So reports today’s New York Times (Oct 31, 07, p. A10). The Senate voted 70 to 22 to authorize $11.4 billion, or $1.9 billion a year, up from the $1.2 billion Amtrak received in recent years.
According to the Times, “The vote signaled a desire for a major investment in the money-losing railroad service when the Bush administration and other critics say it should be privatized.” You might think Amtrak wouldn’t need more taxpayer hand-outs because, “High gasoline prices and congestion…
The bloggers over at DCist are rightly concerned about proposed new rules for photography, filming and sound recording on federal lands that would require “commercial” photographers to get permits before shooting. A group of journalism organizations has complained to the Department of Interior complaining, among other things, about the definition of “commercial.”
In a release, Society of Professional Journalists President Clint Brewer said, “Public land should be safeguarded, but the rules the department is seeking to codify simply go too far.”…
Jacob Sullum’s syndicated column describes Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether federal maritime law permits punitive damages against Exxon, and if so, whether the $2.5 billion in punitive damages it was ordered to pay for an oil spill was excessive.
Sullum notes that the punitive damages work out to $23,000 for each barrel of oil spilled, and that Exxon has “spent more than $3.4 billion on clean-up costs, fines, and compensation payments,” quite apart from…
As I wrote about earlier in the week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been talking about banning exclusivity deals between landlords and cable television providers. The FCC announced today that it now has the power to nullify contracts between these private parties, which represent a monopoly within apartment buildings. According Susanne Guyer of Verizon, (reported by CNN)
“Millions of consumers live in apartments, condos or other private developments, and, until now, many of them have been denied the benefits of video competition…
This morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 to send the Law of the Sea Treaty to the Senate floor for ratification. The result was expected — though still disappointing — so now the real fight begins. The vote count was as follows:
Yes votes
Joseph Biden (D-Del.)
Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)
John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.)
Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
Bill Nelson (D-Fla.)
Barack Obama (D-Ill.)
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)
Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)
Robert Casey (D-Pa.)
Jim Webb (D-Va.)
Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)
Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.)
Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)
John Sununu (R-N.H.)
George Voinovich (R-OH)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)No votes
Norm Coleman…
Congress is set to pass a bloated farm bill that will increase federal sugar subsidies, which have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and prevent farmers in some of the poorest countries in the world from selling their sugar to the United States at low prices. Even The New York Times thinks President Bush is right to consider vetoing the bill.
In a letter to the House Agriculture Committee joined by public interest and consumer groups, Fran Smith explained that the sugar subsidies will…
Trial lawyers have brought lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages against telephone companies for assisting federal antiterrorism surveillance programs. In today’s Washington Post, Senator Jay Rockefeller, who is a critic of the Bush Administration, and usually sympathetic to the trial lawyers, explains why this is nevertheless fundamentally unfair to many telecommunications firms and an obstacle to important intelligence gathering.
He advocates giving the telephone companies a limited form of immunity from suit, if they cooperated based on plausible assurances by…
On the eve of All Hallow’s Eve, the Boston Globe’s list of the “Top 50 scariest movies of all time” is worth a look. Any you want to add — or subtract?
As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST; also known as UNCLOS, for United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) tomorrow, National Review Online editorializes against the treaty, in today’s lead item, taking the Bush administration and the Navy to much-needed task for their misguided support.
[E]nough has surely been written to demonstrate that the selling of UNCLOS is a white-collar crime that has the fingerprints of the Bush administration all…
In Today’s Washington Post, Cindy Skrzycki reports on Devra Davis’s book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. According to Skrzycki, Davis asserts that “10 million cancer deaths could have been avoided over the past 30 years had it not been for industry opposition to good science and regulatory inaction by the U.S. government.”
Wow! There’s the answer we all have been looking for! If we want to get rid of cancer, we simply need to cede more power to bureaucrats…
How you can profit from the coming nuclear holocaust will likely be the next publication by the conservative site Newsmax. After all, it just sent out a message from Jarrett Wollstein of Intelligent Options:
Iran War Danger Creates Huge
Investment OpportunitiesIn the last few days, the danger of expanded war in the Middle East has greatly increased.In Northern Iraq, Turkish troops intensified attacks on Kurds, creating a new danger of intense warfare in this previously largely peaceful area. Also, just yesterday, the…
Today one presidential aspirant joined a growing list of senators in opposing U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Taking as long as the opposition has to assert itself, this clearly was a difficult decision for these political leaders to step out on this matter, flying as it does in the face of one of President Bush’s “to do” items before he leaves office. The latter have an actual vote on the matter which appears likely (though by…
The full Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has just rejected a challenge to an earlier ruling that the District of Columbia’s Prescription Drug Pricing Act is preempted by federal patent law. D.C. drug price-control law bans “excessive prices,” a vague term for which there is no specific statutory definition. It does, however, include a provision declaring that a drug price is presumptively excessive when it is “30% higher than the comparable price” charged in Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, or Canada.
It also…
Eli–Re your post on the Robosaurus, I like these better. The one above weighs about 104,000 lbs. and the one below 123,459 lbs. Just add a propane torch.
The moderately conservative Judge Thomas Meskill has died, eliminating one of the few non-liberal judges on the New York-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a court still dominated by liberal Clinton appointees. And even some of the Bush appointees on the court are not moderate or conservative, but rather very liberal (like Barrington Parker, who believes that the Constitution provides elaborate protections for foreign terrorists, and who ruled that companies can be penalized by bureaucrats based on unproven…
The other side of India’s boom is the corruption and lack of protection of rights for the poor. This story from NPR about a month long protest march for protecting the property rights of the poor gives a picture of India that you seldom see in the media.
If you have been to India, you might have passed through the roadside encampments outside the big cities, where nothing stays clean for more than half an hour, where people live, not paycheck to…
Nice commentary by Jonathan Chait on Marketplace last week about the problem with farm subsidies.
Wealthy trial lawyer William Lerach, a big donor to liberal politicians who specialized in bringing class action lawsuits, has pled guilty to giving kickbacks. But under the terms of his guilty plea, he apparently will be able to keep most of his millions. Liberal politicians who oppose tort reform have received millions from Lerach and his cronies, and have been reluctant to return any of those donations.
Lerach gave kickbacks to class representatives, who then let Lerach run class-action lawsuits in ways…
As EU allows four more GMO crops (crops created with molecular plant breeding techniques), the new president of France puts a temporary “freeze” on planting GMO crops. A story from Norway says the agricultural area dedicated to GMO crops in the EU have increased 77 percent in the last year, with Spain taking the lead in adoption.
It appears that the Communist Party of China occasionally makes a mistake. Too bad millions of people already have paid a price and millions more are likely to get stuck with the bill as well.
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