PART TWO

PART THREE

The Hill reports:

“I think this is a good first step to reining in an out-of-control, unelected bureaucracy. I think the EPA has gone way beyond its mandated duty and is now at the point of stifling industry in our country,” Paul said Thursday.

The bill would give EPA a 60-day deadline to veto Clean Water Act permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or else they will go forward.

Pretty clever. Those bureaucrats move pretty slow, you know, what with the time it takes to do environmental impact assessments and whatnot. They’ll never get their work done in 60 days or less. Brilliant!

The coal industry is upset at the EPA for quashing the huge Spruce No. 1 mine in West Virginia. Paul, who made some waves during his campaign for senator when he characterized the deaths of 29 coal miners at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine as an example of the “accidents and unfortunate things that do happen no matter what the regulations are,” is exactly the kind of libertarian senator that most big polluters dream of. But the ironic, or ridiculous, part of his “good first step” statement is of course the fact that the action taken by the EPA’s “unelected bureaucracy” was the clear result of an election.

Bush’s EPA was instructed to lay off the coal mining industry. Obama’s EPA came in with a different mandate, as a consequence of a Democratic candidate winning a presidential election. What Rand Paul is really trying to do with his new law is overturn the will of the people! Where’s the outrage?

In related news, is it time to ban use of the word “overreach”? If it isn’t Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, “overreaching” in his attack on public-sector collective bargaining rights, or the Wall Street Journal “overreaching” when it reported that Wisconsin’s Democratic senators were ready to give up, we now have Sen. McConnell declaring that “an overreaching Environmental Protection Agency in Washington is blocking new jobs for Kentuckians and Americans by waging a literal war on coal.”

Literally? I think McConnell may be guilty of some metaphorical overreach.

All of this was published at PrisonPlanet.com, one of the many websites founded and run by talk show host Alex Jones, along with his various acolytes. It was on Jones’ show, last week, that Sheen began his recent media blitz and probably ended his profitable sitcom. Anyone familiar with the long, strange career of Jones probably enjoyed his train-wreck appearance on “The View” Monday:

The fact that the executive producer of “Loose Change: Final Cut” — a man who made his name in Texas radio in the 1990s by campaigning for the construction of a new Branch Davidian church as a memorial to the cult members “murdered” by Janet Reno — was a guest on ABC’s daytime talk hour for ladies is a sign that 2011 ought to be about as weird as any year in our nation’s truly weird history.

9/11 Trutherism barely scratches the surface of the Alex Jones mythology, which encompasses almost every modern major conspiracy theory of the American left and right. He describes himself as a paleoconservative or a libertarian, rails against fiat currency and the Federal Reserve, opposes the Patriot Act and globalization, posits that the Bilderberg Group is in the process of establishing a New World Order, claims Michelle Malkin is softening up the populace for FEMA camps, and argues that carbon taxes will be used to establish a World Government. Sheen and Jones go way back (which means, yes, Sheen’s been nuts for a long time).

Jones is, first and foremost, a character. Which is not to say that he’s insincere. I’m sure he believes that our secret rulers are hashing out the details of the sovereignty-undermining NAFTA Superhighway at the Bohemian Grove. It’s simply to say that there’s a reason why Richard Linklater had Jones shouting his mad prophecies through megaphones in both “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.” The guy is a uniquely American type.

He’s also about as fringe a character as exists in our politics, excepting maybe overt white supremacists. Glenn Beck won’t endorse Trutherism. Michele Bachmann either backed out of appearing on his show or never agreed to do it in the first place.

But here’s then-candidate and current Sen. Rand Paul making one of his multiple appearances on “The Alex Jones Show” in 2009. “You’re a weapon we need to use against the New World Order,” Jones tells Paul:

Here’s another appearance from later that year:

The Ron Paul coalition was basically an uneasy alliance between serious libertarians and fringe Internet weirdos in thrall to conspiratorial explanations for all that ails the country. The weirdos tended to out-organize and outnumber the serious people, which is why it raised few eyebrows when the doctor’s son and campaign surrogate called into the Jones show. But with the GOP establishment halfheartedly embracing Paul’s message and wholeheartedly embracing his branding, and with Paul the Younger an actual United States senator, I can’t imagine anyone’s too happy to see national media attention lavished on Jones.

But the Tea Party connection to this entire Charlie Sheen circus is too entertaining to ignore.

Dear Concerned American,

They snickered when I said I came to the U.S. Senate to change Congress. But their laughter stopped when I sponsored the National Right to Work Act to free U.S. workers from forced unionization and break Big Labor’s multi-billion dollar political machine forever. President Barack Obama and Big Labor allies in the Senate are now feverishly scheming to bury the National Right to Work Act without a vote. So I have a question for you. Will you be my sledgehammer? Your signature on the petition to your Congressman and Senators is what is needed to bust through the opposition and force a vote on the National Right to Work Act.

Haven’t workers suffered enough? Just last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2010 only 6.9 percent of the private sector work force were union members. Throw in government workers, and the number pops up to 11.9 percent, but both figures represent 70-year lows. For all intents and purposes, the power of organized labor has been broken in the United States. Rand Paul is kicking a beaten cur.

In 1948, for comparison purposes, 31 percent of the U.S. workforce was unionized. But the writing was already on the wall. In 1947, after Republicans won majorities in both the House and Senate, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act over a Harry Truman veto, severely restricting labor’s ability to organize and strike.

Not uncoincidentally, the era of Big Labor’s most accelerated decline, which more or less began when Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controller’s strike in 1981, maps to growing income inequality in the United States. Imagine that! Less power for workers translates into a greater concentration of wealth at the top of the pyramid in the United States. Karl Marx would never have predicted such a turn of events.

So here’s Rand Paul, hero of the Tea Party, great defender of liberty, doing his best to ensure that inequality continues to expand, and that workers continue to get ground under the heel of Big Capital. Because it’s been working out so well for us, all these years.