The Washington Examiner editorializes further today in anticipation of Labor Day, this time on the efforts by Democrats in Congress to cut the buget of the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards. Now, Democrats wanting to cut a government agency’s budget is a story that should attract man-bites-dog attention, so what’s the catch? This is the agency that enforces disclosure requirements for union finances.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao made a priority of finally putting teeth into the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act, which…

Read the full story

With all the hype about recalls of Chinese toys, jewelry, and other children’s items, consumers — especially parents — in the West are understandably concerned if not downright fearful of Chinese goods. Yet the risks don’t match the hype as Brendan O’Neill of Spiked points out very well.

So what drives the extreme response? O’Neill offers some thought provoking perspectives on other forces that may be at play. He notes:

Look behind the headlines and it seems that, yes, some toys and various…

Read the full story

Perhaps wanting to preempt Congress before it returns next Tuesday, President Bush offered his own plan to deal with troubles in the housing market.

The plan wisely avoided a paternalistic “suitability” standard such as that proposed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), which would treat borrowers almost like children and make lenders virtually guarantee that loans could be afforded. As I have noted, such an approach would make lenders overcautious and deny loans to anyone who had a slight blemish on his credit…

Read the full story

This morning both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President George W. Bush addressed the subprime lending problems and what the government would and would not be doing. Both said it’s not the role of the government to bail out speculators and investors who made imprudent decisions, but . . .

Bernanke, in a speech delivered at the Economic Symposium of the FRB of Kansas City in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, said that the Fed “stands ready to take additional actions as needed…

Read the full story

Julie Satow of the New York Sun does a great job today profiling our very own Angela Logomasini’s new study on the costs of environmental regulation:

Any assumption that the environmental lobby has been fighting an uphill battle to implement important regulations belies the facts, a new study has found. In fact, environmental regulations have grown at an exponential pace, and their cost to the federal government is second only to that of homeland security regulations.

The report, by the think tank Competitive Enterprise…

Read the full story

With Tim Johnson, the lead sponsor of the Optional Federal Charter for insurance companies back in the U.S. Senate next week, it’s likely that the debate over the bill will heat up. The proposal, which I’ve written about here, would let insurance companies do what banks have done since the Civil War and organize themselves under federal rather than state laws. I’m hardly wild about creating a new federal bureaucracy but, in my judgment, adding an infinitesimal amount to an…

Read the full story

Russell Roberts at CafeHayek posted excerpts from Freeman Dyson’s article “Heretical thoughts about science and society.” Dyson, professor of physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, lays out cogent and wonderfully reasoned heretical thoughts about global warming. Read the whole article. It’s brilliant. Here’s a sample:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by…

Read the full story

Communist China’s attempts to suppress Tibetan Buddhism are well known in the West, where it’s created a backlash in the form of the “Free Tibet” movement, so Chinese excesses in seeking to diminish the influence of the Dalai Lama aren’t surprising. But now the Beijing government is going where no totalitarian state has gone before. Reports Newsweek:

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission…the law, which goes…

Read the full story

Indonesia is protesting that the bill to subject the tobacco industry to FDA regulation would violate an international trade treaty. The Jakarta Post reports that the Indonesian government objects to the fact that the bill bans clove cigarettes, which Indonesia produces, while permitting menthol cigarettes. It says that the differential treatment is discriminatory and not justified by health concerns, and thus violates the World Trade Organization Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Safeguards. More discussion of the FDA tobacco regulation…

Read the full story

Government is the only area in which unionization is growing in America. Today’s DC Examiner features an editorial that explains one reason why:

It’s a lot easier to extract big raises and juicier benefits from politicians bidding for votes among politically active bureaucrats, who, unlike the private sector, don’t have to worry about the bottom line.

Yet it’s worse than that, because the politicians and agency administrators who negotiate with government employees aren’t paying government workers out of their own money. In the…

Read the full story

As a New Orleans native — born and raised there — I’ve been reading the coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s second anniversary today.

Next week we’ll be taking our third trip to New Orleans since Katrina — and it doesn’t sound like we’ll see many signs of progress in the Crescent City. Most of the anniversary news coverage focuses on the botched job of recovery by the federal government, the state and city governments; the still inadequate levees, the wasted millions spent…

Read the full story

The Globe and Mail today (Toronto, Canada) looks at the U.S. presidential candidates and their views on trade as they talked about those issues on the campaign trail. The article rates them using three former presidents’ trade actions as the benchmarks:

You simply can’t know, from the current presidential campaign, whether Americans are getting set to elect a Franklin Delano Roosevelt (low tariffs, high taxes), a Ronald Reagan (low tariffs, low taxes) or a Herbert Hoover (high tariffs, high taxes).

How do they…

Read the full story

Britblogger Guido Fawkes delights in blowing up the sacred symbols of establishment. Here he presents data that strongly suggest that mass public transport, symbolized by the train, is less “clean” in terms of emissions than the average car trip, particularly when the trains aren’t fully loaded. As Guido puts it:

Trains are heavy, get their energy inefficently down wires where much of the energy is lost and are fundamentally a nineteenth century point-to-point technology belonging to a slower era. Cars are light,…

Read the full story

I strongly agree with Michelle that NASA is a fine example of public choice theory at work. Political pressures impel NASA to sacrifice safety to propitiate environmentalists. The public choice problem has been a chronic issue. As the late, very much lamented Richard Feynman discovered in his investigation of the organization in the wake of the Challenger disaster, public choice and cognitive dissonance figured strongly in the misrepresentation of safety there, which led to the death of an ordinary schoolteacher:

Official management, on the…

Read the full story

NASA announced last Friday that while searching for the reason foam separated from the space shuttle Endeavor during takeoff (tearing a 3-inch gash in the belly of the craft and causing much nail biting during reentry), they found nine small cracks in the insulation on an external fuel tank that may be the cause of the foam chipping off—the same foam that was responsible for the Columbia disaster 4 years prior.

While NASA is coyly suggests that the blame ought to rest…

Read the full story

If you have two botanists discussing a certain plant species, and the first one believes that the plant will grow to 1 foot, but the other states that it reach 80 feet — would you say they have reached a “consensus?” But they both agree it will grow! However, is their science on it “settled?”Zoe Cormier has this to say in an article in theglobeandmail.com:

When Al Gore predicted that climate change could lead to a 20-foot rise in sea levels, critics…

Read the full story

Washington, D.C. is a wonderful place. Perhaps its hallmark is the lack of shame. A qualification for high office is being able to engage in the rankest hypocrisy with a straight face. It happens all the time.

The other day House Minority Leader John Boehner criticized the ruling Democrats for failing to eliminate earmarks, the principle vehicle for delivering pork to voters. And there certainly is cause for complaint. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) observes that the Democrats so far have…

Read the full story

There’s been quite a buzz recently on the second anniversary of Hurricane Kartrina’s destruction of New Orleans. Presidential contender Barack Obama even offered a plan to restore the city.

Of course one should sympathize with the residents of New Orleans, especially those who were driven from their homes and lack the resources to rebuild. But from what springs the belief that one is entitled not only to live in a flood plain, below sea level, but to have the rest of…

Read the full story

In England, new centennarian Winnie Langley celebrates her 100th birthday by smoking her 170,000th cigarrette.

Winnie Langley started smoking only days after the First World War broke out in June 1914 when she was just seven-years-old - and has got through five a day ever since….

Speaking at her 100th birthday party Winnie said: “I have smoked ever since infant school and I have never thought about quitting.

“There were not all the the health warnings like there are today when I started.…

Read the full story

New census bureau data shows a modest uptick in the number of Americans who do not have health insurance. (The number has not “soared,” contrary to some headlines.)

Dealing with the uninsured is a complicated question. As the National Center for Policy Analysis has shown time after time, the Left has every reason to overstate the severity of the problem. NCPA, however, can rightly be criticized for being too enthusiastic about whatever the Republican idea of the moment is. For example,…

Read the full story