ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Student op-ed: Outdoor clubs are too white.
Archive for 2017
November 18, 2017
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TRUMP VERSUS THE DEEP REGULATORY STATE: Unfortunately the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Christopher DeMuth is behind the pay wall. But it’s a fine essay and worth quoting at length.
Federal regulation has been growing mightily since the early 1970s, powered by statutes that delegate Congress’s lawmaking authority to mission-driven executive agencies. Beginning in 2008, the executive state achieved autonomy. The Bush administration during the financial crisis, and the Obama administration in normal times, decreed major policies on their own, without congressional authorization and sometimes even in defiance of statutory law.
President Trump might have been expected to continue the trend. As a candidate, he had railed against imperious Washington and promised to clear regulatory impediments to energy development and job creation. Yet he also was an avid protectionist, sounded sometimes like an antitrust populist, and had little to say about regulatory programs like those of the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. He was contemptuous of Congress and admiring of President Obama’s unilateral methods. Clearly, this was to be a results-oriented, personality-centered presidency.
The record so far has been radically different. With some exceptions (such as business as usual on ethanol), and putting aside a few heavy-handed tweets (such as raising the idea of revoking broadcast licenses from purveyors of “fake news”), President Trump has proved to be a full-spectrum deregulator. His administration has been punctilious about the institutional prerogatives of Congress and the courts. Today there is a serious prospect of restoring the constitutional status quo ante and reversing what seemed to be an inexorable regulatory expansion…
The essay goes on to say Trump has appointed qualified, reform-oriented agency leaders (a first indicator that he’s serious). He has turned away from “unilateral lawmaking” (a second indicator). Unilateral lawmaking is a diplomatic term for Obama’s questionable or blatantly unconstitutional executive orders (like spending “billions without a congressional appropriation to subsidize insurance plans on the ObamaCare exchanges”).
Finally:
A third indicator is the introduction of regulatory budgeting, which sounds tedious but is potentially revolutionary. The idea goes back to the late 1970s, when the new health, safety and environmental agencies were first issuing rules that required private businesses and individuals to spend tens of millions of dollars or more. It seemed anomalous that this should be free of the disciplines of taxing, appropriating and budgeting that applied to direct expenditures. Jimmy Carter’s commerce secretary, Juanita Kreps, proposed a regulatory budget as a good-government measure; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D., Texas) introduced legislation; and several academics (myself included) worked out the theory and practicalities in congressional reports and journal articles.
The idea never went anywhere.
Well, it never went anywhere until now.
LCAC IN THE MIST: Landing Craft, Air Cushion in an amphibious assault exercise.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● “Hillary Clinton says Donald Trump is acting like a dictator.”
—Tweet by Newsweek yesterday plugging this article.
Newsweek on the president as dictator in November of 2012? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Choose the form of your destructor, to coin an Insta-phrase.
IT’S 1998 ALL OVER AGAIN:
Flashback: “Not that being an environmentalist makes a guy a saint, but Gore seemed almost desperate to have us see him as more moral than the average Al. . . . The greenest of the green people I talked to felt betrayed. Gore was their leader and the movement is now, um, stained. The woman even said, according to the transcript of her interview with Portland, Ore., police made public on the Internet, that her ‘Birkenstock Tribe’ friends told her to ‘suck it up’ and not tell anyone or the ‘world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.’”
CNN’S BRIAN STELTER FRETS ‘STUPID’ MISTAKES IN MEDIA ARE ‘AMPLIFIED’ TO HARM THEM.
Of course, in Soviet America, media harms you! CNN threatened to dox an anti-CNN gif-maker this past Fourth of July, and a month later, former Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employee Lena Dunham threatened to dox American Airlines stewardesses for an allegedly politically incorrect conversation she overheard (or imagined she overheard) in an airport. Back in May (also at the second link above), leftwing academician Freddie deBoer wrote a post in which he suggests that everyone, on both sides of the aisle, is a cop these days. “Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.”
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE UNDERAGE-DOMINICAN-PROSTITUTES ANGLE? Senate ethics panel resumes Menendez probe after judge declares mistrial.
CALIFORNIA SCHEMING: Minor Violations Lead to Massive Prosecution Fees in Two California Desert Towns.
I don’t think we’ve seen an enforcement mechanism as nasty and cruel as the one the Desert Sun has uncovered out in California’s Inland Empire. The cities of Indio and Coachella partnered up with a private law firm, Silver & Wright, to prosecute citizens in criminal court for violations of city ordinances that call for nothing more than small fines—things like having a mess in your yard or selling food without a business license.
Those cited for these violations fix the problems and pay the fines, a typical code enforcement story. The kicker comes a few weeks or months later when citizens get a bill in the mail for thousands of dollars from the law firm that prosecuted them. They are forcing citizens to pay for the private lawyers used to take them to court in the first place. So a fine for a couple of hundred dollars suddenly becomes a bill for $3,000 or $20,000 or even more.
In Coachella, a man was fined $900 for expanding his living room without getting a permit. He paid his fine. Then more than a year later he got a bill in the mail from Silver & Wright for $26,000. They told him that he had to pay the cost of prosecuting him, and if he didn’t, they could put a lien on his house and the city could sell it against his will. When he appealed the bill they charged him even more for the cost of defending against the appeal. The bill went from $26,000 to $31,000.
Brett Kelman of the Desert Sun found 18 cases in Indio and Coachella where people received inordinately high legal bills for small-time violations. A woman fined for hanging Halloween decorations across a city street received legal bill for $2,700. When she challenged it, the bill jumped to $4,200.
Kelman notes that these thousands of dollars in fees came from a single court hearing that lasted minutes.
As Glenn would say, “tar, feathers.” And as Kate of Small Dead Animals titles her recurring posts on California craziness, “O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas, Hear My Prayer.”
TRUMP HASN’T DRAINED THE SWAMP, BUT HE’S DISCREDITED IT. Or maybe it’s discredited itself. We need a new elite.
If we’re going to get a new “elite,” could we make sure this time that it’s actually, you know, elite?
PARTY LIKE IT’S 1983: Democrats Revive the ‘Trickle Down’ Smear.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: After 86% Enrollment Decline, Valparaiso Law School Stops Admitting Students And Will Likely Close. “When it hit us, it came fast.” That’s how it works.
WELL, NEW TO THEM: Scientists discover ‘new species’ of dinosaur.
PFUI: Female psychologist says PMS is a myth. Female psychologist is fortunate in her hormones, is all.
THEY’RE ECONOMIC ILLITERATES: Democrats Revive the “Trickle Down” Smear.
BOTH DONOR AND PATIENT WERE DEAD, BUT OTHER THAN THAT … World’s first human head transplant a success, professor says.
MICHELLE OBAMA ENDORSES THIS STUDY, SO SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR VEGGIES: 90% of Americans eat garbage.
AHAHAHAHAHAH! OH, WAIT, THEY’RE SERIOUS: Democrats Set Five Articles of Impeachment Against Trump. Let me laugh even harder.
UNFORTUNATELY NOT WHAT HAPPENED IN ROMANIA IN 1989. MUGABE COULD USE A CEAUSESCU MOMENT: What’s going on in Zimbabwe?
YOU EXPECTED DIFFERENT FROM COMMUNIST NEWS NETWORK? THERE IS NO TRUTH (OR SHAME) IN PRAVDA: CNN Partisan Shills Spin Clownishly For Molesting Clown Al Franken.
SPEAKING OF HILLARY: Look, I told my friend not to go on reading Hillary’s book. I told her it would have Necronomicon-like effects. She was warned. She was told to watch her liver damage. And yet she persisted. You might as well enjoy the results. HRC: A New Deal, A Square Deal or How She Wanted to be the Next Roosevelt. Also, wait, I THOUGHT Obama was the new Roosevelt. Progressives. Living in the past. Again.
TO BE FOUND SOON HAVING COMMITTED SUICIDE WITH THREE BULLETS TO THE BACK OF THE HEAD: Here’s The FBI Informant Who Says He Has Evidence On the Uranium One Deal.
November 17, 2017
FRONT-RUNNER: Joe Biden 2020 Is A Terrible Idea In A Post-Weinstein America.
Related: Top Dem Presidential Prospects: A Septuagenarian, a Radical and a Comedian. The comedian’s not looking so hot right now. . .