Justin's Political Corner
WKRG-TV managed to track down Derrick Belcher, the man responsible for the petition calling for Alabama’s secession.
Gawker noted on Thursday that the 45-year-old trucking company manager was really just upset because his Euro Details topless car wash had been shut down by the government.
But according to Al.com, it was the Mobile city government — not the federal government — that arrested Belcher and charged him with obscenity after the state of Alabama enacted an anti-obscenity law in 1998.
“The government ripped my business away, and now they’re choking America to death with rules and regulations,” the secessionist explained.
Another Teabagger who skipped civics class.
Romney said that Obama quadrupled regulations on small businesses. Here’s what Bloomberg has found:
Obama’s White House has approved fewer regulations than his predecessor George W. Bush at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father, according to government data reviewed by Bloomberg News. The average annual cost to businesses under Obama is higher than under his predecessors, the Bloomberg review shows. The increase is estimated to total as little as $100 million or as much as $4.1 billion, or at most three one-hundredths of a percent of the total economy.
Quadrupled?
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz has an inside look at Fox News today that focuses on its 71-year-old president, Roger Ailes. In one passage, Kurtz revealed that Ailes is the brains behind a new Fox News series — Regulation Nation — that is meant solely to attack the very idea of regulations:
Ailes raises a Fox initiative that he cooked up: “Are our producers on board on this ‘Regulation Nation’ stuff? Are they ginned up and ready to go?” Ailes, who claims to be “hands off” in developing the series, later boasts that “no other network will cover that subject … I think regulations are totally out of control,” he adds, with bureaucrats hiring Ph.D.s to “sit in the basement and draw up regulations to try to ruin your life.” It is a message his troops cannot miss.
The point of the series is supposedly to “expose how excessive laws are drowning American businesses.” So far, Fox has used the campaign to bash everything from financial regulation and environmental protections to labor law. In one segment, Fox framed a new law in Seattle requiring businesses provide workers with paid sick days as something that will inevitably lead to job loss.
h/t: ThinkProgress Economy
GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann yesterday brought her anti-government message to a meatpacking plant in Des Moines, Iowa, one day after she delivered the same rhetoric at a traffic light factory in Waterloo, Iowa (that depends on government contracts). At the meatpacking plant, Bachmann railed against regulations that protect the nation’s food supply, saying that they are “overkill” that is preventing job creation:
Bachmann says, as do most of those in the GOP field, that a lightened regulatory load would allow employers to spend money on expansion rather than federal compliance. But the Minnesota congresswoman is the first to focus the argument on the food-processing industry.
“That’s part of the problem, the overkill,” Bachmann told reporters during an appearance in which she posed with huge slabs of beef. “And when they make it complicated, they make it expensive and so then you can no longer stay in business.”
As the Associated Press noted, Bachmann’s call to do away with food safety regulations “follows high-profile recalls of peanuts, eggs and other tainted food products.” Just last month, in the third-largest recall on record, food giant Cargill had to pull 36 million pounds of ground turkey out of stores after a salmonella outbreak linked to one of the company’s plants sickened nearly 80 people, killing one.
At the moment, one out of six Americans suffers from a foodborne illness every year, with 128,000 of those resulting in hospitalization. Ultimately, 3,000 people die from foodborne illness annually, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project has found that foodborne illness costs the U.S. $152 billion each year. This month, the Agriculture Department announced that it “will ban the sale of ground beef tainted with six toxic strains of E. coli bacteria that are increasingly showing up as the cause of severe illness from food.”
Early this year, President Obama signed a landmark food safety law, which was the first upgrade of the nation’s food safety system since 1938 (and which Bachmann voted against). However, House Republicans have refused to approve the necessary funds to implement the law, because they believe the private sector always “self-polices.” And it seems that if Bachmann had her way, the government would begin rolling back these regulatory advances.
h/t: ThinkProgress Economy
Today, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) issued the first policy position of his presidential campaign by asking the White House to issue a “moratorium on regulations across this country”:
We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America.
Under such a moratorium, the Food and Drug Administration would stop approving new drugs and preventing human experimentation; the USDA would stop checking for food safety; the EPA would stop monitoring for poisons in drinking water; the Library of Congress would stop loaning materials to blind people; the NTSB would stop investigating airplane accidents; HHS would end Medicare payments; no more patents, copyrights, or trademarks would be issued; DHS would stop protecting chemical facilities from terrorist attacks; the Treasury would stop printing currency; financial sanctions on hostile nations like North Korea and Iran would end; and the Federal Reserve System would shut down.
Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” would mean a literal end to the rules of law in the United States. At least it would also mean that all of President George W. Bush’s midnight regulations favoring polluters and industry abuses would also be lifted.
Is this Bush 2.0 governor batshit crazy or what!?
H/t: ThinkProgress Green
