Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

EPA, the Enforcer of Federal Pollution Control Laws

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created in 1970, is the primary federal agency and key player with boundless authority to develop and enforce regulations to allegedly protect human health and the environment from harm caused by pollution. EPA regulations are issued based on the following Acts enacted by Congress:

Sweet Lucy

Sweet Lucy moves painstakingly slow and carefully, her arthritis twisting her back in pain, forcing her to slow down. The sunshine turns her hair into a fiery mane, warming and soothing her painful arthritic joints. She sits down in her favorite chair on the patio, taking in the gentle breeze with a sigh of elation and a smile when she notices the ducks floating on the nearby pond.

Leave Your Secularism at the Door

The atheist minority in this country is challenging everything the majority holds dear in their traditions, faith, and beliefs in order to satisfy their agenda of fundamentally changing America in their view of “social justice” promised by the hollow “hope and change.”

Christmas, the Season of Faith, Family, and Charity

Christmas was my Dad bringing home proudly a scraggly fir with sparse branches - fragrant with the smell of winter, tiny icicles hanging from the branches, miniature crystal daggers, melting on my mom’s well-scrubbed parquet floor. I never knew nor asked how he could afford it from his $70 a month salary that barely covered the communist subsidized rent, utilities, and food. No matter how bare the branches of my Christmas tree were, it was magical to me.

Art Imitates Painful Life

Radu Mihaileanu’s 1999 award winning movie, “Train of Life,” is a metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit and the desire to be free with a decidedly anti-communist and anti-Nazi message.

What is a “Living Wage?”

The recent fast food workers strike sponsored by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) demanded a “living wage” of $15 an hour. In progressive public policy, the “living wage is considered the minimum necessary for a worker to meet needs considered basic.” Who decides what the “basic needs” are? Are everybody’s needs the same? Why stop at $15, why not $50 an hour?

Sonny and the Red Shouldered Hawk

Sonny was running back and forth in the wet snow, barking furiously in the direction of the back yard fence. Scott Lingamfelter’s yellow lab was normally quiet, he rarely barked. Something must have really attracted his curiosity.

“Robbing” and the “War on Christmas”

Psychological projection was described by Sigmund Freud as an immature “defense mechanism in which a person unconsciously rejects his or her own unacceptable attributes by ascribing them to objects or persons in the outside world.” (Sigmund Freud, Case Histories II, p. 132)

You’re Too Old for MRI under Obama Care

It is not easy to find a doctor who takes Medicare in our area. When we found one that did, mom accepted him, no questions asked, based on his sweet, smiling demeanor. I was not so easily convinced. Call me from the Show Me State if you’d like.

Low Information Voters in the Information Age

As a former college teacher, I know why idealistic young people vote with their hearts and not based on logic or with their pocketbooks. They have yet to mature into serious tax paying adults.

Is Health Care A Fundamental Human Right or a Service?

How many Americans believe that health care is a fundamental human right? How many Americans believe that it is just a service that must be paid for just like any other service? Good doctors and nurses who train a long time and invest a lot of money in their education expect to be paid well for their expertise and unique skills.

Do Young Americans Understand Thanksgiving?

"Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be." - John Wayne While on errands today, I overheard shopkeepers wishing customers happy holidays. One young woman who handled my purchase wished me Happy Thanksgiving.

Everybody Loves to Hate Home Owner Associations

My plane landed safely at Reagan National Airport. We were deplaned on the tarmac in the dark, away from the gate, to find our black suitcases by the jet way in the lightless, windy, and below 20 degrees Fahrenheit night. After much confusion and shivering, we were loaded onto buses and delivered to the terminal.

Prairies, Wind Turbines, Solar Panels, and Fried Birds

The green energy policy in the United States which requires blending gasoline with ethanol produced from corn has expanded the corn fields to the detriment of prairies. According to AP, more than 1.2 million acres of grassland were lost to the federal requirement of blending gas with 10 percent ethanol, soon to be 15 percent ethanol. These former prairies are now planted with corn and soybeans.

Now it’s “Biotic” and “Fossil” Carbon

Global warming/climate change proponents are a hardy, determined, one-track mind group. They were brainwashed by the elitist powers that, unless we fundamentally alter our way of life and de-develop to subsistence level economies of the Middle Ages, the planet will perish. “We can’t keep developing infinitely on a finite world,” said one of the organizers of a recent protest in Canada.

1989 A Bittersweet Year

I watched recently the video of a speech given by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to an adoring crowd of communist useful idiots a few days before the dictator was arrested in December 1989. Ceausescu, a megalomaniac who appointed himself the Father of the Country, was touting the slave wages he had ordered raised for his unlucky proletariat from 700 lei per month to 800 lei.

“I Can’t Believe” This is Happening in America

My “I Can’t Believe This is Happening to America” list is growing larger by the day. It is so vast now, I can write a book. Would my book have an audience? Judging by the eagerness with which most Americans have embraced the transformational hope and change of our country to communist utopia, the answer is no.

Environmental Conservation Easements Trump-ing Property Rights

A new battle is waging in Virginia involving the restriction of land use in rural areas. The protagonists are the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) with its "comprehensive planning" of Virginia's rural areas and Donald Trump with his proposed Trump National Golf Club in Albemarle County near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Do Teachers Really Know Best?

Teachers have been maligned, derided, put on a pedestal, ignored, followed, awarded, lionized, and sued by parents. Administrators choose their favorite teachers as educators of the year, star teachers, or outstanding faculty, lavishing praise and accolades on those they deem the best team players.

Cyprus and Venezuela, Castro Care

Cyprus, a tiny island of less than one million people, is a small scale study in “big banking out of control,” “insane spending like there is no tomorrow,” coupled with “socialism runs out of other people’s money.” While researching the bailin and bailout of early summer, I found disturbing accounts of their socialized health care.