Excerpts from recent Nebraska editorials | WashingtonExaminer.com

Excerpts from recent Nebraska editorials | WashingtonExaminer.com

Excerpts from recent Nebraska editorials

July 9, 2012

North Platte Telegraph, July 1
Environmental Protection Agency flyovers
Imagine how much money could be saved by our government if once a year, a team of local, state and federal inspectors and law enforcement personnel could do a simple walk-through in all of our homes.
Imagine how much safer we would all be if those inspections turned up everything from meth houses to illegal guns to unpasteurized milk in the refrigerator. Our all-encompassing government could protect us from everything from second hand smoke, to those Big Gulp soft drinks that are making the kids fat, to tell-tale Happy Meal boxes that contained french fries instead of politically correct apple slices.
And while this good-doing team of inspectors was poking around in our homes, going through our sock drawers, looking for spoiled food in the back of our refrigerators, they could even test our window sills for evidence of lead-based paint.
Imagine how much better off we would all be, and how much safer, if we simply gave up our outdated notions of privacy, quaint beliefs that our homes as our castles, and that silly old requirement that a judge grant permission before our homes can be subjected to search.
Why on earth, if you have nothing to hide, would you object?
Obviously, we are being facetious here. We do not favor annual inspections by the government, no matter how efficient they might be. Our forefathers had a healthy disregard for unchecked government power when they addressed the issue of search warrants and what would become known as probable cause to invade someone's privacy.
With that in mind, we wholeheartedly concur with livestock officials in Nebraska who are objecting to a dozen recent flyovers by Environmental Protection Agency officials looking for violations of environmental regulations. This was in addition to the normal schedule of ground-based inspections by state officials.
Of those flyovers, Sen. Mike Johanns said, "They are just way on the outer limits of any authority to act as an eye in the sky."
"The EPA's surveillance program only acts to the deficit of trust this closed door agency has earned of late," Johanns said. "It's past time for Congress to put an end to EPA's use of aerial surveillance."
This comes as a time when, according to news reports, a wave of used unmanned drones — first used by the federal government overseas — is coming on the market, as updated drones are purchased by the federal government, and domestic law enforcement officials around the country are considering their use here at home.
It is truly Orwellian to consider a time in America when all of us — not just livestock producers — could be under surveillance at any time, in any place.
No wonder that, at a time when EPA also appears bent on crippling the nation's coal mining and power generation industries, many Americans consider themselves at war with their own government, battling endless reams of rules and regulations thought up by bureaucrats in Washington who never stand for election to any office.
We have never bought the notion that if you have nothing to hide, you should have no problem with someone searching your home. That isn't the country we have all known and loved.
We stand with the livestock producers on this one, and applaud our senators and congressmen for attempting to rein in a clearly out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency.
It is time for someone to clip the EPA's wings.