Last week the House Appropriations Committee released its draft bill for funding of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. Of particular note is the appropriation for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). As Marcia Smith observes, the $13 million set forth by the Committee is half of what agency director George Nield requested back in May: 
The request was 74 percent higher than what it had received for FY2010 and FY2011… Nield said at the hearing that he expected a ten-fold increase in the number of commercial launches and pointed to new initiatives such as the Commercial Spaceflight Technical Center at Kennedy Space Center, FL and a “prize” program.
The news was greeted with skepticism in some quarters, with predictions of permit and license delays as a consequence of the trim-down. Alternatively, Behind the Black’s Robert Zimmerman sees this as a positive sign:
This is good, to my mind. Cutting their budget will pull the teeth from their regulatory efforts. As the commercial space industry ramps up, the political pressure on this office to approve permits will increase, and if they are short of cash they will have no choice but to keep things simple and say yes.
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Under the What We Do heading on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) website, the board states: “The National Labor Relations Board is an independent federal agency vested with the power to safeguard employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative.”
This mission statement by the NLRB explains the board’s recent court decisions and rulemakings. The unadulterated bias toward Big Labor by the NLRB is a far cry from the intentions of the National Labor Relations Act (which created the NLRB). The NLRA intended to protect employees and employers rights, not enforce widespread unionization.
The regulatory avalanche from the NLRB during the Obama administration demonstrates the board’s dedication to union cronyism. Public perception of the board is so negative that Rep. Trey Gowdy has gone as far to ask, “Why do you need an NLRB?” and to demand a transfer of the Boards responsibilities to the Department of Justice.
Amid NLRB promulgation of rules, court decisions, orders, and political grandstanding, workers’ rights hang in the balance. The three most recent devastating NLRB court decisions subjugate the worker to a second class citizen. The NLRB court orders comprehensively cover unions’ rights to organize and employers and employees are ordered to let them. The decisions eliminate workers’ ability to choose union representation or not. Obama’s NLRB has consistently chosen to interpret the right to associate as forcing unionization, not the freedom to choose to associate or not.
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Privatizing Pennsylvania’s liquor stores has been a subject of debate for decades. Proposals in the past have been met with fear about the effects privatization would have on public safety and skepticism about the need for change. Most recently, Rep. Michael Turzai, Pennsylvania’s House 
majority leader, introduced a bill that would sell of state-owned liquor stores and provide more licenses for private businesses to retail liquor and wine and this time it looks like the proposal might have a chance.
The difference this time around is residents’ increasing frustration with the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board’s draconian policies, and the growing body of evidence that privatized liquor sales would not adversely affect public safety. In fact, privatization would increase choices for residents and would actually bring more money into the state than the current government control system.
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Despite its massive price tag of $450 billion, President Obama’s recently-proposed American Jobs Act seems like a useless dud to experts who’ve analyzed it, and the proposal was a big disappointment to struggling businesses.
As one newspaper notes, “business owners and financial experts reacted negatively to President Barack Obama’s Thursday night speech outlining his plan to boost jobs in America. Wall Street and investors in general were disappointed, said Chris Murray, owner of Murray Financial Group.” The so-called “American Jobs Act” is just a “‘ploy’” that “‘lacked any real substance,’ Murray said. ‘As far as Obama declaring class warfare on Americans who make $250,000 or more, that has proven to be counterproductive in the past and will be this time as well,’ Murray said. ‘Until clear leadership is displayed and sound policies are implemented by the administration and Congress, the economy won’t show any real measurement of improvement, stock market volatility will continue, and business and consumer confidence will remain depressed. It’s all about leadership, or lack of, at this point’. . .Scott McCaskill, a financial planner with Voso Financial Advisors, said the president’s plan came out much as analysts had expected: ‘A lot of excitement and promises, but very little detail and specifics.’ McCaskill said he had seen responses from other analysts who described the plan as ‘a lot of sizzle, very little steak.’”
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Associated Press fact checkers took issue with President Obama’s claims about his new $450 billion federal “jobs” plan:
President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions. . .Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due.
The Associated Press also rebutted Obama’s claim that his proposal would not increase the deficit, as if all the new spending Obama is pushing could be paid for out of money conjured up out of thin air:
OBAMA: “It will not add to the deficit.”
THE FACTS: It’s hard to see how the program would not raise the deficit . . . The accumulation of years of deficit spending has produced a national debt headed toward $15 trillion.
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Here’s another batch of regulatory bloopers:
- In Little Rock, Arkansas, it is illegal to honk your horn at a restaurant after 9:00 pm.
- It has been illegal for men to walk dogs in public in Saudi Arabia since 2008.
- Until 1975, wearing a swimsuit on a Kentucky city street without a police escort meant a fine of up to $25.
- In New Jersey, you need a license to break eggs at work.
- In Walnut City, California, cross-dressing is only allowed if you get a permit from the sheriff.
- §10-1.2 of Honolulu’s city code makes it “unlawful to annoy any bird” in a public park.
- In Naples, Italy, the law requires pizzas to be round.
- It is illegal to play bingo while drunk in Kern County, California. Only sober people may play.
President Obama observed in his speech that “the millions of Americans who are watching at home right now, they don’t care about politics.” Obama harkened back to the days of the American Dream, where merit and hard work were enough to prosper in America. His plan to restore America’s past greatness and economic power: the American Jobs Act.
Until next week when the President’s full details and budget of the American Jobs Act are released, it is difficult to predict the consequences of the plan. However, the American Jobs Act feels a lot like yet another doomed stimulus.
Remarkably, Obama admitted to some mistakes in past legislation, commenting that the American Jobs Act would be, “No more boondoggles… We’re cutting the red tape that prevents some of these projects from getting started as quickly as possible.” This is a promising statement by the President, but looking back to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), it is a long shot.
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Over at Cosmic Log, the blog of MSNBC science correspondent Alan Boyle, there is an interview with me based on a phone conversation I had with him yesterday, and an hour-long discussion last night in Second Life and on Blog Talk Radio. The podcast for the latter went up shortly after, for those who would like to listen:
Simberg still believes the Apollo moon landings were “a historic achievement” from a technological and even spiritual perspective. It’s just not the way to run a sustainable space program.
“I tend to think of Apollo as not having much to do with space in terms of opening it up” as a frontier, he told me.
Is the space frontier even worth opening up? Simberg said policymakers see the space program as more of a jobs program. “The reason space policy is a mess is because it’s really not ‘important’ … to the people who make the decisions about it,” he said.
Although Simberg shies away from being pigeonholed as a Republican or a conservative, he’s in favor of free-market, small-government solutions. That means he often finds himself in the camp opposing Obama — except when it comes to space policy. He’s strongly in favor of the Obama administration’s push to commercialize spaceflight to low Earth orbit.
…In Simberg’s view, the worst thing about Obama’s space policy is that Obama is behind it. “It’s just very unfortunate that it’s this administration that managed to come up with this one enlightened policy,” Simberg said. “The biggest political challenge is trying to make sure that if/when the Republicans take over … they don’t have a kneejerk reaction to everything that came out of the White House.”
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Have a listen here.
In a speech tonight, President Obama is expected to announce the creation of a government infrastucture bank as part of his plan to reduce unemployment. Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews explains why it won’t work as planned, and offers an alternative idea: liberalization.
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