Yes, and he was even arrested for his courage to stand against the government.
EPA arrests CNBC's Rick Santelli
By: Scott Ott, Examiner Columnist
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February 24, 2009
CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, whose passionate rant about the Obama housing rescue plan, and call for a "Chicago Tea Party" became a viral internet video, was arrested today by armed officers from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) covert special forces division.
Held without bail at an undisclosed "brownfield site", Santelli faces several counts of reckless endangerment of wildlife habitat after he threatened to rally capitalists to dump "derivative securities" into Lake Michigan as a way of re-enacting the Boston Tea-Party protest of 1773.
"Mr. Santelli is certainly entitled to his wacky economic opinions," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, "But if he had gone to the EPA website, clicked the regulations link, downloaded the document, printed it out and read it...he would have realized that dumping toxic assets into a lake is expressly forbidden. Read the document, Mr. Santelli. Read it."
Gibbs added, "I don't know where Mr. Santelli lives, but apparently, like most conservative critics, he has a callous disregard for the lives of the waterfowl, sturgeon and fresh-water mollusks that inhabit the Lake Michigan watershed. If the Chinese were shipping us toys made with derivative securities, we'd recall our ambassador and cut off relations. If R.J. Reynolds were mixing derivative securities with its tobacco, cigarettes would be banned. Do you know what's in those securities, Mr. Santelli?"
The press secretary later said that final question was rhetorical since, like the recently-passed stimulus act, "no one really knows what's in there yet."
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the family-friendly news satire site, and anchor of ScrappleFace Network News (SNN), seen on YouTube.
