Politics
Eric Cantor Leads the Anti-NSF Chorus
Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, is rounding up the good citizens of the country for a campaign against those evil scientists who are wasting society’s money. Just check out his YouCut website, which tries to crowd source the search for suspect research funding by NSF. He admits NSF does fund some worthwhile research: including “more …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Roberts Court’s Corporate Romance
Forty years ago, before going on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell wrote a call to arms for business interests, calling on them to counter “enemies of the free enterprise system” like Ralph Nader. Among other things, he recommended a concerted campaign to influence the courts. The campaign seems to have been a success. The NY Times …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Tea Party, the GOP, and the Environment
According to a recent study, non-Tea Party members of the GOP are actually a bit closer to Democrats than to Tea Party members on environmental issues. That creates a conundrum for the GOP. More than half of Republicans support the Tea Party, and supporters tend to be more active than others. Yet the Tea Party …
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CONTINUE READINGLeave Agribusiness Lobbyists ALOOONE!!!
A few weeks ago, I posted about the Obama Administration’s effort to change outrageous and wasteful food aid rules that line the pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies. The more you look at the absurd policy preventing USAID from purchasing food locally for famine relief, the worse it looks: it wastes money, it prevents getting food to people …
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CONTINUE READINGResearch? We Don’t Need No Stinking Research!
Yes, this post is about the House GOP. How did you guess? Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee, has opened an unprecedented investigation into five NSF research projects, demanding copies of peer reviews and other information in a letter to the NSF director. I looked up the abstracts for the five projects that …
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CONTINUE READINGA Strong OIRA Pick
I was traveling and missed the news about the selection of Howard Shelanski to replace Cass Sunstein as head of OIRA, the White House office that oversees government regulations. Or, regulatory czar, in simpler terms. He’s a terrific pick. Howard was on the faculty here when I first came to Berkeley and got to know …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Justice, Metrics & California’s San Joaquin Valley
This week the California Environmental Protection Agency issued a disturbing but worthwhile report on environmental justice issues in California. That report confirms what many environmental justice advocates and state residents already assumed: that the San Joaquin Valley is–far and away–the most environmentally-challenged region of the state. According to the CalEPA press release accompanying the report, …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s Unspent Water Funds: An Instinct for the Capillary
The AP reports today that California has failed to spend $455 million of federal money for improving the state’s water infrastructure, even though many of the state’s communities suffer from unclean water. The state has received more than $1.5 billion for its Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Fund over the past 15 years, but has failed …
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CONTINUE READING(Another) Bad Day for Economists
One interesting project for future intellectual historians will be figuring out how economics became the queen of the social scientists when virtually none of their predictions have come true and so much of their empirical work is downright shoddy. Perhaps it will lie in the way ideology can take over the discipline because of data …
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CONTINUE READINGAre Filibusters of Executive Branch Nominees Constitutional?
President Obama’s announcement today making three nominations to the National Labor Relations Board should remind us that the GOP is the party of permanent constitutional crisis. It has been quite clear from the beginning of the Obama Administration that the Republicans simply have no interest in allowing the NLRB to function. That shouldn’t be much …
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