Free Republic

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's first emission standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants. In its ruling, the court rejected state and industry challenges to rules designed to clean up chromium, arsenic, acid gases, nickel, cadmium as well as mercury and other dangerous toxins. The EPA’s determination in 2000 that regulating emission standards is appropriate and necessary, and the agency’s reaffirmation of that determination in 2012, “are amply supported by EPA’s findings regarding the health effects of mercury exposure,” said the court. Congress did not specify what...

In a disptach early this evening, the Associated Press's Pete Yost, perhaps signaling his employer's intent to remain the journalistic lapdog known as the Administration's Press, accepted at face value Attorney General Eric Holder's claim, while defending his department's actions, to have played no role in its wide-ranging subpoena of two months of AP phone records involving 20 cellular, personal and business lines used by over 100 wire service reporters and editors. Yost also did not address whether DOJ received judicial approval for its fishing expedition, a question the AP's Mark Sherman identified last night as unresolved. It apparently hasn't...

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is raising the possibility that records sought in the CIA leak investigation could be missing because of an e-mail archiving problem at the White House. The prosecutor in the criminal case against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff said in a Jan. 23 letter that not all e-mail was archived in 2003, (((GET THIS: ***the year the Bush administration exposed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.***)))) (They aren't even faking journalistic integrity in leaving out the word "allegedly.") Lawyers for defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby this week accused prosecutors of withholding evidence...