#7 Virginia (-3)
#16 Delaware (-4)
#37 Maryland (-4)
#39 Pennsylvania (-7)
#42 West Virginia (-8)
"The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties."
"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense . . . . So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost."
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos."
"One of [government's] primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives."
"Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
"When 'A' annoys or injures 'B' on the pretense of saving or improving X, 'A' is a scoundrel."
"Our environmental laws badly need re-thinking. This book makes that case and then charts a course for action. A straightforward, comprehensive, and persuasive case for reform."--William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1970-1973 and 1983-1985 (William D. Ruckelshaus )
"The authors remind us that a number of our environmental laws are not achieving their important goals. Breaking the Logjam documents the power of well-regulated markets to achieve significant improvements in air quality and challenges us to incorporate those lessons more broadly, hopefully provoking a valuable national discussion on these complex issues."-Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund
 clipped from www.washingtonexaminer.comThe dealers are required to destroy the clunkers, which will reduce the supply and increase the price of spare parts for those low-income folks who can't afford to trade their clunkers in even with a $4,500 subsidy. So much for helping the poor.
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all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.Most parents don't bother trying to change or improve the public school system. They just try to game it as best they can while their kids are enrolled.
America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? ...
Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them.
The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself.It proposes safety valves that will ease the cap if it threatens to have a noticeable effect on energy prices. It relies heavily on offsets – theoretical carbon reductions bought from other countries or other industries – so that big US emitters will not need to try so hard. It gives emission permits away, and tells utilities to rebate the windfall to consumers, so their electricity bills do not go up. It creates a vastly complicated apparatus, a playground for special interests and rent-seekers, a minefield of unintended consequences – and the bottom line for all that is business as usual.
It's time for my state legislators in Maryland District 42 to step up to the plate. Are you listening, Sue Aumann, Jim Brochin, Bill Frank and Steve Lafferty?How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm.
Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the policy’s stupidity.
People don't change because the government intervenes with a social program. People change when they become exhausted with their suffering.Despite the subtitle, his book on Obama is well worth reading today.
from a law enforcement perspective, it's easy. [Marijuana users] are far less likely than other drug users to carry a weapon or get violent with an officer . . . Busting college kids for holding weed and taking down grow houses is a terrific way [for police] to keep [their arrest] numbers up . . . . . . [and] because its so widely used, especially among the young, no amount of crack downs is going to get rid of weed in our society. So it's a well that never goes dry. And it's a win-win on the PR end: every marijuana bust can be used as both evidence of a problem, and evidence that law enforcement is confronting that problem. Perfect.This way of looking at it just gives more support to those of us who think that the War on Drugs is a complete failure.
Mr. Obama suggested . . . that while Ronald Reagan was wrong in saying, in his first inaugural, that “government is not the answer, government is the problem,” Bill Clinton too was wrong in saying, in a State of the Union, that “the era of big government is over.” Such talk, Mr. Obama suggested, is beside the point. “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” Programs and policies that are effective should move forward, and those that are not “will end.”"
"CSPAN has come a very long way with their digital video services, evolving from an over-aggressive assertion of copyright to now offering embeddable video."
“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.The column points to the farm lobby as one cause of the problem:
The Agriculture Department — and the agriculture committees in Congress — have traditionally been handed over to industrial farming interests by Democrats and Republicans alike.Kristof points to two things Obama can do to begin to fix the problems: (1) hire a reformer as the new Secretary of Agriculture, and (2) change the name to Secretary of Food.
100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.What Kristof leaves out is this: in recent years we voters in urban-industrial states have shown little interest in "agriculture" policy. After all, what do we know about farming? As a result, our representatives have ceded authority on food legislation to politicians from the rural breadbasket states.
This makes so much sense -- it seems sooooo obvious -- that I don't understand why more people don't make a big fuss about it.everyone should pay something in income tax, and that the amount they pay should go up or down with total federal spending. Otherwise nobody has any incentive to control spending, and we wind up . . . well, where we are.
“Nuclear power and all other ways to produce or save energy should be allowed to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership.”Glenn Reynolds & Dr. Helen interview interviewed Lovins a few months ago.
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