I’m not sure how I got onto a mailing list for The Tea Party (or that splinter of them hanging out at TheTeaParty.net), but it does make for some entertaining reading at times. Like, say, today.
Stop the Obama Regime and his EPA from taking our gun rights away! Sign and share our new petition!
Yes, of course, the “regime” is using their national police force, the FBI, to … wait, the EPA? What?
Dear Patriot,
Howdy! I appreciate being called a patriot.
The Obama Administration thugs are it again.
When in doubt, call the other side “thugs.” (Note, this is not strictly a right-wing thing. Zanies on either extreme use this term when the other side is in power and doing stuff they don’t like. Both sides like to prefix it with “jackbooted,” but the Far Right likes to use the term alone, just to evoke those Gang-Banging type of thugs.)
Turning up the heat on those who don’t play ball, …
Yes, requiring people to comply with the law is “turning up the heat” on folks who “don’t play ball.”
Lead! It’s what’s for dinner!
… the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is forcing the closure of the nation’s last remaining lead smelting plant, creating dire consequences for employees, their families and the millions of firearm owners across the country. We must continue to stand together against this tyranny!
Are they cackling and twirling their mustachios as they do so?
The nation’s last remaining lead smelting plant provides lead for ammunition used in firearms nationwide. Without the lead, ammunition will become scarcer and costs will continue to rise- a turn of events that is sure to delight the gun-grabbing leftists in Washington. Do you want that to happen?
Wow! Out of the blue, the EPA is trying to shut down a company vital for our home defense industry? The fiends! Clearly this is a back door avenue to rendering the populace helpless!
Operating like old-school thugs, …
Are those the ones who wear black uniforms or the ones who wear black hoodies? Just checking.
… the EPA has demanded the Doe Run Company, which has operated for more than a century, pay $65 million to be in compliance with the EPA’s restrictions and also pay a $7 million civil penalty. The EPA laughably gloats that Doe Run has made a “business decision” to close down the plant, leaving the plant’s 218 employees and contractors out of work.
Herculaneum, Mo., a small town on the bluffs above the Mississippi River, was always a company town. The company, Doe Run, is the largest lead producer in North America, trucking in lead from Missouri’s rich mines to a 120-year-old smelter on the river. For 25 years, the smelter didn’t meet federal air standards for lead, and now, after decades of battling government regulators and angry parents, Doe Run is leaving town at the end of next year.
Percentage of kids 6 and under testing with high lead levels in their blood around the smelter.
[…] For one thing, there was this thick dust on the streets where the trucks drove in from the lead mines. […] The Department of Natural Resources test came back: the dust from the streets in Herculaneum contained 300,000 parts per million lead. That’s 30 percent. […] Within a quarter mile, 56 percent of kids [6 and under] had high levels of lead in their blood. At a half-mile, it was 52 percent. Jordan-Izaguirre says she’d never seen numbers like that, except in the developing world.
[…] In 1988, Doe Run was fined for 177 health violations at the plant – accused of breaking “virtually every section” of the workplace lead standard. […] In 2002, Doe Run and state and federal regulators decided it was easier to get rid of the people than the pollution: the company agreed to buy out the 160 homes closest to the smelter. […] Around that same time in 2002, Doe Run met the Clean Air Act lead standard for the first time ever, since it was set in 1978. […] Despite all this, and even though the air was meeting federal standards, it was still recontaminating people’s yards with lead.
[…] By law, EPA is required to review the national ambient air quality standard for lead every five years to make sure it matches up with current science on public health. But Lipeles discovered the agency had never completed a full review. She filed a lawsuit against the EPA in 2004. Four years later, the agency released a new national lead standard. It was ten times more restrictive than the old one, dropping from 1.5 micrograms lead per cubic meter, to 0.15 micrograms. Doe Run agreed to close the smelter, rather than try to meet the new standard.
So a company that was responsible for massive environmental pollution did some stuff to clean up, but what they were doing was still dangerous (do I need to belabor the dangers of lead and other heavy metal pollution?), so they’ve decided to shut down rather than investing further to correct the problems. That hardly seems radical, or thuggish.
And note when that new national lead standard was released (after lengthy work by the EPA): in 2008, distinctly not during the “Obama Regime,” but during that tree-hugging, gun-hating Bush Administration.
The Doe Run smelter (2001)
Oh, and in case you’re worried that this is some innocuous Mom & Pop company being oppressed by the Man for harmless mistakes …
(Kansas City, Kan., Oct. 8, 2010) – Doe Run Resources Corp. of St. Louis, North America’s largest lead producer, has agreed to spend approximately $65 million to correct violations of several environmental laws at 10 of its lead mining, milling and smelting facilities in southeast Missouri, the Justice Department, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources announced today. The settlement also requires the company to pay a $7 million civil penalty.
The release from the EPA goes through the various pieces of what that’s about and what it covers. None of it strikes me as particularly vindictive or thuggish. Back to the Tea Party:
Is this the “hope” and “change” America signed on for? The Obama Administration, having been thwarted in their efforts to curtail Second Amendment rights time and time again by principled gun owners, have now tasked the EPA with doing their dirty work by making ammunition scarcer and more expensive. Enough is enough.
The main question asked is “Will this shut down your supply of lead.” The answer to that is no. First, Sierra buys lead from several different vendors to maintain constant supply. Second, this facility only smelts primary lead or lead ore. This is lead ore that has just been brought out of the earth. Sierra uses no primary lead at all and never has, so we use nothing directly from this facility. The lead we buy from Doe Run comes from their recycling facility in Boss, MO that is about 90 miles away from the smelter that is closing.
Our supply should not be in jeopardy and we do not anticipate any changes in our supply chain at this time. Could the lack of primary lead create a little more demand for recycled lead? Sure, but how much is unknown. Could this increase in demand also create an increase in price? Sure, but again, by how much is unknown at this time.
There are many other primary lead smelters in the world and so the flow of primary lead will not be shut off.
So a company that’s been responsible for lead pollution at multiple locations in the US and abroad is closing one of their smelters in response to pollution regulations put forward during the Bush Administration, and this will have little to no effect on ammunition supplies. Clearly nothing demonstrating a Deep, Dark Conspiracy to Take Away Our Ammo by the Obama Regime Thugs.
Yeah, nothing here that needs fixing! Defund! Defund!
Like the IRS, the EPA has become an enforcer in the Obama regime and it’s time for them to go. While maintaining protections for the environment remain important, the EPA’s heavy-handed tactics prove that they are not protectors of the environment, but enforcers of the leftist agenda. We must send a message that we will not be intimidated! Join the fight and sign the petition calling for the defunding of the EPA.
Well, that certainly makes sense. Or, more likely, not.
It is obvious to all that bullet production will continue if the nation’s last major lead smelter is shut down. What is factual, though, is that prices for lead bullets will go up, if not way up, because lead recycling does not reproduce as much lead as actually smelting the ores do. It’ll boil down to what will take up the now removed supply in the chain.
I agree with the E-mail, though, in that this is another way to constrain the ease of firearms access in the United States. It won’t “shut down” bullet production, but every little chip at the availability of the raw materials that make firearms makes it that much easier to reply. Supply and demand is clear. Lead demand is fast rising, and that’s not just bullets. Lead is used in hybrid car batteries, gasoliene car engines, and yes, bullets.
I don’t need to go into a discussion about EPA thuggery. What I see as “thuggery” may be what you see as “justice”. I believe that it is thuggery, but not because I don’t care about the environment. It’s because I believe the EPA should not exist in intrastate matters, or better, exist at all. Environmental enforcement is a states’ matter, and the state-EPA branches know how to care for their states’ ecosystem.
Concerning the beginning of operations under Dubya, you need to remember the demographics of the EPA. Since its inception, it’s been a crown jewel of leftism and used for strange enforcements of mandates by force of an armed raid.
Whether these enforcements are good or bad are up for fierce debate. When rightists want to work in the public sector, they usually join the military or serve on something in bed with oil, or in a place that is seen as Constitutional, like the (much ridiculed) Post Office. When leftists want to work in the public spere, they end up at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Equal Oppurtunity Employment Commission, or worse, the National Endowment of the Arts.
The EPA in 2008 AD was as leftist was it was in 1999 AD, or any year since its inception. I sincerely doubt it’s ever considered the opposition, because it honestly thinks, as its employees do, that we (the far right) want to kill the environment and mutilate puppies over a burning barrel of crude.
In other words, the actions of the EPA were not authorized or encouraged by the sitting President. After all, Doe Run hasn’t met its end until the end of 2013 AD. George Bush, being the “oil tyrant” the left think he is, could have obstructed the EPA of his time- which he controlled as POTUS -to keep them burning.
As for the dangers of lead, consider this: you and your ancestors slept in cribs with lead paint, drank water from leaded pipes, used leaded gasoliene, and some evgen went to lead factories. Lead was everywhere for generations, and MOST of those generations are not dead.
Does lead casue environmental impact? Absolutely. Is its consumption the death sentence liberals claim it is? No. You lived through it, and nothing went wrong with your brain, or your parents’ brains, or their parents’ brains, or their parent’s parents’ brains…
The EPA exists to keep pollution from one state from flowing downstream (as in navigable rivers) and from one factory smokestack in Georgia mucking up another in Florida. The EPA no longer does that, and THAT is why it needs to be dismantled and its powers restructured with the proper limits of interstate nature, specified in our Constitution.
I agree with the E-mail, though, in that this is another way to constrain the ease of firearms access in the United States. It won’t “shut down” bullet production, but every little chip at the availability of the raw materials that make firearms makes it that much easier to reply.
I think it’s paranoia to consider this action as some sort of plan to constrain firearm access.
I believe that it is thuggery, but not because I don’t care about the environment. It’s because I believe the EPA should not exist in intrastate matters, or better, exist at all. Environmental enforcement is a states’ matter, and the state-EPA branches know how to care for their states’ ecosystem.
Actually, later in your comment you seem to concede the use of the EPA for pollution issues that cross state lines, so I’m not sure why you suggest the EPA should not exist at all.
Local state environmental agencies are an important part of environmental matters, but are much more subject to local political (and business) pressures on priorities, appointments, law, and funding.
In other words, the actions of the EPA were not authorized or encouraged by the sitting President. After all, Doe Run hasn’t met its end until the end of 2013 AD. George Bush, being the “oil tyrant” the left think he is, could have obstructed the EPA of his time- which he controlled as POTUS -to keep them burning.
But the National Lead Standards revision, which is what led to the need for further controls, was issued in 2008, right in the middle of the Bush Administration. Are you suggesting that he had no control over that, or over his three EPA Administrators (the one in the position at the time, Stephen L Johnson, was certainly no radical tool of the leftist environmentalist elite).
As for the dangers of lead, consider this: you and your ancestors slept in cribs with lead paint, drank water from leaded pipes, used leaded gasoliene, and some evgen went to lead factories. Lead was everywhere for generations, and MOST of those generations are not dead. Does lead casue environmental impact? Absolutely. Is its consumption the death sentence liberals claim it is? No. You lived through it, and nothing went wrong with your brain, or your parents’ brains, or their parents’ brains, or their parent’s parents’ brains…
Really? Now you’re questioning whether lead is actually toxic, can cause developmental problems with kids, or lead to a whole raft of other long-term health issues? Is there some actual scientific basis for this skepticism, or is it just wishful thinking?
The EPA exists to keep pollution from one state from flowing downstream (as in navigable rivers) and from one factory smokestack in Georgia mucking up another in Florida. The EPA no longer does that, and THAT is why it needs to be dismantled and its powers restructured with the proper limits of interstate nature, specified in our Constitution.
The EPA’s job is to enforce laws passed by Congress related to clean air and water and other environmental concerns. I suggest that if those laws are unconstitutional they be addressed as such, rather than using the EPA as a whipping boy.
Google Plus repost of this is at https://plus.google.com/101083456815352083930/posts/4PytqpQxXDc .
It is obvious to all that bullet production will continue if the nation’s last major lead smelter is shut down. What is factual, though, is that prices for lead bullets will go up, if not way up, because lead recycling does not reproduce as much lead as actually smelting the ores do. It’ll boil down to what will take up the now removed supply in the chain.
I agree with the E-mail, though, in that this is another way to constrain the ease of firearms access in the United States. It won’t “shut down” bullet production, but every little chip at the availability of the raw materials that make firearms makes it that much easier to reply. Supply and demand is clear. Lead demand is fast rising, and that’s not just bullets. Lead is used in hybrid car batteries, gasoliene car engines, and yes, bullets.
I don’t need to go into a discussion about EPA thuggery. What I see as “thuggery” may be what you see as “justice”. I believe that it is thuggery, but not because I don’t care about the environment. It’s because I believe the EPA should not exist in intrastate matters, or better, exist at all. Environmental enforcement is a states’ matter, and the state-EPA branches know how to care for their states’ ecosystem.
Concerning the beginning of operations under Dubya, you need to remember the demographics of the EPA. Since its inception, it’s been a crown jewel of leftism and used for strange enforcements of mandates by force of an armed raid.
Whether these enforcements are good or bad are up for fierce debate. When rightists want to work in the public sector, they usually join the military or serve on something in bed with oil, or in a place that is seen as Constitutional, like the (much ridiculed) Post Office. When leftists want to work in the public spere, they end up at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Equal Oppurtunity Employment Commission, or worse, the National Endowment of the Arts.
The EPA in 2008 AD was as leftist was it was in 1999 AD, or any year since its inception. I sincerely doubt it’s ever considered the opposition, because it honestly thinks, as its employees do, that we (the far right) want to kill the environment and mutilate puppies over a burning barrel of crude.
In other words, the actions of the EPA were not authorized or encouraged by the sitting President. After all, Doe Run hasn’t met its end until the end of 2013 AD. George Bush, being the “oil tyrant” the left think he is, could have obstructed the EPA of his time- which he controlled as POTUS -to keep them burning.
As for the dangers of lead, consider this: you and your ancestors slept in cribs with lead paint, drank water from leaded pipes, used leaded gasoliene, and some evgen went to lead factories. Lead was everywhere for generations, and MOST of those generations are not dead.
Does lead casue environmental impact? Absolutely. Is its consumption the death sentence liberals claim it is? No. You lived through it, and nothing went wrong with your brain, or your parents’ brains, or their parents’ brains, or their parent’s parents’ brains…
The EPA exists to keep pollution from one state from flowing downstream (as in navigable rivers) and from one factory smokestack in Georgia mucking up another in Florida. The EPA no longer does that, and THAT is why it needs to be dismantled and its powers restructured with the proper limits of interstate nature, specified in our Constitution.
@Turtleshroom:
I think it’s paranoia to consider this action as some sort of plan to constrain firearm access.
Actually, later in your comment you seem to concede the use of the EPA for pollution issues that cross state lines, so I’m not sure why you suggest the EPA should not exist at all.
Local state environmental agencies are an important part of environmental matters, but are much more subject to local political (and business) pressures on priorities, appointments, law, and funding.
But the National Lead Standards revision, which is what led to the need for further controls, was issued in 2008, right in the middle of the Bush Administration. Are you suggesting that he had no control over that, or over his three EPA Administrators (the one in the position at the time, Stephen L Johnson, was certainly no radical tool of the leftist environmentalist elite).
Really? Now you’re questioning whether lead is actually toxic, can cause developmental problems with kids, or lead to a whole raft of other long-term health issues? Is there some actual scientific basis for this skepticism, or is it just wishful thinking?
The EPA’s job is to enforce laws passed by Congress related to clean air and water and other environmental concerns. I suggest that if those laws are unconstitutional they be addressed as such, rather than using the EPA as a whipping boy.