A Minnesota school district is “laying off 94 teachers” even while spending thousands of dollars to send “a delegation” of teachers to an annual “White Privilege Conference” with Marxist speakers, notes the National Review:
“This will cost the district $160 a day for each teacher plus $125 a day for the substitutes who will handle their classes while they are away, learning ‘how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life.’ Other cash-strapped districts will also be sending delegations. The keynote speaker will be Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,” who was “part of the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba. . .Last year’s speaker recommended looking to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela for ‘exciting progressive developments.’ The sponsors of this educational event include the University of Minnesota,” and the private institutions “Hamline University, Gustavus Adolphus College,” and “Augsburg College, among others.”
The Seattle schools, a past participant in the White Privilege Conference, recently insisted that Easter eggs be referred to as “spring spheres” so as not to offend non-Christians. In 2007, the Seattle Schools illegally used federal funds to send students to the White Privilege Conference. (One of the Conference speakers says that Christianity has far too much influence in our society.)
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Today the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York released criminal charges against a number of online poker websites operating in the United States as well as charges against a number of companies involved with processing payments to and from these sites. A DoJ release describing the lawsuit can be found here.
As a result, the largest sites offering poker in the United States have immediately suspended players from the United States from participating. There are millions of dollars that belong to United States citizens tied up in these sites that have also become immediately unavailable. It is unclear if/when any of this money will be able to be recovered.
A law was passed in 2006 which made it illegal for financial institutions to process payments that would be sent towards online gambling sites. This law was not particularly effective, as it was still fairly easy to find organizations that either believed (1) that they were still operating legally, or (2) didn’t care that they were operating illegally. This has now changed.
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Congress can always change the law if it chooses. For example, it passed the 1991 Civil Rights Act, which overturned many Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But you would never know that from reading Virginia Senator Jim Webb’s letter today in the Wall Steely Journal. In it, Webb defends his vote against a Republican amendment to block EPA regulation of carbon dioxide, an amendment supported by many Virginians because the EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide would wipe out thousands of Virginia jobs in industries that emit carbon dioxide. (Carbon dioxide is the gas needed by plants to conduct photosynthesis. It is not poisonous or dirty, and humans emit carbon dioxide every time they breathe.)
Webb claims he voted against the amendment because the amendment would have been “a violation of the Supreme Court holding in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency,” a case that interpreted a provision of the Clean Air Act to potentially expand the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
The amendment would have greatly reduced future energy costs, thus saving countless jobs. In 2008, President Obama admitted that under his greenhouse gas regulations, people’s utility bills would “skyrocket,” and coal-fired power plants would go “bankrupt.” The EPA’s own internal documents show that the administration’s global warming regulations will result in a massive “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”
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An expensive rail line for passengers traveling in and out of the Washington, D.C. region’s Dulles International Airport never struck me as a good use of taxpayer dollars. As a resident of northern Virginia, I’ve found the Washington Flyer bus service reliable and affordable. However, now that the Metro rail line is being built, its costs should be kept as much under control as possible.
Unfortunately, the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority (MWAA) — which oversees both Dulles and Reagan National — threw caution to the wind recently, by imposing a project labor agreement (PLA) on the second phase of the line’s construction. PLAs impose onerous conditions on contractors who wish to bid on government projects.
Under PLA, employers can be required to hire workers through union hiring halls and apprentices through union apprentice programs. In addition, workers — whether previously unionized or not — can be required to pay union dues. The Washington Examiner reports:
The MWAA board’s 11-2 decision last week to mandate a project labor agreement, or PLA, for the second phase of Dulles Rail construction, will not preclude nonunionized contractors from bidding on the multibillion-dollar project. If they win the bid, however, it will require they follow specific wage guidelines, offer union benefits, and hire union workers. The move comes on the heels of the board’s decision to spend $330 million more on the Dulles International Airport train station, against the wishes of state and local officials.
“Basically, this mandates unions,” said Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity, R-Springfield.
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CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
April 15, 2011
>>Featured Story
Federal employees are billing taxpayers for hours they spend on union activities, and the Obama administration is absolutely fine with that—as long as the American public doesn’t find out. But this week in The Washington Times, Vincent Vernuccio called attention to Obama’s “union welfare program” and the administration’s attempts to cover things up. Yesterday Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) cited CEI’s efforts to investigate this issue during a House Oversight Committee hearing on state budgets and public debts. Watch the clip here.
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“Being a classical liberal means being a conservative when you need to preserve liberties you already have, a radical when you have to gain liberties you don’t have yet, a reactionary when you need to regain liberties you’ve lost, and a revolutionary when you can’t be free any other way. And always progressive, because without liberty, there can be no progress.”
– Carlo Cardasco, European director of Students for Liberty (via Oliver Cooper)
Discuss.
Tech:
Fujitsu plans 1Gbps fiber optic network for rural Britain:
“Economies of scale mean that densely populated cities have generally been the ones to benefit from the roll out of superfast broadband networks, while those in rural areas have missed out. Following Google’s recent announcement that it will build and test 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks in selected cities with between 50,000 to 500,000 residents in the U.S. starting with Kansas City, Kansas, Fujitsu has unveiled plans to create a similar superfast FTTH broadband network for five million homes and businesses in rural Britain to bridge the digital divide between city and country.”
Google to sentence YouTube violators to ‘copyright school’:
“Google released a set of tougher copyright policies for YouTube online video users on Thursday, requiring violators to watch a copyright tutorial and pass a test before allowing them to continue using the service.”
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The GOP has been bragging that its shutdown-avoiding budget deal will save $38 billion. The CBO took a closer look, and it turns out the actual figure is $353 million, or 0.02 percent of this year’s budget deficit.
In The Daily Caller, I point out that this is one more example of the iron law of politics — inertia always wins.
Disclaimer: CEI takes no stances on foreign policy or social issues. The opinions on those issues in the article are my personal opinions.
Have a listen here.
Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow Kathryn Ciano analyzes the Continuing Resolution passed by the House today that will keep the federal government open for another six months. She also looks at proposals from President Obama and Rep. Paul Ryan to reduce the budget deficit over the next decade.
On April 4, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent the nation’s school officials a letter urging them to water down due process and other protections for students and staff accused of sexual harassment. It encouraged colleges and schools to cut back on procedures that help debunk unfounded allegations, such as cross-examination, and sought to place limits on students’ ability to appeal their convictions. The Education Department’s letter, timed to coincide with a PR campaign by Joe Biden, was also criticized by civil libertarians, like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for defining sexual harassment so broadly as to include constitutionally protected speech.
As Wendy Kaminer noted, the Education Department is attempting to deprive accused students of the right to cross-examine their accusers: “students accused of harassment should not be allowed to confront (or directly question) their accusers, according to OCR, because cross-examination of a complainant ‘may be traumatic or intimidating.’” As OCR puts it, “OCR strongly discourages schools from allowing the parties personally to question or cross-examine each other during the hearing.” This is perverse, since “a famous legal authority once described cross-examination as the most powerful engine for the discovery of truth ever devised by man.”
(While there is no independent constitutional right to cross-examine in campus disciplinary proceedings, the right is sometimes protected by state education codes, collective bargaining agreements, or other contracts or regulations. Moreover, in a few campus disciplinary cases, such as Donohue v. Baker (1997), judges have ruled that cross-examination was constitutionally required on due-process grounds to test the credibility of the accuser.)
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