Free Republic

Amid the historic flooding many of the rescues in Acadiana, and across the state, are being credited to civilians. They call themselves the "Cajun Navy." The group started during Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds from Acadiana went to New Orleans with their boats to make rescues. "Between us all, we took out quite a bit of people," said Doug Bienvenue, a member of the group. Now the "Cajun Navy" is back, but the fleet is facing a few challenges. Bienvenue is an original member of the fleet, so when GoFundMe accounts and t-shirt sales started popping up throughout flood relief under...

Want to work in a field that has more than quadrupled in size since 1960? Consider being a regulator for the federal government. Even during the last recession, the regulatory agencies were hiring. In 2015, the U.S. government employed more than 277,000 regulators. To put that number in perspective, it’s 50,000 more workers than General Motors Co. employs throughout the entire world. We’ve all heard of the regulatory agencies that constitute the “fourth branch” of government. It has cost our economy over $100 billion during the Obama administration.

Throughout his two terms in the White House, Barack Obama has either exaggerated or covered up his failed record on the economy. Soon after taking office in the midst of a deep recession, he said the only way to grow our economy was to blow $1 trillion on government infrastructure projects across the country and fatten the budgets of a lengthy list of federal bureaucracies here in Washington. He raised taxes, created a sea of costly regulations on struggling businesses and employers, and made excuses when the economy continued to limp along year after year, by blaming the Bush administration,...

Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt has a lot of explaining to do. And a lot of listening. In recent months, the agency issued draft rules carrying out what's intended to bring transformational change to the way Medicare pays physicians. It also rolled out a slew of experiments with payment and delivery reforms, including its first mandatory demonstration programs. In the process, Slavitt has become highly visible on social media and in person, and he has developed a reputation for unusual candor in conversations with healthcare leaders and clinicians. Slavitt spoke last week with Modern Healthcare managing editor Gregg Blesch. This...

...the dangers are mainly for 534,000 Massachusetts residents who draw their water from private wells, the report found. Unlike public water systems, wells are not subject to state and federal testing and treatment requirements... Environmental advocates said they worry whether the department is up to the job of regulating the water supply....“The DEP really needs to beef up its ground water monitoring.”

There was more of the same old, same old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predictions of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail -- before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon. Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason. The basket of California state taxes -- sales, income and gasoline -- rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom....

Republican candidate Donald Trump focused this weekend on his economic platform: Cut taxes and regulations across the board while also saving Social Security, Medicare, and other government safety-net programs. Trump’s platform is nearly invincible in the general election if he stresses it enough, polling shows. Trump’s plan will also have a transformational effect on how people view his party. But he still needs to make the accounting work to ensure that his Third Way platform is feasible.

When Joey Vanoni returned to the United States from Afghanistan in 2013, he went to work putting his dream of owning a pizza business into action. A Navy veteran and current reservist, Vanoni launched Pizza di Joey, his veteran owned and operated business, in August 2014, serving New York-style brick oven pizza out of a food truck in Maryland’s Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties. Vanoni knows good pizza. He was born and raised in New Jersey and began making pizza at a pizzeria when he was in high school. The reservist has lived in many cities across the country, all...

The tide of red tape that threatens to drown U.S. consumers and businesses surged yet again in 2015, according to a Heritage Foundation study we released on Monday. More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.

Most bad policies harm the economy in one identifiable way. But the Labor Department’s new overtime rule, released on May 18, harms the economy and the American worker in three different ways. The new rule requires employers to pay white collar workers overtime if they earn less than $47,476 annually, instead of less than $23,660, the case at present. (Manual workers generally have to be paid overtime at all earnings levels.) The effect will be (1) to raise costs to employers, discouraging employment; (2) to prohibit flexible time for employees; and (3) to stunt American productivity and economic growth. Consider...

There’s a lot of pearl clutching on the political right this week, so much so you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate it from the constant pearl clutching on the left. Facebook, it is alleged, “censors” conservative news. But does it really? And does it matter? There are not many people in the United States younger than 50 who don’t have a Facebook account. Exactly none of them were forced to open one. When they did they accepted the fact that they were playing in someone else’s backyard. Facebook owes the government no justification as to how it conducts its business as...

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The Obama administration unveiled new regulations on offshore drilling on Thursday, rules that were several years in the making. The regulations stem from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a well blowout that resulted in the death of 11 workers and one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. The regulations call for new well-control measures, limits the volume of fluids that can be injected into wells, and requires heightened well monitoring. ExxonMobil and other companies say the rules will impose costs as high as $25 billion over the next decade, pushing many offshore projects...

Annapolis Update #4 - Outlook for Maryland Businesses There is some truly bad legislation coming through the Maryland General Assembly which will have a huge negative effect on businesses presently in the State and on businesses considering moving here. 1. HB 610 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act - Reauthorization has passed the House and is now in the Senate. These greenhouse gas initiatives will continue to punish conventional utility producers (coal and natural gas), forcing them to pay fines for carbon output. These fines will be passed on to the rate payers -- residential and commercial -- which will drive...

WASHINGTON, PRNewswire — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a regulation to prohibit conversion of vehicles originally designed for on-road use into racecars. The regulation would also make the sale of certain products for use on such vehicles illegal. The proposed regulation was contained within a non-related proposed regulation entitled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Efficiency Standards for Medium- and Heavy-Duty Engines and Vehicles-Phase 2.” The regulation would impact all vehicle types, including the sports cars, sedans and hatch-backs commonly converted strictly for use at the track. While the Clean Air Act prohibits certain modifications to motor vehicles,...

The massive Leviathan gas field, nestled deep inside the Levantine basin off Israel’s Mediterranean coast, is considered a game-changer for both Israel and Europe, but a wide range of roadblocks is threatening development, and now production will be delayed by at least a year. Political hurdles, regulatory approvals and tricky investment decisions have already put production off until 2019, and there are now fears that all the problems surrounding a discovery that put Israel on the energy map for the first time in history will impact prospects for future foreign investment in the country. As the project landed in controversy,...

Ever since the financial crisis, many outside the wealthy elite (sometimes referred to as populists) have argued that the largest banks are too big and too risky. Minneapolis Federal Reserve president Neel Kashkari recently echoed those beliefs.Yet if a new Federal Reserve proposal goes through, Wells Fargo and other large banks might get even bigger and riskier, adding billions to their balance sheets that could increase the banks’ risk profiles.The Federal Reserve says the proposal, which specifies the amount and kind of debt that systemically important large banks must hold, could help make sure that those banks can be wound...

The old politician saw is: “The most dangerous place for you in Washington – is between (fill in name of pol) and a camera.” We’ll coin a government saw: “The most dangerous place for you anywhere on the planet – is government between you and the free market.”Any and every tax, law and regulation – is government placing itself between you and the free market. And, conversely, between the free market and you. And, of course, it makes the market less free. It’s inherent. The bigger the tax – the less money you have for the market, and the less...

Labor Department adds 'transgender status, gender identity' to workplace discrimination listThe Department of Labor is seeking to remove the terms "he" and "she" from a regulation prohibiting discrimination in the workforce in an effort to "avoid the gender binary." The agency is also adding "sex stereotyping, transgender status, and gender identity" to the list of types of employment discrimination banned under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. If adopted, the regulation would cost job training centers millions of dollars to change their equal employment opportunity posters to include "gender identity."

Last Friday, a new regulation was proposed by the Obama administration that will make it harder and more expensive for employers to hire and promote white males, enrich class action lawyers, and do absolutely nothing to accomplish the ostensible goal of raising the pay of women relative to men.