[VIDEO] Congressman: EPA Sexual Predator ‘Fed A Steady Diet Of Interns’

Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz had some harsh words for EPA Chief Administrator Gina McCarthy during a hearing Wednesday regarding the agency’s handling of an employee who repeatedly sexually harassed interns.

For the past couple of years, Republican lawmakers have been investigating reports of misconduct at the EPA from employees watching porn everyday while on the job to an agency employee who sexually harassed interns and was not reported to the authorities and continued to work at the agency for years.

“This is a predator who was fed a steady diet of interns,” Chaffetz told McCarthy during the hearing. “The first time this happened he should have been fired and he should have probably been referred to the authorities for criminal prosecution.”

“It happened 10 times

Chaffetz remarks come after the EPA inspector general Arthur Elkins told Congress that Peter Jutro, an EPA employee, “engaged in offensive and inappropriate behavior toward at least 16 women, most of whom were EPA co-workers.” Elkins also said very senior EPA officials “were made aware of many of these actions and yet did nothing.”

The IG also noted that Jutro was even promoted to be Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security where he again “engaged in such behavior toward an additional six women.”

Chaffetz went off on McCarthy over the agency’s failure to fire Jutro despite repeated allegations that he was sexually harassing women. Here is the exchange starting with McCarthy’s response to Chaffetz’s first remarks about a “predator who was fed a steady diet of interns”:

McCarthy: I am aware that eleven years ago there was an issue raised and it was handle appropriately is my understanding.

Chaffetz: Appropriately?! He got a promotion, he continued to work there.

M: No, he was carefully watched. The very minute we had any indication of impropriety, which was the recent issue, we took prompt action and in less than two months…

C: You moved his cubicle four spaces away. You think that’s appropriate? What do you say to the mother and father who sent their twenty-four year old to the EPA — she’s starting her career, and she’s harassed. Look at her statement. And you did the right thing by moving her four cubicles away?

M: Sir, we are doing everything we can to reinforce the policy and the law. We are developing procedures so there’s never a question about this, and we are doing everything…

C: That isn’t good enough! When someone is sexually harassed you send them to the authorities, you fire them.

M: I did send them to the authorities…

C: You sent them to human resources, who wanted to reprimand him, you never did send them to the criminal referral.

M: Human resources recommended the same thing as every manager, which was to proceed to removal, the man is no longer in federal…

C: That’s not what actually happened. It was in his record that they had had ten complaints — ten sexual harassment complaints against this gentleman and he was allowed to continue to be there. And as we heard testimony, a predator who was a fed a steady diet of interns.

M: I am aware of one complaint, eleven years ago, and the complaint that was just processed under my watch which resulted in his removal from public service within five or six weeks.

C: Did you fire him, or was he allowed to retire?

M: He was allowed to retire because that is his right. Even if he were fired, he’d be allowed to retire.

C: Do you believe this intern who said there was sexual harassment? Do that her statement is true?

M: Oh, I absolutely do…

C: Then why didn’t you refer it for a criminal referral? If you believe that her statement is true, and it was sexual harassment, and that is a violation of the law, and you allowed him to just retire, why didn’t you send that to the proper authorities?

M: We took the appropriate action.

C: Do you think it’s appropriate, do you think it’s against the law to sexually harass somebody at work?

M: I think it’s not only against the law, but it’s also against our policies, and we acted under the policies and the law when it led to the removal of him from public [office].

C: Did you let any of the law enforcement officer know?

M: Mr. Chaffetz, I’ve got two young daughters just about this woman’s age…

C: I’ve got two young daughters too! And I would never send them to the EPA, it’s the most toxic place to work I’ve ever heard of. This person, this twenty-four year old girl, she’s starting her career, she’s harassed over a three-year period and you admit that is a violation of the law. Why didn’t you do the criminal referral?

Via: Daily Caller

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Nevada's Road to Nowhere - and Why You Need to Drive It

 While Traveling From Michigan to Lake Tahoe, One Road Tripping Fanatic Recounts Why US 50 is One of the Greatest Roads He's Ever Traveled 

I first became aware of the Loneliest Road (US 50) when I was planning a trip to Lake Tahoe to attend my niece's wedding.  I found out that in 1968 Life magazine had dubbed US 50 in Nevada the "Loneliest Road in America" and that the State of Nevada would provide travelers of US 50 with a certificate and pin once they had had traversed it.  Well that did it for me, I was going to travel US 50 to Lake Tahoe.  When I traced the route on the map I also found that US 50 would be the shortest route to my destination as it passes right through South Lake Tahoe on it's way into California.  Coming down out of the Rocky Mountains on I-70 you pick up US 50 in Utah at Salinas.  It then passes  I-15 through Delta, Utah before you enter Nevada. 

It was a marvelous experience to get off the interstate on to US 50 and have this marvelous 2 lane blacktop road all to yourself.  I made it to Ely the first day and spent the night and the next day I made it all the way to Carson City. 

What was amazing to me was the 17 mountain ranges I crossed and the spacious valleys between them.  It's like the mountains ripple across Nevada like the waves out on the sea. In December they are mostly show capped and you can see them looming in front of you for many miles before you ascend the pass that crosses them.   The road slithers like a reptile, snaking between mountains like an ancient river bed before disappearing behind the next mountain range you must cross.

The vistas along US 50 are breathtaking. Coming down the Austin Summit pass in the Toiyabe Range was amazing, in my humble opinion. Here, you can see for miles and miles. As I told many a friend and family member, I felt the horizon was 360 degrees and looked like I could see the natural curvature of the Earth. The land seemed to envelope me and I felt naked and exposed as if gravity would fail me and I would float up into the great American west. 

Via: National Review

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How Mike Lee Is Changing The Republican Party

Former-President Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has a fine op-ed in today's Washington Post, heaping praise on Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Gerson writes:

For those who expect and fear an irrepressible conflict between the tea party and the Republican establishment, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is a hopeful anomaly. Should this anomaly become a trend, the GOP’s future would be considerably brighter.

Few have done more to burn ideological bridges within the GOP. Yet no one from the tea party side is now doing more to construct them....

Lee has been proselytizing for a “comprehensive anti-poverty, upward-mobility agenda” — making him one of the few Republican politicians talking in any sustained way about stalled economic mobility, stagnant middle-class wages and economic inequality. To this, Lee has added a dollop of populist “anti- cronyism,” proposing to simplify the tax code and rein in the big banks. Setting aside the policy details, Lee makes strikingly sane observations about the Republican future....

The subtext here is not a challenge to establishment Republicanism, which would offer no ideological objection to the role of government that Lee described. The real contrast is with libertarianism, particularly of the Rand Paul variety. And Lee has come close to making his criticism explicit. “Freedom means ‘we’re all in this together,’?” he said. “The conservative vision for America is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie: a nation of ‘plain, ordinary kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too.’?”

This is a good, general prescription for Republican recovery: More Frank Capra. Less Ayn Rand.

Via: Townhall
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Senator Mike Lee Critiques the War on Poverty

If you haven’t read Utah Senator Mike Lee’s remarks [Bring Them In] at the Heritage Foundation’s Anti-Poverty Forum you really owe it to yourself to do so. It is probably the most succinct conservative critique of modern government anti-poverty programs in recent decades.

When President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union address it represented, arguably, the high water mark for the acceptance on liberal ideology in America. The essence of the speech was a singleminded devotion to the “the perfectability of man”: the notion that perfection can be achieved on Earth through the efforts of man, or in the case, the federal government. Never mind that some famous guy, his name escapes me at the moment, warned us all that the poor will always be with us.

As is so often the case, federal intervention becomes a self-licking ice cream cone where the resources earmarked for the eradication of poverty do little more than sustain the bureaucracy dedicated to eradicating poverty. And for good reason, if poverty ends so do the jobs associated with its eradication.

The outcomes have been dramatic and had they not been visited upon those at the margins of society would have resulted in long prison sentences for all involved. Instead of declaring a war on poverty, by Johnson’s actions he actually began the institutionalization of poverty and hopelessness as a lifestyle.

Via: Red State

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Ryan emerges a possible dealmaker in fiscal crisis, with ObamaCare still in mind

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan is emerging as the key congressional Republican in negotiating with Democrats to solve Washington’s two fiscal crises with a plan that only delays efforts to defund ObamaCare, not derail them.

Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is proposing a plan to increase to the federal debt that is tied largely to simplifying the tax code, make enough changes to Medicare to offset cuts to domestic spending and defense programs and a solid promise from Senate Democrats and President Obama to continue talks about reopening the federal government, other fiscal crisis.

Failure to increase the debt limit within roughly the next week would result in the country defaulting on its debt for the first time in history. The partial government shutdown started Oct. 1.

“I'm working to get a budget agreement,” Ryan told a group of conservative meeting this weekend in Washington. “We need to completely rethink government’s role in helping the most vulnerable. … That means we can never give up on repealing and replacing ObamaCare.”

His remarks, in a video message for the Value Voters summit, were reassuring to conservative concerned that Ryan in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece seemed to have abandon the idea of defunding or altogether dismantling ObamaCare as part of fiscal negotiations -- considering how hard they, led by Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz, Texas, and Mike Lee, Utah, worked to garner support for the effort.  

Via: Fox News

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‘Democratic’ and ‘Anti-Business’ Are Becoming Synonymous

Forbes’s recently released list of “The Best States for Businesses and Careers” provides further evidence of the Democratic party’s striking erosion as a party of economic growth and prosperity.  Based on their votes in the most recent presidential election, all but three of Forbes’s top-10 states are Republican-leaning, while all but two of its bottom-10 states are Democratic-leaning. 

The top-10 states on Forbes’s list — Utah, Virginia, North Dakota, North Carolina, Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Iowa — voted for Mitt Romney by an average margin of 14 percentage points.  Meanwhile, the bottom-10 states on Forbes’s list — California, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Vermont, West Virginia, Mississippi, Michigan, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Maine — voted for President Obama by an average margin of 13 points.  That’s a 27-point swing from Romney to Obama as we move from the top-10 states to the bottom-10 states.

Forbes rated the states based on six factors: “business costs,” “labor supply,” “regulatory environment,” “economic climate,” “growth prospects,” and “quality of life.”  Forbes rated 62 percent of Obama’s states as being below average and 63 percent of Romney’s states as being above average.  Obama won only 33 percent of Forbes’s top-15 states but 73 percent of its bottom-15 states.

Via: Weekly Standard

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UTAH: Mia Love leads Matheson by 12

With the presidential race so close, we haven’t had much of an opportunity to pay attention to Congressional races — but the race in Utah’s 4th District deserves a look today.  Mia Love looks poised to become the first African-American woman elected to Congress as a Republican, according to a new Mason-Dixon poll in her district, which puts her up by twelve points over six-term incumbent Jim Matheson (via Ladies Logic):

Matheson trails Republican challenger Mia Love 52 percent to 40 percent in a new poll conducted for The Salt Lake Tribune, a large margin in a race where, even a few days ago, both campaigns were predicting a tight finish. …

The Tribune poll, conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, found that the coalition of Democrats, independents, moderate Republicans and women that Matheson has united in past elections is failing to coalesce this time around, with just 9 percent of Republicans crossing over to support him.

That’s the key to this election.  The 2nd District has a Cook rating of R+15 [see update], which suggests that Matheson has benefited from an ability to look moderate, combined with the blessing of not having to face a charismatic and inspiring challenger.  Even the 12-point lead in this poll slightly underperforms the Republican advantage in this district, but that’s within the MoE and probably has more to do with Matheson’s status as an incumbent.  The Salt Lake Tribune also notes, though, that Love has done what other challengers couldn’t — match Matheson’s spending.

Matheson claims that his own poll shows him leading Love by two, and that 19% of Republicans support him.  He told the Tribune that he would release the poll “to all of his supporters,” which would be the first time Matheson made any of his internal polls public.  That sounds like a desperate attempt to mitigate the perception that his is a lost cause and not worth the effort on Election Day.  In a presidential election that kind of surrender seems rather unlikely — people will want to vote for President regardless of how Matheson’s doing — but the concern is still quite telling.

Update: I had forgotten that the 4th is a new district, and that the 2nd was Matheson’s old district.  There are no Cook Report stats for UT-04 that I could find.

Via: Hot Air

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GOP's Love: Focus should be on economy, not 'in the weeds' on abortion

Mia Love, the Utah mayor and rising GOP star running for Congress, backed her party’s stance on abortion but said members shouldn’t be “getting into the weeds on this.”

Love told “Fox News Sunday” that she is pro-life and that Republicans are trying to protect the lives of unborn children, but candidates and elected officials should at this point “just focus on the economy.”

She also dismissed Democrats’ argument that Republicans are waging a war on women, saying it is “a way to distract from failed policies.”

Love, who is currently mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, is trying to unseat six-term incumbent Democrat Jim Matheson, who is leading in polls. She won the nomination at the state GOP convention this spring with more than 70 percent of the vote and has national support from such party leaders as Mitt Romney and House Speaker John Boehner.

The first-generation Haitian-American stepped into the national spotlight last month with a well-received speech at the Republican National Convention.

On Sunday, she defended a decision as a city council member to increase taxes, saying the decision in part helped the then-largely agricultural Saratoga Springs prosper and achieve its AA-plus bond rating.

  

Love also argued for her plans to cut federal spending that includes reducing subsides for college tuition, despite still having outstanding loans.

Via: Fox News

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