Let’sallwelcometheCIAtoTwitter

Let’s all welcome the CIA to Twitter

posted at 8:31 am on June 7, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

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An interesting blip popped up on the social media radar this week, when the Central Intelligence Agency took the plunge and joined Twitter. (@CIA). There was no huge fanfare or media uproar beyond a few “news lite” pieces, but the Twitterverse certainly noticed. In a matter of hours the account had passed a quarter million followers. Of course, I’m not sure how much entertainment we can expect from Spook Central, given that they have thus far managed only two tweets.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.

— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

Thank you for the @Twitter welcome! We look forward to sharing great #unclassified content with you.

— CIA (@CIA) June 7, 2014

There were plenty of jokes going around as soon as they broke virtual radio silence, as well as perhaps only partially serious jibes about having the spies among us. (Including mine.)

@CIA You realize nearly everyone just quit Twitter, right…?

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) June 7, 2014

Concerns about the CIA suddenly “finding” Twitter and listening in on us are clearly unwarranted. (And for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that the agency has had files on every writer at Hot Air for at least the last 66 months.) While they don’t announce such things, I’m sure that intelligence agencies have been gathering information and monitoring Twitter (as well as Facebook, Pinterest and all the rest) pretty much since they went online. I imagine that if you wanted to do it, you’d set up a number of relatively anonymous accounts from generic e-mail addresses and not even bother following people of interest. Twitter allows you to set up searches for key words, so you’d just begin monitoring for every instance of potentially threatening phrases and checking them out.

So why join the social media herd now? Well, the CIA had an explanation for that.

“By expanding to these platforms, CIA will be able to more directly engage with the public and provide information on CIA’s mission, history, and other developments,” said CIA Director John Brennan in a statement. “We have important insights to share, and we want to make sure that unclassified information about the Agency is more accessible to the American public that we serve, consistent with our national security mission.”

So much for that. The only serious question I have regarding this story is how did they manage to get that handle? Surely somebody would have taken it by now, if only the Culinary Institute of America. Did they have to kick somebody off?

Anyway, here are some other agencies who are already on Twitter that you might not have known about.

The DEA
The FBI
The Department of Homeland Security
DARPA
The Defense Intelligence Agency

You may as well keep an eye on them. You know they’re keeping an eye on you.

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Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, federal government, social media, Twitter

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Inspectorsgeneral:TheEPAisbeingactivelyuncooperative

Inspectors general: The EPA is being actively uncooperative with and dismissive of our investigations

posted at 6:31 pm on May 6, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Remember the bizarre case of John C. Beale? Last year, it was finally revealed that the former high-level Environmental Protection Agency employee managed to defraud the federal government of almost a million dollars over the course of twelve years while doing almost no work, and then excusing his many absences by claiming that he was jetting off on secret climate-change-related business in conjunction with the CIA, followed by a fake retirement party. Much to the EPA’s chagrin, federal watchdogs were not filled with confidence in either our sprawling bureaucracy generally or the EPA’s power-grabbing/obfuscating tendencies specifically, and began an investigation into the lack of internal controls that allowed the guy to fly under the radar for so long; then in February, the EPA inspector general wrote a letter to Sen. David Vitter informing him that several EPA employees were actively getting in the way of the IG’s investigations thereof. This afternoon, the Associated Press just dropped another bomb on those inauspicious EPA activities:

A unit run by President Barack Obama’s political staff inside the Environmental Protection Agency operates illegally as a “rogue law enforcement agency” that has blocked independent investigations by the EPA’s inspector general for years, a top investigator says.

The assistant EPA inspector general for investigations, Patrick Sullivan, was expected to testify Wednesday before a House oversight committee about the activities of the EPA’s little-known Office of Homeland Security. The office is overseen by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s chief of staff, and the inspector general’s office is accusing it of impeding independent investigations into employee misconduct, computer security and external threats, including compelling employees involved in cases to sign non-disclosure agreements.

“Under the heavy cloak of `national security,’ the Office of Homeland Security has repeatedly rebuffed and refused to cooperate with the OIG’s ongoing requests for information or cooperation,” Sullivan wrote in prepared testimony obtained by The Associated Press. “This block unquestionably has hamstrung the Office of Inspector General’s ability to carry out its statutory mandate to investigate wrongdoing of EPA employees.” …

EPA’s Office of Homeland Security was set up in 2003 by an administrative order, and has no statutory authority to conduct investigations or enforce the law. But since July 2012, in an agreement with the FBI, it has been the primary contact on all investigations with a connection to national security.

Hmm — this EPA office secretively operates by using the heavy cloak of “national security” as its justification? Is that kind of like how John C. Beale used the cloak of national security as a justification, do you suppose? They already have the oh-so-convenient justifications of the “public health” and “environmental protection” to excuse their every whim; how many more can they possibly need if, as they claim, they really aren’t up to anything untoward?

Funny how the self-proclaimed Most Transparent Administration, Evah seems so averse to scrutiny — particularly the zealously environmentalist agency currently marshaling as much authority to itself as it can muster for the sake of almost singlehandedly executing President Obama’s costly and ideological climate change agenda via top-down regulations executive orders.

Tags: Associated Press, bureaucracy, Environmental Protection Agency, federal government, investigation, Obama administration, regulations, transparancy

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Report:Oregonisabouttogiveupon

Report: Oregon is about to give up on its ObamaCare exchange

posted at 4:21 pm on April 24, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The increasingly obvious conclusion to the long odyssey of CoverOregon, which began in a dreamy, technicolor haze of unbounded ObamaCare enthusiasm and now sounds like it’s ending with a big, fat thud. Oregon’s nonfunctional exchange remains the only one not to have signed up a single enrollee through its online system, forcing the state to redirect all of its applicants to sign up via snail mail and telephone, and it’s been dogged by reports and allegations of waste, fraud, and utter incompetence as officials have been trying to figure out exactly how they managed to crash and burn so dramatically with a budget of $300 million for the entire endeavor. The federal government got officially involved back in March, and it sounds like the feds are ready to take to project out of Oregon’s hands, via WaPo:

The Obama administration is poised to take over Oregon’s broken insurance exchange, according to officials familiar with the decision, who say that it reflects federal officials’ conclusion that several state-run marketplaces may be too dysfunctional to fix.

In public, the board overseeing Cover Oregon is scheduled to vote Friday whether to join the federal insurance marketplace that already sells health plans in most of the country under the Affordable Care Act. Behind the scenes, the officials say, federal and Oregon officials already have privately agreed that closing down the system is the best path to rescue the state marketplace, the country’s only one to fail so spectacularly that no residents have been able to sign up for coverage online since it opened early last fall. …

A consultant’s analysis for Cover Oregon recently concluded that it would cost $4 million to $6 million to move into the federal insurance marketplace, a fraction of the expense of refurbishing the exchange’s existing technology.

According to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about discussions that have not been made public, leaders of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the insurance marketplaces, have firmly told Oregon officials that they did not believe they had the ability to repair the exchange themselves.

The federal government might be looking to absorb Maryland and Massachusetts’ messy exchanges into the national system too, but for Oregon, as WaPo notes, “one important unresolved question is whether people who have just chosen health plans through Cover Oregon will need to sign up a second time in the federal system for their new coverage to continue beyond this year” — and if that does end up being the case, might we see some frustrated Oregonians taking a second look at GOP Senate candidate Dr. Monica Webhy, perhaps? Eh?

Tags: exchange, failure, federal government, ObamaCare, Oregon

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ComingsoontotheNevadadesert:“BundyFest”?

Coming soon to the Nevada desert: “BundyFest”?

posted at 8:01 pm on April 23, 2014 by Allahpundit

Via Becket Adams and TheBlaze, it’s not what you think. Although it does sound like it’ll involve a lot of, er, freedom.

Attendees of the annual Burning Man festival plan to converge near Cliven Bundy’s property in September for a 30-day “rules-free” gathering, a cheeky response to the rancher’s refusal to recognize federal authority in Nevada.

“For years, we paid permitting fees to hold Burning Man on the beautiful Playa in Northern Nevada,” reads the event’s Facebook page. “But now, Cliven Bundy has shown us a NEW WAY! ABSOLUTE FREEDOM! Bundy has declared the entire area surrounding Bundy Ranch as a TOTALLY RULES-FREE ZONE! ANYTHING GOES! WOO-HOO!!!”…

No permits will be required for “BundyFest,” nudity is encouraged and participants are expected to embrace the festival’s gay friendly atmosphere, according to the event’s Facebook page.

There will be no bathroom facilities, Shealy warned, but festivalgoers can always use the great outdoors.

“You’re free to let it all hang out right there, just like Bundy’s cattle, right there in the Virgin River, if you want to,” he said.

It started as a Facebook goof aimed at satirizing Bundy’s claim to the land but it’s gotten picked up by various lefty, and even mainstream, media outlets so now maybe it’s becoming a thing. The plan, supposedly, is to set up shop on federal land across the street from Bundy’s ranch and “let it all hang out.” As for the militias, here’s what the “organizer” told the Las Vegas Sun:

We have in fact, invited the militias. They will be needed. They are defending the principle that this land is open and free to all to use however we wish — and that includes BundyFest! We will need them to hold off the BLM and local law enforcement throughout this festival, just as they showed up for Cliven Bundy. It is the exact same principle. There cannot be one set of laws for Bundy and a different set for the rest of us. If the militias are acting on principle, then they will defend our rights, as well.

Bundy’s been using the land far longer than BundyFest has, of course, but contrary to what I’ve seen on some sites, his family wasn’t there before the feds were. This local news report has a thorough timeline of events. The federal grazing district in Vegas was established in 1936, the BLM was established in 1946, and then Bundy’s parents purchased the ranch in 1948, when he was two. Either way, I’m curious to know what the BLM’s response will be if the BundyFest people manage to pull together a crowd for the “festival.” Will they let them on the land to make a point or try to keep them off lest they be accused of a double standard?

Via RCP, here’s Bill O’Reilly asking one Bundy supporter what the difference is between him and Occupy Wall Street. After all, they both seized public land (well, quasi-public in the case of Zuccotti Park) for their own ends. The reply comes that Bundy is doing something productive whereas OWS was clearly not, but c’mon: It can’t be that a few thousand OWSers occupying Central Park would be tolerated if only they promised to grow vegetables for sale.

Tags: blm, bundyfest, cliven bundy, federal government, land, ranch

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Westernstatesdebateretakingcontroloffederallands

Western states debate retaking control of federal lands

posted at 5:01 pm on April 19, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

It’s going to sound as if this story is some sort of reflexive reaction to the showdown at the Bundy ranch, but it’s apparently been in the works for a while. A number of officials from nine different states got together to discuss ways to retake control of poorly managed federal lands. One can only imagine the kind of firestorm this is going to kick off in DC if it moves forward.

Officials from nine Western states met in Salt Lake City on Friday to discuss taking control of federal lands within their borders on the heels of a standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management.

The lawmakers and county commissioners discussed ways to wresting oil-, timber- and mineral-rich lands away from the feds. Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart said it was in the works before this month’s standoff…

“What’s happened in Nevada is really just a symptom of a much larger problem,” Lockhart said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

The Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands, as it was called, was organized by Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory and Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, addressed the group over lunch, the Tribune reported.

“It’s simply time,” Ivory told reporters. “The urgency is now.”

Fielder said federal land management is hamstrung by bad policies, politicized science and severe federal budget cuts.

This has some interesting possibilities, though it’s unclear what the prospects for success are were it to come down to a court battle at the federal level. It would be useful to highlight precisely how much “federal land” there is in the United States, and how much of it is actually being put to productive use. Further, how much land should the federal government legitimately control?

A really strict interpretation of just how much land that would be could be found in Article I, Section 8.

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;

The origin of national park lands is a bit more hazy, but dates back to the life and activism of John Muir. But at the time, the idea of establishing national parks was frequently referred to as a radical one, and it took a lot of salesmanship to bring it to pass. There is also a long standing debate over the number of abandoned military bases scattered around the country which represent eyesores and lost tax revenue. When the federal government needs land for an active base in support of our military, then sure… no problem. But what about when they shut one down? Shouldn’t that land immediately revert back to the control of the state?

It seems, however, that even if we accept all of the above examples, there is still an argument to be made that public lands which are not being dutifully maintained to serve some valid purpose of the public would be better classified as state lands. There used to be a lot of state land, even where I grew up in rural New York. The state maintained control of such lands and could preserve it or sell it to residents as they saw fit. The same could doubtless apply to things like grazing rights, tourism and what have you.

There may be something to this idea. But we’ll have to wait and see what, if anything, they come up with and how Washington responds. I doubt it would be resolved in my lifetime, however.

Tags: federal government, Tenth Amendment, U.S. states

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Statelegislators:Hey,youknowwhatwereally

State legislators: Hey, you know what we really need right now? More federal land!

posted at 7:31 pm on April 15, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

I should probably go ahead and get it out of the way and say that, unfortunately, I agree that Cliven Bundy is legally very wrong in refusing to pay federal grazing fees and instigating a potentially violent standoff with the Bureau of Land Management — but that being said, that does not mean that the law of the land he is opposing is a good one.

As I have written before, the fact that the federal government currently owns a full third of the surface area of the United States is nothing less than a scandal that directly results in countless economic opportunity costs as well as inefficient, uninformed management practices and environmental degradation. For decades, eco-radicals flying the banner of “environmentalism” and “conservation” have been using the auspices of the federal government to slowly take lands out of the hands of private individuals and rural communities and instead put them in the hands of a politically-driven, top-down gigantic bureaucracy wielding the hammer of regulatory power, usually in the name of saving the sage grouse or something.

The “conservationists” that have been advocating for the subsequently restrictive land-use policies and wilderness designations tend to believe that commercial activity and free enterprise (as it pertains here, that means drilling, mining, logging, grazing, etcetera) are fundamentally and necessarily at odds with fostering environmental quality, and generally would really like to see human beings relocated almost entirely into cities.

The federal government hasn’t even designated the requisite cash it takes to properly manage the property it already owns, resulting in a major maintenance backlog, and yet it is constantly acquiring more land — largely via the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which President Obama has oh-so-proudly declared he will fully fund to the tune of around $900 million a year. Perhaps instead of using that money to acquire more land and thus expand those restrictive land-use policies, the feds could instead use that money to better steward the existing federal estate? And hey, while they’re at it, perhaps they could actually sell off some of the federal estate, or even just relinquish some of it to state control, the better to service that $17 trillion debt in which we’re floundering? Maybe?

Alas, expanding those restrictive land-use policies is kinda‘ the goal for these progressive “environmentalist” types. Federal land management essentially means political land management, and they’d like to keep it that way. A timely case in point:

A group of 230 state legislators on Tuesday encouraged President Obama to brush aside Republican opposition and designate more public lands as national monuments.

Public areas in the United States are valuable for tourism and outdoor recreation, the lawmakers said, but the threats of mining, logging and drilling put the lands at risk.

“As legislators, we encourage action from Congress to protect these landscapes but, as you know, for the last three years Congress has passed just one bill to designate new wilderness,” they wrote. …

They want him to declare the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks in New Mexico and Boulder-White Clouds in Idaho as monuments.

“Your administration can deliver a bold agenda for permanently protecting our most critically important cultural and natural heritage in your remaining years in office,” they wrote.

Here’s the letter, and yes, they do actually say that not designating these monuments increases “the risk of mining, logging and drilling,” whilst applauding the president’s support for the LWCF. The fact that decades’ worth of the federally-directed prevention of thinning activities like grazing and logging has directly resulted in unnaturally dense forests that have been erupting into the explosive wildfires we’ve lately been experiencing, was not mentioned (because, of course, they’d like the shift the blame away from themselves and onto climate change). Nope — for these guys, ushering more land into the federal estate is just another tool through which “environmentalists” can exert their whims, deter fossil-fuel investment, squash rural economies, and shepherd more people into urban areas.

Tags: bureaucracy, Democrats, environmentalism, federal government, land, Land and Water Conservation Fund, natural resources

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Theover-federalizationofcriminallawinAmerica

The over-federalization of criminal law in America

posted at 3:31 pm on April 6, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

One popular topic among conservatives – and a frequent bone of contention when debating liberals on the subject – is the issue of states’ rights vs the federal government. We tend to hone in on specific cases as they crop up in a sort of whack-a-mole fashion, but Rodrigo Sermeño has an excellent essay this weekend at PJ Media on the larger, overarching reality of this problem. There are simply too many federal laws on the books, with an average of more than fifty new ones being added each year, and most of them usurp legal issues already being handled by the states. This, as the author notes, leads to a variety of problems which are already metastasizing and coming back to bite us.

Criminal law experts warned a House panel late last week about the dangers of over-federalization in the nation’s criminal law system.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Over-Criminalization Task Force held its second hearing of 2014, where members of Congress discussed the federal criminal code’s astonishing rate of growth.

Today, there are more than 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a study by Louisiana State University law professor John S. Baker…

“Today there’s a continuing crisis in the overlap of federal and state law, particularly in the areas previously covered only by state law,” James Strazzella, professor of law at Temple University, told the panel. “With the growth of federal law demonstratively covering more and more traditionally state-crime areas, a mounting and duplicating patchwork of crimes has grown up in the last few decades.”

The author notes that this is a non-partisan issue which draws criticism from both sides of the aisle for multiple reasons. This federal overreach undermines the competitive and unique nature of state sovereignty, defies the idea of a federal government with well defined and limited powers, and removes the ability of individual states to set sentencing which comports with the views of their citizens.

This sort of legislative sprawl in Washington also raises complicated issues involving a legal principle known as mens rea, which essentially means that citizens wind up facing felony charges involving laws which they didn’t even know existed and certainly held no intent to violate. This particular wrinkle was pointed out last year in a piece at the Wall Street Journal telling the story of one family who ran afoul of Uncle Sam in the most inexplicable of ways.

Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho, is a retired logger, a former science teacher and now a federal criminal thanks to his arrowhead-collecting hobby.

In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities “notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one,” Mr. Anderson recalls.

There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.

As if this weren’t enough, expansion of the boundaries of federal law can lead to what should, by any rationale analysis, be examples of double jeopardy. One case in point which currently holds the potential for this is the status of George Zimmerman. Having been found not guilty in Florida on murder charges, there is still discussion of taking him to federal court for the same crime. And that, as was pointed out at Forbes by numerous legal experts, is not a good thing.

Thus Florida can’t charge Zimmerman again, but, presumably, if there is an appropriate statute, the federal government could charge him, since it never charged Zimmerman to begin with.

But does this make sense?

To many legal scholars this precedent is wrongly decided and it’s a matter of current legal controversy. I asked Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett for his perspective. Barnett was the architect of the Commerce Clause arguments against Obamacare and was once a former state-court criminal prosecutor in Chicago.

The original meaning of the double-jeopardy bar in the Fifth Amendment must be evaluated in context. At the Founding there was thought to be little, if any, overlap between federal and state laws governing individuals. In light of the modern expansion of federal power, ‘twice put in jeopardy of life or limb’ should be interpreted to mean what it says.

There is a place for federal laws, obviously, but it should center on areas where the states are unable to pursue crime, most commonly from a lack of either resources or jurisdiction. When kidnappers take a victim across state lines, or complicated fraud and fiscal mismanagement schemes involve banks and individuals across the country, there is a clear case for federal jurisdiction. But in the vast majority of instances of private misconduct, the states tend to agree on what is legal and what is not. (And to the great chagrin of some progressives, the list boils down to the Ten Commandments.) What varies is how – and to what extent – each state chooses to punish the offenders. And this is something which should rightly be left to the voters of each state depending on their preferences and needs. Reigning in Washington after they get hold of some power, however, usually proves to be an impossible task.

Tags: federal government, law, state

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Federaltaxrevenuesforthefirst5months

Federal tax revenues for the first 5 months of FY2014, $1.104 trillion, hit an inflation-adjusted record

posted at 8:01 pm on March 17, 2014 by Steve Eggleston

There is a reason President Obama thinks the era of economic austerity is over – CNS News reports that in the first five months of FY2014, between October 2013 and February 2014, the federal government took in a record $1,104,947,000,000 in tax revenue. That is not only a current-dollar record, but also an inflation-adjusted record:

Inflation-adjusted federal tax revenues hit a record $1,104,947,000,000 in the first five months of fiscal 2014, but the federal government still ran a $377,379,000,000 deficit during that time, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement for February….

In constant 2014 dollars, the $1,104,947,000,000 that the federal government collected from October through February in fiscal 2014 was $90,193,750,000 more than the $1,014,753,250,000 it collected in October through February in fiscal 2013.

After the current fiscal year, the second highest federal tax intake in the first five months of a fiscal year occurred in the first five months of fiscal 2007, when the government collected $1,076,721,860,000 in 2014 dollars—or $28,225,140,000 less than in the first five months of this fiscal year.

The nominal-dollar outlays of $1,482,327,000,000 was the third highest over the first five months of a fiscal year, behind only FY2013 and FY2011. On an inflation-adjusted basis, every year prior to FY2009 saw less spending in the first five months than FY2014.

Even though the $377 billion deficit over the first five months is the best such performance during the Obama administration, it is worse than every year prior to FY2009 on both a current-dollar (not inflation-adjusted) and a constant-dollar (inflation-adjusted) basis. FY2008, which was closest, saw a $264,339,000,000 current-dollar/$294,442,000,000 constant-dollar deficit in the first five months of that year.

Indeed, even when adjusted for inflation, the $1.104 trillion the federal government took in would have resulted in a first-five-month surplus every year prior to FY2003. That is something so rare, between FY1981 and now, that happened only twice, in FY2000 and FY2001.

Tags: deficit, federal government, spending, taxes

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Thegovernmentdoesn’tknowhowmanyemptybuildings

The government doesn’t know how many empty buildings it owns — just that they’re costing us billions

posted at 8:01 pm on March 13, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Ugghhh. Via The Hill:

President Obama on Thursday urged Congress to “do even more” on conservation projects after signing legislation protecting a 35-mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s coastline.

“There are currently dozens of conservation proposals before Congress — many supported by Democrats and Republicans — that would protect important lands across the country and help grow our economy,” Obama said in a statement.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes conservation law was the first public lands designation by Congress in more than five years — the longest lawmakers had gone without making a wilderness designation in nearly 50 years.

While urging lawmakers to take up additional conservation measures, Obama pledged to “continue to do my part to protect our federal lands for future generations to enjoy.”

I’m sorry, but simply implying that adding more land to the one-third of the surface area the United States government already owns is not quite the same thing as the president doing his “part to protect our federal lands for future generations to enjoy” and simultaneously “growing the economy.” If Obama really wanted to ensure the best possible environmental and economic stewardship of those precious lands, he might start considering opening them up for public-private management setups or leasing them for other commercial uses that could actually turn their own profits — instead of subjecting them to clunky, political, top-down policy decisions and turning them into a further strain on our deferred maintenance backlog.

In that same vein, the many empty and abandoned buildings currently beefing up the federal estate are a major drain on taxpayer resources, but the bureaucracy is gummed up with rules and regulations that directly deny the properties from being put to productive uses. Via NPR:

Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget says these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year. …

Wise and his colleagues have been using the only known centralized database that the government has, the Federal Property Profile, and it’s not reliable, he says. …

But Carper says that even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit what it can do. No federal agency can sell anything unless it’s uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.

Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn’t want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see whether it could be used as a homeless shelter.

Which means that federal agencies usually end up giving up and just locking the gates on these blighted opportunity costs. Instead of focusing on placing still more lands and properties under federal control, perhaps the government should be a little more focused on getting rid of some of them.

Tags: Barack Obama, conservation, federal government, monuments, national parks, waste

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Federalcommitteedevisingnewdietaryguidelinesbasedon…

Federal committee devising new dietary guidelines based on… climate change

posted at 1:21 pm on March 13, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

As I mentioned yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency recently released a new report attesting to the fact that all of the United States’ collective natural gas systems are no longer the country’s number-one emitter of methane — a so-called greenhouse gas that environmentalists often lament has even more potent global warming effects than carbon. According to the study, the top methane-emitting spot is once again being occupied by the nation’s livestock population:

There’s a new methane champ, says the Environmental Protection Agency,  which found in a new draft report on greenhouse gases that cattle passed the natural-gas industry as the biggest source of U.S. methane emissions in 2012.

The EPA also revised some of its 2011 findings, again turning to cows as the culprit—specifically, enteric fermentation in cattle—in methane emissions, according to the EPA.

The multiple-compartment stomachs in cattle create the methane, resulting in bovine belches. Despite better digestibility in cattle feed over the years, methane emissions from cattle has risen more than 2% since 1990,  said the EPA, because of upward trends in cattle populations.

One reason that vegetarians and vegans cite for their dietary choices — so I’ve been told — is that they want to reduce the carbon footprint of their food intake and help lower the general demand for meat, particularly beef, in the hopes that herd sizes will eventually grow smaller. That general trend, as the EPA points out, is still moving in the upward direction, which I would think implies that the world is eating increasing amounts of meat — but hey, the dietary decision not to partake is absolutely vegetarians’ prerogative.

It sounds like there are some eco-radicals out there, however, who would just love it if that choice wasn’t a personal prerogative. Too bad they’re only designing the federal government’s dietary standards that HHS and the USDA use in a handful of policy decisions and they can’t actually force Americans generally to follow these guidelines — but hey, an environmentalist can dream, right? The WFB reports:

The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) is responsible for creating new nutrition standards that are used to create policy at the federal level. The committee will meet for the third time on Friday, and though the group has not yet released an agenda, past meetings have heavily focused on climate change.

During DGAC’s second meeting on Jan. 13, Kate Clancy, a food systems consultant and Senior Fellow in the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, was brought to speak on “sustainability.”

“After 30 years of waiting, the fact that this committee is addressing sustainability issues brings me a lot of pleasure,” she began. Clancy went on to advocate that Americans should become vegetarians in order to achieve sustainability in the face of “climate change.” …

Clancy said beef production is the “greatest concern.” …

Nelson is DGAC’s work group lead for “Environmental Determinants of Food, Diet, and Health.” She said eating less meat could lower Americans’ carbon footprint.

“Eating fewer animals, but choosing those wisely, and reducing sugar, refined grains, things like that, that diet that we already have stated from the evidence, if we were to get Americans to eat it, would actually have a lower footprint than what we are currently doing,” Nelson said.

Yes, by all means — let’s base our nutrition guidelines, not on actual human nutrition, but on politics.

This is why the federal government should not be in the business of telling people what to eat.

Tags: bureaucrats, climate change, diet, federal government, food, greenhouse gases

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Fewerfarms,richerfarmers,andwhyagriculturesubsidies

Fewer farms, richer farmers, and why agriculture subsidies are inexcusable

posted at 1:21 pm on February 21, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Once upon a time, there were all sorts of politically quaint justifications for why the federal government needed to dish out billions of dollars worth of tender, lovin’ subsidy care to the agriculture sector. Farmers need all of the direct payouts, and the tax credits, and the crop insurance, and the trade barriers that Congress so generously offers them, you see, because food is super important, and the federal government really needs to step in and ensure that we have a stable food supply. Plus, farming is a really tough and risky job, and who’s going to help all of those small, struggling family farmers that will hit hard times in down years?

All of which was and is utter baloney, of course. The federal government doesn’t feel the need to ensure that we have a stable supply of door knobs or washing machines, and yet somehow, we manage to get along just fine — and in fact, the federal government inflicts a lot of damaging free-market distortion onto the agriculture industry that subsidizes overproduction. As for those small, struggling family farmers we’re meant to visualize when we think of agriculture? Farming today is a largely corporate endeavor, and the vast majority of subsidies go to the biggest growers of mostly corn, soy, cotton, rice, and wheat. Those smaller farms growing the organic chard and strawberries the government tells us we’re supposed to be eating? Not so much.

The USDA just started releasing information from its own census report, and surprise: The trend of fewer farms and richer farmers has kept right on rolling, via Bloomberg:

The first batch of data from the Agriculture Census (PDF), a snapshot of American farming released on Thursday, shows that farmers flourished between the last survey in 2007 and 2012, a period that saw crop and livestock values hit record highs.

There were fewer farms in the latest five-year span—the number shows a 4.3 percent drop during the period, continuing a long-term trend—even as the amount of land devoted to farming declined just slightly.

While the average size of farms increased slightly, to 434 acres from 418, the census shows a continuing hollowing out of midsized farms in America. The number of very small farms and very large ones remained constant.

So take comfort in knowing that the ~$200 billion of subsidies in the 10-year farm bill we just passed is being spent — er — fruitfully?

Tags: agriculture, farm subsidies, federal government, free market, wealthy

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Source from: hotair

Thefederalgovernmentisfinallytryingtodigitize.

The federal government is finally trying to digitize. The paper lobby doth protest.

posted at 4:01 pm on February 19, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

This is just another of the many reasons why big government is such a confoundedly awful idea: Just about any industry that can manage to scrape together a lobby can find a way to get a foothold, even if that foothold comes at the expense of the federal bureaucracy finally getting it together and joining the 21st century.

The Obama administration has been making a concerted effort to improve efficiency, save resources, and cut down on costs by going digital and rejiggering its services toward online communication, forms, direct deposit, and etcetera. As you might imagine, the paper lobby — or perhaps you didn’t imagine it, because who even knew there was such a thing? — is not a fan of this initiative from one of its biggest single customers. The inaptly named Consumers for Paper Options (inaptly, because it is comprised not of consumers but rather a creation of the paper industry itself) is is working Congress in closed-door meetings, underwriting research favorable to its position, and putting together a media campaign in an effort to preserve Washington, D.C. as the capital of paper, the Washington Post reports:

The group — which bills itself as “a coalition of individuals and organizations advocating for access to paper-based services and information” — was set up by the Envelope Manufacturers Association (EMA), officials from both organizations said. It receives financial backing from the paper industry’s largest trade group, several of North America’s biggest paper manufacturers and EMA, according to documents and interviews with company and trade association officials. The EMA and other paper companies are also pushing for Congress to pass legislation to help stabilize the Postal Service.

Consumers for Paper Options is led by a veteran advocate for the industry’s interests on Capitol Hill. His previous posts include head of federal government relations for International Paper, the largest pulp and paper company in the world, and treasurer of its PAC. …

At Treasury, which last year suspended most paper mailings for all but the very aged and those with “mental impairments,” officials estimate the shift will save $1 billion over 10 years. The move by the Social Security Administration in 2011 to stop mailing paper earnings statements to 150 million Americans is saving $72 million a year. …

For the paper industry, the stakes are high. The digital age has ravaged sales of envelopes, office paper, catalogues and pulp products, with industry analysts saying that demand for paper products dropped 5 percent on average in each of the past five years. Mills have closed, and thousands of employees have been laid off.

The paper lobby’s best and biggest argument in this facepalm-worthy fight against creative destruction is that up to a quarter of Americans are still without home Internet access, and that the federal government should probably accomodate some paper options while the full population catches up so as not to “disenfranchise” the elderly or the poor — but come on, now. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the paper lobby is some kind of social-justice martyr that won’t do anything and everything humanly possible to lobby for the preservation of paper-heavy processes wherever it can, with whatever excuses it can think up, to keep themselves viable at the expense of overall economy and national budget.

Tags: bureaucracy, business, Congress, federal government, lobbyists, Obama administration

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Source from: hotair

Surprise:AccordingtoaUSDAreport,thefarm

Surprise: According to a USDA report, the farm bill could end up costing way more than it’s supposed to

posted at 7:21 pm on February 13, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

This farm bill is new and improved!, they said. Congress finally came together and achieved something on a bipartisan basis!, they said. This new bill replaces old agricultural payout programs with new ones that, if all goes as planned, could save some big bucks!, they said.

Too bad it took about five seconds for things to stop going as planned.

As I mentioned the other day, corn prices have been dropping (and will sink even lower if the EPA decides to move forward with their proposal to relent on the ever-increasing ethanol requirements of the Renewable Fuel Standard — fingers crossed), and Politico reports on some new economic projections released by the USDA today that, if they prove correct, have the potential to hike up the supposed price tag of the farm bill. Unexpectedly.

New economic projections released by the Agriculture Department Thursday carry a sober warning of what lower corn prices could mean for the cost of the new farm bill over the next few years.

For the 2014-2015 marketing year beginning Sept. 1, the report projects a seasonal average farm price of just $3.65 per bushel of corn–compared to $4.50 for the current year. In 2015-2016, the price drops further to $3.30 per bushel before beginning a slow but steady climb back up to $4.10-$4.20 per bushel by 2023 and 2024.

That’s a much steeper decline than many had expected and well below the corn prices assumed by the Congressional Budget Office in scoring the new farm bill.

Just a year ago, the department was forecasting about $1 more per bushel for corn in the same 2015-2017 period. If the revised projections prove accurate, it will surely impact the cost of new counter-cyclical programs signed into law last week by President Barack Obama.

Read the rest of the Politico article for more details, but the point is that the CBO (as ever) scored the farm bill off of a set of assumptions that could really end up swinging any which way, by a little or by a heck of a lot — and that Congress not only largely created a lot of this mess in the first place with the Renewable Fuel Standard, but is ready and waiting to catch agribusiness with all manner of subsidies when it subsequently falls.

Only the federal government, through their ever-august and well-meaning largesse, could accomplish such an exquisitely tangled and entrenched web of self-inflicted artificial market signals and costly taxpayer losses.

Tags: agriculture, Congress, farm subsidies, federal government, free market, insurance

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Source from: hotair