[UPDATE (Moe Lane): Turns out that E&E/Greenwire completely took the quote out of context: EPA Director Jackson was sarcastically referring to her own employees with the jack-booted thugs comment. We are thus retracting that portion of the article, and apologize to our readers for any inconvenience.]

Yesterday at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson fought back against criticisms aimed at the agency’s unprecedented regulatory plans.

According to the Environment & Energy Daily, Jackson, while giving a speech, blasted opponents  for latching on to the EPA’s request for 230,000 new employees.  She claims that the number was drawn from an agency document arguing for “tailoring” the regulations to exempt small business.

Bureaucratic speak can be tough, so let me translate.  It was widely reported that the EPA would need 230,000 employees in order to enforce the regulations that were proposed.  Lisa Jackson is not denying this.  What Lisa Jackson is saying, is that the only reason anyone knew that these hirings would be necessary was because, when they came up with a plan to exempt small businesses from these regulations, they noted that it would save them from having to hire 230,000 new employees.  Which means without the exemption, hello hundreds of thousands of healthy and happy bureacrats.   This does of course beg the question, “if these regulations are so incredibly important to the survival of our species, why would you be willing to exempt such a huge portion of the country?”

Her bureacratic speak aside, it was apparently enraging for Jackson that Republicans claimed the EPA wanted to hire 230,000 employees based on a document saying they’d need to hire 230,000 employees to enforce their absurd regulations.  So enraging that it caused her to lash out in what I’m sure would’ve been called “violent, fascist, police-state, authoritarian, terrorist-speak” had it been said while George W. Bush was president:

“Those jack-booted thugs knew that,” she said of the Republicans.

Jackson had already received some attention for saying that Republicans viewed coal fired power plants as “too dirty to fail.”  Personally, I found that to be revealing of the EPA’s motive, but either way, it seems that Jackson is becoming increasingly unhinged at the prospect that American’s may not want to lose 1.44 million jobs, increase power bills, as well as ultimately destroy the coal industry.

And don’t forget , Lisa Jackson knows what she’s doing.  The EPA is making a killing on American businesses by regulating them to death:

“For every $1 we have spent, we have gotten $40 of benefits in return. So you can say what you want about EPA’s business sense. We know how to get a return on our investment.” (emphasis mine)

Gotta love those benefits the EPA is getting!  (They’re known to the rest of us as useless regulatory fees that help grow the size of government)

Here’s hoping that the poor, defenseless EPA will finally be left alone so that they can get back to fulfilling President Obama’s mandate to end our dependence on foreign oil by destroying our economy by destroying the coal industry.