Environmentalists embrace the ‘precautionary principle’ in opposing human development of land. In essence, the principle boils down to better-safe-than-sorry.
Though eco-crazies use the precautionary principle as a substitute for science that empowers government, Americans on the West Coast should put the teaching to another use: being skeptical of government assurances that radiation from Japan is too little to harm humans.
In addition, the radiation currently being measured does not take into account radiation emitted by pools of deadly spent nuclear rods, which only began to emit serious amounts of radiation a few days ago.
We will not know the true level of the threat until the radiation particles emitted as a result of the three explosions that devastated Fukushima hits the west coast over the weekend and into Monday.
The article goes on to recount similar guarantees that turned out to be fatally false. The most recent example involved Ground Zero workers being told – erroneously – that the air on site was safe to breathe. Tragically, hundreds of ground crew workers are suffering from crippling illnesses associated with inhaling toxic substances.
Now, we’re being told that buying over-the-counter potassium iodine pills verges on alarmism. If the price of a helpful supplement puts one’s mind at ease, have at it. After all, it’s not like the president and his party can boast a sterling track record when it comes to predicting outcomes in the economy, health care or job creation.
One of the many important votes the new House Republican caucus has taken includes yesterday’s vote to defund National Public Radio (NPR).
While the bill is expected to die in a Democrat-controlled Senate, the measure puts a majority of House members on record as supporting the complete defunding of a government agency that unabashedly promotes pro-state liberalism. One of the hardest things to do in politics is get a majority of legislators to vote “Yes” on something – especially when the bill has little chance of becoming law.
But this group of House Republicans is different. These votes and others are setting out clear distinctions between conservative and liberal spending priorities. In 2012, voters will know exactly how candidates prioritize taxpayer money.
Apparently, whatever jobs labor unions don’t drive overseas or eliminate entirely are made worse by them.
According to a just-released Gallup survey, “U.S. Union Workers Score Lower on Work Enforcement Index.” On a variety of measures, from the sense of employee/supervisor partnership to overall trust, unionized workplaces simply maintain substantially lower levels of workplace wellbeing. Ultimately, as the Gallup report states, unionized workplaces impact the factors that “in turn have well-documented associations to various desirable business outcomes, including customer engagement, turnover, absenteeism, and productivity.”
As critical standoffs between taxpayers and intransigent labor bosses in Wisconsin and across the nation continue, this new Gallup survey sheds some important information on the matter.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino explains how President Obama’s energy policy – namely, his opposition to opening up America’s vast domestic resources – amounts to a massive energy tax at a time when prices at the pump are soaring ever higher.
Glenn Spencer, Executive Director of the Workforce Freedom Initiative at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, discusses his organization’s recent 50-state study highlighting labor and employment regulatory regimes and their impact on economic growth.
Should she be successful, Angle may find the House a better fit than the Senate because of the lower chamber’s greater maneuverability for colorful members.
There’s a confrontation brewing between fiscal conservatives in the House GOP caucus and their leadership over how best to handle the budget crisis. House leadership wants to keep negotiating while passing short-term spending bills to avoid a shutdown. Fiscal conservatives like Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) are voting No and getting killed for it.
“I have no doubt that Speaker John Boehner and Republican Leader Eric Cantor and the rest of our leadership will privately, and if needs be, publicly denounce any effort to essentially bad mouth the intentions of Republicans that are simply fighting for fiscal responsibility,” the former GOP conference chair said Thursday morning on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
It’s funny to hear that the House leadership is fuming at fiscal conservatives for voting their principles when those same leaders say that the latest budget extension is the last one. With House leadership moving towards the fiscal conservatives’ position, maybe leadership is just ticked that they’re losing negotiations with both Democrats and Republicans.
Yesterday, the new House of Representatives took another step to make good on its campaign promises last fall to the American people.
The House Energy & Commerce Committee, by a 30 to 23 vote, approved a resolution prohibiting Obama’s rogue Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from imposing so-called “Net Neutrality” on the nation’s Internet sector. This follows last week’s 15-8 vote by the Communications and Technology Subcommittee on the same issue. The FCC doesn’t possess the legal authority to regulate the Internet via “Net Neutrality” in the first instance, as a unanimous court of appeals ruled last year. Further, Americans oppose this sort of Internet regulation by a solid two-to-one margin, and a rare bipartisan majority of 300 from Congress has formally instructed the FCC against pursuing this lawless course. Ignoring all of that, the FCC rammed through “Net Neutrality” by a partisan 3-2 vote in December.
Big-government activists claim that “Net Neutrality” is somehow necessary to prevent Internet service providers, who invest the tens of billions of dollars necessary to create the networks on which the Internet passes, from blocking various websites or maliciously discriminating in Internet traffic. But they cannot explain why that hypothetical epidemic of blockage has never occurred despite two decades of explosive Internet growth in our lives. And with good reason – any service provider that did so would quickly find itself out of business due to irate customers. But never mind that. What are facts, after all, against the desire to add yet another sector of the American economy to the Obama Administration’s regulation?
Fortunately, Americans know better. And just as fortunately, Congress and the courts are doing something about it.
Sanity in the debate over slashing the federal budget is coming from some odd places lately. Today, it’s courtesy of Politico’s Michael Kinsley, a liberal’s liberal if ever there was one. Writing in a terrific piece in the Los Angeles Times, Kinsley offers up some conservative wisdom in words better than any on the right have come up with:
Comparisons [of domestic spending programs proposed to be cut] with Pentagon spending are especially inappropriate, because defense spending is different. The payoffs from most types of government spending are incremental. You can decide how much you want the government to spend on, say, subsidizing symphony orchestras. There is no exact right answer: The more you spend, the more you get. More symphony orchestras are a good thing, but there are other good things you want the government to do, or of course you might want the government to stay out of it and lower your taxes instead.
But in the case of defense spending, notions like how much we can afford, or what it would be nice to have, are inappropriate. The value is not gradual or incremental. It is absolutely essential to spend whatever is necessary to keep our nation safe, and a total waste to spend a nickel more.
Another worthy use of federal money: having the passage above carved into the walls in the Democratic cloakrooms on Capitol Hill.
No one begrudges a man his pastimes, but veteran White House reporter Keith Koffler wonders whether President Barack Obama might be better off canceling his upcoming ESPN appearance and focusing – at least in public – on any number of world crises.
This morning, as Japan’s nuclear crisis enters a potentially catastrophic phase, we are told that Obama is videotaping his NCAA tournament picks and that we’ll be able to tune into ESPN Wednesday to find out who he likes.
Saturday, he made his 61st outing to the golf course as president, and got back to the White House with just enough time for a quick shower before heading out to party with Washington’s elite journalists at the annual Gridiron Dinner.
With various urgencies swirling about him, Saturday’s weekly videotaped presidential address focusing on “Women’s History Month” seemed bizarrely out of touch.
Koffler also notes the growing concern among members of Congress that Obama is AWOL in the deficit reduction debate, seemingly content to let the legislative branch decide whether to shut down the government if negotiations fail on Friday.
Forget debating whether this president is able to make the right decision when he gets a 3am phone call. So far, it looks like he can’t maintain focus during his regular workday.
In just a few hundred words a Wall Street Journal editorial writer summarizes how out-of-touch supposed ‘experts’ can be when it comes to how policies affect everyday Americans. The object lesson comes courtesy of New York Fed President William Dudley’s failed attempt to convince citizens in Queens that the economy is doing much better than they think.
The former Goldman Sachs chief economist gave a speech explaining the economy’s progress and the Fed’s successes, but come question time the main thing the crowd wanted to know was why they’re paying so much more for food and gas. Keep in mind the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of “core” inflation.
So Mr. Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said. “You have to look at the prices of all things.”
Reuters reports that this “prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring from the audience,” with someone quipping, “I can’t eat an iPad.” Another attendee asked, “When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?”
Mr. Dudley has been one of the leading proponents of negative real interest rates and quantitative easing, so this common-man razzing is a case of rough justice. If Mr. Dudley were wise, he’d take it to heart and understand that Americans aren’t buying the Fed’s line that rising commodity prices are no big deal. Unlike banks and hedge funds, they can’t borrow at near-zero interest rates, and most of them don’t have big stock portfolios. Wall Street and Congress may love the Fed’s free-money policy, but Mr. Dudley and Chairman Ben Bernanke ought to worry about losing the confidence of the middle class.
Ronald Reagan destroyed confidence in Jimmy Carter with one simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Any Republican presidential hopeful that can channel the frustration in Queens into a similarly concise indictment of President Barack Obama will be well positioned to oust yet another bumbling Democratic incumbent.
Yesterday, we noted that Obama’s 2012 reelection odds may not be as high as many currently assume, especially with even higher inflation, gas prices and international chaos on the horizon. Recalling 1991 and the supposedly invincible President George H. W. Bush, Byron York makes the same point with a brilliant summary quote:
Back in 1991, the pundits discussed how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job-approval rating of 90 percent. Now, they’re talking about how hard it would be to defeat a president with a job approval rating of 47 percent.”
Owsley Stanley, the famed 1960s “King of LSD” who helped pioneer the Grateful Dead’s trademark sound, has died following an auto accident in his adopted home country of Australia. So what led him to abandon America and flee to Australia, anyway?
It’s actually instructive regarding our current political climate. Apparently, he became convinced during the 1970s that global cooling was about to trigger a new ice age, so he relocated to the southern hemisphere, which he considered less subject to that supposed oncoming disaster. Mr. Stanley, of course, wasn’t alone in the global cooling hysteria. Among others, Newsweek and The New York Times repeatedly sounded the alarm, and continuing climate alarmist Paul Ehrlich predicted massive crop failures and starvation.
Rest in peace, Owsley Stanley. And thank you for the sobering lesson of the ephemeral nature of climate change alarmism amid the current fashion of global warming.
Washington is a town where being an intellectual means being relentlessly synchronized with the conventional wisdom, no matter how vapid. That’s how President Obama (no doubt a smart man by any reasonable standard — all presidents are, almost inevitably) has been elevated to the commanding heights of the cognitive elite by the Beltway press corps. Not so fast, says one guy who actually knows what he’s talking about.
In one brief run in a piece in the new edition of Newsweek, famed Harvard historian Niall Ferguson absolutely eviscerates President Obama’s glib reading of revolutionary history:
President Obama is reluctant to intervene in the bloody civil war now underway in Libya. As a senior aide told The New York Times last week, “He keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic.” I like that notion of organic revolutions—guaranteed no foreign additives, exclusive to Whole Foods. I like it because, like so much about this administration, it is both trendy and ignorant.
Was the American Revolution “completely organic”? Funny, I could have sworn those were French ships off Yorktown. What about Britain’s Glorious Revolution, the one that established parliamentary rule? Strange, I had this crazy idea that William III was a Dutchman.
The reality is that very few revolutions, good or bad, succeed without some foreign assistance. Lenin had German money; Mao had Soviet arms. Revolutions that don’t get some help from outside aren’t so much inorganic as unsuccessful.
President Obama is that cocky student always ready to wow the class with a raised hand and a lithe tongue. Dr. Ferguson is the kid who actually read the material and, after a certain point, just can’t take the prima donna’s hollow showboating. Nice work, Dr. F.
Since at least the FDR era, the Democratic Party has served as an umbrella for a motley coalition of special interest groups that have only one thing in common: demanding action from government. Most of the time, the competing priorities of the groups don’t come into direct conflict. But when they do, it is a delight to sit back and watch each carve up the other.
Today’s example comes from the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, businesses in the energy sector aren’t the only ones fighting the Obama Administration’s job-killing EPA regulations. Labor unions like the Utility Workers Union of America and the United Mine Workers are demanding a ceasefire on cap-it-or-close-it regulations that could force companies to close 18% of the nation’s coal factories if they fail to comply with the EPA’s proposed climate change rules.
Unions recognize that without factories workers get fired. Environmentalists don’t want to budge on what the Natural Resources Defense Council calls “the biggest public health achievement” of the Obama Administration.
Simple math is likely to break the stalemate. Unions in coal states account for millions of campaign contributions and thousands of votes. With Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all flipping from Obama in 2008 to the Republicans in 2010, don’t count on the president to sacrifice his reelection chances on the altar of green jobs.
If he does, union voters – and their dollars – just might stay home in 2012.
For every crisis there is an opportunity. The Detroit public school system is in a fiscal state of emergency with a mandate to eliminate its $327 million deficit. At first, leadership planned to close 40 of the district’s 142 schools.
Now, more innovative heads have prevailed. Yesterday it was announced that instead of closing schools the district would convert 41 of them into privately-run charter schools. Estimated savings to the taxpayer: more than $28 million. Estimated benefit to parents looking for a hand-up out of failing classrooms: priceless.
Of course, teachers’ union advocates bristle at the idea that nearly one-third of their Detroit membership will be laid off and required to reapply for jobs without costly pension funds and tenure protection.
But the data doesn’t support the status quo. Since Louisiana lawmakers transformed New Orleans into the only public school system where a majority of students attend charter schools, scores on student achievement exams have risen dramatically.
Louisiana’s reform was made possible by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Michigan’s ongoing financial crisis may be just the opportunity Detroit families need to get the education – and the tax relief – they deserve.
According to a Wall Street Journalsurvey of economists, unemployment for the November 2012 election will remain elevated at 7.7%. That would make it the highest for a presidential election since the Carter/Ford nailbiter in 1976, when it was 7.8%.
Ominously, the report adds, “Economists in the survey slightly raised the likelihood of recession over the next 12 months to 14%, largely due to rising oil prices.” The article endeavors to highlight the caveat that, “analysts point out that it is often the overall trend – rather than the level of joblessness – that determines an incumbent’s fate.” The 7.8% rate of November 1976 (in which the incumbent Ford lost), however, had declined from 9.0% in May of 1975, 8.3% one year earlier and 7.9% at the beginning of 1976.
Liberal pundits appear eager to claim that no Republican wants to take on the supposedly strong Obama, but this survey and storm clouds in the form of higher gas prices, overall inflation and worldwide chaos may suggest otherwise.
There is never a dull day in the Oval Office. In the midst of budget fights and 2012 politicking, President Barack Obama surely does not relish the foreign policy “distractions” that are dominating the news cycle, if not his personal schedule.
But Obama can’t continue to avoid his office’s innate leadership responsibilities in the wake of yet another humanitarian crisis. First, he dithered while an enormous oil leak ravaged the Gulf of Mexico. Then, he looked the other way while Middle East protests pushed the region into chaos. If Obama lets this pitch from wrecked Japan sail by with America’s big stick resting on his shoulder, his disastrous responses will be the perfect metaphor for his catastrophic presidency.
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