Tag: policy

The Supreme Court looks hard at the EPA and doesn’t like what it sees

10:39 pm

The Supreme Court looks hard at the EPA and doesn’t like what it sees.

This case is about the EPA’s ongoing effort to steal property from private landowners.

The Sacketts wanted to build a home on a 0.63-acre lot near Priest Lake in the Idaho panhandle that they bought for $23,000. But after three days of bringing in fill dirt and preparing for construction in 2007, officials from the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ordered the activity stopped and said they suspected the land contained wetlands.

Months later, the agency sent the Sacketts a “compliance order” that said the land must be restored as a wetlands before the couple could apply for a building permit. The government acknowledged Monday that fines for failure to comply with the orders could be as much as $75,000 a day.

0 comments

The U.S. Agriculture Department announced Monday it will close nearly 260 offices nationwide.

9:24 pm

The U.S. Agriculture Department announced Monday it will close nearly 260 offices nationwide.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the goal was to save $150 million a year in the agency’s $145 billion budget. About $90 million had already been saved by reducing travel and supplies, and the closures were expected to save another $60 million, he said.

Though this is probably a good thing, the article only notes the amount supposingly saved, without showing how it would actually reduce the agency’s budget. Furthermore, I am puzzled why these cuts are necessary, since the USDA’s budget in 2011 still exceeds what it got in 2008. Both facts make me wonder if these cuts are nothing more than smoke-and-mirrors, designed to make us think they are trimming the budget when they actually are not.

0 comments

After 16 years in space, NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has been shut down

5:16 pm

After 16 years in space, NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has finally been shut down.

RXTE far exceeded its original science goals and leaves astronomers with a scientific bounty for years to come. Data from the mission have resulted in more than 2,200 papers in refereed journals, 92 doctoral theses, and more than 1,000 rapid notifications alerting astronomers around the globe to new astronomical activity.

“The spacecraft and its instruments had been showing their age, and in the end RXTE had accomplished everything we put it up there to do, and much more,” said Tod Strohmayer, RXTE project scientist at Goddard. The decision to decommission RXTE followed the recommendations of a 2010 review board tasked to evaluate and rank each of NASA’s operating astrophysics missions.

0 comments

A U.S.-Canadian partnership to re-establish migrating cranes has been halted by the FAA because it doesn’t meet its regulations.

3:05 pm

We’re here to help you! A U.S.-Canadian partnership to re-establish migrating cranes using human-powered ultralights has been halted by the FAA because it doesn’t meet its regulations.

FAA regulations say only pilots with commercial pilot licenses can fly for hire. The pilots of Operation Migration’s plane are instead licensed to fly sport aircraft because that’s the category of aircraft that the group’s small, open plane with its rear propeller and bird-like wings falls under. FAA regulations also prohibit sport aircraft – which are sometimes of exotic design – from being flown to benefit a business or charity. The rules are aimed, in part, at preventing businesses or charities from taking passengers for joyrides in sometimes risky planes.

What goddamn business is it of the FAA to “prohibit sport aircraft … from being flown to benefit a business or charity”? Isn’t that exactly how the aviation industry got started, taking passengers on short flights during the barnstorming era?

2 comments

Tucson school system loses $5 million in funding because it has refused to dump ethnic studies

12:57 pm

The Tucson school system has lost $5 million in funding because it refuses to close its Mexican studies program.

“The assertion that TUSD’s Mexican American Studies Program was designed and implemented only to promote cultural diversity and a greater understanding of the role of Mexican Americans in this nation is inaccurate and incomplete,” Huppenthal stated today. “Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies Program courses, curriculum and classroom materials have been found to (1) promote resentment toward a race or class of people; (2) be designed primarily for the pupils of a particular ethnic group; and (3) advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

In other words, this leftwing program was designed to promote hatred of whites and America within the immigrant Hispanic community, all good reasons for the local liberal, blue-state Democratic politicians of Tucson to want to support it, no matter the consequences.

0 comments

Why the Doctor Won’t See You

9:26 am

Why the doctor won’t see you.

Estimates are that ObamaCare will succeed in insuring 32 million otherwise uninsured people. If economic studies are correct, once these folks are insured, they will try to double their consumption of health care. On top of that, ObamaCare does something that Massachusetts did not do. It will force the vast majority of people who already have insurance to switch to more generous coverage. For example, everyone will have to be covered for a long list of preventive care and diagnostic screenings, with no copay and no deductible. Once people have this extra coverage, they will be inclined to take advantage of it.

Get prepared, then, for a huge increase in the demand for care. The result will be growing waiting lines — at the doctors’ offices, at hospital emergency rooms, at the health clinics, etc.

The pattern here has been the same worldwide, in every country that has tried it: Let the government interfere with the “invisible hand” of the market and the market gets distorted in ways that no one predicted that are also counterproductive.

2 comments

Playing Politics with the Constitution and the Law

6:07 pm

Playing politics with the Constitution and the law.

All of Obama’s appointments yesterday are illegal under the Constitution. And, in addition, as too little noted by the media, his appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is legally futile. Under the plain language of the Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB, Cordray will have no authority whatsoever.

The Dodd-Frank act explicitly requires Cordray’s confirmation by the Senate in order for his authority to go into effect. Prior to that confirmation he has no authority.

Once again, the issue here is what Obama’s actions tell us about him as an elected official, suggesting that he an arrogant man who is willing to trash the Constitution and create legal hell for business and the government all for the sake of election-year politics. Not a good recommendation at all.

8 comments
1 … 784 785 786 787 788 … 838