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 wants to ban guns in and near workplaces, and could use his position at OSHA to do so, if the political climate shifts in favor of gun control. (Some businessmen in high-crime areas possess guns to protect themselves against armed robbers, and even strict local gun-control laws have generally contained exceptions to allow such businesses to defend themselves.)

The fact that such bans might undermine, rather than enhance, workplace safety would not deter Michaels, who would be happy to rely on junk science.   Michaels wants to reverse the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision limiting the use of junk science.

As the Washington Times noted, “Mr. Michaels also is an anti-gun zealot who has described ‘gun violence’ as an issue of ‘public health’ that ‘invariably demands more and stronger regulation, not less.’ As Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute explained, by way of warning, on Aug. 15: ‘That’s by no means irrelevant to the agenda of an agency like OSHA, because once you start viewing private gun ownership as a public health menace, it begins to seem logical to use the powers of government to urge or even require employers to forbid workers from possessing guns on company premises, up to and including parking lots, ostensibly for the protection of co-workers. In addition, OSHA has authority to regulate the working conditions of various job categories associated with firearms use (security guards, hunting guides, etc.) and could in that capacity do much to bring grief to Second Amendment values.’”

As I noted in a New York Times story, Michaels’ appointment could “dramatically alter OSHA’s approach to ensuring workplace safety.” Michaels has been called “one the nation’s foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.”

Many business groups raised concerns about his nomination and extreme views.

Iain Murray notes that Michaels seeks to ban useful products from the workplace based on imaginary risks. One newspaper calls Michaels “virulently anti-business.”

The lopsided committee vote in favor of Michaels is probably explained by log-rolling.  As The Wall Street Journal has noted, some Republican committee members likely voted along with their Democratic colleagues to approve Michaels, in exchange for Obama’s recent nomination of an aide to the ranking Republican committee member, to sit on the board of an independent agency that is supposed to be bipartisan (the NLRB), but which Obama could conceivably have made even more partisan and liberal than it is by nominating a liberal RINO rather than a GOP aide to that post (that might have invited a filibuster, but there are only 40 Republican Senators, and it takes 41 votes to successfully filibuster a nomination).

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 operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

From ABC News:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There’s no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government’s recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don’t exist.

The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

Between January and mid-September, over 1.4 million claims for the tax credit were made.  Those 1.4 million are spread over 8.5 months, which means that about 165,000 claims were made monthly.   Over the same period, total home sales averaged roughly 450,000.  Those monthly tax credit claims subtracted from 450,000 results in a number below the 300,000 monthly foreclosures.  Given the number of variables in play, it would be extremely difficult to determine how many of those sales would not have taken place in lack of the credit, but it is safe to assume that some significant portion would not have occurred.  With this assumption in mind, it seems clear that foreclosures would at least come close to negating total home sales were it not for the tax credit.  In any case, this is not a promising sign for the health of the economy.

Even with the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit, which has just been extended and broadened in scope, foreclosure filings continue to outstrip home sales by nearly a factor of ten.  Recent data pegs foreclosure filings at above 300,000 for the eighth straight month.  By contrast, monthly home sales hobble in at an average of roughly 33,000 since January of this year.

The administration has been quite eager to tout recent GDP growth as an indication that a recovery has begun.  There are myriad other reasons to doubt that recent GDP growth is a sign that economic recovery is on the way, but these foreclosure numbers demonstrate just how meaningless claims of recovery really are.  The GDP is easily manipulated, as we have seen, by way of targeted government spending such as the housing tax credit.  But people are the real economy, not the GDP.  It is a profane notion that artificially created GDP growth should be should be taken as a sign of recovery, even as hundreds of thousands continue to receive pink slips and eviction notices.

We will have cause to celebrate when employment numbers begin to rise and inflation-adjusted, post-tax, average household incomes undergo a period of sustained growth, and not before.

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.

Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus package, and only 7.6 percent in Germany, which adopted a stimulus package that was smaller relative to its economy than ours was.  (Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated President Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)

A “broader measure of U.S. unemployment,” including discouraged workers, puts U.S. unemployment at 17.5 percent, reports the New York Times.

As the Post notes, “For many on the left, the lament for years has been: Why can’t America be more like Europe? Why can’t rustic Americans be more like sophisticated Europeans? The sentiment has resurfaced in recent months as the health-care debate has raged on — why can’t the American health-care system be more like Europe’s?”

Well, America is now more like Europe when it comes to unemployment.  But not when it comes to social benefits and protections.  The American Left knows how to import Europe’s failures, but not its successes.

The massive health-care bill passed by the House on Saturday is a classic example.  It would expand health care coverage somewhat, but not to European levels, and it would vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels.   It would also increase taxes to “European levels of taxation.”  The health care bill contains politically-correct provisions that Europeans would never put up with, like pork for trial lawyers and racial preferences.  And restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.

In France, doctors don’t need to be paid as much, because competing professions, like lawyers, are paid less.  French law is much more conservative than American law when it comes to lawsuits, including lawsuits against doctors.  There are NO punitive damages, and France discourages lawsuits by making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the other side’s legal bills.  (Other European countries have specialized health courts, rather than American-style jury trials, to cut lawyers’ bills, speedily compensate the injured, and prevent American-style baseless lawsuits against doctors.)  There are no racial preferences — even my Marxist father-in-law, a French trade unionist who likes Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men, thinks that racial preferences are evil.  French people do not let political correctness shackle their minds the way American leftists do.

Europe is not as far to the left of America as people think, and America’s business climate is already not much more favorable than Europe’s.  For every three ways in which Europe is more socialistic than America, there are two ways in which it is less socialistic than America.  The Obama administration is getting rid of our advantages, but not our disadvantages.

American tort law and family law are much more burdensome, anti-business, and bent on redistribution of wealth, than Europe’s.

Confronted with the specter of new burdens under the health-care bills and global-warming bills backed by the Obama administration, many businesses with the money to do so are afraid to hire people and create jobs lest they be stuck with a large tab for things like health care benefits for newly-hired, less-skilled employees.

The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly admitted that Obama’s stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.”  It contained welfare and repealed welfare reform.  Unemployment is higher now than if Congress had voted it down.

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 change (sent to the Federal Register on October 29) that would change the way in which votes are counted in organizing elections under the Railway Labor Act (RLA).

Under a 75-year-old interpretation of the Railway Labor Act, any employees who don’t vote on whether to create a union are counted as “no” votes. That means a union can’t be approved without a full majority of all employees voting in favor of it.

Under the National Labor Relations Act governing other industries, a union can be created as long as a majority of all votes cast are in favor of collective bargaining. In such elections, nonvotes don’t count either way.

Earlier this year, the White House named Linda Puchala, a former leader of a flight-attendant union, to the NMB to succeed Read Van de Water, a former lobbyist for Northwest Airlines. Harry Hoglander, a board member since 2002, is a former union leader for pilots.

Ms. Dougherty joined the NMB’s board in 2006. A registered Republican, she served as a labor adviser to Mr. Bush earlier this decade.

In September, the AFL-CIO union formally asked the NMB to adopt the same voting rules as the National Labor Relations Act, arguing that the unionization-election process under the Railway Labor Act is undemocratic.

In its proposal published Monday, the NMB agreed, saying that “few if any” democratic elections treat nonvotes as “no votes.” Allowing a contrary policy, as under the current NMB union-voting rules, “could allow those lacking the interest or will to vote to supersede the wishes of those who do take the time and trouble to cast ballots,” the agency added.

Opponents of the overhaul say the higher bar for unionization was set up to protect interstate commerce from disruption. They also argue the law hasn’t hindered unionization: Roughly two-thirds of airline employees and more than three-quarters of railroad workers are organized, according to industry estimates, far higher than the 12% rate across the entire U.S. economy.

That’s a major change, but the unions are not about to stop there in their efforts in this area. The Teamsters, in cooperation with UPS, are trying to move employees of FedEx — UPS’ competitor and a Teamsters organizing target — out from being regulated under the RLA to jurisdiction under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

Unlike the NLRA, the Railway Labor Act requires unionization to be carried out company-wide. This prevents the creation of balkanized work rules that could result from piecemeal unionization at individual facilities. UPS began as a ground transport company, so most of its employees are covered under the NLRA.

However, the Teamsters are UPS have pursued that change through the legislative process. Now some union allies are pursuing a similar change through the regulatory process. When it comes to changing the organizing rules, Big Labor seems more likely to keep persisting.

For more on the RLA, see here.

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 until the depression finally ended.  Clearly, GDP growth alone cannot be taken as an indicator that the economy is on the upswing.

It is also disheartening that the two major contributors to GDP growth in the third quarter were housing construction and auto sales, both of which were propped up by government subsidies.  Auto sales were boosted by the Cash for Clunkers program, and housing construction was driven by the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit.

Combine this with other spurious accounting maneuvers used to calculate third quarter GDP, and it begins to appear that GDP might actually have decreased during this period.

In addition to phony GDP growth, there are other signs that the recession is not yet over.  Employment during the third quarter fell by over 750,000, and it is expected to fall further still.  Employment has been called a lagging indicator of economic health, but when economic health is measured in terms of the financial well-being of the population, employment is not a lagging indicator, it is the indicator.

The recent bankruptcy of CIT Group is another sign that our economic woes are far from over.  A recipient of $2.3 billion in TARP funds—deemed likely unrecoverable—CIT Group Inc. filed for Chapter 11 today, seeking protection from $10 billion in debt.  CIT finances close to one million businesses, and conducts business with over 80 percent of all Fortune 1000 companies, so there is enormous potential for negative secondary effects stemming from the bankruptcy.

The CIT Group bankruptcy comes on the heels of nine more bank failures on Friday, which brings this year’s total to 115.  These bank failures came at a cost of $2.5 billion to the FDIC deposit insurance fund.

There is a clear political incentive for Geithner and others to make efforts to convince us that this economic slump is over.  It is unfortunate that these efforts include no actual facts.

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 Valley Tribune. But as even liberal law professor Jack Balkin, who was initially fooled by the story, now admits, it’s pure bunk: a video recording of the event shows that Scalia actually said he would have voted to strike down segregation.

Before the error was uncovered, the story circulated all around the internet, including at CQ Politics’ Political Wire, and as a result, we can expect to see the false claim repeated for weeks in the press. (Political Wire, for example, contains a commentary by Taegan Doddard entitled, “Scalia Would Have Voted to Keep School Segregation.”)

This sort of reporting is typical for liberal court reporters, who routinely make false claims that make conservatives or businesses look bad or politically-correct constituencies look good. A classic example is the Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision, which Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times deliberately distorted to make it seem like the Supreme Court had created a rule that discrimination plaintiffs have to sue even before they could have learned about pay discrimination. (In fact, the plaintiff in the Ledbetter case had known of the pay disparity she later claimed was discriminatory for at least 5 years before complaining to the EEOC. By distorting the facts of the case, and what the Supreme Court actually held, the press also created a political weapon for the Obama campaign to use against McCain in the 2008 campaign.)

Another example is the Duke Lacrosse case, where the prosecutor was later jailed for misconduct for pressing a baseless interracial rape case against innocent Lacrosse players. DNA evidence proved the players were innocent, and North Carolina’s attorney general admitted that they were in fact innocent. But the New York Times’ Duff Wilson claimed that a substantial “body of evidence” pointed to the defendants’ guilt.

CBS News legal “analyst” Andrew Cohen repeatedly denounced the Duke lacrosse players, calling for the gagging of their attorneys. At a time when few journalists dared question the rape claim for fear of being seen as politically incorrect, Cohen absurdly claimed that the media had rushed to the “defense” of the players and that “there is no balanced coverage in the Duke case. There is just one defense-themed story after another.” He demanded for prosecutor Mike Nifong “the privilege of seeing the case unfold at trial” against the players, rather than dropping the prosecution.

Sadly, both Wilson and Cohen still have their jobs, suggesting that liberal bias is viewed as a plus when it comes to employment with the “mainstream” media. (Cohen’s “evidence-free” commentaries denouncing Justice Scalia are a self-parody of left-wing bias.)

I don’t agree with Justice Scalia on everything. (See my law journal article criticizing the ruling he and the “conservative” justices issued in Morse v. Frederick.)  But the liberal bias of Supreme Court press coverage is obvious to me.

UPDATE, Oct. 27, 4:12 p.m.: the reporter who made the false claim about Scalia (Howard Fischer) has now deleted his claim that Scalia would uphold segregation from his story, tacitly admitting that he was wrong.  But he did not disclose the error in his original story for readers.  As a commenter to his story, jayr23, notes

“Sorry Scalia. I disagree with you in general but it looks like you were terribly misquoted here. The only hack is the reporter.

Mr. Fischer should probably correct this and then apologize.

BTW, a correction is not simply a deletion of the offending material! Sheesh. Journalism has sunk to an all time low.”

SECOND UPDATE, Oct. 27, 6:22 p.m.: The erroneous story’s internet version has now been revised to contain a vague reference to its error, in a passage that reads:

“Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story that was originally posted Oct. 26. It removes an incorrect reference to Brown v. Board of Education in the initial version.”

Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors from requiring arbitration of employment discrimination disputes and sexual assault cases, including “arbitration” of “any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment.”  The language about sexual assault was irrelevant to most employers: Lawsuits against employers for employment discrimination vastly outnumber lawsuits over sexual assault, which are a tiny fraction of all court cases, so the bill’s real purpose was to ban arbitration of discrimination cases, not to do anything for rape victims.  Few rapes occur in the workplace, as opposed to private settings like homes; and even rapes that do occur in the workplace often fall outside the scope of arbitration clauses.  (Arbitration does not, of course, prevent criminal prosecution.)

Liberal trial lawyers have long objected to Supreme Court decisions like its 7-to-2 Gilmer decision upholding contractual provisions that require binding arbitration of employment discrimination cases, even though arbitrators often rule in favor of employees and consumers, and award them substantial monetary damages (although they do permit plaintiffs less discovery than courts do; on the other hand, arbitration typically results in “lower litigation costs and expenses“).   Franken’s amendment largely fulfills their fantasy of banning arbitration in discrimination cases.

Although Franken’s amendment has a big effect on discrimination cases — and no effect at all on most rape cases — it has been falsely described ever since as an “anti-rape amendment,” and the 30 senators who voted against the amendment have been depicted ever since by liberal sites such as Huffington Post as the “Republicans for Rape“  — even though the Defense Department opposed Franken’s amendment, and even though Senators like Bob Corker said they might have voted for the amendment had it merely covered rape and violence claims, rather than a vast array of unrelated employment disputes.

Jon Stewart, for example, depicted the amendment as being all about rape, asking his viewers “How is ANYONE against this?” and suggesting that only a nut or a misogynist could do so.  (This is the same Jon Stewart who selectively edits taped interviews to make conservatives look stupid, or make them appear to say the opposite of what they actually said).  But the liberal Stewart has aimed this criticism only at conservative lawmakers, not at the Obama Defense Department (or the liberal Supreme Court justices who voted with their conservative colleagues to allow all employment disputes, including those involving sexual assault, to be governed by contractual arbitration provisions in the Gilmer case).  So has Huffington Post, whose first inflammatory article on the vote generated over 2000 comments, many of them angry and vituperative.  The inflammatory coverage has resulted in Senators who voted against the amendment receiving hate mail and angry and hateful messages.

Liberal journalists and bloggers complain a lot about the use of so-called “wedge issues,” but they themselves are the ones who typically use inflammatory wedge issues, as the Franken amendment illustrates.

Another example is the many false claims made by liberal journalists and Obama about the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a subject I addressed at length here.  In the Ledbetter case, the press claimed that the Supreme Court had created a rigid 180 day deadline for suing over pay discrimination — when in fact it did no such thing.

By the way, studies show that Jon Stewart’s viewers aren’t any smarter than Bill O’Reilly’s — contrary to what liberal journalists believe.

The panel featured H.E. Han Duk-soo, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea; Francisco Álvarez de Soto, Vice Minister for International Trade Negotiations, Republic of Panama; and Ricardo Triana, Director, Colombian Government Trade Bureau.  The speakers pointed principally to the FTAs’ benefits to the U.S., not only in economic terms but in its national interests.  Ambassador Terry Miller, the moderator, noted that the three countries are entering into trade agreements with other major trading partners, while the U.S. holds up action on their trade pacts. That disadvantages the U.S., which can’t yet take advantage of significantly lower tariffs on exports of numerous goods and services that the FTAs include.

Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) rounded out the presentations by emphasizing the benefits of free trade, especially in the current downturn, when increased trade can lead to more vibrant economic growth and job creation.  In his closing remarks, Goodlatte hit the cap-and-trade bills currently being considered for the job losses they will create.  He also noted that the proposed sanctions on imports from countries that don’t enact a CO2 repression regime would be a huge mistake and a blow to the world trading system.

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 of Americans has been practically unaffected by the recession: government employees. Their hours have not been cut, their benefits are gold-plated and they are almost impossible to sack. In good times, few Americans notice these things, but in bad times, the disparity grates. Cops and firefighters can retire in their 40s and draw defined-benefit pensions for life. With overtime, one tenth of the police in Massachusetts made more than the governor’s annual salary in 2006, according to the Boston Globe. Including benefits, the average employee of New York City makes more than $100,000, according to Forbes, while some Californian prison guards “sock away $300,000 a year”.

And what do taxpayers get for their generosity? The bad bargains get all the publicity. Union contracts force the postal service to pay thousands of unneeded workers to do nothing. In New York, public-school teachers who can’t be trusted to teach but can’t be sacked either are paid to sit and do crosswords.

For more on the effects of public sector unionization, see the study, “Vallejo Con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Representative Government,” co-authored by University of South Florida economics professor Don Bellante, Public Service Research Foundation president David Denholm, and myself, and published by the Cato Institute.

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 biggest donor to liberal politicians, received billions of dollars it didn’t even need from the taxpayers’ $170 billion bailout of AIG.

The administration claimed that the stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose very rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector.

Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.

President Obama claimed the stimulus was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office said it would actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”  It subsidizes lots of waste, corruption, and welfare, and repeals welfare reform.   It also contains racial set-asides (which are costly) and prevailing-wage rules (which will waste $17 billion).

For more on project labor agreements, see here.

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 Court, “big business always prevails, environmentalists are always buried, female and elderly workers go unprotected, death row inmates get the needle, and criminal defendants are shown the door.”

This is breathtakingly inconsistent with reality. Over the last dozen years, the death penalty has been dramatically cut back in cases like Roper v. Simmons (2005), as the Supreme Court has invalidated the death penalty when imposed on the “retarded” (even the mildly retarded) or juveniles (even 16 to 18 year-olds), or when imposed by judges rather than juries (as state laws long provided).

The Supreme Court overturned thousands of sentences given to criminal defendants in cases like U.S. v. Booker (2005), based not on their guilt or innocence, but on the fact that judges, rather than juries, had made findings related to those sentences (the so-called Booker/Apprendi line of cases). The supposedly “right-wing” justices Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas joined in these decisions.

Environmentalists won many cases, including perhaps the most economically-significant decision ever — Massachusetts v. EPA (2003) — which potentially opened the door to EPA regulation of virtually every human activity, on the grounds that virtually all activity (from industrial production to farming to cars) emits carbon dioxide and thus allegedly causes global warming. That decision also created a special rule of standing to allow state attorneys general to bring lawsuits that would otherwise be thrown out as meritless for lack of standing.

The Supreme Court recently allowed businesses to be sued even for products the FDA deems to be safe and effective, in Wyeth v. Levine (2009).

The Supreme Court progressively expanded businesses’ liability for discrimination against female and elderly workers. It continuously expanded the definition of sexual harassment, overturning earlier limits on vicarious liability (in Faragher v. Boca Raton (1998)), allowing institutions to be sued based on the acts of non-employees (in Davis v. Monroe County (1999)), and rejecting longstanding lower-court limits on lawsuits where there is no economic or psychological harm (in Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993)). It also allowed businesses to be sued for discrimination against elderly workers even absent any showing of discriminatory intent or differential treatment (in Smith v. Jackson (2005)). All of these decisions reversed lower court rulings in favor of businesses.

In short, Dahlia Lithwick’s perception of the Supreme Court bears no relation to reality. But it is shared by most of the nation’s leading court reporters, at publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, who promote a similar caricature of the Supreme Court.

As a result of such reporters ceaselessly peddling this perspective to their readers, it is also the perception of much of the newspaper-reading public, especially in the so-called Blue States, many of whom view the Supreme Court as “too conservative.”

For example, factually inaccurate and dishonest reporting on recent Supreme Court decisions also contributed to recent election results.

A classic example is the Supreme Court’s recent Ledbetter decision, which many reporters wrongly claimed required discrimination plaintiffs to sue within a rigid 180-day deadline — when in fact, most pay discrimination cases could legally be brought for at least 3 years after the discrimination allegedly occurred, under laws unaffected by the Supreme Court’s decision (like the Equal Pay Act), and the 180-day deadline, even when applicable, had lots of common-sense exceptions to keep employers from escaping justice (such as tolling to protect hoodwinked employees)

(Regardless of whether the death penalty is good or bad, it is very clear that it is not unconstitutional).

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 cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs,” as jobs migrate overseas to countries which have fewer environmental protections than the U.S. does.

Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” As Obama admitted, that cost would be directly passed “on to consumers” — just the way Herbert Hoover’s excise tax increases were in 1932, aggravating the Great Depression. Although the tax’s supporters claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.

Americans for Tax Reform summarizes the tax increases in the trimmed-down version of ObamaCare revealed by its principal drafter, Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana).  Here is a partial list:

· Individual Mandate Tax.  If you don’t sign up for health insurance, you will have to pay a tax in the following range:

· Employer Mandate Tax. $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered.  Note: this is a huge incentive to drop coverage, as $400 is much less than the average plan cost of $11,000 for families or $5000 for singles (Source: AHIP)

· Excise Tax on High-Cost Health Plans.  New 35% excise tax on health insurance plans to the extent they exceed $21000 in cost ($8000 single)

· Medicine Cabinet Tax.  Americans would no longer be able to purchase over-the-counter medicines with their FSA, HSA, or HRA

· Eliminate tax deduction for employer-provided retirement Rx drug coverage in coordination with Medicare Part D

· Report Employer Health Spending on W-2. This is clearly a setup for the easy individual taxation of employer-provided health insurance down the road.

· Cap Flex-Spending Account (FSA) Contributions at $2000. Currently unlimited.

· Backdoor Death of HSAs. By requiring that all plans (besides the few that are grandfathered) provided first-dollar coverage for most services, there would be no HSA-qualifying plans available from the Massachusetts-like exchanges

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 supply of barbers artificially low means that existing barbers can keep their prices artificially high.

Three of the four licensing board members must be licensed barbers. They write the apprenticeship rules and the license examination. They decide who gets in, and who gets left out. They have plenty of excuses built into the rules for excluding potential competitors.

Owing child support payments, for example, is by itself grounds for exclusion. What this has to do with cutting hair is beyond me. And getting a job cutting hair is one way to be able to make those payments. But there it is, encoded in state law. The board can legally keep you from being a barber if you owe child support.

A sure sign of an anti-competitive practice is using the force of law to prevent competitors from entering the marketplace. Where is the antitrust investigation into Nevada’s barber licensing?

To sum up, the failure of the European ETS should give pause to Senators considering a similar system for the U.S. Cap-and-trade will not result in emissions cuts. It will, however, greatly enhance the power of the government to regulate the economy. And it will lead to higher energy costs, as the costs of trading permits add to utilities’ cost of doing business.

Given these facts, why the strong push for cap-and-trade? The sad fact is that both President Obama and the Democratic Congress are misleading the public. Alternative measures such as a carbon tax have not been considered precisely because their costs are transparent and obvious to the public. By contrast, cap-and-trade allows the President and Congress to claim credit for “taking action” on global warming without acknowledging the real costs that entails — costs which the public, when informed of the facts, is rightly unwilling to accept.

Feel free to send a copy of our piece to your Senator!

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

The increase in the deficit is driven largely by reckless federal spending, even though federal tax revenue fell at the fastest rate since 1932 thanks to the recession.

The Obama Administration wants to pile on even more federal spending, including a health-care “reform” proposal predicted to cost at least $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). In reality, Obamacare will likely cost far more than predicted, the way past health-care expansions always have.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains affirmative action and subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but may be able to access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.

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 haunt it.

This quote, which the Times pulled from a Teamsters-run anti-FedEx website, typifies the backward thinking of the organized labor movement: Business cost-savings should be thought of as “unsavory.” Labor, for those of this mindset, is not seen as a production input; rather, work is viewed as an end in itself. Consumer welfare, let alone shareholder welfare, is rarely considered at all.

This should appear ridiculous to anyone with even a cursory understanding of economics–you work in order to consume the things you want. Unfortunately for consumers, Big Labor is now driving U.S. economic policy.

What is perhaps most interesting about this story is not so much what it reveals about the impermanence of green jobs as the British labor unions’ attitude to them:

“The court has made its decision, but we will continue with our campaign and the right to work on green energy jobs.”

So it seems that on the British left there is now a substantive right to a green job. What a happy world this will be, when everyone is paid for saving the planet.  Presumably this right will be secured by a tax on the productive workers, but one has to wonder, just who will they be in this world?