January 2012

Last Call for Ethanol: Biofuel Lobby Out in Full Force

by Brian McGraw on November 17, 2010

in Energy, Ethanol

With 2011 a month and a half away, the ethanol industry is pushing full steam ahead for a renewal of the tax credit and tariff provided to support the industry. There seems to be ample opportunity to push this legislation, as it could be attached to either any energy or tax legislation that makes it way through Congress. Rent-seeking lobbyists and politicians are out in full force hoping the river of cash doesn’t run dry:

A group of senators have pressed Harry Reid over concerns that the expansion of ethanol is being constrained by “marketplace limitations.” It also implies that eventually the ethanol industry will be ready to leave the government teat, though we must ensure this isn’t done prematurely and that there is ample time for “broader discussions” on how to address the limitations facing biofuels (hint: they aren’t cost competitive).

The ethanol lobby is also out in full force, attempting to scare politicians over potential job losses. Should they get much attention to their cause, the U.S. will be seeing increased amounts of flex-fuel vehicles and billions of dollars wasted to fund ethanol pipelines and pumps around the country.

Finally, Senator Harkin (D-Iowa) threatened to oppose electric vehicles if his colleagues don’t support biofuel policies. Politics at its best. Let’s hope they can’t come to an agreement and stop the subsidies for both.

Need another reason to oppose ethanol subsidies? We are now subsidizing European drivers because our ethanol producers are receiving tax credits for ethanol exported to the EU.

Image credit: Rascaille Rabbit’s flickr photostream.

The Power of Incumbency: Charlie Rangel Edition

by Ryan Young on November 17, 2010

in Politics as Usual

Over at the AmSpec blog, I look at the just-wrapped House ethics trial against Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY). Worth noting: while that Damoclean sword was hanging over Rangel’s head, 80 percent of his district’s voters though him worthy of another term.

Nothing against Rangel; he has his problems, but he’s good on some issues, such as wanting to end the Cuban embargo. But the ease with which even ethically challenged incumbents get re-elected is a sign that our democracy is not healthy.

Image credit: pamhule’s flickr photostream.

Afternoon Links: November 17, 2010

by Nicole Ciandella on November 17, 2010

in Zeitgeist

1. The Flagstaff, Arizona school district is going to start weighing elementary school children and sending overweight children home with notes.

2. A Brooklyn cafe is advertising its 10-shot espresso drink as “coffee porn in a cup.” (Don’t tell the FDA.)

3. The fate of Staten Island wild turkeys depends on a survey of local opinion conducted by the NY Department of Environmental Conservation.

4. A New Jersey pastor tells his congregation that Facebook leads to adultery.

5. After conducting focus groups, Playboy TV has decided to change their programming to attract more female viewers.

Photo Credit: DennisSylvesterHurd’s Flickr Stream.

Why You Should CARE About the Ban on Four Loko

by Michelle Minton on November 17, 2010

in Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Late yesterday evening, the maker of Four Loko announced it was removing caffeine from the popular alcohol beverage. This came following media-driven hysteria, state bans, and a potential federal ban from the FDA. My colleague Greg Conko analyzes the likely FDA regulation here.

You might not like the idea (or the taste) of Four Loko, the popular beverage that combines caffeine, other stimulants, and 12 percent alcohol in a candy-colored 23.5 ounces. But if you do like any alcohol beverage or any other product that could be remotely controversial, you should care about the banning and treatment of Four Loko and other similar alcohol energy drinks by government officials.

While several states have banned or taken steps to ban Four Loko and other similar products, which some believe contain a dangerous cocktail of caffeine and alcohol, the most disturbing developments occurred in New York where the product was not banned through a legislative process. Rather, it was intimidation and strong-arm tactics, including “convincing” the state’s largest distributors to “voluntarily” agree to stop selling the beverage, and conducting raids on bars and restaurants serving the drink. According to an account by Eddie Huang, the owner of New York City restaurant Xiao Ye, which proudly serves Four Loko, the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) raided Huang’s restaurant last Friday night, just before announcing the deal with distributors not to sell Four Loko. Eddie reacted to the raid on his blog:

We followed the law, we were in line with the SLA requirements, but basically, it was understood that if we kept selling Four Loko, we would be seeing a lot of raids… All Four Loko in the house was destroyed on site, it was taken off the menu, and four Loko Thursdays is cancelled.

It still isn’t certain that the SLA actually destroyed any of the product (the SLA denies destroying any Four Loko), but the raid is obviously meant to scare Eddie Huang from promoting the drink at his restaurant. The “voluntary” agreements with the large distributors is disturbing alone, especially when one considers that future federal legislation would likely make it impossible to get beer any way other than going through a distributor.

The CARE Act (H.R. 5034) would prevent the federal government from using the dormant Commerce Clause to stop states from enacted discriminatory laws against out-of-state producers of alcohol. My colleague Angela Logomasini describes the proposed legislation here.

Of particular concern is the fact that the new legislation would almost certainly be used to prevent direct shipping of wine, beer, and any other alcohol beverage. This means that retail operations would be forced to rely on distributors to get the products their consumers want. If one regulator has an issue with a particular product, vineyard, or brewery, he or she could convince distributors to “voluntarily” agree not to sell the product.

The FDA: Banning Out of Fear

For the last few years a widespread skepticism about alcohol energy drinks (AEDs) has prompted the FDA and other regulatory agencies to investigate the products. In 2008 MillerCoors “voluntarily” agreed to reformulate their massively popular drink called Sparks after state attorneys general applied pressure to the company.  In 2009, the FDA jumped into the debate when it sent letters to several manufacturers AEDs, giving them 30 days to produce evidence showing that the alcohol-caffeine combo is safe for consumption.

Now the FDA has set it sights on Four Loko and will likely announce their decision today on whether caffeine is a “safe” ingredient to add to non-cola products. Such a decision could impact many more beverages than Four Loko alone.

Lawmaking that is based purely in panic and on anecdotal evidence as opposed to scientific is nothing new. The FDA and state lawmakers are up in arms about Four Loko as a result of a few isolated incidents of people behaving badly while drinking the product. Whether or not their is a direct correlation between the behavior and consumption of the product is not known and doesn’t seem to matter to the FDA or state regulators.

Whether or not you like Four Loko, you should defend consumers, retailers, and restaurant owners’ right to make the choice for themselves whether or not they want to buy or sell a product.

CEI saw this wave of misguided, manufactured outrage coming. Earlier this year, we published a study on alcohol energy drinks (AEDs) by Baylen Linnekin, “Extreme Refreshment Crackdown,” on FDA’s continued harassment of AED manufacturers and the lack of evidence supporting their alarmist claims.

Image credit: The Wisest Wizards’ flickr photostream.

Union Members: Where Do Your Dues Go?

by Marc Scribner on November 17, 2010

in Video

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SFWzJ_amkY 285 234]

Four Loko Crackdown: FDA Set to Ban Caffeinated-Alcohol Drinks

by Greg Conko on November 17, 2010 · 1 comment

in Health and Illness, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

So, it looks as though the FDA is now set to ban the small but growing market for so-called alcohol-energy drinks, such as Four Loko and Joose. CEI wrote about the issue back in May of this year and explained that the move is an arbitrary extension of FDA authority based on irrelevant science at the behest of grandstanding state attorneys general and pro-regulation activist groups.

As food and beverage law expert Baylen Linnekin wrote in a CEI OnPoint, “The agency’s campaign against alcohol energy drinks (AEDs) … is based on research unrelated to AEDs and targets products the FDA should classify as generally recognized as safe. With more than 100 years of historical evidence that consumers can safely consume caffeine and alcohol together, the FDA should not stand in the way of adults’ drink choices.”  Most of the scare stories and essentially all of the research on the alleged abuse of caffeine-alcohol drinks are based, not on commercial pre-mixed AEDs, but on self-mixed or bartender-mixed drinks like vodka-and-Red Bull or JaegerBombs (see here, here, here, and here, for example).  Nanny State activists are simply extrapolating the findings of this research to pre-mixed AEDs because, as commercial products, they are more susceptible to regulation.

As it turns out, the FDA’s central legal objection to AEDs, and the source of its authority to ban the products, is not merely the mixture of alcohol and caffeine, but the addition of caffeine to nearly any food or beverage at all.  Currently, it is legal for the makers of commercial products to add caffeine only to “cola type beverages”, which means that the FDA could use its authority to ban countless other, much more common products, from Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper to an array of popular candies and snacks that currently contain added caffeine.  Worse still, one of the lead campaigners against commercial pre-mixed AEDs has also suggested forbidding bartenders from selling their own caffeine and alcohol concoctions, which would wipe out not only vodka and Red Bull mixes but even the popular Rum-and-Coke and Irish coffee.

Of course, it’s easy to single out a small, politically incorrect product class.  But it’s pretty clear that young adults aren’t going to stop getting their kicks from the combination of caffeine and alcohol as long as those other products are so freely available.  So, the ban on Joose and Four Loko won’t solve any of the alleged problems associated with caffeine’s tendency to mask the intoxicating effects of the alcohol.  It is not reasonable to believe that banning AEDs would have any measurable effect on drinking or drunkenness, especially given the ubiquity of self-mixed cocktails combining alcohol and energy drinks.  The campaign against AEDs is therefore wasteful and misguided, and our national nanny will simply be removing one beverage option that some consumers seem to enjoy.

As my colleague Michelle Minton put it last week, “Product Bans Are More Dangerous than Four Loko.”

Morning Media Summary

by Lee Doren on November 17, 2010

in Economy, Energy, Environment, Legal, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Trade

Tech:

Internet Explorer 9 Caught Cheating in SunSpider Benchmark?:
“A Mozilla engineer has uncovered something embarrassing for Microsoft – Internet Explorer is cheating in the SunSpider Benchmark. The SunSpider, although developed by Apple, has nowadays become a very popular choice of benchmark for the JavaScript engines of browsers.”

SilverStripe CMS the first ever open source web app to become Microsoft Certified:
“We’re excited to report that SilverStripe CMS has become Microsoft certified today. This is notable because Microsoft has certified a very small number* of web applications, and we are the first ever open source web-application to attain certification.”

Global Warming / Environment / Energy:

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer Pleads For Government to Force Environmentalism:
Video

Insurance / Gambling:

South Carolina Baptists back resolutions against gambling, homosexuality:
“South Carolina Southern Baptists adopted resolutions defending their right to preach against homosexuality and encouraging legislators not to loosen the state’s gambling laws, as the state Baptist Convention began its 190th annual meeting Tuesday in Columbia.”

Health / Safety:

FDA Set to Move on Caffeine in Alcoholic Drink:
“U.S. regulators are poised to ban the sale of caffeine-containing alcoholic drinks amid rising safety concerns, in a blow to several small but fast-growing drinks companies.”

Cash-strapped states cut funds for anti-smoking programs:
“Many cash-strapped U.S. states are cutting budgets for tobacco-prevention programs, raising alarms among public-health groups as the nation’s progress toward getting adult smokers to quit has stalled.”

Economics:

Podesta calls on Obama to circumvent Congress:
“Former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta, now the head of the Center for American Progress, called on President Obama to push forward with his agenda using federal agencies and executive branch power Tuesday, even though Democrats were dealt a blow in the recent midterm elections. Podesta said the American people want the president to move forward with his agenda.”

GM boosts IPO size to reduce government stake:
“The announcement by the top U.S. automaker comes a day after it raised the price range for the IPO and increased the preferred shares on offer by a third to $4 billion.”

U.S. Sets 50 Bank Probes:
“The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is conducting about 50 criminal investigations of former executives, directors and employees at U.S. banks that have failed since the start of the financial crisis.”

Legal:

House ethics panel convicts Rep. Rangel on 11 of 13 counts of rule violations:
“Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), once one of the most powerful members of the House, was convicted Tuesday on 11 counts of violating ethics rules and now faces punishment.”

Labor:

Crashing the big Democratic donors’ D.C. meeting:
“Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors met Tuesday afternoon with influential party figures such as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, organizer Joan Fitz-Gerald and former White House aide Van Jones to discuss the lessons and implications of the GOP’s landslide midterm election victory.”

Transportation/ Land Use:

Foreign Policy: Richard Branson’s Rail Ambitions:
“It’s conventional wisdom now that President Barack Obama’s energy program is dead. But it’s looking increasingly likely that the greatest bipartisan motivator of all, money, will preserve at least one of the program’s pillars: high-speed rail.”

This Half Million Dollar Mini House Was Built on Top of Single Parking Space:
“Tiny houses are not uncommon, especially in Tokyo. But Fuyuhito Moriya’s three-story pad (which he bravely shares with his mother) is among the most impressive I’ve ever seen. It sits atop a single parking space.”

Celebrate Egyptian Blogger Kareem Amer’s Freedom by Defending Free Speech

by Michelle Minton on November 17, 2010 · 1 comment

in Culture, Personal Liberty, Zeitgeist

Tonight have a drink and give a Tweet to the man who spent four years in an Egyptian jail, and remember that he is not the first, nor the last, blogger or writer to be silenced. Be thankful that we live in a nation where “highlighting inappropriate aspects” about your country won’t get us thrown in prison (it might actually get you a TV show).

After more than four years in an Egyptian prison, Kareem Amer was released, having finished out his sentence. Kareem was jailed as a result of articles he’d published on the Internet that were secular in nature and critical of the Egyptian government. He was officially charged with “spreading data and malicious rumors that disrupt public security,” “defaming the president of Egypt,” “incitement to overthrow the regime,” “incitement to hate Islam, and breach of public peace.” And finally, he was accused of “highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt and spreading them to the public.”

The many people of various ideologies who threw their support behind Kareem will be celebrating his release tonight, including CEI. While you toast to the liberation of an innocent man, remember that there are many others who are currently being silenced and that freedom, even here in the United States, is something that requires constant and serious vigilance. There are more insidious ways to silence free speech than simply locking someone up in prison.

Intellectuals of the libertarian bent are often painted as being reactionary, inflammatory, and petulantly idealistic. In some cases, that might be true. Yet, what we seek to do, some with more finesse than others, is defend individual rights and freedoms from every threat, no matter how small it may appear.

Forcing artists, writers, or any individual to alter or eliminate his or her work, whether it is a video game, TV show, movie, play, or blog, is also a threat to free expression. It may not seem like much at first — and Americans would not stand for a blogger being thrown in jail simply for saying something the government didn’t like — however, they have stood by while state, local, and federal government officials, wielding their pens like knives, cut into our freedoms with a thousand tiny pen strokes. After enough of those cuts, the fabric that maintains our liberty in this country and separates us from Egypt begins to fall apart.

They silenced Kareem because he said things they didn’t like. There are ways even in the “liberal West” in which one group can use the government to silence or limit the speech of another group or individual, simply because they don’t like what they hear (for example, the recent discussions about reviving the Fairness Doctrine.) That is why, while we celebrate one man’s freedom, we must remember that the fight is ongoing and that the best way we can defend liberty around the world is to defend our right to speak up here at home.

Image credit: MohammedMaree ???? ???? mar3e’s flickr photostream.

Afternoon Links: November 16, 2010

by Nicole Ciandella on November 16, 2010

in Zeitgeist

1. Do the non-religious really have greater brand loyalty?

2. The Janesville Gazette in Wisconsin is banning website comments on stories that involve “crimes, courts, accidents, race, or sex.”

3. A Conan audience member is subjected to an extended TSA pat-down. (Chocolate-covered strawberries are involved.)

4. Posters show how many floppy disks you would need to load popular contemporary software.

5. Anti-mosque Arizonans accidentally protest the construction of a church.

Photo Credit: Lusitana

TSA Screening: What are the Limits?

by Kathryn Ciano on November 16, 2010 · 9 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

Top security officers claim these invasive scans are necessary for our safety. In a news conference at Reagan National Airport, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pointed to a Nigerian man caught last Christmas day trying to board a plane with explosives hidden in his underwear. If officials had used less invasive techniques, Napolitano reasons, we would not have caught him.

Here is the photo the Drudge Report is running to demonstrate how intrusive TSA’s scans are:

There must be limits to how far TSA officials can go, right?

Actually, not really.

TSA officials put their hands down this radio host’s pants. Baggy sweatpants made it impossible for officials to see the precise contours of the man’s crotch, so officials were directed to grope inside his pants until they were satisfied he wasn’t hiding anything.

In the same ABC News video, another man tells the chilling story of a TSA official giving him a “full 360″ “between his underwear and his skin” to check for, well, junk:

Janet Napolitano defended the new policies in a USA Today op-ed, calling invasive scans “safe” and “private,” viewable only by federal airport workers. Yet somehow images from these scans have already been leaked, flooding the Internet.

So far the folks speaking out against invasive TSA touching are men. How far would TSA officials — merely human beings backed by federal indemnity – grope to satisfy themselves a female isn’t hiding a small bomb?

Photo credit: jello2594’s flickr photostream.

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