Showing posts with label federal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label federal. Show all posts

Here’s Why It’s All But Impossible To Fire A Fed

by Kathryn Watson.  Federal workers are far more likely to be audited by the IRS or get arrested for drunk driving than they are to be fired from the civil service payroll for poor performance or misconduct. The odds are one-in-175 for the IRS audit and one-in-200 for the drunk driving arrest, while the odds for a fed to be fired in a given year are one-in   ... MORE

Americans Hate The U.S. Government More Than Ever

By Aimee Picchi.  The reasons continue to grow. A handful of industries are those "love to hate" types of businesses, such as cable-television companies and Internet service providers. The federal government has joined the ranks of the bottom-of-the-barrel industries, according to a new survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.     ... MORE

The Congressional Budget Office Foresees A $30 Trillion Debt As A Result Of Looming Tax Hikes And Obamacare

by Stephen Dinan.     The federal government will be flirting with $30 trillion in debt within a decade, the Congressional Budget Office reported Monday, blaming an aging population, new spending and tax cuts approved on Capitol Hill, and the growing burden from Obamacare for erasing the progress Washington had made over the past few years.     ... MORE

Mike Hopper: The Federal Government Is Launching A Criminal Investigation Into Chipotle, And It’s A Bad Sign

Criminalizing mistakes.   Law enforcement is a growth industry. 2015 was full of high-profile safety cases. Blue Bell Ice Cream had to take all of its products off the shelves after several cases of listeria, Chicago-based Aspen Foods recalled over 2.5 million pounds of frozen chicken over salmonella concerns, and, most recently, Chipotle saw cases of   ... MORE

Jack Healy and Kirk Johnson: This Land Is Your Land

The folly of federal land management.    Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your land, he says, and not the federal government’s. Mr. Ivory,   ... MORE

Julia Vitullo Martin: Drunk With Power

How Prohibition led to big government.       If they think about Prohibition at all, most Americans probably accept Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter’s conclusion that it was a farce, a “ludicrous caricature of the reforming impulse,” an ineffective albeit financially costly moral crusade imposed on a reluctant populace. Decades   ... MORE

The Federal Ban On Medical Marijuana Was Not Lifted

by Jacob Sullum.   Contrary to what you may have read or heard, Congress did not quietly lift the federal ban on medical marijuana. Nor did it lift the ban loudly. It did not lift the ban at all. Here is what actually happened. In December 2014, Congress approved an omnibus spending bill that included a rider prohibiting the Justice Department   ... MORE

Absurdly Harsh Penalties Sparked Oregon Rancher Protest

by Jacob Sullum.      As Ed Krayewski noted yesterday, the armed men who are occupying an office building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon broke off from a demonstration protesting the sentences received by two ranchers, 73-year-old Dwight Hammond and his 46-year-old son Steven, who in 2001 and 2006 set fires on their own  ... MORE

The Federal Government's Illegal Registry Of Gun Owners

by Joshua Krause.     I remember after the Sandy Hook shooting, when states like New York and Connecticut passed laws that would force their gun owning residents to register some of their firearms. At the time I thought that was a little absurd. Not knowing any better, I just assumed that the government already knew exactly what kinds of firearms  ... MORE

Judge Blocks Federal Power Grab Over State Waters

by Stephen Dinan.     “Inexplicable, arbitrary and devoid of a reasoned process” President Obama’s push to extend the EPA’s regulatory hand to ditches and small streams to enforce clean water rules was blocked Thursday by a federal judge, who said the administration had overstepped its bounds in trying yet another end run around Congress. Judge ... MORE

Feds Deploy Warrantless Database Fishing Expeditions

by Mark J. Fitzgibbons.   While focusing their resources and political energy on the NSA’s mass collection of metadata, privacy advocates have neglected the most dangerous institutionalized violations of the Fourth Amendment: administrative subpoenas. Now a United States District Court judge in Texas has ruled for the Drug Enforcement Agency        ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Paying The Price

Imposing kinder, gentler policing.    Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters. Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double  ... MORE

Rick Moran: 175,000 Pages Of Federal Regulations

What "unfettered capitalism?"        Whenever a liberal like Paul Krugman talks about the American system of “unfettered capitalism” I break out laughing. There are currently about 175,000 pages of federal regulations governing anything and everything about American business. In truth, many regulations have become necessary over the      ... MORE

From The Drug War To Militarizing Police, Why Does The Left Still Support Federal Control Of Local Policing?

March of the Democrats.      Glenn 'Instapundit' Reynolds has a great column in USA Today demolishing the idea—floated by the Obama administration and pushed recently by Al Sharpton—that a nationalized police force would somehow be an improvement, from a civil liberties perspective, over the current situation. The Obama       ... MORE

Publius Huldah: Nullification is a Natural Right!

Understand your history & you will understand nullification. What did our Framers really say we must do when the federal government usurps power? They never said, "When the federal government ignores the Constitution, amend the Constitution." They never said, "File a lawsuit and let federal judges decide." Instead, they advised two manly   ... MORE

FBI Lies May Have Led To Execution of 14 Innocent People

The Washington Post reports:  The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s   … MORE

Damon Root: Property Rights Vs. USDA Crop Seizures

Gov't takes without paying just compensation. According to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government must pay just compensation when it takes private property for a public use. Three years ago, in the case of Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that command, declaring that    ... MORE