The Obama administration is currently embroiled in three big scandals that have nothing to do with science – the vast, right wing conspiracy that said they edited out references to terrorism in the Benghazi murders by Muslim extremists turned out to be true, they had the IRS targeting conservative groups for special attention and they have been tapping the phones of Associated Press reporters and editors.
It’s all very Watergate-y but unfortunately President Obama has been more like Nixon than Lyndon Johnson in his incompetence at it. Nixon tried to use Johnson’s tactics but he got caught where Johnson did not, which makes him and Obama also-rans to the true master, the guy who got so many dead people to vote in Texas (a tactic duplicated in Daley’s Chicago of the day, so President Obama learned that history as well) he stole the election from Nixon in 1960.
The administration has broken all kinds of laws – even Tom Brokaw and Maureen Dowd have turned on him, and rightly so. There is optimism about his politics because it matches their own and then there is enabling corruption and they are not going to enable corruption.
One law he breaks that gets no attention at all regards Eagles, which are a vulnerable species and therefore killing them, even by accident, is a federal crime.
It’s not that the administration doesn’t care. They have been really good about prosecuting oil companies if a bird falls in a waste pit, or energy companies when they hit a power line. They just don’t care if it’s one of his pet causes, like the wind energy sector that gets all that government money. Not only has a wind company never been prosecuted, unlike successful energy sources, they don’t even bother to report the deaths.
When companies do voluntarily report deaths, Dina Cappiello at Associated Press writes, “the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.”
So if you also want to break the law – join a green energy company and get the White House to say any federal laws you break are private information the public has no need to know about.
Look for Dina to have her phone tapped as well. The administration doesn’t seem to like reporters at AP who do actual journalism.
Read another take, this one berating environmental groups for being bought off so easily, in Wind Power:1 – Eagles: 0