Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Current Events - July 17, 2013


Rolling Stone’s strange, dreamy cover of terrorist

It’s interesting, and infuriating.  We’ve already seen the rise of what Twitchy calls the “Jaharem” of admirers of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, in custody since murdering a police officer and engaging in a firefight with law enforcement, then hiding and bleeding in a boat the rest of the day until he was discovered.  Now Rolling Stone offers a profile of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother of the duo who killed three and injured hundreds of others at the event, including an eight-year-old boy shredded by their bomb.
Why not give Tsarnaev the soft focus treatment for that, huh?

RS at least notes that Tsarnaev became “a monster,” so why pose him as a sultry dreamboat for the cover?  They didn’t need to make him look maniacal or diabolical to get the point across.  One of the surveillance photos would have been sufficient to get the point across, or one of the pictures of Tsarnaev with his friends if they wanted to press the innocence-lost angle.  Instead, they give Tsarnaev the celebrity treatment, complete with soft focus, sepia wash, and bedroom eyes.  That’s why the credit on the cover says “Illustration by Sean McCabe.”

A more minor nitpick comes from the teaser for its cover story.  Rolling Stone insists on using the name “Jahar Tsarnaev.”  That may be how the first name is pronounced, but his name is spelled “Dzhokhar.” It certainly sounds chummy and intimate to use the nickname version his friends used, but that’s hardly appropriate for a news story about a “monster.”  Why not use his actual name? Did Rolling Stone assume its readers couldn’t figure out how to say it? As Allahpundit notes in the Green Room, the Jaharem isn’t pleased with the magazine despite the soft-focus treatment Tsarnaev gets on the cover.
 http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/17/rolling-stones-strange-dreamy-cover-of-terrorist/

McCain Orchestrates Another GOP Surrender

Sen. John McCain spent the weekend negotiating with Majority Leader Harry Reid on a deal to avert Reid's threatened use of the "nuclear option" to change Senate rules to eliminate filibusters on Presidential nominations. Through his efforts, McCain was able to secure a complete GOP capitulation on 7 pending nominations. Reid secured all the benefits of exercising the "nuclear option" without the political cost of actually using it.  

Under the McCain deal, the GOP will provide enough votes to secure the 60 votes needed for cloture and proceed to final consideration of the 7 nominees. In exchange, Reid agreed to replace two current union attorney nominees with two alternative union attorney nominees. McCain's swift surrender ensures that the "nuclear option" is a permanent fixture of the nomination process.

GOP objections to many of the pending nominations were not minor. The first nomination to be approved under the McCain deal was Richard Cordray to be the first Director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB was enacted under the Dodd-Frank legislation and holds sweeping powers over all aspects of the financial and credit sector. 

When Cordray was first nominated two years ago, McCain and all but 2 GOP Senators signed a letter vowing to block any nomination unless reforms were made to the agency. A major concern was that Congress was specifically prohibited from exercising any oversight over the Agency's budget. The promise to block that nomination wasn't prompted by concerns about a specific nominee, but a fundamental political principle. McCain's deal is further confirmation that principle are cheap in Washington. 

Theoretically, McCain's surrender preserves the right of Republicans to filibuster future nominations. Practically speaking, however, that right has been permanently ceded. If the GOP is willing to fold when it has serious objections to pending nominations, it will easily surrender again in the future the next time Reid threatens the "nuclear option." If the GOP isn't willing to draw a line over flawed nominees like Cordray or Thomas Perez, it never will be. 

Reid believed that he could eliminate the filibuster for nominations with a simply majority vote. Democrat Sen. Carl Levin on Tuesday said he believed the change required 67 votes and stated he would vote against Reid's rule change. It would have been better for the GOP to force Reid to vote on the change. Senators would have had to go on record whether they supported Reid or Levin's interpretation of the rules. With a number of vulnerable Democrats up for reelection next year, a vote could have carried political consequences. 

McCain, however, helped the Democrats avoid a risky political vote. He also ensured that he is on Harry Reid's speed-dial the next time the GOP raises objections to an Obama nomination. 


http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/17/mccain-orchestrates-another-gop-surrender

Republicans Get Filibusted

Democrats end the 60-vote Senate rule for presidential nominees.

Senate Majority Leader Rich Trumka, er, Harry Reid held a gun to the head of Republicans on the filibuster, Republicans blinked, and President Obama and the AFL-CIO will now get their nominees confirmed for the cabinet and especially a legal quorum for the National Labor Relations Board. 

Cut through all the procedural blather and that's the essence of the Senate's "deal" Tuesday over the 60-vote filibuster rule. While Democrats didn't formally pull the trigger of the "nuclear option" to allow a mere majority vote to confirm nominees, they have now established a de facto majority-vote rule. Any time Democrats want to do so, they can threaten to pull the majority trigger.

***

Republicans might as well acknowledge this new reality, even if it means admitting defeat in this round. GOP Senators should state clearly for the record that the next time there is a GOP President and a Democratic Senate minority wants to block an appointment with a filibuster, fuhgedaboutit. Majority rule will prevail.
Otherwise Republicans will be conceding that the filibuster remains the rule—except when Democrats say it isn't. Democrats would be able to use the filibuster to block confirmation of GOP nominees the way they did John Bolton for U.N. Ambassador during the Bush Presidency, but Republicans couldn't return the favor. Bottom line: This week Democrats killed the filibuster against executive-branch appointees when the same party holds the White House and Senate. 

They did so, moreover, to serve AFL-CIO chief Trumka, who all but ordered Mr. Reid to threaten the nuclear option. Big Labor desperately wants a quorum of at least three National Labor Relations Board nominees to keep issuing pro-union orders that have become the NLRB's standard operating procedure in the Obama years. Today there are only three board members and Chairman Mark Pearce is set to resign on August 27.

Under Tuesday's Senate deal, the Obama Administration will agree to withdraw the nominations of the two NLRB board members whom Mr. Obama first appointed in January 2012 as recess appointments though the Senate wasn't in recess. The President will then nominate two new pro-union board members, whom Republicans won't filibuster, as well as two GOP nominees. Mr. Trumka gets his new legal quorum. 

The good news here is that this maneuver shouldn't block the legal challenge to the non-recess recess appointments. Both the D.C. and Third Circuit courts of appeal have ruled that NLRB rulings made by those non-recess board members are illegal, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the D.C. Circuit's Noel Canning case. 

Mr. Trumka and the White House now hope the reconstituted NLRB will reissue those rulings. Then they will argue to the Supreme Court that the case is moot because there is no longer any injury.

But this is wishful thinking. The NLRB no longer has formal jurisdiction over the case now that it is in the courts, a precedent that no less than Justice Elena Kagan endorsed in 2010 in the New Process Steel v. NLRB case when she was Solicitor General.

More broadly, the President has claimed a power to declare when the Senate is in recess, and he can always do so again. Thus the injury from illegal rulings due to illegal appointments could recur, which means the issue is far from moot. This is also a significant dispute about the separation of powers. If the President can decide on his own when the Senate is in recess, then the Senate's advice and consent power is essentially gutted. 

The D.C. Circuit ruling said a President can only make recess appointments if the executive-branch vacancy occurs during a Senate recess. Judge David Sentelle's majority opinion is powerful and deserves a Supreme Court hearing. But short of adopting his logic, the High Court can still rule on the legality of recess appointments made during "pro-forma" Senate sessions or in between sessions. If the High Court drops the case, it will mean such appointments are illegal in the Third and D.C. Circuits, but nowhere else.

***

Tuesday's deal also means some dreadful appointees will get to wield power, notably Labor nominee Thomas Perez. (See editorial nearby.) This would have a silver lining if it meant that Senators would put fewer holds on nominees of both parties. Michigan Democrat Carl Levin stopped nearly all Pentagon appointments during George W. Bush's second term, and it is becoming difficult for any President to fill out a government. But we suspect Democrats will still stymie GOP nominees as long as they control the Senate.

It's also worth noting why Mr. Reid didn't demand a simple majority vote on judicial nominees. That may still come, but the reason for his caution is political, not a matter of Senate principle. Abortion activists want to retain the right to filibuster any future GOP nominee for the Supreme Court who is on record opposing Roe v. Wade. They fear that overruling the filibuster to get some D.C. Circuit nominees confirmed today isn't worth setting that political precedent.

Democrats also didn't challenge use of the filibuster against legislation, though this too is subject to political whim as long as this current class of liberals runs the Senate. The now dominant Al Franken generation has been elected since 2006 and doesn't know life in the minority. 

If Democrats take back the House in 2014 while retaining the Senate, you can bet they will also break the legislative filibuster to give Mr. Obama some final partisan policy victories. Think carbon tax, or forcing doctors to take all Medicare and Medicaid patients. For the Obama Democrats, the rules are whatever they say they are.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324348504578609912616658012.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Union Watchdogs Criticize Deal to Pack NLRB with Pro-Union Officials

Senate deal to preserve filibuster will lead to union-picked officials joining body

The Senate filibuster deal that scrapped the nominations of two unconstitutional labor appointees will not alleviate the pro-union imbalance on the board, according to union watchdogs.

Just hours after Democrats announced that President Barack Obama withdrew the nominations of the National Labor Relations Board members Sharon Block and Richard Griffin, the politically powerful AFL-CIO handpicked two replacement nominees, according to Politico.

Conservative labor activists and attorneys said the replacement nominees, former AFL-CIO attorney Nancy Schiffer and Democratic NLRB attorney Kent Hirozawa, could maintain the anti-business climate that has defined the NLRB under the Obama administration.

The new picks immediately drew the ire of the National Right to Work Foundation, which has successfully challenged the NLRB’s authority after President Obama illegally used his recess authority to appoint Block and Griffin to the board.

“Even though the American people, who are outraged by this [rogue] NLRB, were not included in these discussions, Obama’s NLRB appointments will pave the way for at least three more years of the very forced-unionism giveaways union bosses failed to obtain through the legislative process,” NRTW president Mark Mix said in a statement. “Both NLRB nominees, who are practically guaranteed to be confirmed, are staunch pro-forced unionism advocates.”

Former NLRB general counsel Jerry Hunter said he is not confident that Obama pursued a moderate course in replacing Block and Griffin in the five-nominee package that will undergo Senate confirmation.

“Block and Griffin were part of a pro-union triumvirate that threw to the wind any objective decision-making,” said Hunter, who is helping to challenge the authority of the board in federal court. “If the administration permitted the AFL-CIO to pick the two new proposed nominees, then this would simply be a continuation of the administration’s policy of permitting organized labor to pick Democratic nominees for appointment to labor agencies.”

Republicans negotiated the withdrawal of Block and Griffin on Tuesday in order to prevent the Democrats from using the nuclear option to lower the confirmation threshold to a bare majority. The GOP allowed the White House to choose two labor attorneys as part of the agreement, though sources emphasized that Republicans promised a fair hearing, rather than confirmation.

“The basics [of the agreement] are that two new NLRB nominees are submitted and the Senate gives them a fair hearing—which is what [Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell [(R., Ky.)] and Senate Republicans called for as early as January of this year,” a top Senate aide told the Washington Free Beacon on condition of anonymity.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka led the charge to pressure Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) to “pull the trigger” on the nuclear option last week. The union is a major powerbroker in the Democratic Party, spending more than $30 million on the 2012 election.

AFL-CIO did not return multiple requests for comment.

Mix had harsh words for the Republican lawmakers who struck the deal, which will continue to undermine workers and employers.

“After Sen. John McCain [(R., Ariz.)] apparently struck a backroom deal today with Senate Democrats to sell out independent-minded workers, the Obama White House wasted no time meeting with union bosses to determine who they want on the agency to enact their radical agenda,” he said.

Senate Democrats have pledged to rush the two new nominees through confirmation by August, when the NLRB chairman Mark Gaston Pearce’s term is set to expire. If the Senate fails to confirm at least three nominees, the board will not be able to issue rulings in labor disputes.

Obama nominated two Republicans and Pearce to serve in the board’s next term, which could mean a GOP majority if Schiffer and Hirozawa are not confirmed.

The Democratic majority moving forward will have vast implications for labor law in the United States. The Supreme Court will review NLRB v. Noel Canning a January appeals court ruling that declared Block and Griffin’s appointments unconstitutional and could invalidate every board decision issued since January 2012. It would be up to the new board to re-issue decisions on all of those cases.

“Even if Noel Canning comes down, you could have some Obama appointees that aren’t any better, from an employer viewpoint, than the last.  They could rubberstamp all the [Block and Griffin panel] rulings,” said David Phippen, a labor attorney with Constangy, Brooks, & Smith.

Activists who campaigned against the nuclear option, as well as Block and Griffin, said they hope the new nominations will not mimic the behavior of the current board.

“We hope to see people that have the ability to be neutral arbiters of labor law—Obama’s struggled to put forward nominees who meet that criteria,” said Geoffrey Burr, chairman of the Center for a Democratic Workplace (CDW).

CDW, which is working to preserve the secret ballot in union election, spent thousands of dollars on ads in swing states to pressure senators to preserve the 60-vote threshold on executive appointments in the lead up to the Tuesday’s deal. Burr emphasized that the CDW has yet to decide whether or not it will support Schiffer or Hirozawa.

Senate Republicans claimed victory for the deal, saying that it restored the power balance to the Capitol.
“This agreement allows the Senate to make clear that this president, or any president, cannot thumb his nose at the Senate’s constitutional role in our system of checks and balances,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), ranking Republican on the Senate Labor Committee.

The nominees will appear before the labor committee next Tuesday morning.

http://freebeacon.com/union-watchdogs-criticize-deal-to-pack-nlrb-with-pro-union-officials/

U.S. One of the Least Attractive Tax Climates in the World

A new study out this past week [pdf] from two European economists attempted to come up with an empirical ranking of tax attractiveness of various national tax systems around the world. Using metrics like statutory tax rates, investment taxes, withholding taxes and status of double taxation, Sara Keller and Deborah Schanz constructed an index and ranking for one hundred countries around the world. 

The United States comes in very, very near the bottom. 

Largely due to corporate taxes, investment taxes and double taxation, the U.S. ranks 94th out of 100 in these tax attractiveness rankings, behind such attractive destinations as Venezuela, Serbia, and Greece. Countries that are known as "tax havens" like the Bahamas help to drive the Caribbean's ranking as the most attractive geographical region in the world. 

As the Tax Foundation notes, the American policy of global taxation puts the U.S. in a unique class of countries:
As with corporations, the United States tax code taxes the income of individuals, no matter where in the world they earn it. The only two other counties in the world that tax individuals this way are North Korea and Eritrea. Let me repeat that: North Korea and Eritrea.
Now, to throw a little bit of cold water on this: there's a lot more than tax system that makes a country "attractive" to both prospective immigrants and businesses. Very few people outside of Edward Snowden would prefer to immigrate to Venezuela over the United States. A strong civil society, justice system and rule of law obviously make the United States a very attractive place to live. 

This is also a subjective and experimental study that necessarily includes value judgments, so it's far from authoritative. 

But in an increasingly industrializing and interconnected world, these tax incentives will matter even at the margins. Legislators and policymakers should be taking things like this into effect when considering tax reform. 

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2013/07/17/us-one-of-the-least-attractive-tax-climates-in-the-world-n1642851

Stop the (Obamacare) World, I Want to Get Off

Free Trade is one of the great economic boons to which we owe a large measure of our prosperity. The fact that we can buy shirts from Malaysia, electronics from Japan, wine from France and bananas from Costa Rica makes not just us but the Malaysians, the Japanese, les Français and los Costaricenses much better off than any of us could possibly be by growing, manufacturing, or otherwise producing everything within the borders of our own country. As nations develop and advance up the economic ladder, they become capable of increasingly high-order creative design and engineering, able to outsource lower-order assembly to less advanced countries and to trade on an equal footing with the world's leaders. 'Made in China' typically means: designed in the USA, manufactured in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and/or the USA (still the world leader in manufacturing despite noise to the contrary), and finally assembled, at the end of the chain, in China. 

High-productivity workers in advanced countries are not threatened by low-wage workers in less-advanced ones, because it is productivity that counts, not the hourly wage. If the workers of Prosperia earn $100 per hour and produce 1000 widgets apiece per hour, then their labor is more cost-effective than that of workers in Destutistan who earn $10 per hour but only produce 90 widgets apiece per hour; that's 10 cents a widget from Prosperia vs 11 cents per widget from Destutistan. Under those circumstances Prosperia is said to have an absolute advantage over Destutistan. 

Even if Prosperia's workers, management, capital markets, and climate are the best in the world for everything (which no country may boast), workers in Destutistan can still find work to do where they have a relative advantage, that is, where the difference in productivity between Prosperia's and Destutistan's workers is less relative to areas where Prosperia is the undisputed leader. It pays Prosperia to do what it does 'most best' and buy what it makes 'less best' from others, which provides employment for Destutistan's workers, and gives them the opportunity to advance up the economic ladder.

However, if something occurs that makes workers in one country more expensive (or more risky) to employ for any reason, then their competitive advantage may be eroded or disappear altogether, to the detriment of all except the immediate competitors. If a natural catastrophe or government-imposed tax raises the cost of employing Prosperian workers by twenty percent, then it will cost $120 to produce 1000 widgets, or 12 cents per widget, erasing the advantage. Those Prosperian workers will have to accept lower wages or lose their jobs to the foreign competition. This is obviously a loss for those workers in Prosperia and a boon to the competing workers in the particular industry. But it is not necessarily happy news even for the citizens of Destutistan in general; after all, they too now must pay 11 cents per widget when they could have gotten them cheaper by buying from Prosperia before. 

Computers, the internet, and telecommunication technology have integrated world markets and intensified competition as never before in world history. Capital, entrepreneurial projects and jobs can move overnight to the places on planet Earth where they are the most welcome, most secure, and least handcuffed. 

Which brings us to ObamaCare.

The Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act's employer mandate requires that employers of 50 or more full-time employees (full-time being defined by the government as those working just 30 hours or more per week) must offer health insurance coverage compliant with the requirements of the Law and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations or pay a $2,000 fine (sorry, tax) per employee, exempting the first 30 employees for purposes of calculating the penalty (I mean tax). This provision of the law has now been postponed by one year (in a move of questionable legality) to January 2015, but not yet repealed. The delay is a deferment, not a solution; the effects of the mandate must still be factored into any company's long-term planning. 

For those companies who want to 'do the right thing' and offer a health insurance benefit, the law contains many more requirements, including:
• All compliant health insurance plans must cover dependent children to age 26.
• No annual or lifetime coverage limits may be imposed.
Insurance companies may not differentiate premiums on the basis of the riskiness of an employer's industry or the age of its employees.
• ...and much more, buried in the law's 2700 pages and the derived regulations' tens of thousands of pages.
Some or all of these things may be desirable to many, but they are not necessary for all, and they must be paid for somehow. Imposing them in a one-size-fits-all mandate on all employers raises the cost and risk of employing any American without consideration of the cost-benefit trade-offs that different employers and employees might prefer and mutually agree upon (that's called Liberty of Contract). Except for very small firms, the mandate favors large, mature companies (that are not the primary source of new job growth) that employ highly-paid workers, at the expense of smaller firms employing less-skilled workers. In the latter case, the effect of the law can be to increase the cost of employing certain workers by 50% or more. The city of Wilmington, Delaware is facing the prospect of a half-million dollar spike in payroll costs (give or take $200,000) due to reclassifying part-time employees as full-time, as required by the Law. Many private employers are cutting their workers' hours to below 30 to avoid the penalty, and many '49er' companies are cancelling plans to hire their 50th employee.

Even costs not specifically attributed to employers, but borne by taxpayers (which is to say, people who work) take their toll on the employment of Americans. The (recently doubled to $4.4 billion) cost of administering the government health insurance exchanges takes that money out of the private sector where it might have been used for entrepreneurial purposes, bidding up the wages of American workers. 

Meanwhile, the foreign competition doesn't have to pay these costs, and gets a free advantage over American firms and employees, courtesy not of a volcano, a hurricane, or an earthquake, but of a man-caused disaster. Why hire 10 Americans when you can hire 12, 20 or 40 equivalently trained non-Americans for the same price?

Six million net full-time jobs have been lost in America since 2008, offset only by the 'gain' of three million part-time jobs. Relief is nowhere in sight: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in its Household Survey for June 2013, that the economy added 360,000 part-time jobs and lost 240,000 full-time ones.

This is not virtuous free trade; this is leading a global decline with our own self-inflicted wounds.
"There can be no prosperity or even freedom for our people if we ever abandon the competitive economic system that transformed this country into the strongest nation in the world." -- Ronald Reagan

Strangling Life

By John Stossel
There are now 175,000 pages' worth of federal laws. Local governments add more.

I'm not so cynical that I think politicians pass laws just to control us. Someone always thinks: "This law is needed. This will protect people."

But the cumulative effect of so many rules is to strangle life.

Yet lawyers like George Washington Law professor John Banzhaf want more rules.

Banzhaf requires his law students to sue people, just for practice
.
"And we keep winning!" he bragged to me.

They do. But his legal "victories" hardly benefit the public.

He and his students have sued Washington, D.C., hairdressers, and dry cleaners for "discrimination" because they charge women more.

Of course, they charge women more for a reason. Women's haircuts take longer. "Women get pampered," said hairdresser Carolyn Carter. "Men just get a haircut." Women's clothing is more varied and doesn't always fit dry-cleaning machines. The market sorts out these differences through differing prices.

But intrusive Washington, D.C., politicians write laws that say, "Discrimination ... cannot be justified by ... comparative characteristics of one group as opposed to another."

So the poor defendants have to spend thousands on legal fees, while law students get their "practice." A Korean dry cleaners association "went through three or four high-powered law firms" defending itself, Banzhaf says with pride.

Banzhaf's lawsuits even got "ladies' nights" banned at Washington, D.C., bars. Women liked "ladies' night." Men liked it because it brought more women into bars. Bars liked it; that's why they did it. But the practice violates the lawyers' concept of "equality."

As if his lawsuits weren't obnoxious enough, the real irony is that the cost of the suits is passed on to future customers. Businesses charge more to cover the cost of suits and complying with regulations.

Lawyers like Banzhaf aren't elected, but their actions still govern our choices.

Tibor Machan, professor of business ethics at Chapman University, told me we should object to Banzhaf on principle. "Is it right to manipulate people all the time, to treat them like they're little children? The next step from the nanny state is the petty tyrannical state. And a dictatorial state."

Machan echoes writer C.S. Lewis' point that well-meaning tyrants are even more dangerous than purely selfish ones. Lewis wrote, "Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end."

The conceit of politicians and lawyers is that they think they can manage life through rules. So they keep adding more.

They don't see that these rules gradually wreck life.

Critics of lawsuit abuse focus on the cost of litigation, but the bigger harm is that fear of lawsuits itself deprives us of good things.
  • Drug companies invented a vaccine against Lyme disease, but they won't sell it, because they're scared of lawyers.
  • Fearful medical device makers often stick to old technologies because trying something new, even if it's better, risks a suit.
  • Monsanto developed a substitute for asbestos, a fire-resistant insulation that might save thousands of lives, but decided not to sell it because the company feared it might be sued.
We don't even know how many wonderful life-enhancing products we might have today if innovators didn't live in a climate of fear.

I don't suggest that we should be at the mercy of rip-off artists. Some lawsuits are useful -- if businesses commit theft or fraud, they should be sued. But American law (SET ITAL) encourages (END ITAL) suits. In other countries, if you sue and lose, you and your lawyer must pay the court bills of the people you dragged into court.

When I started consumer reporting, I believed that only legal rules could protect us. But it's not true. The rules just give us a false sense of security.

The free market does a better job protecting consumers. Competition protects us.

Repeal most of the laws. Let the market work its magic.

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2013/07/17/strangling-life-n1642019/page/full

A dozen states sue EPA over FOIA stonewalling

After months of haggling, 12 states are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to compel them to release documents related to the agency’s controversial “sue and settle” practice.

The attorneys general of twelve Republican-led states, led by Oklahoma, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday after the EPA failed to respond to the attorneys general’s appeal of a Freedom of Information Act fee-waiver request.
The fee-waiver request was denied by the EPA in February.

“This appears to be a blatant strategy by the EPA to go around the process and bend the rules to create environmental regulations that have failed in Congress,” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a statement. “As part of our investigation into the pervasiveness of this tactic, we requested documents that the EPA has refused to produce. If the EPA is making backdoor deals with environmental groups to push their agenda on the American people while bypassing the states and Congress, we need to know.”

Oklahoma was joined by Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

The states sought documents on communications between environmental groups and EPA officials regarding consent decrees from sue-and-settle lawsuits with environmental groups that directed the agency to implement regulations under the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze program.

The states asked for EPA communications with environmental groups — including Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club — all of which engaged in sue-and-settle lawsuits to control the EPA’s enforcement of the Regional Haze program, critics say.

According to Pruitt’s office, “Under the Clean Air Act, the states – not the EPA – design and implement plans for compliance with the Regional Haze program.” However, states are cut out of the process when the EPA enters into a consent decree, but the states are responsible for implementing whatever new regulations the EPA proposes.

One sue-and-settle lawsuit resulted in the EPA’s costliest clean air regulations ever – the Mercury Air Toxics Standards. Other cases noted by Pruitt were settled in the same day the suit was filed, suggesting maybe some level of coordination.

Pruitt raised concerns about the EPA’s actions in a letter sent to the agency in May, after it was reported that the EPA had also been routinely denying fee waiver requests to conservative groups while granting them to environmental groups.

“Looking at FOIA fee waivers, it’s clear that EPA favors far-left environmentalist groups over conservative think tanks, but today’s lawsuit is just another example demonstrating EPA’s discrimination extends toward states as well,” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter.

The free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute obtained documents showing that since January 2012, the EPA granted fee waivers for 92 percent of FOIA requests from major environmental groups, while the agency rejected or ignored 81 percent of fee-waiver requests from conservative groups.

“Ninety-two percent of the time EPA grants fee-waiver requests from noncommercial requesters who are supportive of EPA’s policies and agendas, but denies a majority of fee-waiver requests from noncommercial requesters who are critical of EPA,” reads the state’s complaint. “States properly asked for specific records … [and] EPA violated FOIA’s mandate.”

According to Pruitt, the EPA has awarded nearly $1 million in attorneys fees in 45 settlements with environmental groups it has made public.

The EPA did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

A Living Document? Well, that Depends

Our glorious President, and his almost equally glorious Attorney-General, miscellaneous members of his exalted cabinet as well as numerous members of the amazing Democrat politicians in the House and Senate are constantly reminding us that the Constitution of the United States is a "living document." To be fair, there are a number of RINOs that try to help with their agenda as well.

By "living document" they, one presumes, mean that they are able to discern the true intent of those who drafted the original Constitution and put their intentions down on paper in clear, reasonably simple English, which are opaque to the rest of us.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, the three gentlemen who collectively wrote The Federalist Papers, explained to the American people during the debate over this new idea of a Constitution, exactly what the intent of the drafters was when they were coming up with this basic law that was to govern the government. 

The present day "living document" crowd has evidently determined that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were really only kidding, and the things that they also set down on paper should be ignored. Meanwhile the presumptive séances that must be going on in the White House and the DOJ, which allows them to channel the thoughts of these Founders, should hold sway.
A great deal of the discussion about just how "living" our Constitution really is swirls around the 2nd Amendment. That famous Constitutional scholar, and semi-famous actor, Jeff Daniels recently opined on Piers Morgan's nightly tribute to his own colossal ego on CNN that:
"I'm one of the guys that goes back to the Second Amendment and just goes, you know what, it was a different time..."
One can infer from Mr. Daniels that he is able to channel the Founders' thoughts on what they would have done if they knew then what they might know today. 

What about that whole pesky "freedom of speech and the press" thing? Perhaps the problem is that James Rosen and the folks at FOX News can't channel the Founders the way the president and the grandees that surround him can. They just don't get that the Constitution is a living thing, and it can be aborted.

Or that really annoying "free exercise of religion" nonsense. Even though there are devout people who view abortion as anathema to their religious beliefs and their exercise of those religious beliefs, well, they just haven't gotten the message that they don't really understand that "free exercise" means what Obama says it means.

In looking at this view that our foundational document is "living" and can be interpreted to mean just about anything that the current administration (as well as earlier administrations going back to Woodrow Wilson) wants it to mean.

But the brouhaha surrounding the arguments of those who see the Constitution as a living document, which they hold can be aborted when it becomes inconvenient, is certainly not limited to the 2nd Amendment. Abortion itself, while not even mentioned in the Constitution, is subjected to their same logic.

In the 17th Century abortions were undoubtedly performed. But no government -- not local, not state, not Federal nor any foreign government -- would officially condone abortion. It might be discussed in very hushed tones, but it was, at that time, officially anathema. Yes, it was a different time, but human nature hasn't changed all that much in the 200-plus years since the Constitution was written.

So, because a fetus was not specifically protected in writing by the Founders, in the late 20th Century a new "right" was discovered. It was the right to terminate a life that was found to be inconvenient. A life that would have made life somehow less fulfilling for the mother. So destroying the fetus is just good mental hygiene, right?

Hold on though, as many late night commercials on TV would phrase it: They're not done yet!

Since much of this free interpretation of the Constitution is based on the view that that the Constitution is really, really old and "it was a different time" when it was written, our political leaders have expanded their interpretive skills to include an even older, much older, document.

The Bible itself.

Keeping it simple, just look at the current, Progressive view of just a few of the Ten Commandments:

Thou shalt not kill. Seems a simple enough concept, doesn't it? Unless of course you are wearing a suit and tie, aren't playing golf or basketball, and are using a drone and firing Hellfire missiles on our enemies and their children. Or if you live in Chicago -- or Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, or ... well you get the idea.

Thou shalt not commit adultery. Unless you are a President of the United States, a senior Senator from Massachusetts, or a Governor of New York State, just to name a few exceptions. Then it appears to be acceptable behavior, but only if you happen to espouse Progressive ideas.

Honor thy Father and thy Mother. This is no longer true, since the state will take over raising our children, "thy Father and thy Mother" will end up meaning Barack and Michelle. Think about that and try to sleep well.

Thou shalt not steal. This doesn't count if you are a former Governor of New Jersey, or if you have a future Attorney-General lobbying for your pardon from one of those presidents who also don't buy into the adultery thing.

I do find one exception to the Progressive mantra that if the document is very old, it can be viewed as "living" and can be reinterpreted at will. For one thing, they invariably decline to define "old". If they mean that the document in question was written before they, themselves were born, I can deal with that. The fact that it implies that all the history of the planet really only started when they arrived on the scene is a little egocentric can be ignored for the moment.

But if they truly think that if it was written more than say, fifty or sixty years ago it's "old", I have to ask just one question. If the age of a document, and the fact that "it was a different time", is the criteria to discredit that document and allow it to be interpreted it mean just about anything the reader wants it to mean, then why haven't take the same tack when dealing with two works that they seem to find extremely important for support of their agenda and tactics?

Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, for example, was first published in 1867. That's 146 years ago. Don't they think that Das Kapital is "old" and was written in a different time? And how about Rules for Radicals, written by Saul Alinsky? That was published in 1971, the year before Alinsky died. But that's only 42 years ago, so I suppose that's still current in their view.
Apparently Progressives view these two books to be carved in stone, unchangeable and immutable.

 WaPo: ‘Don’t Write Off The Deficit’

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s editorial board had a good piece making the case that we still have a debt problem today, and that tomorrow’s debt requires attention now. 
The forces of complacency may find more ammunition in the Obama White House’s most recent fiscal update. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the federal deficit will be $759 billion in the year ending Sept. 30, or 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — rather than $973 billion and 6 percent of GDP, as it calculated in April. The OMB numbers rest on the unlikely assumption that President Obama’s tax and spending policies get enacted. Still, they are consistent with declining deficit forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which assume no change in current law. . . .
The report projects that net public federal debt will remain above a historically abnormal 65 percent of GDP through 2023, assuming no wars or major recessions in the interim. . . .
Mr. Obama and Congress need to turn their attention back to fiscal policy precisely because current law sets a path for government under which more and more money will flow on autopilot — into Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements — while the resources to deal with any other needs, defense or non-defense, get squeezed. In other words, when our leaders avoid the country’s long-term fiscal issues, they avoid their most basic responsibility: to govern.
While they call for the repeal of sequestration because of its counter-productive consequences, they do once again remind their readers that the country’s very serious debt problem rests in the the growth of programs that are on autopilot, such as Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. In my recent Reason column on this same topic, I write about this out-of-control spending growth:
And even these dire debt numbers pale in comparison to the magnitude of current unfunded liabilities. According to the Financial Statement of the United States, which looks at the government’s net financial position, as of 2012 the American people have been promised about $55 trillion worth of future benefits (through Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs) that the federal government does not have the money to pay. 
With the impending entitlement crisis requiring even more future borrowing, by 2023 interest on our debt, plus autopilot programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, will account for 75 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government, up from 45 cents in 2010. In other words, starting now, non-interest and non-autopilot programs will gradually be squeezed out by everything else. 
Unfunded liabilities as measured by the Treasury is now $55 trillion, but other scholars have come up with much large estimates :
  • In 2012, former chairman of the SEC Chris Cox and former chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee Bill Archer, using data from the Medicare and Social Security Trustees Reports, found roughly $87 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Their measures account for the unfunded liabilities — including Social Security, Medicare, federal workers’ pensions — in addition to the official debt.
  • Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff calculates a “fiscal gap” amount of $222 trillion using the Congressional Budget Office’s alternative long-term budget forecast. The fiscal-gap measure takes into consideration the present value of all the expenditures now through the end of time (including servicing the official debt) and subtracts all the projected taxes from that amount.
Here is a chart with the different estimates to put them in perspective:
Both alternative debt figures dwarf the official $16 trillion debt figure, even when you add the Treasury’s estimate of $55 trillion in unfunded liabilities and come up with a total of $71 trillion. Obviously, that’s a lot of promised spending that the government doesn’t know how to pay for. But as I have said before, the main reason why our debt crisis needs to be addressed today is that failing to do so will result in burdening future generations with higher interest rates, lower growth, higher unemployment rates, and lower standards of living. We are about to embark on the most massive transfer of wealth from younger taxpayers to the elderly in American history. It’s both unprecedented and unfair. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. For a chilling warning of the consequences of living in a high-debt world read the June CBO report:
Such high and rising debt later in the coming decade would have serious negative consequences: When interest rates return to higher (more typical) levels, federal spending on interest payments would increase substantially. Moreover, because federal borrowing reduces national saving, over time the capital stock would be smaller and total wages would be lower than they would be if the debt was reduced. In addition, lawmakers would have less flexibility than they would have if debt levels were lower to use tax and spending policy to respond to unexpected challenges. Finally, a large debt increases the risk of a fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose so much confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget that the government would be unable to borrow at affordable rates.
You can find interesting CBO charts on our current debt levels here.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/353641/wapo-dont-write-deficit-veronique-de-rugy

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