Bulletin:
Dateline Washington (AP) — President Barack Obama this morning scrapped his administration’s controversial plans to tighten smog rules, bowing to the demands of Congressional Republicans and some business leaders. Mr. Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency — and the unanimous opinion of its independent panel of scientific advisers — and directed administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the proposed regulation to reduce concentrations of ground-level ozone, smog's main ingredient.
The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.
While Swish’s media minions pay their dues to the Angry Left with their incessant daily stories mocking President Perry, the GOP candidate they fear most, The Swisher keeps saying yes-yes to his Republican betters.
The steadily unraveling climate change circus keeps deconstructing, as phony schemes usually do.
Swishy, who said something balmy about the oceans receding when he was elected President, championed global warming as a candidate.
But having inspected it from the inside on the three days a moth he is in town, he is starting to jump overboard.
He is bailing because climate change looks like, oh, Prohibition, or the Democrats’ favorite math mind=bender:
2-plus-2-equals-40 million, a scam even cast-iron Swishy can’t stomach.
Before the angry left-wing boys in Washington had dried their obsession tears over Swishy’s puerile Steve Jobs Speech gaffe two days ago, bowing low to House Speaker Boehner, The Gaffer, thinking holiday weekend getaway, gulped and said yes-yes again today to his Republican teachers on the Halloween-style EPA.
Lisa (I Know Nearly Everything) Jackson, the madam of the house of prostitution that is the jokable “Environmental Protection Agency,” was seen gargling stale dry cereal this afternoon to make her Obama headache recede.
Here is how the smart commentator Steven Hayward, over at powerlineblog.com, reacted to the happy news that temporarily defangs the EPA:
Everyone knows that you always dump your unwanted news on a Friday afternoon, and what better Friday afternoon to dump something you want to go away than the Friday before Labor Day. This is huge. I’m on a deadline this afternoon so I don’t have time to work through it in detail right now, but suffice it to say for the time being that the proposed new ozone standard made no sense at all and was totally unnecessary. But that hasn’t stopped the EPA juggernaut before (and they still have at least a half-dozen other new regulations in process).
The interesting thing to see now is how loudly environmentalists will scream about this (all the while, imagine how much louder if a Republican White House had done this), especially since it is coming from, as the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope keeps saying, “the best environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt.”
Also, let’s see how much media coverage it gets tonight and over the weekend. Not much I expect, which is exactly what the White House wants.
The AP story does not say so, but apparently this is merely a delay in the rule, till 2013 (safely after re-election, in other words). Even so, it is a huge retreat, and sometimes these delays result in a regulation being abandoned entirely, or rewritten in much different form. The EPA, no doubt under White House orders, already delayed the “Boiler MACT” rules (don’t ask) a few weeks ago. They’re circling the wagons.
