Heritage Foundation estimates that annual regulatory costs increased during Obama’s first four years by nearly $70 billion—with more regulations in store for term two.
And that’s just the 130, or so, so-called major regs. President Barack Obama’s EPA accounted for $45 billion all by themselves.
So much for Obama’s “commitment” to cut the red tape in Washington.
President Barack Obama and his DoT folks, abetted by the press, have done their best to create a commercial travel problem out of the Obama Sequester. The press, including “fair and balanced” Fox News, are focusing on the ATC Controller furlough-caused 1,600 delays per day since the furlough scheme went in.
What the press cynically omit to mention is that ATC Controllers handle 28,500+ commercial, 27,000+ general aviation, 24,500+ air taxi and charter, 5,000+ military, and 2,000+ air cargo flights, or more than 87,000 flights each day.
Now we’re six days into the Obama-directed Huerta Furlough, and the FAA’s own Web site shows the lack of widespread “staffing” delays. If you’re patient, and track that site through a day, you’ll see that the “staffing” delays are concentrated in the New York area with an occasional bump in LA or Chicago.
Michael Huerta, FAA Administrator, was asked during his testimony before the House Wednesday why he couldn’t focus ATC furloughs—to the extent they’re needed at all—on regional and small airports, leaving these larger, much busier airports fully staffed. Huerta responded that he couldn’t pick winners and losers from among the nation’s airports.
Which, of course, is exactly what he’s doing when he elevates those regional and small airports to the same level as the US’ air traffic hubs. Oh, and maximizing what little pain the FAA’s share of the sequester can cause.
Update: The FAA…has suspended furloughs for air traffic controllers….
Air traffic facilities are supposed to return to regular staffing through today, and normal ops should be achieved by tonight.
While the second terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing still was being hunted, Boston and a number of surrounding suburbs were put on lockdown, as police recommended (strongly) that everyone should stay indoors while they searched for the terrorist, a terrorist who, as it turns out, had escaped the perimeter the police had set up to enclose a small part of the city.
During that lockdown, Boston took a number of hits, and so I have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the matter.
The city and people of Boston took hits from the impairment of their individual freedoms (this time, brief) and to their economic activity (this time, both brief and local). In the end, too, the lockdown contributed very little to the actual tracking and capture of the remaining terrorist.
There are a couple of things about this: for one, these now are tools for subsequent terrorists in their subsequent activities. On an individual basis, the loss to Boston and to Bostonians was small—but scaled up, with terrorists now acting so as to prompt further lockdowns, the losses can easily mount to a scope far beyond the reach of any physical terrorist act or collection of them done in concert. Disruptions to our lives get us dancing to the terrorists’ tune as surely as actually killing us.
Widespread lockdowns also get us in the habit of letting the government corral us, for our own good.
Keep in mind Benjamin Franklin’s warning:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, will have neither Liberty nor Safety.
Although the warning might be hard for some to understand, it being older than one hundred years.
President Barack Obama, in his dismay that he couldn’t dictate his position on gun control via demagoguery, expressed his dismay thusly:
The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.
The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had “no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this. It came down to politics.”
“A minority was able to block it from moving forward” through “this continuing distortion of Senate rules.”
What Obama chose not to mention, though, is the steamrolling tactics he tried while coming down with his own politics, attempting to impose his minority position through an attempt to preempt actual discussion of the bills—by distorting Senate rules and while outright lying about his behavior and his role in the gun control bills’ failure.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) could have forced an up-or-down vote on the Manchin-Toomey background check bill—it got 54 votes on the cloture motion, so he might have gotten the bill passed. No, though. He and Obama didn’t want debate, they didn’t want Americans—or our Senate stand-ins—to have a chance properly to study the bill and (the horror!) to propose amendments before voting on it. We all would have gotten that chance because skipping the cloture vote would have required Obama and Reid to sit through 30 hours of public debate and amendment before the vote could happen. The word came from on high: no scrutiny, do the cloture vote.
In the midst of his crocodile tears over the lost opportunity for the Newtown children, Obama angrily denounced fears over a national registry of gun owners—saying that the just defeated bill explicitly banned the creation of such a registry. That ban was in the bill, true enough. But the fears are no less real for that.
Were Progressives to win the 2014 mid-terms and regain control of the House, who can believe that the registry ban wouldn’t be promptly rescinded and a registry created making used of the now additional two years of background checks?
This is another failure of Obama’s doing. As Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, Obama and his cronies have zero credibility after their shenanigans vis-à-vis Obamacare, border security, Dodd-Frank, the present gun control “debate,” demonizing—and slandering—all those who disagree throughout his administration’s rule, etc, etc, etc. Obama’s blandishments about registry bans simply are unbelievable.
Now the educators are politicizing the “science” to be taught our children. Newly released national science standard “proposals” will include the pseudo-science of manmade climate change as a “core concept.”
The new standards claim
Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming)
without any regard for the lack of actual science, or even data, to support that thesis.
On the other hand, some of the objections to this politicization miss the point and, if these objections are the ones that successfully defeat the nonsense, they’ll create their own problems. There is, for instance, the worry that
the very presence of climate change instruction in classrooms will create controversy.
So what? That actually would be beneficial. A proper handling of the controversy (of any controversy, come to that) would constitute an excellent mechanism for teaching critical thinking, to say nothing of the opportunity to teach the social aspects of dealing with controversial matters.