Team Obama spends $7 million to study “Environmental Justice”

WTH is “Environmental Justice”? It sounds like another way to flush $7 million of our tax dollars to a bunch of lefties.

Not even sure what the “Environmental Justice” noted in the headline above might be about? It’s likely that neither are most other Americans but that doesn’t prevent President Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, from sending $7 million of the taxpayers’ money to dozens of groups mounting academic and propaganda campaigns organized around that theme.

Judicial Watch reports that Jackson’s agency announced late last week that the $7 million will be awarded ”to study how pollution, combined with stress and other social factors, affects people in ‘poor and under-served communities.’ The agency refers to it as cumulative human health risk assessment research and the goal is to rid under-served communities of extensive pollution-based problems.”

Cash for Clunkers is Destroying Perfectly Good Cars

In an example of bureaucratic and leftist inefficiency, perfectly good cars are being destroyed under the guise of the 'Cash for Clunkers" program. What a waste.

From The Examiner:

The Cash for Clunkers program is stupid for a lot of reasons. Not only is it just another tax-payer bailout of the unions automakers, who can sell more cars at artificially depressed prices so they can keep the doors open. It also screws with the free-market (big surprise there) by pulling forward demand that isn’t there now, only to kill demand over the next 1-2 years. Killing off the clunkers also hurts the used car market, the spare parts market, and the auto repair business. If there aren’t any old cars to buy or fix, those guys are all out of a job.

But one of the most asinine parts of the plan is that they take old cars, many of which were being used as functional day-to-day transportation the day before, and destroy them. A perfectly good and useful machine destroyed for political reasons…

I know people will say that some of these cars were maintenance disasters to own and if the blue book is less that what someone will pay you for it, then there is no point in keeping it. But the Cash for Clunkers program requires that a working vehicle be destroyed. What about giving it to charity, or to your teenager, or to whomever deems the thing more useful than a $4,500 credit on a new car.

Watch a perfectly good Volvo engine bite the dust.