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The deepwater drilling moratorium may have been “lifted” in an election-season feint, but the eco-radicals have already accomplished their mission: Zero drilling permits issued. Today’s column spotlights the ideological engine behind the Obama job-killing machine: Carol “The Green Menace” Browner.

Update: The Senate Republicans on the Committee on Environment and Public Works have called on chairwoman Barbara Boxer to hold hearings on Browner’s data doctoring. See more below column.

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Throw Carol Browner under the bus

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2010

Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet. ASAP.

One of the Beltway’s most influential, entrenched and unaccountable left-wing radicals, Browner has now been called out twice by President Obama’s own federal BP oil spill commission and Interior Department inspector general. How many strikes should a woman who circumvented the Senate confirmation process and boasts a sordid history of abusing public office get?

Pushing the question — and shining a bright, hot spotlight on Browner’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering — should be a top priority of the new House GOP majority. Not least of all because Washington insiders are still buzzing about possible White House plans to increase her policy role and elevate her status with Team Obama.

First, the BP oil spill panel dinged her for disseminating misleading information to the public about the scope of the disaster. In the aftermath of the spill, she falsely claimed that 75 percent of the spill was “now completely gone from the system” and falsely claimed that the administration’s August report on the disaster was “peer-reviewed.” The false claim “contributed to public perception” of Browner’s calculation as “more exact and complete” than it was ever designed to be, the oil spill commission concluded in October.

This week, the Interior Department inspector general singled out Browner’s office for butchering peer-reviewed scientists’ conclusions in a key report about the administration’s preordained deepwater drilling moratorium. The scientists first blew the whistle on the administration’s monkey business this summer (pdf here). A federal judge sided with the misrepresented scientists and blasted the Interior Department’s big green lie that its moratorium was “peer-reviewed” and endorsed by “seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.”

As the court concluded: “Although the experts agreed with the safety recommendations contained in the body of the main Report, five of the National Academy experts and three of the other experts have publicly stated that they ‘do not agree with the six month blanket moratorium’ on floating drilling.”

It was Browner’s office behind the hatchet job. After cutting, pasting and tweaking the drilling moratorium report, one of Browner’s staff members sent a 2 a.m. e-mail back to the Interior Department on May 27 with edited versions that implied that the outside scientists endorsed the moratorium. The Interior Department inspector general tip-toed around Browner’s responsibility for fudging the truth, using passive language to describe how the edited versions “caused the distinction” between what the administration wanted and what the scientists believed “to become effectively lost.”

Nonsense. The distinction didn’t “become” lost. Browner’s office disappeared it, doctored it and obliterated it. Browner’s wordsmiths played Mad Libs with the report until it fit their agenda. There was “no intent to mislead the public,” Browner’s office claims. But this eco-data doctoring fits a long pattern of politicized science over which Browner has presided.

While head of the Clinton administration’s EPA, she ordered a staffer to purge and delete her computer files to evade a public disclosure lawsuit. Lambasted by the judge for “contumacious” behavior and contempt of court, Browner claimed it was all an innocent mistake — and blamed her young son for downloading games on her work computer that she was trying to erase.

During her tenure as EPA chief, she was also caught by a congressional subcommittee using taxpayer funds to create and send out illegal lobbying material to more than 100 grassroots environmental lobbying organizations. Browner exploited her office to orchestrate a political campaign by left-wing groups, who turned around and attacked Republican lawmakers for supporting regulatory reform.

According to the left-leaning Atlantic, Obama has increasingly relied on Browner’s counsel on issues beyond her environmental portfolio. Which means he’s listening to her advice and strategizing on how to apply her truth-fudging, transparency-evading tactics to the rest of the economy and domestic policy.

Browner, a darling of left-wing billionaire George Soros’ environmental justice circles and the wife of a top energy lobbyist, is a dangerous woman whose ideological zeal has helped power the Democrats’ war on prosperity. Sunlight, as always, is the best disinfectant — and a much-needed monkey wrench in the Obama job-killing machine.

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EPW GOP MEMBERS WANT HEARING ON BROWNER’S EDITING OF MORATORIUM REPORT

Time for Transparency with Browner, Architect of Cap-And-Trade Agenda

Washington, D.C.-Senators James Inhofe (R-Okla.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and David Vitter (R-La.), Republican Members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, demanded openness and accountability from Carol Browner, the President’s top climate change policy official, and architect of the Obama cap-and-trade agenda.

Inhofe, Barrasso, and Vitter called on EPW Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to hold a hearing on findings by the Interior Department’s Inspector General that an official in Browner’s office edited the Interior Department’s report on the Obama Administration’s Gulf drilling moratorium. The official edited the report to say that independent scientists who reviewed it agreed with the moratorium when in fact they did not.

In 2008, Sen. Boxer convened a hearing examining allegations that Bush White House officials interfered with decisions at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Center for Disease Control. Senators Inhofe, Barrasso, and Vitter strongly urge Sen. Boxer to pursue similar oversight of Carol Browner and her staff.

Sen. Barrasso, Ranking Member of the EPW Subcommittee on Oversight:

ORDER IT NOW

“Under Carol Browner’s watch, politics is trumping science. Congress must investigate the editing of scientific reports and secret meetings where nothing was put into writing. As the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Oversight, I will demand that hearings be held immediately. This ‘Czar’ should be accountable to the people, not the other way around.”

Sen. Inhofe, Ranking Member of the EPW Committee:

“For two years, Democrats refused to conduct oversight of the Obama Administration, while congratulating themselves this Administration would be different-that it would be open, transparent, and rely on the best available science. Yet we know otherwise: conducting negotiations on global warming regulations in secret, hiding the costs of its green jobs program, and now a sensitive report on the drilling moratorium manipulated to achieve political ends. This is all part of the Administration’s cap-and-trade agenda, designed to raise energy prices for consumers and destroy jobs. It’s time the American people fully understand what the architect of that agenda, Carol Browner, is doing with taxpayer dollars. To help with that, Sen. Boxer should conduct real oversight.”

Sen. Vitter, Ranking Member of the EPW Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety:

“This blatant disregard by Administration officials to push their job-crushing moratorium on the people of the Gulf Coast absolutely must be further investigated. The IG report that I requested in June and that was released this week revealed that the recommendations to move forward with the moratorium were directed by politics-not science or expertise. The Administration should explain themselves before Congress so the thousands of impacted Louisianians can hear why politics was put before their best interests.”