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April 2018

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Blasts ‘Ludicrous’ Obama-Era School Discipline Policy that Turned Schools into War Zones By Debra Heine

By on April 7th, 2018

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to scrap a controversial Obama-era education regulation that penalized schools for having disparate rates of discipline and turned school districts across the country into war zones.

The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice issued the federal directive jointly in 2014, warning public school districts receiving federal funding that they “could face investigation and funding cuts if they fail to reduce statistical ‘disparities’ in discipline by race,” the New York Post reported.

After Mayor de Blasio adopted the more lenient school discipline standards in early 2015, “more schools saw fighting, disrespect, drugs, gang activity,” said Max Eden, an education policy expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

While NYC school suspensions are down, crime has spiked in the city’s public schools, including major crimes such as robbery and arson, new NYPD data show. The current academic year has seen the first school murder in more than 20 years — a stabbing at a Bronx high school — and the first time a gun was fired inside a school in more than 15 years. What’s more, new state Education Department data reveal there were more rapes and other sex crimes at NYC public schools during the 2017-2018 school year than any year since 2007.

The Obama-era school discipline policy received fresh scrutiny in the wake of the Parkland school shooting when critics said it prevented police from using available tools that could have stopped it.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

EPA Leads the Way on Permitting Reform By Timothy Doyle

By on April 7th, 2018

Now more than ever, as the economy continues to pick up steam, it is vitally important to reduce the barriers to economic growth. Nowhere is this more important than in the manufacturing sector.

In manufacturing, lengthy permitting processes can still be the death knell for projects that would otherwise expand operations and create new jobs. The Clean Air Act (CAA) has created delays so great that they kill some projects in their infancy before the permitting process has even started. While there has been bipartisan support for addressing permitting delays, Congress has only recently laid out a starting point from which improving efficiencies in permitting can be obtained.

In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in to make some common sense reforms that were long overdue. Citing President Trump’s push to streamline regulatory permitting, the EPA recently announced its intention to clarify the permitting process under the New Source Review (NSR) analysis, which pertains to potential increased emissions at project sites.

Simply stated, the CAA’s NSR considers whether a manufacturer’s expansion of operations will result in a significant increase in emissions. Then, if there is a projected significant increase, the agency looks to see if there are any potential offsets to mitigate the net increase. Previously, the EPA calculated off-sets during the first step of the review process in such a way that it added unnecessary time and complexity.

As testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee revealed last year, going through the analysis could result in unnecessary delays even when there was no chance of a significant increase. In some cases, manufacturers decided to abandon projects altogether and put their resources elsewhere. The EPA’s proposed modification would address this problem by first asking whether there will be a significant increase in emissions, and if the answer is “no,” the project is allowed to move forward without a permit.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Why the Democrats won’t win big in November Roger Kimball

By on April 7th, 2018

Is a big blue Democratic wave poised to sweep the Republicans out of Congress in the 2018 mid-term election?

To listen to much of the media, you might think so. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post quoted Nate Silver, the Yoda of Dem pollsters, who suggested that the “Democratic wave in 2018 may be swelled substantially by the enthusiasm gap into a tsunami.” Last month, when the conservative Democrat Conor Lamb eked out a narrow victory over Rick Saccone in a special Congressional election in Pennsylvania, CNN gleefully reported that “Lamb’s performance is ominous for Republicans as the November midterm elections approach.” As I write, Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is warning about an impending “blue wave” after a liberal won a judicial seat on his state’s court. There are intermittent bulletins urging caution about these prognostications, but prevailing meme emitted by the punditocracy forecasts a huge Democratic victory.

Let me introduce a dollop or two of doubt into this orgy of excited anticipation.

In the first place, Conor Lamb’s victory, far from limning the future, suggests why the Democratic Party as currently configured is likely to continue to lose seats. Forget that Lamb squeaked to victory by a margin of 755 votes. More important is his ideological profile. An ex-Marine, he is a patriotic pro-Second Amendment social conservative, i.e., an extreme outlier in a party whose right wing is tacked down by the socialist Bernie Sanders and whose left-wing is represented by the faux Injun Elizabeth Warren and whatever species of incontinent glossolalia Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi represent. If the Democratic Party had more Lamb Chops, they might look forward to more victories, but then the Democratic Party would not be the modern Democratic Party, whose cynosure is class-warfare fired by identity politics and various forms of exotic sex panic.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New EPA And Why The Radical Left Is Losing It Steve Forbes

By on April 7th, 2018

It should come as no surprise how the man who is boldly redirecting the EPA — a once rogue agency that operated far beyond its constitutional authority — is now the subject of routine attacks from liberal news outlets and activists who want him fired. Scott Pruitt has taken his job as EPA Administrator seriously and has done more to reinstate the EPA’s true, core mission than any of his modern-day predecessors.

Pruitt’s sharp focus is correct — to restore contaminated lands, safeguard our nation’s air and water, and do so by respecting real science rather than the ideologically driven fake science of his predecessors. He is demonstrating that we can both have a cleaner environment and greater economic growth and job creation. Contrary to the extreme environmentalist, prosperity and a safer environment can go hand-in-hand.

As Scott Pruitt observes, our nation can be, “pro-growth, pro-jobs and pro-environment.”

He is absolutely correct.

In just over a year as EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt has worked with the president to roll back dozens of needless regulations that will save America’s manufacturing and energy sectors billions annually.

Most recently the Pruitt EPA announced how his agency will take much more realistic view of how the automobile industry can work with government regulators to reduce vehicle emissions. Liberals and green activists immediately cried foul — making chicken little claims of how the sky will immediately fall.

The truth is for many years EPA has issued regulations and mandates by bureaucrats who are completely ignorant of how real businesses and industry sectors operate or the compliance costs they already must endure. What’s even more appalling is how these bureaucrats blatantly ignored or distorted inconvenient facts in conjuring up their suffocating, anti- growth decrees.

Shockingly, most government bureaucrats and liberal agency heads haven’t even tried to seek input from the very people operating in the industry sectors they regulate. Scott Pruitt is eliminating the “silo” mentality at EPA and will seek an honest discussion with the people who operate our factories, power plants and heavy industry to find realistic, workable ways to protect our environment while allowing American industry to grow.

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