David Michaels, a left-wing ideologue who supports junk science and seeks to restrict gun possession, has been approved by the Senate Health Committee to head the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Only two committee members, both Republicans, voted against Michaels.

The vote occurred with no discussion, and no hearing was even held on his nomination, although hearings have consistently been held on OSHA nominees in the past, even for far less controversial picks.

Lawyer and Second Amendment expert, David Kopel explains how Michaels…

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President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package creates imaginary jobs, while destroying ones in the real world.

Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site…

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UPDATE: It appears that I misinterpreted the cited data on home sales, though I elect to shift the blame to the poor labeling of the Census Bureau data set (linked in original text).  The 33,000 per month I cited reflects only new home sales.  The correct number for monthly home sales is well over 400,000 per month.  However, one is left to wonder whether, in lack of the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit, demand for home sales would…

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With unemployment up yet again, it must be reassuring to Americans that job-seeking veterans are being helped so much by the government, and by all those Web-based organizations with such names as VetJobs.com, MilitaryHire.com, RecruitMilitary.com, HireVeterans.com, and Military Job Zone.

Except that they’re not. Remember the expression “Don’t forget; hire the vet”? We’ve forgotten.

Read my Philadelphia Inquirer piece, “No Medals for Hiring Vets,” and be enraged.

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Unemployment is now higher in the U.S. than in Europe,  reports the Washington Post.  “The official U.S. unemployment rate, reported last Friday, now stands at 10.2 percent,” compared to “9.7 percent” in Europe.   This is the highest rate in more than 26 years, and marks a huge change from the recent past, in which unemployment was double the American rate in much of Europe, such as in France.

Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus…

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From attempting to manipulate the definition of “supervisor” to changing the way in which workers are organized, the above seems to be a guiding principle in organized labor’s bold new approach to increasing union membership. Consistent with that, some union friendly government officials are trying to change the way in which votes for some workers are counted.

Today, as The Wall Street Journal reports, National Mediation Board chair Elizabeth Dougherty wrote to more than a dozen Republican senators, protesting her colleagues’ proposed rule…

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The recent announcement that the GDP grew in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent was referred to by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as proof that the economy is finally improving.  But a quick glance at history demonstrates that this is not the case.

Between 1934 and 1937—during the heart of the Great Depression—GDP grew at by an average of 9.5 percent annually.  In 1934, GDP grew by nearly 11 percent, but it would be six more years…

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Liberals are busy sending each other twitters falsely claiming that Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, said that he would have voted to uphold school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite!

A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East…

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Recently, the Senate voted to ban defense contractors — that is, much of American business — from contractually mandating arbitration of employment discrimination disputes.  The bill’s sponsor, Al Franken (D-Minn.), pushed the bill by claiming that arbitration provisions in an employment contract kept Jamie Leigh Jones from suing her alleged rapists.  But they didn’t: a federal appeals court ruled the arbitration provisions didn’t apply to Jones’ case, leaving her free to sue in court.

Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors…

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The pending U.S. Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia are languishing in limbo, despite the fact that all three agreements will improve the flow of goods and services, foster economic growth and create jobs, and enhance the close relationships between the U.S. and those countries.   That was the theme of the panel of speakers at The Heritage Foundation’s seminar today, “Getting America’s trade agenda back on track.”

The panel featured H.E. Han Duk-soo, Ambassador of the Republic of…

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The Economist’s current Lexington column highlights the growing public resentment at the widening disparity between compensation and job security in the private and public sectros — which are largely the result of increasing unionization of government employees. (Subscription required for the Economist link.)

Those who are still employed have seen their wages stagnate and their pensions shrivel in the stockmarket crash. Their health insurance is insecure, but they don’t trust Congress not to make it worse.

Meanwhile, they can see that one group…

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Unemployment has risen to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.

That’s much higher than the Obama administration predicted unemployment would rise, if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package.  The administration claimed unemployment would rise to 8 percent without a stimulus.

Small businesses are finding it more difficult than ever to borrow badly needed money to meet their payrolls.  New financial regulations backed by the administration are contributing to a terrible credit crunch.  Meanwhile, the wealthy Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, perhaps the…

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Yesterday in Harrisburg, rowdy unionists disrupted a rally held by two Pennsylvania state legislators to promote legislation to end project labor agreements (PLAs), which put nonunion contractors at a sever disadvantage, on state construction projects.  Under a PLA, an open shop contractor could be required to employ workers from union hiring halls, acquire apprentices from union apprentice programs, and require employees to pay union dues. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that “testy exchanges and pushing and shoving followed” the press conference. Meanwhile, the…

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American law has moved in a leftward direction over the last 20 years, steadily restricting use of the death penalty and criminal sentencing, and expanding lawsuits against businesses, thanks largely to the Supreme Court.

But to some left-leaning journalists who write about the Supreme Court, none of this has ever happened, and the Supreme Court, which is responsible for many of these liberal changes, remains a conservative boogeyman.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, America’s most famous Supreme Court reporter, writes today that in the Supreme…

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The middle class is facing big tax increases thanks to Obama and liberal congressional leaders.

Even the trimmed-down version of Obama’s health-care plan recently announced by a ranking Senator contains lots of tax increases for the middle class (see below).

And the costly cap-and-trade energy legislation passed by the House and supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases in the name of fighting global warming, Administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think…

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Want to be a barber in Nevada? You’ll need to get a license first. One of the requirements is a chest X-ray, of all things. And a blood test.

More onerous is the 18-month apprenticeship under a licensed barber, which requires its own license – plus another chest X-ray and blood test.

Occupational licensing regulations are rarely in place to benefit consumers. Their primary purpose is often to limit competition by putting up barriers to entry. Why do this? Because keeping the…

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Even though 4 Democratic Senators are so nervous about the electricity tax called cap-and-trade they are urging their leadership to drop it from the global warming bill, no-one should count on that happening yet. More Senators need to wake up to the significant problems cap-and-trade has, and there is no better example of those than the European version of the scheme. With that in mind, my colleague Roger Abbott and I have written a piece for the American Spectator today that…

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The federal budget deficit has already risen by $880 billion to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion. Most of the increase is attributable to recent increases in federal spending, including Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in “the long run,” and which ended welfare reform, destroyed thousands of jobs in the export sector, and substituted welfare for productive investments.

Ironically, Obama had campaigned on a promise, since broken, to make a “net spending cut” in…

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As described in an OpenMarket post by CEI’s Ivan Osorio a couple weeks ago, the Teamsters union and UPS are currently lobbying Congress to change FedEx’s labor law status, thereby making it easier for the Teamsters to organize FedEx drivers.

Today, the Washington Times ran an article on the ongoing battle, which included a you-can’t-make-this-up quote from Teamsters boss James P. Hoffa:

FedEx has built much of its empire on low-cost business models and other unsavory tactics, some of which are now coming back to…

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Demand for wind turbine blades in Europe has slipped, apparently, so a British company that makes them, Vestas, has plans to let go 625 workers (or, in the formulaic language of British news reports, “axe 625 jobs“).  So some of those being “axed” have decided to barricade themselves into the factory, in the unorthodox but apparent hope that this will stimulate demand.

What is perhaps most interesting about this story is not so much what it reveals about the impermanence of…

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