The new testimony and announcements by DOI/USFWS regarding coming Endangered Species Act (ESA) listings and changes are most interesting.

First, DOI announced a major change in its barely two-year old critical habitat designation for the Canada Lynx. Critical habitat had been restricted to 2,000 square miles. Now it has been vastly increased to 43,000 square miles.

Recreation industry and timber industry had lobbied hard and testified on lack of need for such a vast critical habitat designation — and thought that common…

Read the full story

In recent months, environmentalists have been saying that bottled water is wasteful and no healthier than tap. They are helping advance bottled water taxes, bans on bottled water in government offices and at public events, along with a host of other silly anti-bottled water policies. Their advice for those of us who want water on the go: use refillable containers. What they don’t advertise is the fact that those bottles can quickly become breeding grounds for bacteria—which doesn’t sound like…

Read the full story

Candidates running for POTUS shouldn’t whine about being attacked by their opponents. Things look pretty mild in the good ole USA, especially compared with campaign rhetoric in Zimbabwe.

BBC News reports that Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has launched his reelection campaign by calling his opponents “witches, prostitutes and charlatans,” as well as “traitors and two-headed creatures.” Here’s his full quote:

Let the people’s voice thunder across the whole country on 29 March, rejecting and damning once and for all the bootlicking British stooges,…

Read the full story

The Virginia Supreme Court today struck down a state law giving unelected bodies the power to levy taxes in Marshall v. Northern Virginia Regional Transportation Authority. It blocked regional transit authorities from levying taxes to pay for regional transportation projects. (Some of the money is being wasted on pork-barrel projects).

I earlier criticized the biggest tax imposed by the transit authorities, the regional grantor’s tax, in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Examiner, noting that it violates the “user-pays” principle, and economic common sense, by making…

Read the full story

I have more posts on child-snatching by government agencies, strange sexual harassment rulings, and punitive damages for oil spills, at Point of Law Forum, where I am guest blogging.

Read the full story

In the Wall Street Journal today (subscription needed), Kimberley A. Strassel’s column hits the Democrats’ current protectionist stance on trade and points to the party’s rebuilding of the world trade system in the 1930s and understanding of the benefits of free trade.

But, Strassel notes,

That common sense hasn’t matched the temptation to win points with Big Labor or to ride a populist anti-trade wave. Threats to hold trade deals hostage to labor and environmental rules; vows to review existing deals; the…

Read the full story

Public policy is rife with unintended consequences. The newest is that soaring food prices caused by ethanol subsidies in the U.S. are causing food prices to skyrocket in Mexico. While this is old information, what’s news is how this is contributing to civil disorder and other acts of violence in Mexico.

Brigadier General Greg Zanetti believes that ethanol subsidies combined with a slowing American economy and continued drug violence on the border could contribute to a massive flow of refugees, not migrants,…

Read the full story

More proof that wind power is no panacea for the nation’s looming electricity crisis. The wind dropped in Texas, and caused blackouts:

ERCOT said the grid’s frequency dropped suddenly when wind production fell from more than 1,700 megawatts, before the event, to 300 MW when the emergency was declared.

In addition, ERCOT said multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday. That, coupled with the loss of wind generated in West Texas, created…

Read the full story

It’s E-Day in the UK, a national ‘awareness’ day backed by major environmental groups and religious organizations, and the BBC, aimed at getting Brits to reduce their electricity use. The motto is “the small things in life can make a big difference.”

With two hours left to go, electricity use is slightly higher than normal.

Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance is live-blogging the event.

Read the full story

These days it seems that you can slap the word “addiction” after any activity and escape personal responsibility for poor decision making. Moreover, in some places calling yourself an addict not only earns a free pass from consequences but it also gives you the right to sue other people for not protecting you from yourself. Take for example, Graham Calvert, a greyhound trainer in England is suing his bookmaker for failing to prevent him from losing over 2 million pounds in…

Read the full story

Does this make sense? At the same time the House thinks it’s a good idea to provide Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia with duty-free access to the U.S. market for most of their exports, House leadership is opposing the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Yesterday by voice vote the House approved a 10-month extension of the Andean Trade Preferences Act (ATPA), which gives the four Andean countries preferential U.S. market access. For Colombia, according to the U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, that means…

Read the full story

Government social workers have an incentive to overreact to erroneous allegations of child abuse, and take children away from loving parents, because they reasonably fear that they will be fired if a child on their caseload dies, even if the death was unforeseeable. (The problem is even worse in England, fueled by adoption bonuses). Children seized and placed into foster care often experience devastating psychological harm.

Washington, D.C.’s Child and Family Services agency (where 6 case workers were recently fired after a…

Read the full story

I find it ironic for Virginia State Delegate Dave Albo to decry businesses being “scammed,” when he has built a reputation for  pushing grossly punitive aggressive driving and DUI laws at the same time that his law firm specializes in, among other things, defending DUI cases.

Read the full story

The Virginia General Assembly last year voted to let counties increase their commercial property tax in order to pay for new transportation projects. The counties promised they would spend it on new projects. Business groups didn’t fight the tax increase because they were desperate to see transportation improvements that would enable customers to shop and go to work without being stuck in gridlock.

But soon after the tax increase was enacted, Fairfax County decided to instead divert the money from new…

Read the full story

The Supreme Court decided two discrimination cases this week that confirm that the Supreme Court is not “pro-business “in discrimination cases, as liberal journalists claim. I discuss them at PointofLaw. Examples include one ruling (Federal Express v. Holowecki) that’s anti-business, and another ruling that’s neutral towards business.

Today, I also discussed how courts can be downright hostile to employers in sexual harassment cases, engaging in a game of bait-and-switch to first hold them liable and then maximize the damages that plaintiffs can collect.…

Read the full story

With talk of recession, inflation, and stagnation dominating financial news, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in his written testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, today gave a sobering but yet not overly pessimistic view of the U.S. economy, which was followed closely by investors.

Bernanke noted the widespread effects of the subprime mortgage crisis in the housing and credit markets. The growth in job creation has slowed, and unemployment has inched up. But he said that there were some encouraging signs…

Read the full story

Biofuels have recently come under attack from their erstwhile supporters in the liberal environmentalist movement for increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Now it’s the turn of the plug-in hybrid. So much for the “Who killed the electric car?” line of argument.

The fact is that environmentalists won’t be satisfied until personal automobility is crippled and we are all living within walking distance of “sustainable” work. For those who want to “save the planet,” however, there will be exemptions.

Read the full story

William F. Buckley, Jr. passed away today. How very sad. For some libertarians, it all started with Rand. For me, it started with Buckley.

WFB was my guiding light through those formative years in the 1960s when the “anti-war” (pro-Hanoi) movement, the New Left, and the counter-culture were in full cry.

Though vastly outnumbered in high school by peers and teachers mouthing cliches of socialism, appeasement, and moral relativism, I confidently debated any and all comers, armed with facts and arguments from…

Read the full story

GAO FINDS FEDERAL DATA PROTECTION LAGGING
“The GAO says that despite a steady stream of embarrassing computer security breaches, many major U.S. federal agencies still are doing too little to safeguard the sensitive personal information in their possession. Only two of 24 agencies studied by the GAO in a report released last week had implemented all five security measures recommended by the Office of Management and Budget to protect personal information.”

Read the full story

A new CEI paper by one of our fellows–okay, me–outlines the five dumbest product bans we could find in the United States. My personal (least) favorite is a Louisiana law that threatens children with $250 fines if they sell wildflower bouquets without having passed a florist’s exam. Admittedly, writing the paper was sort of like shooting fish in a barrel: the bans we picked are so clearly absurd that I simply can’t figure out how legislators have managed to pass them without…

Read the full story