Meaning that the pharmacy measure, which would end North Dakota’s ridiculous pharmacy protectionism and allow the state’s citizens to shop for prescription drugs where they want, won’t be on November’s ballot.

A PDF of the opinion is below.

Truth be told, this was probably the right decision. As much as I sympathize with the measure and want to see it made law, and as much as I firmly believe that North Dakotans would vote for it overwhelmingly if put on the ballot, and as much as I believe that the signatures of roughly 13,000 signatures should only be cast aside with darn good reason, the law is the law.

And the law wasn’t followed in this instance.

It’s sad to see this push end because of a technicality, but technicalities are the soul of the law.

I have no doubt that this measure will eventually make it to the ballot, and when it does it will be made law.

This was announced last week, and didn’t really get a lot of attention in the North Dakota media:

A federal district court in New York had dismissed the Connecticut case, but the Second District Court of Appeals reinstated it.

The appeals court acknowledged that a broad solution to global warming “arguably falls within the purview of the political branches,” in essence, Congress and the White House. …

“A decision by a single federal court concerning a common law of nuisance cause of action… does not establish a national or international emissions policy,” the court said. “Nor could a court set across-the-board domestic emissions standards or require any unilateral, mandatory emissions reductions over entities not party to the suit.”

Indiana’s brief seeking to overturn the appellate decision argues that it would lead to more litigation that could eventually apply to any businesses that emit carbon gases.

“The theory of liability being advanced here has no limiting principle,” Indiana’s brief said. “It would permit federal courts to impose CO2 (carbon dioxide) emission limits on any entity in the country, and one might reasonably expect that the major economic actors of each state, not to mention state government entities themselves, would be on a list of potential defendants.”

In addition to Connecticut, the states suing to limit the power plants’ emissions are New York, New Jersey, California, Iowa, Vermont, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

With Indiana and Kansas, states urging the Supreme Court to dismiss the suit include Arkansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, Hawaii, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Good for Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem for joining North Dakota with these other states in challenging the federal government on this issue. We need more push back against federal encroachment on this and many other issues, and Stenehjem’s decision to join this case (as well as his decision to join the multi-state challenge to Obamacare) is a good one.

Roll Call has a lengthy article up today about North Dakota’s at-large House race between Earl Pomeroy and Rick Berg. The entire thing is worth a read, but this quote from Pomeroy floored me:

“I’m very, very motivated for this race,” Pomeroy told a group of more than 30 local Democratic supporters at the corn feed in his hometown of Valley City. “This is the beginning of what’s going to be a very competitive race.”

Pomeroy pointed to his record working for North Dakota as a reason for voters to come out to the polls in November, adding that his opponent is taking credit for the good fortune North Dakota has had in recent months rather than any legislative victories he had in the state Legislature.

“I believe my record will serve me well,” he said.

Pomeroy reiterated his determination to secure re-election in an interview at Babb’s Coffee House in downtown Fargo.

“I’ve been in tough cycles my entire career,” Pomeroy said, discounting the national political handicappers.

Pomeroy’s been in touch cycles before, but never one this tough. Remember, he’s never lead in a single poll in this race, and as the article notes, “Most political handicappers believe veteran Rep. Earl Pomeroy is more likely to lose than win re-election in November.”

But what’s this about Earl saying his record will serve him well? His record is killing him right now. If there’s any reason why Earl Pomeroy is likely to lose, it’s his vote for Obamacare specifically and his long-term liberal voting record in general.

There’s the oft-cited statistic about Earl voting with Nancy Pelosi 97% of the time. But then there’s also Earl’s 3% rating from Citizens Against Government Waste, an abysmal showing for this supposed “Blue Dog” fiscal conservative.

And when has Pomeroy talked about his record with voters? If he’s so proud of it, if he’s so certain he can ride to victory on it, why isn’t he campaigning on his biggest vote of the last two years? The one for Obamacare? Why isn’t he holding town hall meetings with his constituents where they can ask him questions, directly, about his record?

Hell, why isn’t he taking Rick Berg up on one of the 30 dates offered for a debate?

He’s not because he isn’t proud of his record. He knows it’s killing him with his constituents. He knows his principle problem this year is that he can’t keep up the charade of being a moderate here in North Dakota and a tax-and-spend, big-government liberal in Washington DC.

His only shot is to convince enough voters that North Dakota will lose out on federal pork spending if he’s cast out of office. He may be able to squeak it out on that basis, but at this point it seems unlikely.

A lot hinges on the polling that gets released this month. If Pomeroy goes an eight month behind in the polls in post-Labor Day polling when more voters are paying attention his goose may be cooked. Remember, absentee voting begins about two weeks from today.

Pomeroy is in dire straits.

Obama is proposing tax relief in the form of tax write offs for businesses that invest in new equipment and other business infrastructure. The problem is, that’s not really what the economy needs right now.

President Obama, in one of his most dramatic gestures to business, will propose that companies be allowed to write off 100 percent of their new investment in plant and equipment through 2011, a plan that White House economists say would cut business taxes by nearly $200 billion over two years.

The proposal, to be laid out Wednesday in a speech in Cleveland, tops a raft of announcements, from a proposed expansion of the research and experimentation tax credit to $50 billion in additional spending on roads, railways and runways. But unlike those two ideas, both familiar from Obama’s 2008 campaign, the investment incentive would embrace a long-held wish by conservative economists that had never won support from either Republican or Democratic administrations.

There’s nothing inherently harmful in this proposal. The economy isn’t going to be hurt by these expanded write-offs (as opposed to Obama’s proposed payroll tax holiday which is going to put a serious budgeting hole in the already beleaguered Social Security and Medicare programs), but they aren’t likely to stimulate economic growth.

A reader emails:

When the fundamental problem is excess capacity because of obama caused incertinty, buying more of it doesn’t solve the problem.

Why would anyone create more capacity in a market with excess capacity, even with incentives? Of course, not every market has excess capacity. but every market faces confusion as to which way Obama wants to go—he wants jobs: but also wants to punish those who create jobs: chicken or eggs?

Business is looking for long term stability in the “rules of the game”, not a short term enticement to reduce working capital and liquidity.

Smart business realizes the business purpose for capital purchases as the main reason for purchases—not tax avoidance.

Put another way, businesses don’t invest in equipment or research or expanding operations just to get a tax break. They do it because there is demand for that additional capacity to be met.

by Proof

I had forgotten about this story. James Cameron, director of “Avatar” (who is planning at least three different releases of his movie “Avatar” on DVD) said this in an interview with the Washington Post:

You’ve been very vocal about environmentalism, and certainly the themes in the film touch on environmentalism and eco-consciousness. Is it possible to put out the next DVD releases in an eco-conscious way?

Cameron: DVDs are wasteful. I think there’s less plastic in a DVD than there is in a VHS. It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability.

I guess I was thinking in terms of the packaging. Some DVDs have come out with the slimmer packaging and are made out of recyclable materials, that sort of thing. Is that something that Fox could entertain for this next release?

Cameron: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s something that would be absolutely the right way to approach the 3-D release, which will be next year. We’ll have time to do that. And maybe it’s recyclable paper container, that sort of thing. There’s nothing much you can do about the disc proper, although it’s not a use-once-and-throwaway kind of medium. These are things that people hold onto. So it’s not like plastic water bottles or something like that which people need to get out of their lives as soon as possible.

But the release in November is a box set, so it’s just physically, structurally there are some limitations on that.

But you’re right. These are things the studios need to be thinking about. When I do my next film, we’re going to go much farther than we did in terms of running a green set. You know, look at a typical film set. There’s thousands of plastic water bottles that are used in a given week and that all needs to be revisited. Honestly, the truth is, we have to revisit almost every part of our lives and our existence over the next few years. Energy consumption, I think, being the biggest one. Energy and global warming are interlinked issues obviously, and global warming is going to take us out long before plastic pollution. Don’t get me started on that. I just got back from a two-day renewable energy conference in Aspen and it’s grim trying to get the needle of policy to move. You’re there in D.C. You see what goes on there. You see the paralysis of our leaders, even when there’s a Democratic majority. It’s still paralyzed.

If you’ve ever seen a movie being made, thousands of water bottles are the least of your “green” worries! Making movies requires a lot of energy consumption from start to finish, not to mention transporting all of those “wasteful” and non-biodegrable DVDs around!

I may have mentioned something similar this last April, when I noted that the Avatar DVD was scheduled to be released on “Earth Day”:

For all of you that are “irony impaired”, think about how many people are going to buy a plastic disc Tuesday, that is hardly biodegradable, and turn on their big screen TV’s and DVD players and sit and suck electricity out of the grid for hours to watch a movie about how superior the simple, primitive life is.

I’m glad James is starting to come around to my way of thinking. But he still has a long way to go. He seems to be of the opinion that if his fortune is to be made polluting the planet, that as long as he makes it “not as bad as it could have been” and paying off his conscience with the indulgences of “carbon credits” that he can continue to pollute as long as he pleases.
Green (money) over “green”. *Sigh*

Cross posted at Proof Positive

Recently Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn released a list of what they considered to be the 100 most wasteful stimulus projects in the country, including things like cocaine for monkeys and new windows for a federal interpretive center that’s closed and has no plans to re-open.

As a North Dakotan, I was interested in noting that #80 on that list was a project in my state. It was $6.1 million in federal funding for a new visitors center at the Audubon National Wildlife Refuge. This facility is actually located near Lake Audubon, where my family owns a lake cabin. I saw in the Minot Daily News that the facility was just opened and “dedicated” this last week (complete with “Fuel Efficient Vehicle Parking Only” signs in front), and since my family and I were spending the Labor Day holiday weekend at the lake anyway I thought I’d stop by and see what my tax dollars paid for.

After all, the proponents of the funding claim that this attraction brought in 80 visitors per day on average even before the new visitors center. I didn’t want to miss something that popular (though if there’s really that many visitors I’ll eat my hat).

So off we went on the four wheelers, taking the long and scenic way around the lake to find this new building. And what did we find when we got there? The place is closed on what is perhaps one of the busiest weekends for the Lake Audubon area all year. In fact, according to the sign on the door, the visitors center is closed every federal holiday. And it’s only regularly open 8am – 4:30pm, Monday – Friday.

The Minot Daily News quotes Audubon Manager Lloyd Jones as saying that the building is an “increased opportunity for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to tell the story about wetlands and grasslands.” He goes on:

We really want to emphasize that it’s a public facility. The commitment the service is making to this facility is an example of how important this region is. It’s the most important waterfowl breeding habitat in North America. Now we have a state of the art interpretive facility for the public to come and learn and enjoy and see what the prairie ecosystem is all about.

Well sure. They want the public to come…but only 8am – 4:30pm, Monday through Friday when it’s not a holiday. Otherwise, it’s just not that important. By the way, the half hour we were walking around outside taking pictures, about half a dozen cars full of people pulled up and then left when they realized the facility was closed.

I guess they’ll have to take time off work next week and come back.

Anyway, the building also has wind turbines outside because it’s a “green” facility as well as stimulus signs inside and a portrait of Barack Obama so that we’ll all know who brought us this marvelous…waste of time and taxpayer dollars.

Here are the wind turbines that supposedly power the facility:

And car pool-only parking…for the people who come during the scant few hours the facility is actually open.

Discussion question: How is this stimulating the economy? The only jobs that seem to have been created here are…government jobs.

Second discussion question: My four wheeler is fuel-efficient, right?

My most recent Washington Examiner piece is up. An excerpt:

Bill Clinton once told an audience in Philadelphia, “You know one of the things that’s wrong with this country? Everybody gets a chance to have their fair say.” It was intended as a humorous response to a crowd of hecklers who was giving him fits as he tried to deliver a speech, but it’s not hard to imagine that Democrats have taken that sentiment to heart of late.

Seton Motley notes a letter sent to book publishers Simon & Schuster by the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee accusing the company of making an in-kind donation to Republicans with the publishing of Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders which is about Republican House candidates. In a letter to the publisher, Democrats allege that the book is an “in-kind” donation and make ominous statements (given the party’s current control of Congress and its investigatory/regulatory power) about ensuring that the marketing of the book is “legal.”

Of course, corporations are allowed to make independent political expenditures. And how can this book be an in-kind contribution when it is set to be published, and sold, for profit?

Read the whole thing. Check out the Examiner’s Opinion Zone.

You can read all of my contributions here.

With the election looming, and Democrats suffering from an utter lack of trust with the electorate when it comes to economic issues, the White House is scheming for an “October surprise” of sorts in the form what they’re calling tax breaks for businesses.

Except, I don’t think that “tax breaks” is the right term given that we’re talking about temporary tax credits that only kick in when businesses meet specific criteria.

With just two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars – to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll-tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research-and-development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States.

First, isn’t it Democrats who tell us that any attempt to let Americans keep more of their own money through tax relief creates budget deficits? If that’s true (and it is true as far as it goes, though I’d argue that our deficit problem lays with spending not taxes) then how can they justify a payroll tax holiday that takes billions in revenues from gigantic entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare?

We have a big budget problem here in America, and the most acute areas of that budget problem lay in the funding of Social Security and Medicare. If fiscal responsibility is really what Democrats want, how can they justify cutting revenues for those programs while simultaneously opposing any attempt to cut expenditures in those programs as well?

Even setting that aside, the idea that this is going to lead to any short term or long term economic stimulus is the stuff of fairy tales. If you suppose that businesses would hire workers, or begin research and development, to get a tax (and that’s a bit of a stretch), if that hiring or that research is dependent upon government tax credits the jobs/research will only last as long as the tax credits do.

Hardly the stuff of long-term, substantial economic growth.

What Obama is proposing is an economic policy gimmick motivated more by politics than a desire to foment prosperity.

If you wear baggy, drooping clothing in Dublin, Georgia you could be fined:

DUBLIN, Ga. — City leaders in Dublin could soon fine people if their sagging pants or skirts expose their underpants.

Dublin Mayor Phil Best told WMAZ-TV that he plans to sign an ordinance Tuesday that would fine violators $25 for a first offense and $200 for an additional offense.

The rule passed this week by the city council prohibits people from wearing pants or skirts more than three inches below the tops of the hips and exposing any skin or underwear below.

I wonder if this ordinance applies to plumbers?

Regardless, the notion that a city can (or should) outlaw certain fashion choices seems ridiculous to me. Indecent exposure is one thing. Making it illegal for your pants to ride low and expose a bit of underwear is something else entirely.

Society is not high school. Our elected leaders are not our principals or our parents. I think the authorities in Dublin may have better things to do than send cops around with tape measures to ensure that people wear their pants at an appropriate height.

What’s next, a prohibition on t-shirts that advertise alcohol or tobacco? If we allow ridiculous ordinances like this to stand, then that sort of absurdity is exactly where we’re headed.

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine told Fox News recently that Democrats shouldn’t be running away from being Democrats. “If you run away from who you are and you’re a Democrat, it’s foolish,” he said. “It’s foolish because you’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

Actions speak louder than words and judging by the actions of a lot of Democrats – including Texas governor candidate Bill White and now Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold – they’re not proud of what they’ve done at all.

President Barack Obama’s spending Labor Day afternoon in Milwaukee at an annual union festival. It’s quite a party: Parade organizers were still looking for volunteers to help carry the giant protest puppets of the Earth Goddess and such. Pity, then, that Russ Feingold, the incumbent Democratic senator in a neck-and-neck race, can’t hang out with the president.

But Obama and puppetry just aren’t the right atmospherics these days, are they?

Feingold, three terms in office and now tied with a plastics manufacturer no one heard of five months ago, will be at Laborfest earlier in the day. By afternoon, he’ll have scampered far from Obama, to a parade in his hometown, Janesville, where the General Motors bailout didn’t save the truck plant and unemployment is now double-digit. A spokesman said Feingold asked the White House to change its schedule, but you know how these things go.

Ask yourself: If you were an embattled senator, famously progressive and customarily elected by students, unions, peaceniks and others who dig giant protest puppets, and your state was going to be visited by a president who two years ago drew swooning arena-sized crowds of just such voters, do you think you could rearrange your schedule to absorb his magic?

Well sure, but the problem is that magic is gone.

And it’s not just the candidates who are running from Obama. Democrat party leadership has been telling their candidates to avoid talking about the policies they’ve passed over the last several years. Which is no doubt why Rep. Earl Pomeroy, as an example of the national trend, has been running a campaign blitz since April that hasn’t once mentioned a single thing he’s done in Congress recently.

Rather, it attacks his opponent Rick Berg and tries to cast Pomeroy as being an outsider from his own party.

If Democrats can’t campaign on what they’ve accomplished with their political majorities, maybe they don’t even believe that those policies will be good for the country.