Bush blocks state efforts to limit pollution

I must be the silliest man in the world. All these years, I actually thought the Environmental Protection Agency's purpose was to sort of like protect the environment. That's why they call it the Environmental Protection Agency. Get it? Get it? Get it? Get it?

Man, was I ever wrong! Bush's EPA seems to exist not to protect the environment but to destroy it.

Today Bush's EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson shot down an effort by California to establish stringent regulations on automakers to cut down on tailpipe emissions. Seventeen other states planned on imposing similar regulations once California did so. These new rules would have made automakers help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It would have been like if Trent Lott had to stop farting so much. But now these regulations have been nixed by the EPA.

Aren't the Republicans always the ones who are talking about states' rights? Or is this yet another case of "states' rights for me, not for thee", like that garbage called the Patriot Act?

We might as well not even have states, counties, and cities, and just be ruled by an absolute emperor instead. Every time the states try doing anything, the maggoty GOP gizzard flips open and says they can't do it.

Stephen Johnson's excuse for quashing the states' new rules is that the new federal energy law raises fuel economy standards by 2020. Yes, the auto industry gets to wait another 13 years before making cleaner cars. (The California rule that was rejected said efficiency had to start improving by 2012.) Not only that, but the new federal law doesn't even do the same things that the rejected state laws would have anyway.

That the EPA can just defy its own reason for being and strike down states' environmental regulations on a whim (without even asking for the states' input) brings a whole new meaning to "Resistance is futile."

(Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/19/BA55U1JD6.DTL)