Shirts
Imagine a private citizen so fearful of the EPA that he won’t accept their invitation to ‘talk’ to him. I guess we don’t have to imagine that anymore. That’s some serious CHANGE in less than four years, 0bama.
Ping for lists.
I grew up near the Wildlife Refuge. We use to have a Fedzilla tosser in a suit and clipboard come knock on the door about every two years to tell us our storage building was 2 FEET on the federal property and “had to be moved”. I kid you not.
We never did move it.
Screw ‘em.
Why are epa agents armed at all??
Are they afraid that someone might be molesting a squirrel or something?
...and no, I'm not talking about weapons or violence, folks.
There is absolutely no reason for an EPA employee to be armed. They are not law enforcement.
“There is absolutely no reason for an EPA employee to be armed. They are not law enforcement.”
Well, they ARE part of the “executive” branch, and perhaps they might just want to “execute” something.
Tell them that. And tell the people who have not been able to build on their lots, and companies who have accumulated massive fines for almost nothing.
They are jack booted thugs.
What is the criteria for “impersonating a law enforcement officer”? And does this cross that line?
What? The EPA armed?
I love my country, but if I were Keller, I would be afraid to visit the EPA offices in Washington. Facebook, email, tweet, text, phonecall, carrier pigeon, hell even tin cans and string, would all do fine. But a visit, hell no.
We’re not at all far from the day when government morons dressed in SWAT gear and carrying SMGs are sent to kindergarten to make arrests for episodes of “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine” or to make arrests for “excessive force” used during games of tag. Or simply because some idiot, somewhere, got the wrong address. In fact, this latter happens all the time lately.
You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Even the Dept. of Education has an armed security force.
“Even the Dept. of Education has an armed security force.”
And every week Obama gets a list of America’s Most Wanted Truants and decides which ones will get neutralized by Department of Education Hit Teams.
Look at every executive agency at the state and local level. Park Districts have their own police forces. It is an unprecedented amount of police force and unnecessary.
There’s an additional element that isn’t mentioned. So many agencies now rely on Administrative Law which is a “judicial” branch of the executive office. By having their own police force there is no check or balance on proper service or enforcement.
In not having to rely on a local sheriff or municipal police force you lose a check on overreach. Not to mention that in America the judicial and executive branches are to be separate as insurance of individual liberty. The concept of Administrative Law was to unclog the court system. Instead it’s simply allowed governments to run roughshod over individual rights and generate revenue through fines.
Do you really have to ask why tyrants advancing the destruction of liberty want to carry weapons?
I didn’t think so.
Because of our anti-American education system, I wager not five in a hundred even understand, let alone agree with what you are talking about.
Government need not fear and defend itself against a free people. Only an oppressed, beaten, fearful, . . . people pose any threat.
Makes me think about “The Simpsons Movie”
Well, you’re right, but I’m not quitting yet. We keep kicking away at it and eventually people will realize that they’ve got more rights than they know about. They don’t need to know it all, just give political support to those that do.
I think we need to approach Constitutional Law under the same auspices that we’ve used with the 2nd Amendment. A guy like Aaron Zelman was considered a nut. The first time I wore a Hitler gun control shirt people went nuts. They didn’t want to be on a elevator with me. Now people get it.
There needs to be a committed core that relates government abuse back to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I think the focus should be on the Commerce Clause and the 10th Amendment. You already have legal scholarship on it and, via Clarence Thomas, a SCOTUS Justice that is leading the way. He’s the most influential Justice in a half century.
We need books, little pamphlets like Stephen P. Holbrook’s on the 2nd Amendment, built on the Tenth or just the Commerce Clause. A little history mixed with some judicial philosophy and real life cases. Tell the story of FDR’s madness and how we still suffer under it.
We’ve also got to get kids out of government schools and the government out of the business of education. We turn them over to liberals and then have to claim them back. I’m not crazy about Romney, but he’s made some noises about vouchers. They’re the first step toward educational liberty.
So is the Department of Education
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2011/06/beware-us-education-department-swat-team/40158
We can argue over whether or not the EPA should have armed agents (I say NO) but if you send a message like that to someone, do NOT be surprised if you get a visit from the local police accompanied by the FBI, if a Federal official is involved. At least Keller didn't reference his "little friend."
It’s worse than that. They are political police, they derive their authority unconstitutionally from the political aims of the parties in power.
They are no different from any other secret police agency. They are the ‘law’ and they make and enforce their own ‘rules’.
Did you know the EPA has it’s own drone ‘air force’ so they can monitor people’s activities for ‘infractions’?
Yes they are ‘law enforcement’. This is how utterly corrupted our government has become.
Yes, and NOAA and the Department of Education, and the FDA, the list is long.
You can thank the creation of ‘homeland security’ for this. In this case it IS Bush’s fault.
They are actually paramilitary SWAT teams
Oops, I did not mean to imply quitting at all.
Off topic here, but there is no doubt in my mind that Freeper/Tea Party pressure on our congress-critters is the sole reason Eric Holder may soon face some unpleasant music. With enough applied heat, our reps will respond.
Dittos re: Thomas.
We have brown shirts, green shirts and yellow striped shirts. Guess which is which.
“They are actually paramilitary SWAT teams”
I know. I was just trying to show how absurd everything has become. The Dept of Education with a SWAT team???? I would really like to see enumerated and clarified exactly what situations would require the deployment of a Department of Education SWAT team. Hence my prior post, are they deployed to “protect” us from career truants?
Come to think of it, growing up I did run into a couple of Department of Education SWAT members... We addressed them as Miss or Mrs. and they were armed with rulers.. and occasionally they got my attention with a swat.
“...will get neutralized by a Department o Education hit team”
Naah...why waste the manpower on a nest of home-schoolers in Flyover Country...when you’ve got these
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-domestic-drones-armed-090/
This guy is not “fearful” of these clowns.
Some of the enforcement officers are authorized to carry firearms. They or their autos have occasionally been fired upon while carrying out their duties though I don’t know of any being hit. Does the guy say that the weapons were ever drawn?
Since some of the Midnight dumpers are mobbed-up it is easy to justify. Watch the Sopranos for reference.
You will very rarely ever hear me say this, but I’m siding with the ACLU on this one. This stuff is just getting more scary every day.
Nice try but no cigar. EPA has had enforcement authority from long before either Bush. And armed officers.
Oh so it was Reagan then?
The Patriot act allowed a mass deputization of bureaucrats. That was Bush.
Reagan did not create the EPA that occurred under Nixon. It was not armed by the Patriot Act.
Armendariz is as ignorant as he is thuggish. The Romans a) never administered like that, never, and b) never encountered Turks during the long period during which they subjugated Anatolia, the modern Turkey, which then was nearly a dozen kingdoms, city-states, pirate lairs, dependencies, and provinces of the Seleucid and Macedonian Empires.
Reagan did not create the EPA but it became armed under his watch in 1983 when the EPA went to the FBI and asked to have some of the bureaucrats to be deputized as ‘enforcement’ officers.
Republicans and Democrats both are responsible for the ruination of freedom and privacy in this nation.
Threats of violence against EPA Inspectors when out in the field were what prompted arming certain of them. There are only a few who are armed, the vast majority are not and many often have good relations with the regulated communities.
A friend of mine was an Inspector and he was welcome at the sewer plants he inspected because his reports actually helped the operators operate their facilities more effectively. He also understood and sympathized with the technical problems they faced. But he was a rarity in that he actually knew what he was talking about (not being a Womyn’s Studies major but an ME with a PE license) and was not trying to add scalps to his belt.
Since politics reflect the wishes and demands of the people it would be far more accurate to state the FACT that it is the PEOPLE which is responsible “...for the ruination of freedom and privacy in this nation.” Had they not overwhelmingly voted for the RATS for decades the GOP would have never been tempted to whack the Tar Baby. The only reason there are ANY conservative ideals left is because of the GOP.
It also should be clear to anyone who has looked into this that the electorate has NOT voted conservative. It will vote for the more conservative presidential candidate on occasion but consistently fills Congress with Democrats.
I’m am hoping this is changing as the RATs move even further Left but it will remain an ongoing problem if for no other reason than that the Democrat Party is filled with professional politicians in contradistinction to the GOP which is filled with amateurs, citizens who finally got fed up and ran for office, and ideologues who just hate government. This makes having a consistent long-term policy difficult.
Ah, regulated communities. That’s Agenda 21 in a nutshell, and the EPA is a tool.
So to put it bluntly should Agenda 21 be implemented through armed federal agents?
Isn’t that a communist revolution by the executive branch?
Former ‘crucify them’ EPA leader met with environmentalists instead of testifying before Congress
06/07/2012
Former Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz skipped a scheduled appearance at a Congressional hearing Wednesday, but managed to squeeze a trip to the Sierra Club — in Washington, D.C., less than a quarter-mile from Capitol hill — into his busy day.
In a press release, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works ranking Republican Sen. James Inhofe declared the “mystery is solved. Rather than testifying in the House and being accountable for carrying out the Obama EPA’s ‘crucify them’ agenda, it appears Mr. Armendariz may have had a job interview with the Sierra Club.”
The Oklahoma Republican added that “at least at the Sierra Club, Armendariz won’t run the risk of losing his job for telling the truth about President Obama’s real agenda.”
In the instance of which I was speaking, the “regulated community” was sewage treatment plants not an actual community. It has nothing to do with Agenda 21 or any other outside the provisions of the Clean Water Act which has been around in one form or the other since before the 20th century. These plants are required to meet certain discharge standards and the regulations are primarily implemented through the states which also send out inspectors and of which there are likely some who are armed, I don’t know for sure though.
What I was speaking of has nothing to do with communist revolution. I don’t think this case has anything to do with any actual environmental law but seems to be because of a perceived threat against an Agency official. Apparently they are getting jumpy.
Anytime the ‘environment’ is given authority over ‘personhood’, that’s communism.
I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.
During the Clinton administration the environmental activists, green socialists if you will, decided to sue some power plants so they could shut them down.
In the past, a person suing a land owner had to show they were harmed by the land owner, in order to get the courts to determine a remedy for their harm.
They could not show harm to themselves by the land owner so, they claimed that the ‘environment’ was harmed, and won. They call it ‘environmental justice’ and it has changed our law from a basis of individual legal responsibilities through equal justice to a collectivist political mess.’environmental justice’ can mean anything the collectivists want it to mean in order to advance their political agenda.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.