There is war in the streets of America tonight

[Darren]

[Darren]

"by Associated Press
09:00AM Oct 24, 2013

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no legal right to force a West Virginia poultry grower to obtain water pollution permits for runoff from her Hardy County farm because it is routine stormwater discharge, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey said litter and manure washed by rain into Chesapeake Bay tributaries at Lois Alt's Hardy County farm is agricultural runoff, not a fixed pollution source such as a factory. That means it's exempt from the requirement that it be permitted and regulated under the federal Clean Water Act, he said."

https://www.agweb.com/article/west_virg ... ated_Press

[MajGenl.Meade]

I think someone said that at Kent State.

At the time, at Kent State, nobody was ripping down history (ROTC was already burned). The National Guard opened fire from sheer nervousness - although I still swear I saw a news film of a plain clothes cop/soldier surreptitiously sneaking a handgun out of sight, into a car perhaps aided by others. Don't think I imagined it so it must (?) surely have turned out to be not significant. Not possible an agent provocateur loosed off a single shot that set the Guards a-blazing. Is it?

[Big RR]

As I recall there were concerns that the protestors might burn down the entire campus (pretty silly, but they were voiced by some); the firing could have been out of nervousness, or begun someone (perhaps the person you saw?) wanting to teach those "commies" a lesson.

Commies was included on purpose, because I seriously doubt many of them embraced the philosophy of Marx and Engles (or Lenin or Stalin or Mao or ...). I always remember my father saying (when he knew I was part of a protest "You couldn't get away from that in Russia", and he would be nonplussed when I answered "Of course, which is why I am happy to love here--I just want to make it better)

[ex-khobar Andy]

"by Associated Press
09:00AM Oct 24, 2013

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no legal right to force a West Virginia poultry grower to obtain water pollution permits for runoff from her Hardy County farm because it is routine stormwater discharge, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey said litter and manure washed by rain into Chesapeake Bay tributaries at Lois Alt's Hardy County farm is agricultural runoff, not a fixed pollution source such as a factory. That means it's exempt from the requirement that it be permitted and regulated under the federal Clean Water Act, he said."

https://www.agweb.com/article/west_virg ... ated_Press

That's BS, Darren. I don't know what the judge is thinking but obviously EPA has abandoned its primary purpose which is, you know, protection of the environment. (There's a clue in the name.) CWA has long (30 years at least) acknowledged that non-point sources (parking lots, roads, construction sites, agricultural locations particularly feeding lots, etc) regulations have covered these. If what this judge has said is allowed to stand, any waste generator can simply spread his shit all over a handy field and call it unregulated runoff.

Luckily most manufacturers and farmers just want to obey the law, and they do so. It's unfortunate that trade associations often support the polluter which means that the bulk of their members, who do the right thing, are at a competitive disadvantage.

[Big RR]

this case is nearly 7 years old and, in the interim, there have been decisions upholding the right of the EPA to regulate non point source water pollution in other states and circuits (it does not look like this was appealed to the circuit court--not sure why). At some point the USSC may choose to hear this issue to harmonize laws within different circuits, but the ruling of one federal court in west virginia 7 years ago is not the law of the land.

[Darren]

"August 26, 2017

Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson wanted to build a pond on his property for his cattle. He got the necessary state permits and did it. Cattle now drink from the pond, and birds and fish call it home.

But Johnson didn’t ask federal officials if he could build the pond. EPA came along and told him he had to fill it in. Johnson refused and is being fined $37,000 per day by the agency.

Johnson’s fight with the federal government illustrates why there has been such outcry over EPA’s new water rule, the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS)—a rule that extends federal jurisdiction over nearly every body of water in the United States."

https://regproject.org/wyoming-ranchers ... ater-rule/

[Scooter]

We Resist

The eyes say alcohol and pills. The finger on the trigger shows no training with firearms. The mustard on the shirt says the sandwich was fucking delicious.

[ex-khobar Andy]

"August 26, 2017

Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson wanted to build a pond on his property for his cattle. He got the necessary state permits and did it. Cattle now drink from the pond, and birds and fish call it home.

But Johnson didn’t ask federal officials if he could build the pond. EPA came along and told him he had to fill it in. Johnson refused and is being fined $37,000 per day by the agency.

Johnson’s fight with the federal government illustrates why there has been such outcry over EPA’s new water rule, the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS)—a rule that extends federal jurisdiction over nearly every body of water in the United States."

https://regproject.org/wyoming-ranchers ... ater-rule/

This was settled in May 2016. No fine; he has to plant trees around it to prevent erosion. Seems to me his beef should be with the State of Wyoming who did not tell him (??) that he needed a federal review of plans before he went about damming a waterway. If a creek comes onto your property then there are people upstream and downstream of you whose use of the water will be affected if you dam it and take more than your share. It's called being part of a community.

[Long Run]

[Econoline]

[dales]

And now for the rest of the story....

White couple who pointed gun at protesters say they support Black Lives Matter but felt threatened by ‘angry mob’

A white couple who pointed guns at protesters in St Louis have said they were threatened as crowds marched down their street.

Video shared online showed 63-year-old Mark McCloskey and 61-year-old Patricia McCloskey stationed on the lawn outside their St Louis home on Sunday night as protesters walked past.

Mr McCloskey, who was seen with a long-barrel gun, could be heard shouting as some 500 people marched towards the mayor’s house to demand her resignation.

US president Donald Trump, who has criticised Black Lives Matter demonstrations, reshared the video on Monday, without comment.

Mr McCloskey told local news outlet KMOV-TV that he and his wife, who are personal injury lawyers, feared for their lives as an “angry mob” walked down their private street.

“It was like the storming of the Bastille, the gate came down and a large crowd of angry, aggressive people poured through,” said Mr McCloskey. “I was terrified that we’d be murdered within seconds. Our house would be burned down, our pets would be killed.”

The 63-year-old said he phoned 911 when he heard the crowd approaching Portland Place, the private community where he lives in the city’s Central West End neighbourhood.

“A mob of at least 100 smashed through the historic wrought iron gates of Portland Place, destroying them, rushed towards my home where my family was having dinner outside and put us in fear for our lives,” Mr McCloskey told KMOV.

Despite those comments, it was not clear whether or not demonstrators destroyed or removed the gate at Portland Place.

The St Louis couple also claimed that some protesters had threatened them and said “You’re next”, whilst armed with pistols.

Police said on Monday that whilst investigations into the matter continued, the case had been labelled as trespassing and assault by intimidation.

Protest organiser Rasheen Aldridge told CBS that Sunday’s march had been peaceful and no threats were ever made.

The McCloskeys’ lawyer, Albert Watkins, said in a statement on Monday night: “The peaceful protesters were not the subject of scorn or disdain by the McCloskeys.

“The most important thing for them is that their images (holding the guns) don’t become the basis for a rallying cry for people who oppose the Black Lives Matter message. They want to make it really clear that they believe the Black Lives Matter message is important.”

He added that he did not expect charges to be brought against protesters or his clients.

The march had taken place on Sunday after St Louis mayor Luda Krewson read-out the names and addresses of residents who had written to her about defunding the police in a Facebook video that has since been deleted

[RayThom]

The protesters were, in fact, trespassing -- they opened a gate and walked onto the property. Why the homeowners came out of their house armed, rather than wait for the police, is what I question. Who was looking for the most problems?

The weapons were clumsily being aimed at trespassers who passed through property gates from the public sidewalk. Everything in the video was done wrong, and/or illegal.

[Scooter]

The weapons were clumsily being aimed at trespassers

A friend who knows something of firearms (which I don't) said that the way he was holding that gun meant that he would be ejecting searing hot shell casings directly at his nipple if he fired it.

[BoSoxGal]

Newark NJ does it up right!

[Econoline]

Portland Place in St.Louis, where the McCloskeys live, is a "private street" (I guess you could call it the urban equivalent of a "gated community") and it's not clear if residents on the street have a legal right to prevent non-residents from walking down the sidewalk—which is what the protesters were doing when the personal-injury lawyer couple ran out totin' their shootin' arns. The only way you could call it trespassing is if you think that the residents of the street jointly own the whole street and the sidewalks on both sides.

Private streets remain a stubborn relic of St. Louis’ Gilded Age. Homeowners paid for the streets and sidewalks to be paved long before the surrounding arteries were maintained by the city. In doing so, they purportedly reserved the authority to decide who could use them, which, according to an 1895 story in the St. Louis Republic, was “a privilege, not a right.” Whether they still functionally or symbolically shut people out — one can easily enter Portland Place just around the corner from the gates — the ornate gates, guard towers, and black powder-coated signs denoting “private street” in gold-embossed serif type dot the St. Louis urban landscape as reminders of these restrictions.

A revitalized movement to limit access to St. Louis streets emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, when the population of the city dwindled to half of what it had been in 1950, largely because white families moved to the surrounding suburbs. By the time Mayor Vincent Schoemehl left office in the mid-1980s, 285 streets had been blocked or diverted, most by decidedly less ornamental concrete bollards known as “Schoemehl pots.” One program, entitled “Operation Safestreet,” was praised at the time for lowering crime rates, though the long-term benefits have been less clear. In recent years, advocates have been trying to undo the closures in an attempt to knit the city back together, but some residents want to keep their cul-de-sac streets, especially the ones concentrated in high-wealth, predominately white areas like the Central West End.

from curbed.com (How St. Louis’ History of Private Streets Led to a Gun-Brandishing Couple: A Black Lives Matter march through a gated community highlighted the decisions that divide the city.)

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]

Adam Weinstein
June 29, 2020
Standing Their Ground in Well-Manicured Yards
The Trump presidency has been a literal call to arms for excitable whites who view nonwhite people as inherent threats.


LAURIE SKRIVAN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH/AP
The first time I glanced at the images, I thought, My God, the Naval Academy is under attack. It was the only way my brain could process what I’d seen: a middle-aged white man wielding a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, just outside the gated portico of a vast, shimmering beaux-arts structure whose lofty pillars, red-bricked decking, ornate windows, and greenery-filled terrace boxes seemed reminiscent of buildings I’d once marched to on Annapolis’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century military campus. It didn’t seem so far-fetched: Sunday was, after all, the second anniversary of the murder of five Annapolis Capital Gazette staffers by a crazed gunman.

But then I noticed that this gunman—who wore a form-fitting pink polo shirt tucked into spacious flat-front khaki slacks—was barefoot outside the grand portico. He was also holding his AR-15 left-handed, even though it was a standard carbine with its ejection port on the right side, meaning that if the polo-sporting gentleman had fired his gun, with every discharge, it would have spit a spent, white-hot bullet casing directly into his nipples. Clearly, he didn’t carry this gun very often, a fact made all the more obvious by the frequency with which he pointed its business end toward his wife, who was also barefoot, beside him, wielding a small semiautomatic pistol loosely in her hands, like a once-cherished dream that now might burst and dry up at any moment.
This was how most of us met Mark T. and Patricia N. McCloskey—armed multimillionaire attorneys, longtime GOP and Trump donors, and new poster children for the American white citizenry’s fear and loathing of the nonwhite population. On Sunday evening, they stood in front of their mansion—a gaudy early-1900s “Renaissance palazzo” built by connected friends of the Busch beer family—and confronted the peaceful anti-police-brutality protesters who’d had the temerity to pass the McCloskeys’ tony manicured yard while marching to the St. Louis mayor’s house.* The St. Louis Post-Dispatch laid that method out thusly:

The couple, Mark T. and Patricia N. McCloskey, stood outside with weapons. They are personal-injury lawyers who work together in The McCloskey Law Center and own a million dollar home.

“Private property!” Mark McCloskey shouted repeatedly at the crowd, as he held a rifle. “Get out! Private property, get out!” Patricia McCloskey pointed a small handgun.

The McCloskeys nervously waved their weapons at the nonthreatening crowd, which included a Black man wearing a shirt that read “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”—a throwback to the nearby 2014 police killing of teen Michael Brown and the subsequent orgy of racist militarized police violence in Missouri that summer. But despite the McCloskeys’ dangerously inadequate muzzle discipline and their execrable attempts at intimidating and threatening marchers who posed no earthly threat to their stately domain, they have men—top men—on their side. Later Sunday, after Donald Trump had taken time out of his busy golfing schedule to supportively tweet video of an aged Florida campaign supporter on a gold cart screaming “WHITE POWER,” he retweeted video of the McCloskeys stupidly standing their ground.

This—as I have reported for most of my career now, since the unpunished slaying of Trayvon Martin by a criminally negligent, inherently dangerous, obsessively racist armed vigilante—is what “Stand Your Ground”–style gun culture has always been about: free license for white people to indulge in and act violently upon their most irrational fears and suspicions. Last night, the Twittersphere was aflutter with McCloskey defenders, arguing that the couple were simply exercising their supreme American rights: In this view, the Second Amendment, Stand Your Ground, and the Castle Doctrine—as in, “a man’s home is his castle”—permit armed Americans to essentially shoot anyone anytime on their own property, all the way out to the sidewalk. That’s not quite correct, as some lawyers have pointed out, and it’s also a non sequitur, since no one invaded the McCloskey compound, although a few brave souls did attempt to talk them down and encouraged the crowd of marchers not to engage the armed idiots.


But the entire appeal of the Trump presidency, like Stand Your Ground, has been to flatter the id-impulses of excitable whites when they construct nonwhite people—their existence, their persistent presence, and their agency—as inherent threats to public safety. This is the raison d’être of the modern Trumpist Republican Party and the gun lobby, whose favorite past spokeswoman made her bones by fantasizing on talk radio about urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans. Regarding the McCloskeys’ attempt at frontier justice in their upscale neighborhood, that ex-NRA spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, said it was “weak sauce to act like marching through residential neighborhoods isn’t an escalation of tactics we’ve seen the past month where daytime protests diminish into nighttime riots.” This is how Loesch demonstrates that she’s uninterested in truth, safe firearms operation, and the proper usage of the English word diminish.

It is also an ethos among Trump’s “Second Amendment people” that will grow long after Trump is dead. For evidence of this, one need look no further than Arkansas senator and folksy war addict Tom Cotton’s recent public thirst for an outside military occupation to pacify the unruly stateless natives of the District of Columbia, a cynical attempt to “own” liberals and capture Trump’s base by being as racist and dishonest as possible.

These conservatives are so bigoted that they don’t want the equal protections of a classically liberal civil society: They want the guarantees that come with a de facto monopoly on social violence. Who among us can reasonably doubt that, if he were forced to read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Tom Cotton would shop an op-ed declaring that the French simply hadn’t killed enough Black Algerians to establish “stability”? Similarly, this era of militant fundamentalist whiteness should force Americans to ask: Who needs dog whistles, or even legal institutions, when you have AR-15s, gas-powered golf carts, and “Keep America Great” flags?

Certainly not the millions of Americans like Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who, despite their wealth and advantages, have permitted themselves to be driven into paroxysms of fear and victimhood by their conservative white political benefactors. That fear—that they are no longer a silent majority, or a majority at all, assured of keeping what they have—has been brought to a crescendo by the pro-gun, anti-welfare right wing of American politicos who, four years ago, threw their support behind a scabrous, rapacious old bigot from Queens who once boasted that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue with impunity. The rest of us missed it, but when Trump said that, what a certain kind of armed American heard him say was that they could shoot someone in the middle of their Fifth Avenue. Trump’s desire to impose his will on other people by violence is what makes him relatable to the McCloskeys of America. You can only laugh so much at people this ridiculous and well-armed; the genius of the modern firearm is that even the inept can use it to kill. It’s like the presidency that way.

[TPFKA@W]

These 2 lawyers appear to be..thriving, at least in a monetary sense, so how is it some wind up in an eleemosynary state and can only crow about their superior state of being without any actual indication of it?
Such an interesting anthropological comparison.

[Econoline]