The Department of Veterans Affairs is spending millions annually on 314 run-down, vacant buildings, including a pink monkey house. “The buildings are home to rats, lead paint, wall-to-wall fungal growth, mold, radon, and spare tires,” notes the Washington Examiner.

“Billions of stimulus dollars have been wasted on programs” highlighted by Citizens Against Government Waste, such as “$554,763 for new windows in a visitor’s center that closed in 2007 in Washington. In several instances, stimulus spending has actually reduced private sector employment; in Normandy Park, Washington, $3.8 million was spent on a ’streetscaping’ project that drove customers away from local businesses, causing a local restaurant to fire two employees.”

As noted earlier, money from the stimulus package is being wasted on things such as “Saturday night…

Last week, the Obama Administration filed a brief  on behalf of industry petitioners urging the Supreme Court to vacate an appeals court decision (State of Connecticut et al. v. American Electric Power et al.) that would allow States and private parties to sue coal-burning electric utilities for their alleged contribution to global warming-related “injuries.”

The brief clearly lays out the absurdities of attempting to regulate greenhouse gases via common-law public nuisance litigation. Because global warming is, well, global, practically anyone on Earth could claim to be a victim. And because companies emit carbon dioxide (CO2) only as a byproduct of providing goods and services (electricity, cars, food, medical care, bites of information, etc.) to people, practically everyone on the planet could be sued as a contributor to the alleged injuries. In the memorable…

CEI submitted comments this week on an FDA proposed guidance that “encourages” farmers and antibiotics manufacturers to stop using “medically important” antibiotics for livestock growth promotion purposes.  When I first started researching the topic, I was sympathetic to the view that at least some of the antibiotics that serve as essential human…

The Obama Administration’s EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTSHA) are proposing new rules “labeling each passenger car with a  government letter grade from A to D based on its fuel efficiency and emissions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. The new rules “would be the most substantial changes in 30 years to the familiar price and mileage labels afixed to new cars on sale at dealership,” the article continues. Only in the make-work world of bureaucrats would the addition of the letters A, B, C, or D to product labels be considered “subtantial changes.”

The WSJ goes on to point out the obvious: “Currently the labels must show how many miles per gallon a car gets and its estimated annual fuel costs.…

Through June, the government spent about $620 billion of stimulus money. The Obama administration claims that the spending has saved or created 2.3 to 2.8 million jobs.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume those job creation numbers are true. In fact, let’s pick the rosiest number — 2.8 million jobs.

At…

In a classic case of a government solution in search of a problem, Washington has for years set energy efficiency standards for home appliances. By now, refrigerators, air-conditioners, and many other appliances have been subjected to multiple rounds of successively tighter requirements from the Department of Energy (DOE). The Obama administration has taken this pre-existing regulatory blank check and run with it, finalizing standards for over 20 products. As might be expected, such arbitrary government mandates come at a cost — a higher purchase price for regulated appliances, but also compromised performance, features, and reliability. And the downside can easily swamp the often-modest energy savings. The regulations for clothes washers may be the worst of them all.

The clothes washer standards…