Monday, June 11, 2018

This post is about a stupid fucking asshole, Scott Pruitt. President Fucktard Trump chose this idiot to be the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt has been doing everything he can to destroy the environment. Trump said he's doing a great job. I'm not making this up.

Scott Pruitt is a know-nothing creationist. Evolution makes this moron cry. Pruitt is also a denier of human caused global warming. His job is protecting the environment but he is trying to destroy the environment. If it was up to me he would be in prison for excessive stupidity.

This is from Wikipedia:

Pruitt represented Tulsa and Wagoner Counties in the Oklahoma Senate from 1998 until 2006. In 2010, Pruitt was elected Attorney General of Oklahoma. In that role, he opposed abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the Affordable Care Act, and environmental regulations as a self-described "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda."[3] In his campaigns for Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt received major corporate and employee campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, taking in at least $215,574 between 2010 and 2014 even though he ran unopposed in the latter year.[4] As Oklahoma's Attorney General, Pruitt sued the Environmental Protection Agency at least 14 times regarding the agency's actions. In 2012, Pruitt was elected as chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association and re-elected for a second term in February 2013.

Pruitt rejects the scientific consensus that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are a primary contributor to climate change.[5]

By May 2018, Pruitt was under at least 12 separate investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the E.P.A. inspector general, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and two House committees over his spending habits, conflicts of interests, extreme secrecy, and management practices. Pruitt made frequent use of first class travel as well as frequent charter and military flights. As EPA administrator, Pruitt leased a condo in Washington D.C. at a deeply discounted rate from a lobbyist whose clients were regulated by the EPA. Pruitt further caused ethics concerns by circumventing the White House and using a narrow provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to autonomously give raises to his two closest aides of approximately $28,000 and $57,000 each, which were substantially higher than salaries paid to those in similar positions in the Obama administration, and which allowed both to avoid signing conflicts of interest pledges.

There is much more information about this asshole at Wikipedia.

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This New York Times article about Scott Pruitt was very well done and I agree with the whole thing. Pruitt is a fucking lunatic.

New York Times - Scott Pruitt Smells Like the Ritz

By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist
June 9, 2018
448 comments

Finally, Scott Pruitt’s mission on this warming and environmentally degraded planet — his destiny, if you will — has come into focus. It’s not merely to pollute. It’s not simply to grift. It’s not to distill, in one compressed male form, the cupidity and corruption associated with government at its rottenest.

It’s to do all of that while fragrant and moist. And so, according to a report on Thursday in The Washington Post, he had the beleaguered members of his bloated security detail drive him from one Ritz-Carlton to another in pursuit of a favorite lotion available at that fancy hotel chain.

The heart wants what it wants. So, apparently, does the epidermis.

I’ve been hesitant to devote an entire column to Pruitt, the morally squalid head of the Environmental Protection Agency, because whenever you think that the final stratum of muck about him has been dredged up, you learn that there’s another fetid layer lower down. His ethical transgressions, unlike the fossil fuels that he champions, are a renewable resource.

A Times editorial with the headline “Scott Pruitt Has Become Ridiculous” appeared about two months ago, before the revelations that he had sent an aide on a hunt for a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, and had asked another aide to investigate what it would take to set his wife up with a Chick-fil-A franchise. One of those aides quit last week. I hope it’s to write a tell-all: “The Devil Craves Poultry.”

Americans crave answers — and deserve them. Mainly they want to know how Pruitt perseveres, soldiering through the mortifications and shrugging off the investigations, with skin as thick as it is luxuriantly lubricated. Where does he get the strength to slither out of bed each day and face a flabbergasted and repulsed world anew? And why hasn’t President Trump canned him already?

I cannot help with the first question, but I’m all over the second.

I can tell you that Pruitt’s saving grace isn’t his disregard for America’s land and water, though that helps. Some big-money and small-government types who stand by President Trump treasure Pruitt as an unswerving ideologue who has never met a regulation that he was reluctant to dismantle, a toxin that he was loath to disseminate or a special interest that he wouldn’t envelop in a bear hug, provided that there’s something in the embrace — money, or maybe just moisturizer — for him.

Possibly Pruitt gets an assist from God. He professes to be deeply religious. That facet of his persona doesn’t get as much attention as others, largely because it’s so dissonant with his determination to notch all seven deadly sins. By my tally he’s more than halfway there, having definitely covered greed, gluttony, envy and pride. Only three to go.

He’s a deacon of his Baptist congregation back home in Oklahoma. He was a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has disputed evolution, saying that there are not “sufficient scientific facts” to prove it, and he has spoken of years spent “earnestly praying” and “asking the question I don’t think we ask enough: God, what do you want to do with me?” The answer, apparently, was tuck him in a special soundproof phone booth at the E.P.A. Pruitt ordered the construction of one. It cost $43,000.

Conservative Christians somehow see him as one of their own, and Trump sees conservative Christians as crucial, loyal disciples. This works powerfully in Pruitt’s favor.

But it’s not his ultimate inoculation or absolution. He benefits principally from the fact that the very behavior of his that’s an insult to decency is a compliment to Trump: It draws on Trump’s traits and attests to Pruitt’s ambition to ascend to the boss’s regal level and be just like him. In that sense Pruitt’s defects amount to a tribute. Where you see a pathetic scammer, Trump sees a pipsqueak version of himself.

From a certain demented angle, it’s almost poignant. Pruitt wants to sleep on a Trump-branded mattress because he dreams Trump-branded dreams. The unnecessary lights and sirens that Pruitt requests for his motorcade mirror the necessary ones that the president doesn’t even have to demand.

The costly routing of so many supposedly work-oriented trips through Oklahoma so that Pruitt can spend a self-indulgent amount of time back home: Doesn’t that recall the president’s constant breaks at his resorts in Florida and New Jersey?

The phone booth, the body guards, the $3.5 million on security during Pruitt’s first year in the job and his move to acquire specially armored vehicles: Don’t they bespeak a paranoia and imperiousness on a par with the president’s?

As a businessman Trump was known for finagling suspicious bargains and fleeing steep bills, all in the interests of getting more for less, living larger than he otherwise might and enriching himself. Pruitt’s $50-a-night condo in Washington, courtesy of an energy lobbyist’s wife, was like a Trump real-estate deal on training wheels.

And his first-class plane tickets, remember, weren’t the whole or the worst of his high-flying ambitions. Two administration officials told The Times about a proposal — eventually scuttled — to buy a $100,000-a-month charter aircraft membership so that Pruitt could use private jets for his official government business. You could consider it a fun-size Air Force One.

On Friday the president actually admitted that Pruitt wasn’t exactly a model cabinet member, and said, regarding Pruitt’s future, “We’ll see what happens.” But he also insisted that Pruitt was “doing a great job within the walls of the E.P.A. I mean, we’re setting records.”

For what? The number of investigations into an E.P.A. administrator’s conduct that can be spawned? Pruitt is the subject of a dozen now, and Trump doesn’t seem to care all that much, which is another way of saying that this fish stinks from the head.

Perhaps that’s why Pruitt is set on smelling like the Ritz.

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A version of this article appears in print on June 10, 2018, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Scott Pruitt Smells Like the Ritz. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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"Conservative Christians somehow see him as one of their own, and Trump sees conservative Christians as crucial, loyal disciples. This works powerfully in Pruitt’s favor."

Christians are stupid fucking assholes.

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There is another New York Times article from two month ago about Scott Fucktard Pruitt and here it is. Totally free thanks to this blog.

New York Times - Scott Pruitt Has Become Ridiculous

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

April 17, 2018
964 comments

Despite stiff competition, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is by common consensus the worst of the ideologues and mediocrities President Trump chose to populate his cabinet. Policies aside — and they’re terrible, from an environmental perspective — Mr. Pruitt’s self-aggrandizing and borderline thuggish behavior has disgraced his office and demoralized his employees. We opposed his nomination because he had spent his career as attorney general of Oklahoma suing the federal department he was being asked to lead on behalf of industries he was being asked to regulate. As it turns out, Mr. Pruitt is not just an industry lap dog but also an arrogant and vengeful bully and small-time grifter, bent on chiseling the taxpayer to suit his lifestyle and warm his ego.

Any other president would have fired him. Mr. Trump praises him. “Scott is doing a great job!” the president tweeted on April 7. He agrees with Mr. Pruitt on policy — indeed, many of the administrator’s worst moves have been responses to Mr. Trump’s orders. And — no small chiseler in his own right — Mr. Trump seems to care not a whit about Mr. Pruitt’s mounting ethical problems, which have lately reached a point where Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, has reportedly told the president that he should think seriously about letting Mr. Pruitt go.

These problems began innocently enough, with the revelation last year that Mr. Pruitt had ordered up a $43,000 soundproof phone booth for his office so that his employees could not overhear him. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said Monday that the purchase violated the law because the E.P.A. had not notified Congress before incurring the expense. But what seemed like early onset executive paranoia quickly metastasized. Citing security concerns, Mr. Pruitt insisted on flying first class, against government custom, and when possible on Delta Air Lines (not the federal government’s contract carrier), so that he could accumulate frequent-flier miles. He asked his staff to schedule trips back to Oklahoma so he could spend weekends at his home there. “Find me something to do,” he said, according to evidence presented to Congress by Kevin Chmielewski, who was the E.P.A.’s deputy chief of staff until he was forced to resign after raising objections to Mr. Pruitt’s excesses. Mr. Pruitt used his own security detail and hired private security guards during a trip to Italy — at a cost of $30,000 — when embassy guards were available free.

In addition, he tripled the size of his security detail, also at taxpayer expense. He ordered bodyguard coverage 24 hours a day. He insisted on flashing lights and sirens to take him to the airport and to restaurants, a perk customarily reserved for the president and vice president. He rented a room at $50 a night, well below market rates, in a Washington condominium co-owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist with business before Mr. Pruitt’s agency.

He didn’t get everything he and his team wanted: a bulletproof sport utility vehicle, for instance, equipped with special tires designed to keep moving even when hit by gunfire; a $100,000-a-month contract to fly on private jets. But heaven help the E.P.A. staff members bold enough to challenge these demands. The Times reported this month that five agency officials — including Mr. Chmielewski — who objected to Mr. Pruitt’s costly requests and security upgrades were dismissed, reassigned or demoted.

One frequently overlooked truth about Mr. Pruitt amid these complaints is that for all his swagger he has actually accomplished very little in terms of actual policy — a wholly desirable outcome, from our standpoint. While hailed as the administration’s foremost champion of deregulation, he has yet to kill or even roll back any significant regulations that were in place when Mr. Trump came to office. (The Obama administration’s important Clean Power Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants had already been blocked by the courts.) He has delayed a few rules, but even these delays have been overturned or challenged. Most of his actions are in the proposal stage, and many will not be finalized for years, if ever.

That does not mean Mr. Pruitt has been without baleful influence. He helped spearhead the effort to get Mr. Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change, a major insult to every other nation on earth, all of which have agreed to limit planet-warming greenhouse gases.

By endless repetition, he has reinforced in the public mind the lie that Republicans have peddled for years and Mr. Trump’s minions peddle now, that environmental rules kill jobs, that limiting carbon dioxide emissions will damage the economy, that the way forward lies not in technology and renewable energy but in digging more coal and punching more holes in the ground in search of oil. And, on the human level, he has been in the forefront of the administration’s shameless effort to delude the nation’s frightened coal miners into thinking coal is coming back, when any comeback is unlikely not because of regulation but because of strong market forces favoring natural gas and renewables.

Should Mr. Pruitt choose to depart — even some Republicans are complaining about his behavior — or by some miracle should Mr. Trump fire him, the administration’s appalling environmental policies are unlikely to change. The recently confirmed deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal industry lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt’s deregulatory zeal and fealty to the fossil fuels industry. Mr. Wheeler was for many years chief of staff for James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and long the Senate’s most determined denier of the accepted science on global warming.

So far as is known, however, Mr. Wheeler, a Washington insider, has no lust for bulletproof S.U.V.s or other trappings of power. Such modesty by itself can only lift the moral tone of a once-noble office that Mr. Pruitt has besmirched.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 18, 2018, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Scott Pruitt, Man of Little Shame. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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