Harris is the absolute worst choice to lead this country

September 24, 2024

As the 2024 presidential election draws nearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee, continues to avoid nearly every opportunity to tell voters about the specifics of her plan for what she will do, and how.

She has gained a reputation for some rather radical positions, including: wanting to abolish ICE, open the southern border, defund the police, release violent offenders, eliminate middle-class tax cuts, ban fracking and end fossil fuel use, confiscate guns from lawful owners, take away private health care plans, and provide taxpayer funded transgender surgeries for illegal aliens.

During a recent campaign stop in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, a reporter asked her: “And can you give us a sense of what other policies you want to unveil moving forward?"

In answering that question, she said, "Sure, well, I mean, you just look at it in terms of what we are talking about, for example, around children and the child tax credit and extending the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit]." She did not answer the question. She then babbled on about the EITC, and in the process made false statements about it.

Late last month Harris told CNN's Dana Bash in her first sit-down interview since becoming the Democrat’s candidate through a non-democratic process that the Biden-Harris administration has done "good work" on the economy, but "there's more to do." She completely ignored the high level of inflation that developed during her tenure as VP.

Asked about her changing position on important issues, she said, "I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed." Again, she avoided answering the question and failed to explain why she changed positions after becoming a candidate.

On immigration, Harris noted her prosecutorial record as attorney general of California saying she has long cared about border security, even though under her watch as “border czar,” the border has effectively become wide open, allowing in roughly 10 million illegal aliens.

Her priority on day one if elected will be to "strengthen and support the middle class," she said. Again, she did not take the opportunity to explain exactly how she plans to do that.

Harris seems to be following the lead of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, who famously said about a piece of legislation, “We have to pass it to find out what is in it.” Harris’ message: “Elect me to find out what I plan to do.”

Harris claims to be a Second Amendment advocate. She says she wants some “common sense” measures to keep everyone safe.

“I’m a gun owner,” she said in a friendly interview with Oprah Winfrey. “If someone breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.” Ooops! “Sorry. I probably should not have said that. [Cackling] My staff will deal with that later. [Cackling]” 

However, as a prosecutor in California in 2007, Harris outlined her view of why she could violate the Fourth Amendment. She said she would search the homes of gun owners. “Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home to check and see if you are being responsible and safe,” she said. 

And Harris said back in 2020: “These stand-your-ground laws … have often, often and frequently, been used as an excuse, if not a cover, for people motivated by race and racial profiling.” Seriously?

And even this year, while she claims she’s “not taking anybody’s guns away,” Harris still supports a mandatory buyback plan for so-called “assault rifles.” That is a disguise for what it really is: gun confiscation. “We need an assault weapons ban,” she said. 

While claiming that Bidenomics and other policies have been wonderfully successful these nearly four years, she says she will fix everything on day one. What needs to be fixed in this wonderfully successful administration? How will she fix it?

She cites words Trump used that are the same words Hitler used. So, Trump is like Hitler because they have sometimes used some of the same terms. But Harris isn’t like Hitler because some of her preferences are similar to Hitler’s?

So many of her supporters say they will vote for her because they “like her.” She refuses to give details on her plans if elected, but they will vote for her, anyway.

And let’s look at a broader picture: which side is more radical, the left or the right? Well, how many attempts to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have we seen?

If you like the high prices on most everything; the millions of illegal aliens, gotaways and terror watch-list persons running free and committing crimes; our once-great energy status that existed before Biden-Harris; the coming higher taxes and increased regulations; our constitutional republic being torn apart, then vote on November 5 for the woman who spurns interviews and tough questions, refuses to publish her positions and policies, and promises to fix all the things her present administration brought on the American people over the last four years.

She does not understand or care about America, and will take us down the road to socialism. 

Increasing federal control reduces our constitutional freedoms

September 19, 2023

Actions by those in positions of authority to push the boundaries of that authority took a huge step recently when New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a public health order outlining efforts to combat gun violence in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. 

“I’m going to continue pushing to make sure that all of us are using every resource available to put an end to this public health emergency with the urgency it deserves,” she said. “I will not accept the status quo. Enough is enough.”

A provision of that public health order temporarily suspended both the open and concealed carrying of firearms in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County by those who had been granted carry permits by the state government.

The violations would result in civil penalties, not criminal penalties, but the fines imposed could be up to $5,000 per violation.

This action attempted to suspend rights guaranteed to the people by the U.S. Constitution, and that action brought swift and harsh criticism from both sides of the political aisle, and resulted in law suits against the action.

In response, U.S. District Court Judge David Urias agreed with plaintiffs who pointed out the violation of constitutional rights. He granted a temporary restraining order to block the suspension of gun rights. The order will remain in place until an Oct. 3 court hearing.

The rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution cannot be suspended on the whim of a mere elected official, whether that official is the president, a governor, an attorney general or a mayor. Yet this woman believed she had that authority in order to combat a local problem, a problem that many of her constituents argue is really not that much of a problem.

Recently we have seen government mandates and restrictions on our freedoms during the Covid pandemic, and others ostensibly to save the planet from climate change due to too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

The actions taken during Covid, and currently to combat the climate change that many people believe in, may actually have been taken for the best of reasons. However, they also constitute restrictions on the personal freedoms that the United States is known for. And they frequently inconvenience people and raise prices on things they want and need.

We recently increased our level of energy independence, but it was wiped out almost as soon as President Joe Biden took office. That forced the purchasing of materials and fuels from other countries like China and Russia, raised fuel prices substantially, and put thousands out of work. 

And, by the way, American oil and natural gas are the cleanest in the world. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., noted recently that “If we replaced Russian natural gas in Europe [with American natural gas], for one year, just one year, that would lower 215 million tons of emissions because our natural gas is 41 percent cleaner than Russian natural gas.” Biden’s war on fossil fuels has negatively affected his goal of reducing CO2 emissions.

Biden’s efforts to kill fossil fuels now has him campaigning to do away with gas-burning stoves, furnaces, fireplace logs and grills; creating stricter specifications for common appliances like clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers, and others that will substantially increase the cost of those products.

There is the manic effort to decrease gas- and diesel-powered vehicles in favor of electric vehicles that cost much more, depend almost entirely upon China and other countries for the materials to build their batteries, and require fewer American employees to produce them than conventional vehicles. And then there is the needed enormous increase in our electric grid to be able to recharge these tens of thousands of EVs that Biden wants.

The Department of Justice not long ago involved itself in a local matter. When parents attended school board meetings to register their displeasure with some things that were going on in the school their children attended, the DOJ labeled them “domestic terrorists.” 

Even if the parents were behaving inappropriately, or even violently, it is not the job of the federal government to become involved in state or local matters. That is how our republic is designed.

This nation was formed by the several states that united for that purpose. They did not give up their right to control themselves in local matters by creating a federal government. The states still have a large degree of sovereignty that is protected by terms of the U.S. Constitution.

What we are seeing is an increasing effort by Democrats to empower the federal government to control virtually everything that goes on in our country. They are “fundamentally transforming” the country. 

That contradicts two of the primary goals of the Founders of the United States of America: a large degree of personal freedom, and a federal government limited in its power.

If this power-grab is allowed to continue, the once-great United States of America will some day in the future degenerate into just another Cuba or Venezuela, as the protections provided by the Constitution are gradually erased.  It will be a country whose citizens are at the mercy of autocrats who have complete control.

Jobs combat poverty; over-regulation discourages businesses and jobs

Magatte Wade was born in the West African nation of Senegal, was educated in Germany and France, then came to the U.S. She is a frequent speaker at business conferences and college campuses, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, and Wharton. She has started businesses and with her husband is working to create schools in Senegal.

Part of one of her addresses featured on YouTube dealt with how not to be poor. What she said to her audience is a good lesson for everyone.

“People are poor. Why are you poor?” She answered, “you're poor when you don't have enough money to meet your basic needs.” 

And then, the big question: “Where does a source of income come from for most of us?” The answer is, as former Vice President Joe Biden famously said: that three-letter word: ‘JOBS.’

This is not a bolt from the blue to most of us, but to her audiences in colleges and in her native Senegal, this solution may not be so obvious. In fact, some of her audiences responded that jobs actually come from government.

Yes, she responded, some jobs are provided by government. But where does government get the money to pay its employees?

“It comes from taxes. People who work, employees; people who hire them, the companies and employers, pay [taxes] so that we in turn pay these government people.”

So, “we're back to commerce … we're back to business.”

“So I say,” Wade continues, “okay, if ‘jobs’ is the solution to this massive, massive problem we have out there of poverty, then don't you think that maybe we should try to think about where jobs come from?”

If jobs are the answer, and jobs come from entrepreneurs, businesses, “then don't you think that we should really try and pay attention to what type of environment those businesses get to operate in,” Wade asked?

What a concept! Since businesses large and small provide the jobs people need to avoid poverty, and enable workers to pay taxes, and pay taxes themselves to support the government, let’s be careful about the environment that we create for businesses.

In America, it should be easy for someone with a new idea or just the drive to start a business that will provide goods or services, and hire some people to work in it, so long as it follows reasonable laws and regulations. The operative word is, “reasonable.”

Far too often, this is not easy, and sometimes impossible. 

Writing in Business Insider, Michael Snyder addresses this issue. “Small business in the United States is literally being suffocated by red tape. We like to think that we live in ‘the land of the free,’ but the truth is that our lives and our businesses are actually tightly constrained by millions of rules and regulations.” 

“Today there is a ‘license’ for just about every business activity,” Snyder adds. “In fact, in some areas of the country today you need a ‘degree’ and multiple ‘licenses’ before you can even submit an application for permission to start certain businesses.” It gets worse. “And if you want to actually hire some people for your business, the paperwork nightmare gets far worse. It is a wonder that anyone in America is still willing to start a business from scratch and hire employees.”

“The truth is that the business environment in the United States is now so incredibly toxic that millions of Americans have simply given up and don't even try to work within the system anymore.”

To put the regulatory issue into perspective, the Federal Register is where federal rules are catalogued. The number of pages in it was about 2,600 in 1936. That’s a lot of pages of rules, but it pales in comparison to the calendar year of 2016, when the number of Federal Register pages stood at 95,854.

Certain variables factor into this: Some rules take more pages than others, and page size is also important. However, most novels have 250 words per page, and a really long novel has 425 pages. At the end of 2016, the Federal Register had as many pages as 225 long novels, and 383 normal-sized ones.

President Donald Trump has implemented efforts to reduce regulations by signing an executive order on Jan. 31, 2017 for the agency requesting a new regulation to cut two older regulations.

A Daily Caller story said that the Trump administration “reported $23 billion in savings from 176 deregulatory actions in fiscal year 2018. Even more consequential, the administration has issued 65 percent fewer ‘significant’ rules — those with costs that exceed $100 million a year — than the Obama administration, and 51 percent fewer than the Bush administration, after 22 months in office.”

That’s a start, but a lot more needs to be done to give Americans the freedom and ability to start a business or get a job.

A final word from Magatte Wade: “Not living up to our potential is a failure for which the only person who can possibly be responsible is oneself.“

She’s right, of course, but things like over-regulation make that much more difficult for even those who are determined to succeed.

Repairing the damage of regulatory over-reach: so far, so good

Is the fact that overregulation kills economic growth one of the country’s best-kept secrets? Or is it perhaps that the effects of overregulation are not widely understood or discussed. With all that’s been going on – the tax bill, the government shutdown, everything President Donald Trump says, does, wears, tweets or thinks – showing the downside of too many regulations and too much government doesn’t attract nearly as much attentions as it should.

A huge number of Americans don’t understand how over-regulation negatively affects the economy, and quite a few subscribe to the idea that in order to keep greedy businesses in line, more regulation is needed. This condition provides bureaucrats and politicians to hurt the people they exist to serve by putting harmful regulations into effect.

Every regulation businesses have to follow costs them money, increases the cost of products and services to customers, and makes operating a business profitably more difficult. Every dollar spent on non-productive and unnecessary regulatory compliance is a dollar that can’t be used for higher wages, better equipment, expansion and other beneficial things.

Trump pledged to get rid of two existing regulations for every new regulation, which has never been done before. The actual reduction in regulations last year was even better than two for one, and the economy has shown its appreciation through job creation and higher GDP.

Maurice McTigue, Vice President of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, says that in addition to millions of Americans, many of those serving in Congress also don’t understand the economic effects of over-regulation. And he said “the pace of regulatory reform going on today is faster than at any time since the Reagan Administration.”

Research from Mercatus shows that if regulations since 1980 had just been held at that level, the economy would have been 25 percent larger by 2012. But regulations grew to the point that in 2012 the economy was $4 trillion smaller than it would otherwise have been. That works out to the equivalent of 32 million lost U.S. jobs.

If that lost $4 trillion was a country’s economy, it would be the fourth largest economy in the world, McTigue wrote.

One area where reducing regulations has had beneficial effects is in coal country. Last October Fox News reported coal production was down 31.5 percent over the last 10 years, but was up 7.8 percent to that point in 2017.

Politifact noted that Fox had under reported the numbers, using projections rather than actual figures, which show production was actually 12 percent higher than at the same point the year before, and the decline over the last 10 years was closer to 33 percent.

“According to the Energy Information Agency, West Virginia coal production year-to-date is up 20 percent over the same period last year,” West Virginia Coal Association President Bill Raney wrote last November, “and we appear on target to possibly cross the 100 million ton level for the full year.”

“Even so, we remain a long way from the 170 million tons we produced in 2008, before the Obama Administration began its war on coal. And we may never get back to those levels, because most of those 400 coal-fired power generation units Obama shut down with his regulatory assault have been torn down, left to rust or converted to natural gas,” Raney continued.

“The good news is the world never stopped recognizing the value of coal, and 2,200 new coal-fired power plants are scheduled to go online between now and 2040. Many of those plants will look to import their supplies and we plan to be the source of much of that coal.”

“But none of this would be possible without the 2016 election of President Trump,” Raney acknowledged. “He has one-by-one rescinded every anti-coal regulation enacted by the Obama Administration, and he continues to do more. Just recently, his Department of Energy issued a report that said it is vital for the U.S. to preserve its coal fleet for the sake of the stability and reliability of the electric grid.”

In a state as badly damaged by regulatory warfare as any in the nation, West Virginia is dramatic evidence of both the horrors over-regulation causes and the benefits of getting rid of harmful government interference. West Virginia’s unemployment rate has fallen from double digits in late 2016 to 4.4 percent in November.

Think what you will of Donald Trump, but he has been in business for a while, and he has been successful at it. And because of his experience, he knows that a prosperous nation needs successful and thriving businesses to provide needed and wanted goods and services, as well as the jobs that provide people the money they need to purchase those things they need and want, and to live a decent life.

Regulatory reform and improvements to the tax system have already produced positive results in the economy, pushing unemployment to much lower levels than they have been for a while and pushing productivity to respectable levels after many years of unsatisfactory performance.

We should be appropriately pleased with the good things happening in our country today, not overly critical of the person who has allowed them to occur.

Wouldn’t it be great if we would buy “Made in America” again?”

 

Part of President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mission is to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing, and like nearly everything Trump says or does, that idea produced much criticism. A lot of that is the automatic Trump-hater response, but some resulted from reasoned thought and philosophical differences.

National Review roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson discussed this in an essay titled “Made in America: Not Important in the 21^st Century,” where he offers examples of products assembled in America that actually contain some or perhaps most parts made in other countries. The question is: do these products really deserve the “Made in America” label?

Calling Trump’s encouragement for us to buy products “Made in America” to support our manufacturers “a good slogan … [but] bad and incoherent policy,” reason.com’s Nick Gillespie went on to note that using more expensive American labor would increase the price of our products, and protectionist measures to exclude foreign-made materials from our markets runs counter both to the personal freedom the USA provides us, as well as the concept of free trade.

America is a “post-industrial nation,” Gillespie noted, and “the fact is that manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the work force peaked in 1943 and has declined ever since.”

He then urged pursuing policies that create new jobs, new opportunities and new wealth through “lower government spending, flatter and less distorting taxes, and less regulation.”

Opposition to Trump’s idea also includes the Chamber of Commerce and major players in the energy sector. As the Commerce Department worked to meet a late July deadline to present a plan to the president requiring oil and gas pipelines to be made with American-made steel, Trump’s allies in the energy sector warned that this might play havoc with his goal of energy dominance.

Gillespie is correct about the low percentage of manufacturing jobs. This decline occurred over many years, largely through natural progression, but as Gillespie hinted, external factors have also contributed. They had a significant negative effect that increased the decline, and removing those influences can provide some relief to manufacturing job losses.

Whereas technological advancement reduces the need for human work, natural progress in foreign countries is also a factor. In poor nations, people gladly work for pennies or quarters a day. While it may seem cruel to some of us to pay people so little for their efforts, those pennies or quarters are what enable them to achieve a better life in the less developed economy of their country.

If those workers can produce things that cost a fraction of what they cost if made by American workers, even after shipping them across the waters, businesses will go for the less expensive product in order to both enhance their economic situation, and to keep the price of their products lower.

But we often do things that increase our costs compared with other countries. High taxes and over-regulation on businesses, both of which put pressure on American companies to reduce costs to remain competitive, help push manufacturing jobs overseas.

The coal-mining sector is a good example of the effect of external factors. While natural gas usage was increasing and coal use was naturally trending down, Obama’s war on coal sped up that process through anti-coal regulations. That forced a dramatic decrease in coal use, wreaking havoc and harm much greater than if natural economic processes had been allowed to work.

Like coal mining, other manufacturing jobs are affected by the negative factors of over-regulation and high taxes. As Gillespie suggested, flatter and less distorting taxes, and less regulation would help make American steel and other products more competitive.

Other factors will also help to make American products more competitive, and provide a boost to U.S. manufacturing, such as a border-adjustment tax. The purpose of this tax is not to generate tax revenue to offset tax cuts, but to create jobs by evening out the playing field.

The U.S. is one of the few countries that does not tax imported goods and reward those exported to other countries, explains Newt Gingrich in his new book “Understanding Trump.” Taxing goods coming into the country, as other countries do to American goods, makes domestic goods more competitive, and helps create jobs and higher wages.

Gingrich also said that this “incentivizes businesses that want to sell in the United States as well as in other countries to move here, because it allows them to avoid the import tax.”

And lower the 35 percent corporate tax rate to something near that of nations to which American businesses have moved jobs. This will encourage those companies to bring back some, perhaps a lot, of the $2.5 trillion that they hold offshore to avoid the high U.S. corporate tax.

American manufacturing cannot return to 1943 levels, of course, but we have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot with anti-business policies. We need to reduce corporate tax rates, impose a border-adjustment tax, and roll back harmful regulations to free up American manufacturers.

This will enable the creation of thousands of new jobs, increase productivity levels and bring in new tax revenue. It will make it easier and smarter to buy products “Made in America.”

Some good news for local economies battered by the War on Coal

It is a common idea among many Americans that coal as a major industrial fuel is dead, or at least dying, and cleaner fuels, like wind and solar energy, and natural gas, are taking over. There is some truth there; but there are other influences on coal’s recent decline.

Less costly natural gas has become the fuel of choice in power plants and for other industrial uses, not because of the natural relative price of the fuels, but because of the cost of regulatory demands on mining and burning coal that require enormous investments that have priced coal higher than natural gas. Remember former President Barack Obama’s prediction: “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them.”

These regulations produced the closing of more than 400 coal-burning power plants, which dropped the demand for coal, and altogether put 63,000 people in the coal industry, electric production industry and related support industries out of work in just the last few years.

At just the right time hydraulic fracturing (fracking) became popular, after lying mostly dormant since its first commercial application in 1957, and that produced a boom in natural gas production at attractive prices to compete with coal.

Many think burning less coal is a great thing, because burning coal fouls the air and is dangerous to our health, a “truth” which loses importance when you know the actual infinitesimal improvement in air quality derived from burning less coal.

However, considering all those factors, and paraphrasing a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain, the rumors of coal’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Of course, coal will never regain its former dominance among industrial fuels; time and technological/industrial evolution would just as certainly, although much more gradually, have eaten into coal’s popularity without the help of the Obama War on Coal.

But the regulatory adjustments of the Trump administration, the growing acceptance of the idea that the climate change/global warming mania is dramatically overstated, the reality that coal is still the best fuel for many things, the fact that many countries that do not have domestic coal supplies depend upon it for fuel, and the improvement in coal-burning technology all point to a continued market for American coal.

And let’s not forget that fossil fuels made up 81 percent of the fuels used to produce electricity in 2016, and coal is still the primary fossil fuel in electricity production.

Industry insiders, like Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray, see a partial resurgence in coal. “Coal will grow back,” he told Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney. “But we’re in a decline right now.”

He went on to say that Trump “can bring back at least half of those [63,000 lost] jobs as the economy grows and as he ends the regulations on coal.” He noted that we have not had a level playing field in coal; “the government has been picking winners and losers.”

And he told Maria Bartiromo, also on Fox Business Network, former President Obama closed 411 coal-fired plants, and that the Clean Power Plan which Trump ended recently, would have closed 56 more plants. That, he said, would have caused a steep spike in electric rates.

“As [Trump] grows the economy [and] brings jobs back to America, coal will participate in that growth because we are one-sixth the cost of a windmill and one-fourth the cost of natural gas,” Murray said.

Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, said, “The coal industry knows and understands how to mine coal … and protect our environment. We don’t do it the way it was done 50, 60 years ago.”

Here are a few pieces of evidence:

* Reports from the Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia coalfield regions say that mines are cranking back up and miners are being rehired. Train yards are seeing cars filled with coal moving through them in greater numbers.

* Bluefield State College recently held a Job Fair to immediately fill 85 open coal positions at Wyoming and McDowell county mines that mine coal used in making steel.

* Fox News reports that in Wise County, Virginia, a “long-awaited revival is under way in this beleaguered Central Appalachia community where residents see coal as the once and future king. Trucks are running again. Miners working seven days a week cannot keep up with current demand.”

* Coal exports through Hampton Roads last month rose more than 50 percent from last year's level, led by a nearly five-fold increase at Newport News' Pier IX, according to the most recent Virginia Maritime Association statistics. "A lot of mines are open again," said Harry Childress, president of the Virginia Coal and Energy Alliance."

Few if any argue that the coal industry will return to its former greatness, but it will certainly endure for many years at a lower level if natural forces are allowed to work, free of politically correct environmental engineering.

When you replace regulations resulting from selfish ideological goals with a business regulatory level based upon common sense, good things can happen.

And for areas of the country like ours, that have suffered so greatly from Obama’s over-zealous EPA, this is good news.

Obama implements hundreds of millions in new costs for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2015 was an important day for President Barack Obama. In addition to the traditional pardoning of turkeys, he did two other notable things.

He delivered a Thanksgiving message on Thursday comparing Syrian refugees to the Pilgrims who came to North America in 1620, noting that they were also fleeing persecution. “Nearly four centuries after the Mayflower set sail, the world is still full of pilgrims – men and women who want nothing more than the chance for a safer, better future for themselves and their families,” Obama said.

This weird mischaracterization deserves discussion, but it is the other of his Thanksgiving events that people most likely will not hear much about.

The previous day the President of the United States gave the American people a Thanksgiving gift, quietly releasing more than 2,000 new regulations that reportedly will raise the price of many common items. Furthermore, they come on top of a multi-year period of depressed economic activity left over from the 2008 recession that Obama’s policies have not relieved. Among this group of 2,224 new rules are 144 that are deemed “economically significant,” because each of them will cost the nation at least $100 million.

That group of 144 sets a new record, beating the previous high of 136 that Obama released last spring. With this sort of impact, you can understand why the Regulator-in-Chief prefers to utilize that fabulously popular political tactic of releasing bad news on a Friday, or on the eve of a holiday, so that other things will distract news organizations and the bad news will get buried by the holiday or weekend news.

Obama has used this technique frequently to hide similar releases, doing so right before a holiday seven times since Christmas of 2012.

One of the new rules is particularly notable for its importance to mankind: It mandates labeling of serving sizes for food that “can reasonably be consumed at one eating occasion.” In fact, the Thanksgiving agenda includes regulations covering a broad range of areas, from labeling requirements for pet food, new test procedures for battery chargers, mandated paid sick leave for contractors, and automatic speed limiters for trucks, to a dozen new rules limiting energy use, which will increase the cost of everything from furnaces and dishwashers to dehumidifiers, according to James Gattuso of The Heritage Foundation.

While these rules are not yet finalized, if all of them are finalized it will bring the total cost of regulation for this year to $183 billion, according to the American Action Forum.

Barack Obama may lead all presidents in the number of regulations his administration has created. From January, 2009 when he took the oath of office through 2011, the Code of Federal Regulations increased by 11,327 pages, a 7.4 percent increase, which was more than double the annual increase of the previous decade. And of the six years with the most pages of regulations added to the Federal Register, five of them belong to Obama.

At the end of 2014 the Obama administration had issued nearly 21,000 new regulations, and 2015 has seen approximately 5,000 more. It is only fair to point out that while Obama leads the pack, every recent president has also issued stacks of new regulations each year.

Robert Longely, who writes about government for About.com, explains that “[f]ederal regulations are specific details, directives or requirements with the force of law enacted by the federal agencies necessary to enforce the legislative acts passed by Congress,” and that creating the “vast and ever-growing volumes of federal regulations … happens largely unnoticed in the offices of the government agencies rather than the halls of Congress.”

This means, of course, that regulations are created not by the legislative branch, as intended by the U.S. Constitution, but by thousands of faceless, nameless, unelected and virtually unaccountable bureaucrats in the executive branch, who also create penalties with the force of law.

If there is any good news here, it is that the Congressional Review Act (CRA) allows Congress 60 in-session days to review new federal regulations issued by the regulatory agencies. The CRA requires regulatory agencies to submit all new rules to the leaders of both the House and Senate, and the General Accounting Office provides information on each new major rule to those congressional committees related to the new regulation.

However, while the Congress has 60 in-session days to review and potentially reject any proposed rule, the sheer volume of material represented by 2,224 regulations means that only those major rules that will cost over $100 million will be reviewed. Therefore, most of these rules, the most harmful along with the least harmful, will likely become finalized without being adequately reviewed.

And by the way, just because the cost of a rule doesn’t exceed $100 million doesn’t mean it isn’t both expensive and harmful.

In America – whose foundational principles supported the creation of a nation of maximum individual freedom and a small, efficient and non-intrusive federal government – how many regulations and laws are enough? History teaches that unless there is a substantial change of attitude very soon, we are nowhere close to ending the growth of stifling and destructive regulations.

Going Rogue, Part XI: EPA will break the law to do what is right!

The Environmental Protection Agency, long behaving as a narrowly focused ideological organization instead of as a servant of the people, may finally have messed up sufficiently to bring itself down, or at the very least to have earned a significant degree of restriction to its slash-and-burn approach to fossil fuel energy production.

Causing misery to thousands of honest, hard-working people who have lost jobs and businesses, suffered downturns in their business and/or paid heavy fines because of the agency’s dogmatic focus on imposing unwarranted restrictions on behaviors the agency dislikes, the EPA has been caught in an incestuous relationship with organizations that advocate the same ideology as agency bureaucrats.

The work of the Environment & Energy Legal Institute (EELI) reveals that the EPA has secretly colluded with environmental activists to drive the Obama administration’s manic global warming agenda. The organization’s report reveals “records showing illegal activities by EPA staff, conspiring with certain environmental group lobbyists to draft EPA’s greenhouse gas rules behind the scenes and outside of public view.”

As reported by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Michael Bastasch, who quoted Chris Horner, an EELI senior attorney, “These emails, which EPA forced us to litigate to obtain, prove beyond any doubt that EPA conducted its campaign to impose the global warming agenda unlawfully, making the rules themselves unlawful.” Mr. Horner says the EPA’s rules were made in collusion with environmental groups, including the radical Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), thereby excluding the public from the process, and are therefore unlawful.

EELI says the EPA wrote the Clean Power Plan and other agency rules with an “unalterably closed mind” centered on an anti-fossil fuel agenda. The EPA’s behavior and the NRDC’s perspective perfectly fit the dictionary definition of the ideologue: an impractical idealist, an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.

A 2014 EELI report focused on emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request that showed coordination between EPA employees and environmentalists that discussed the Keystone XL pipeline and clean coal technology. The EELI asserts that the records show “the influence on EPA by pressure groups, the same groups from which EPA obtained numerous senior officials,” and that these activists helped to craft the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) that regulates carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

The New York Times found similar connections last year: “Indisputable, however, is that the Natural Resources Defense Council was far ahead of the E.P.A. in drafting the architecture of the proposed regulation.”

Analyzing the EPA’s strategy, Mr. Horner commented: “The issue is solely whether Congress will stop EPA from unlawfully winning by losing, which is to say, using sham rulemaking to metastasize its desired harms before the typical timeline of litigation allows for intervention. The public needs to consider this illegality and cynical lawlessness when the President stands up with the EPA administrator … to lecture us all about how they’re just doing the right thing.”

Question: If the EPA and the Obama administration are doing the right thing, why did they feel compelled to break the law?

The EPA is expected to finalize the CPP this week, and may already have done so by now. According to comments from the White House, this new version of the plan is even stronger than last year’s proposal, which was objectionable enough to prompt several states to file suit opposing the rule, and to outrage some labor unions.

Even before this stronger version of the plan had been developed, United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts said the CPP would result in tens of thousands of union members losing their jobs. Doing the right thing “will lead to long-term and irreversible job losses for thousands of coal miners, electrical workers, utility workers, boilermakers, railroad workers and others without achieving any significant reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,” Mr. Roberts said in a statement. In addition to the thousands who have already lost their jobs, he estimates that the rule will cause 75,000 job losses in the coal sector by 2020, rising to 152,000 by 2035.

Apparently unconcerned with the thousands of American workers whose lives will be turned upside-down, an EPA spokesperson said, “The Clean Power Plan follows our clear legal authority under the Clean Air Act,” adding that, “The supreme court has decided multiple times that EPA has an obligation to regulate greenhouse gases,” without apparent concern for the repercussions.

The EPA, like all federal agencies, is duty-bound to enthusiastically adhere to only one ideology, and that is the one outlined by the U.S. Constitution.

The EPA, or any federal agency, may properly seek input from any individual or organization, but they may not take information or advice exclusively from one side without providing the opportunity for opposing points of view and data to be provided, and to objectively consider all points of view to arrive at a fair and sensible conclusion.

Out of control actions by agencies of the federal government are much too frequent, and repercussions for this inappropriate, intolerable and sometimes-illegal behavior are nearly non-existent. A number of people should be fired, and a few deserve to be indicted.

Don’t hold your breath!

Notice: You are breaking one or more federal laws and/or regulations

Most of us probably think of ourselves as law-abiding, up-standing American citizens. We pay our taxes on time. We keep our drivers licenses and inspections up to date. We don’t shoplift, or take illegal drugs. We don’t murder, rob, rape or assault others. That’s the way law-abiding citizens think and act.

And yet, I am willing to bet some money that every one of us has breeched or is on the wrong side of some federal decree.

I say that with a high degree of confidence because there are so many of these edicts from on high that nobody – not you, not law enforcement, not even the judges at whose mercy we will find ourselves if charged for breaking one – knows them all.

You see, here in the Land of the Free there are between 3,600 and 4,500 federal statutes that impose criminal sanctions, according to Michael Cottone, writing in the Tennessee Law Review.

As bad as that is, the ridiculously high number of federal laws pales in comparison to the number of regulations created by administrative agencies that carry criminal penalties, maybe as many as 300,000 of them.

With that knowledge, the old maxim “ignorance of the law is no excuse” is now a mere absurdity.

Of course, if we actually were to follow the dictates of the U.S. Constitution – a quaint idea, these days – at least some of those 300,000 regulations aren’t valid, since the only authorized law-making entity at the federal level is the Congress, and the Constitution does not authorize the Congress to abdicate that duty, and pass it along to the excessive number of unelected bureaucrats in the too-many Executive Branch agencies, departments, administrations, commissions and offices.

The Constitution sets forth the following: Article I, Section I: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” That’s about as plain as it can be. Notice it does not say, “except where Congress decides to cede that authority to the Executive Branch.”

Some laws are downright stupid, or sometimes are applied stupidly:
* A child saved a woodpecker from her family’s cat and was fined $535 under the migratory bird law.

* A 66-year-old retiree went to prison because he didn't have proper paperwork for orchids.

Some are irrational; others are conveniently broad and through twisted reasoning are used to punish American individuals and businesses. Consider the case of Gibson Guitars: On August 24, 2011, agents of the federal government executed four search warrants on Gibson manufacturing plants in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, where they seized pallets of wood, electronic files and finished guitars. Other than making excellent musical instruments, what had Gibson done?

Public servants in the Department of Justice determined that using wood from India that was not finished by workers in India is illegal, not by U.S. law, but because of the way the DOJ interpreted Indian law. The feds argued that Gibson violated the Lacey Act of 1900, which outlaws the use of plants and wildlife that have been taken or traded in violation of foreign law.

Apparently, Gibson is supposed to have known that Indian companies broke Indian law and sold wood illegally, thereby making Gibson subject to prosecution in the U.S. Seriously.

CEO Henry Juszkiewicz said Gibson competitors also use this same wood, and wondered why his company had been singled out. Fair question. Regardless, Gibson paid $300,000 to avoid criminal charges, was forced to make a "community service payment" of $50,000 to the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to promote conservation and development of tree species used in making musical instruments, as well as withdraw claims to $262,000 worth of exotic woods seized by federal authorities.

It is unfair and oppressive to hold taxpaying citizens to the impossible standard of knowing and obeying every one of the hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations that might affect them, but in addition to that, perpetuating circumstances that allow prosecutors to haul people into court and potentially fine or imprison them on the flimsy basis that they should actually know all these decrees is outrageous, although Mussolini, Pol Pot, and Stalin would approve.

"The criminal code today is so vast and complex that judges and lawyers have a lot of trouble discerning what's legal and what's illegal," John Malcom, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the House Judiciary Committee. "What hope do ordinary citizens have?" The government should be required to identify every federal crime, he said, and make that list easily accessible and free to the public.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers president Steven Benjamin testified that when the average citizen cannot figure out what is illegal, "that is unfairness in its most basic form. We have become addicted to the use of criminal law as a blunt instrument to control social and economic behavior."

George Terwilliger, former deputy attorney general in George W. Bush’s administration, thinks Congress should pass one overriding law that requires proof of intent for any federal crime.

Contact your representative and senators and tell them to implement the Malcom and Terwilliger recommendations.

Is there anything on Earth the government doesn’t want to control?

The EPA is determined to control everything that has anything to do with air, ground and water. The DOJ wants to put legal but “unpopular” types of businesses out of business. The feds tell schools what they can sell to the public at bake sales and at athletic events. And now the five unelected members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have decided the government should control the greatest and most creative invention since the wheel: the Internet.

“President Obama has pushed for the reclassification, which he said is needed to ensure a fair and open Internet,” writes Susan Ferrechio in the Washington Examiner. “But critics say it will stifle innovation and increase fees and taxes by imposing on the industry a 1934 government regulation meant for managing large utilities, such as the old telephone companies.”

"The closer we get to the FCC rubber-stamping President Obama's Internet grab, the more disturbing it becomes,” said House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., prior to the FCC’s decision. Consumers, innovators, and job creators all stand to lose from this misguided approach."

Some background, from Wikipedia: “The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), the infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.”

The Internet began gaining wide usage in the mid-1990s, and since that time has provided users with resources and connections that only until recently was even imagined. It has survived very well without the control freaks at the federal leviathan sticking their noses in.

Even though the FCC did vote to take control of the Internet, the vote was not unanimous. With a Democrat in the White House, the FCC now consists of three Democrat members and two Republicans, and both Republicans voted against the takeover.

One of them, Ajit Pai, made three important points in his dissenting statement. “For twenty years, there’s been a bipartisan consensus in favor of a free and open Internet … [and] the results speak for themselves. Dating back to the Clinton Administration, every FCC Chairman — Republican and Democrat — has let the Internet grow free from utility-style regulation.

“But today, the FCC abandons those policies. It reclassifies broadband Internet access service as a Title II telecommunications service. It seizes unilateral authority to regulate Internet conduct, to direct where Internet service providers (ISPs) make their investments, and to determine what service plans will be available to the American public.

“This is … a radical departure from the bipartisan, market-oriented policies that have served us so well for the last two decades.” 

His second point centered on the idea that the disagreement between Verizon and Netflix exemplified problems that required government intervention to protect consumers. But a free Internet operating in the free market solved this problem without need of government action, and well before this foolish decision was made.

“So the FCC is abandoning a 20-year-old, bipartisan framework for keeping the Internet free and open in favor of Great Depression-era legislation designed to regulate Ma Bell,” Commissioner Pai said, referring to the Communications Act of 1934 that authorized the FCC. “But at least we’re getting something in return, right? Wrong. The Internet is not broken. There is no problem for the government to solve.”

“Literally nothing in this Order will promote competition among ISPs,” he continued, outlining the third point. “To the contrary, reclassifying broadband will drive competitors out of business. Monopoly rules designed for the monopoly era will inevitably move us in the direction of a monopoly. If you liked the Ma Bell monopoly in the 20^th century, you’ll love Pa Broadband in the 21^st.

“One avenue for higher bills is the new taxes and fees that will be applied to broadband. If you look at your phone bill, you’ll see a ‘Universal Service Fee,’ or something like it. These fees — what most Americans would call taxes — are paid by Americans on their telephone service.

“Consumers haven’t had to pay these taxes on their broadband bills because broadband has never before been a Title II service. But now it is. And so the Order explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes. Indeed, it repeatedly states that it is only deferring a decision on new broadband taxes — not prohibiting them,” Mr. Pai concluded.

Will this lead to the FCC playing politics with the Internet like the IRS does with applicants for nonprofit status? Why wouldn’t it?

As happens quite frequently, rules with the force of law are being created not by the only branch of government authorized to create laws, but by the branch of government authorized only to enforce the laws properly created.

Once again under the Obama administration the Constitution is turned on its ear.