Category: Government

I’m generally OK with cuts to education when the government is legitimately running out of other people’s money, but nonsensical and wasteful proposals like this pretty clearly show many in the GOP still aren’t getting it.

Apparently ATF is going after fisherman who use M80 like firecrackers fired from a gun, in order to scare away seals and birds from their fishing lines. I feel safer already!

ATF missed the deadline to turn over subpoenaed materials about the gunwalker controversy, so Rep. Issa is threatening Acting Director Melson with contempt. You can find the letter here. He’s basically telling them to claim executive privilege, cooperate, or face contempt charges. Your guess is probably as good as mine as to what path will be taken, because I don’t have much faith in this Administration’s skill at navigating a controversy any more than I do at it’s ability to navigate anything else. If Obama were skilled, Executive Privilege would not be the smart path. It would automatically bring the White House into the scandal, likely only with hope of delaying, rather than stopping the Congressional action. An assertion of Executive Privilege would be dubious at best, considering Congress paid the bills for this scandal, and has the power to investigate how that money was spent. The claim is unlikely to survive in the Courts.

It’s pretty easy to see, based on the heavily redacted documents that were produced in response to David Codrea’s FOIA request on the gunwalker scandal that there is something wrong with how we’re implementing the idea that the records the government produces belong to the people. Part of that has to do with how the act is structured.

Currently every agency is required to have a FOIA office that handles those kinds of requests and produces the documents. This is going to create bad incentives for that agency to release as little as they can get away with, and bend the requirements of the law to the greatest extent possible in order to achieve that goal.

There should be a separate government agency in charge of FOIA requests, who are authorized to go into every government office, look at and duplicate records, and make the determination about how to implement the law. With FOIA being a separate agency, it will put the natural power hungry and empire building nature of bureaucrats to work doing the people’s business. Agents may even revel in revealing embarrassing or damning information from other agencies.

There should also be a mechanism that if a FOIA agent feels a document is improperly classified, its status can be challenged before an administrative law judge, with all the proper security clearances and precautions for classified data in place. Currently if you feel an agency is inappropriately denying your FOIA request, the onus to file suit is on you.

I’d even be up for paying the agents on a per document basis, and giving them bonuses based on the number of documents they get declassified. You can think of incentives here that could work pretty well. A lot of politicians have never liked FOIA, but if the government wants me to be an open book to it, then my government damned well better be an open book to me.

This is one of those times I’ll wander away from guns and into my sort of side-interest in aviation. Someone e-mails Instapundit in regards to an FAA bill:

There is also an automatic assumption that “privatizing” air traffic will somehow always be more cost effective than what we are already doing. It’s an article of faith, much like Socialists/Communists always seem to think that their system will work (despite a century of mass graves, economic failure, and oppression) if only the right people were running things. The world already has a wide variety of air traffic control systems in use. There are public, private, and public/private air traffic systems all around the world. The US system has the lowest cost per operation in the developed world. We also have the safest system, while running more traffic than the rest of the world combined. Rather than automatically demonizing people that are trying to improve what is already the safest, busiest, and most cost-effective air traffic system in the world, I’d ask your readers to find the working business model out there in the world that will out-perform what we are doing now. Not just an automatic assumption that a private enterprise just has to be more efficient, but a system in use somewhere else. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I am from Missouri on this. Show me. Or should we just assume that it will be more efficient if the right people are running it?

Glenn notes that Canada has a private ATC system, and I believe Eurocontrol is a private consortium as well. I’m not well familiar with how these systems operate, but I suspect there’s still a very high degree of public control.

One fear I would have of privatized air traffic control would be that the large scheduled carriers would dominate any consortium. Those large carriers would have no incentive to allow general aviation or even smaller scheduled or non-scheduled carriers to use their system at anything close to a reasonable price. A completely private system would essentially be handing a public resource, namely the skies, over to private interests who have bad incentives to monopolize the resource as much as possible.

Typically when we do things like this, such as for rights-of-ways for wires and pipes, we regulate them as public utilities. This kind of regulated market is not really a free market in any recognizable sense, and given that, it’s hard to see the case for privatization from a free market perspective.

Never let it be said that bureaucrats in Pennsylvania aren’t doing their part to stimulate the economy. Well, the economy of California anyway. Because the feds & Pennsylvania are giving a Catholic high school money to buy iPads for all of their students.

Funding for the iPads came from an allotment by the state of Pennsylvania for textbooks and technology and the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Enhancing Education Through Technology program. Bishop Canevin received $23,000 from the technology grant program, of which $19,000 will be used to purchase the iPads and $4,000 will be used for professional training and development.

Clearly, the school was in desperate need for some kind of technology solution, and iPads were a simple and reasonably priced option, right?

The school has state-of-the-art computer labs, a wireless infrastructure, business class high-speed Internet, streaming audio and video broadcasts and SMART Boards in most classrooms.

But with all of that other technology at their disposal, the high school administrators have launched some new and innovative teaching methods that can only be served by giving out free iPads, right?

“That’s a crucial component,” said Mr. Sinagra. “Certainly from day one, when the students enter the classrooms, teachers need to be ready to use the iPads.”…

In the meantime, Mr. Sinagra has an assignment for the faculty.

“Their homework, beginning now through mid-summer, is to learn to use the iPad and to research what applications would be appropriate for their curriculum,” he said.

It’s such a crucial component to the curriculum that teachers don’t even have lesson plans ready to use the devices.

I’m so pissed about this, I’m seriously thinking of printing the article, taking my highlighter to key points and sending it off with a letter to my state lawmakers and Congressman. This is a school that seemingly has everything, and we just handed them $23K in education and recovery funds to buy iPads to give out for free while not even having a plan in place to utilize the technology. Insane.