#rsrh Did EPA Director Lisa Jackson really call Republicans “jack-booted thugs?” [UPDATE: No.]

[UPDATE: Turns out that the answer is no.]

(Dammit, Ben Howe beat me to it at RedState)

I don’t have access to the original report from Greenwire, and I’m not familiar with Greenwire in general.  But if this is true, it’s pretty, well, damning:

Jackson accused House and Senate Republicans of deliberately misusing EPA’s assertion that it would need 230,000 people to enforce greenhouse gas regulations. The number, she said, was drawn from an agency document arguing for “tailoring” the regulations to exempt small businesses.

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

I mean, that’s supposedly a direct quote from a speech made earlier this week at the University of California (Berkeley); and if you need to have it explained to you why it’s a bad idea for elected officials to explicitly couch policy disagreements in this kind of violent rhetoric… well, you’re probably one of those people who got all, ah,  stirred up by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’s gay-baiting last week.  Which was even more low-rent than this outburst (assuming that Jackson really did say this) – but not by much.  At this rate we’ll end up seeing Energy Secretary Chu being carted off to jail for running a meth lab..

You know, it’s funny.  I knew, right from the start, that I was going to miss the functional adults from the previous administration.  But if you had told me, back in 2009, that I was also going to end up missing the ones from the administration before that I would have laughed in your face…

Moe Lane