Free Republic

(CNN) – Hoping to help close the gap between workers' skills and the needs of businesses, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce he's putting hundreds of millions toward job training programs that produce highly skilled workers. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will head to a community college in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to make the announcement. The funding will come in two parts: $500 million toward a new job training competition that pairs community colleges with businesses, and $100 million for new apprenticeship programs to train workers. The White House says the new initiatives are meant to combat a...

Former Sen. Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes in his new book—“Falling in Love With America Again”—about the cozy relationship between big business and big government. “Almost all big corporations benefit from, advocate for, and downright like big government,” DeMint writes. […] “These big companies like to write regulations that make it harder for the smaller companies to compete with them,” DeMint said. “The large companies can deal with a regulatory maze much better than the small companies can. Like the big tobacco companies wanted the FDA to regulate cigarettes because they knew the smaller companies could...

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama vowed to wield his executive powers when faced with congressional resistance to his legislative agenda: “America does not stand still – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation … that’s what I am going to do.”This provocative declaration was startling in its bluntness, but it was hardly a new development. For the last five years, the president has aggressively exploited regulation to get his way. In fact, the Obama administration is very likely the most regulatory in history, issuing 157 new...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Friday it will take a hard look at whether new regulations are needed to cut emissions of methane from the oil and gas industry, part of President Barack Obama's plan to address climate change. Regulators will start by proposing new rules later this year to reduce venting and flaring from oil and gas wells on public lands, one way to begin slashing emissions of the potent greenhouse gas, said Dan Utech, Obama's top energy and climate aide. Most oil and gas production takes place on privately owned land. The Environmental Protection Agency...

In a major setback for innovation in the urban transportation market, the Seattle City Council voted Monday to cap the number of cars that ride-on-demand services like Uber and Lyft may have on the road at any one time. The mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, has said he will sign it. Under a new ordinance, which is the first of its kind in the United States, companies like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar will be limited to having 150 cars each on the road at a time. This means that ride-on-demand services will collectively have no more than 450 cars on...

eleste Kelly, Grace Granatelli and Stacey Kollman discovered a profitable niche in the animal therapy market when they found they could turn their passions into successful small businesses. They spent hundred of hours learning animal massage techniques, earned private certification and began their respective animal therapy ventures. Today, they have successful businesses and loyal clients. However, according the Arizona State Veterinary Medical Examining Board, Celeste, Grace, and Stacey are criminals facing jail time. A recent Arizona regulation requires these hardworking entrepreneurs to give up their professions, or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to become licensed veterinarians (an education that...

Via TCOT Report'Is the Prosecution of ‘Pocketknife Felon’ Jordan Wiser about Electing Harold Specht to a Judgeship?'Many have read with outrage the story of 18 year old Jordan Wiser; a young man whose car was searched without permission at his vocational school, resulting in his expulsion, arrest, felony indictment, imprisonment, and separation from his beloved, terminally ill grandfather. The prosecutor in this case, Harold E Specht, Jr. has been quoted saying the reason for Wiser’s arrest and felony prosecution centers on the discovery of a four-inch pocketknife, which was locked in the trunk, inside his EMT kit – a duffel...

President Obama has ordered his officials to step on the gas and clear as much of his regulatory agenda as possible during the twilight of his time in office. The clock is ticking, creating a sense of urgency in the administration to crank out his new rules without delay. Just a year into the president’s second term, experts and former administration officials say it is do-or-die time for scores of regulatory initiatives across the federal government that could shape his legacy. So Obama is spurring agencies on. “He has directed his entire administration to move as quickly as possible in...

Now, farmers are discovering that the FDA's proposed rules would curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing animals, and irrigating from open creeks. Suddenly, from small family operations nestled in the foothills of Appalachia to the sophisticated organic-grower networks that serve Los Angeles and San Francisco, the farms that celebrity chefs and food-conscious consumers jostle to buy from are facing an unexpected adversary. They're fighting back. Even though full enforcement of the rules is still years away, they are warning customers that some farms would have to close. "They are...

In keeping with his trending pattern of throwing bureaucratic bones to environmentalist groups whilst doing everything he can think of to “act where Congress won’t” (like his administration’s decision last week to initiate a $1 billion “climate resilience fund” that will combat problems of the Obama administration’s own making the effects of weather around the country), President Obama announced today the latest round of fuel-efficiency regulations to be handed down on high from the ever wise and abstemious Environmental Protection Agency: Speaking at a Safeway distribution center in Maryland, Obama instructed environmental and transportation agencies to get to work on...

President Obama—the imperial President, the “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” President who can’t wait to show us his “year of action”—once vowed to do exactly the opposite. "The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America." That was candidate Obama back in 2008. This comment somehow slipped under the radar for the past few years and resurfaced...

In Europe, where fracking is heavily regulated or prohibited altogether, consumers pay more than twice for natural gas than what they do in America (currently $11.59 per mBtu vs $4.78). As consumers, businesses, and electric utilities pay more, the result is a stalled economy and lower standard of living. Thanks in part to its large investment in solar energy, Spain's per capita GDP in current U.S. dollars has dropped from $31,679 in 2010 to $28,624 in 2012. Based on his recent words and actions, Obama wants the same for the U.S. Over half the homes in America heat with natural...

On January 31, the State Department released its final Environmental Impact Statement on the Keystone XS pipeline, concluding once again that its construction would have a net neutral effect on carbon emissions. The study also confirms that the pipeline itself would have little to no impact on Canadian oil sands extraction rates or on global oil consumption. Canada will continue to develop the oil sands and consumers will continue to buy oil for the foreseeable future with or without the Keystone XL. The relevant questions surrounding the pipeline’s construction are who will benefit from the development and transit of this...

Auto Safety: The Obama administration is pushing technology that will let cars "talk" to each other to avoid crashes. Sounds great. But do we really want the folks who built HealthCare.gov at the wheel of our automobiles? Earlier this week, the Department of Transportation announced plans to require all cars to come equipped with "vehicle to vehicle" communications technology it's now developing. Once in place, these V2V devices would transmit information about car speeds and locations, warning drivers of danger. The system might even take control of a car to prevent a crash. Administration officials call it "game-changing" technology that...

Today we are pleased to release a white paper entitled The States’ Broadband Plan, a set of three suggested policies designed to promote broadband connectivity in the states. This white paper comes in response to legislators’ requests for proven ideas to foster more economic growth through technology and improve public safety in the wake of natural disasters. The best way to address the economic problems facing the country is to increase economic opportunity, investing in and fostering potential growth areas of the economy that hold real promise to create jobs and wealth. Few areas hold as much promise as broadband...

The Obama administration announced Monday that it intends to require new cars to include technology enabling them to communicate with each other, a step that transportation planners have said could significantly reduce crashes. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters that he hopes to finish the mandate before President Barack Obama leaves office. That would allow time for DOT and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to work out issues including security and privacy.

In an FDA office building in suburban Maryland, the bureaucrats gather over coffee to draft rules meant to squeeze the trans fat out of snack foods. Four blocks from the White House, in an EPA conference room: more bureaucrats, more meetings, more drafting of rules, these aimed at forcing industrialists to spend billions cutting carbon to fend off global warming. Congress? Who needs Congress? Americans heard President Barack Obama declare this week that he intends to bypass the gridlocked Hill to get things done on his own. What they didn’t hear: just how far he’s actually pushing his executive authority....

A government official appears at a man’s door. The man has been breaking the law: He has sold bread baked at home. This isn’t a page from Kafka—it happened to Mark Stambler in Los Angeles. For decades, Stambler has followed traditional methods to bake loaves of French bread. The ingredients are simple: distilled water, sea salt, wild yeast and organic grains. Stambler even mills the grain himself. To make it easier to steam loaves, he built a wood-fired oven in his own backyard. Stambler’s loaves came in first place at the Los Angeles County Fair and the California State Fair....

11 year old Chloe Stirling got some great accolades from her local newspaper for the cupcake business she had started out of her parents' kitchen. Unfortunately the local health department took another view and shut her down. The sticking point was that not only did she lack the proper permits and licenses to run a food business, but according to local and state law she would have to either own her own bakery or have a kitchen separate from that of her parents to continue cooking cupcakes for money. Since this was clearly impossible, Stirling is no longer able to...

Far below the Appalachian Mountains, in a space barely big enough to stand up straight, Bobby Combs works a job his father and his grandfather worked. Coal-mining is the highest-paying job available to him in eastern Kentucky. As he skillfully maneuvers a massive machine and rips into a seam of coal, though, Combs wonders if the family tradition ends with him. “It’s not looking good,” he says, dirt smudging his face. Coal has come under the crosshairs of the Obama administration in the push to transition to renewable energy sources. Coal mines are burdened with a never-ending stream of federal...