House Marks Up Absurd Public Protections Moratorium Bill

Later this morning, the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a mark-up on the so-called "Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act of 2012" (H.R. 4078), a farce of a bill that wrongly calls for a moratorium on public protections until the unemployment rate reaches six percent. This is the latest in a series of more than 190 attacks on regulatory safeguards in the House since the beginning of 2011.

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UPDATED: Rushing To a Full Stop: Obama Gets It Right When He Talks About the Keystone Pipeline

UPDATE (2/27/2012): TransCanada announced today that it will move forward with the Keystone XL pipeline. The company now plans to apply for two separate permits: one for the construction between the U.S.-Canadian border and Steele City, Neb. (the "Keystone XL Project") and the second for the construction between Cushing, Okla., and Port Arthur, Tex. (the "Gulf Coast Project").
 

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Grade Inflation Really Matters If It Means You Catch Listeria

Today, government officials, academics, and the cantaloupe industry are meeting at the University of California, Davis, to try to determine how the 2011 Listeria outbreak could have begun at a facility that had just received a "superior" rating from a third-party food safety auditor.   A report issued earlier this week places the blame squarely on the third-party audit system, which allows private companies hired by food producers themselves to perform food safety inspections.  

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Congressional Budget Office Says Deregulation Will Not Create Jobs

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report that concludes that deregulation will not create jobs. The report is the latest piece of evidence that the ongoing congressional attacks on public protections are misguided, at best.

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OIRA Administrator Sunstein Calls Crain & Crain Report "Deeply Flawed"

In his oral testimony in a hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on June 23, Cass Sunstein called out a "deeply flawed" report that many have been using to criticize the costs of the regulatory system.

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No News is Big News at the FEC

The news out of yesterday's Federal Election Commission (FEC) meeting is that there is, yet again, no news to report.  The FEC has delayed a final vote on an advisory opinion which was jointly requested by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. If this stalemate continues, it will be merely the latest in an unprecedented string of partisan deadlocks.

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