Once again, Americans employed in the coal industry are losing jobs thanks in part to federal regulations under the Obama administration.The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports today, “Consol Energy has told officials and workers that it will idle a West Virginia surface mine and lay off approximately 145 employees starting at the end of the year. The Cecil-based coal and natural gas company blamed the idling on permit delays that have slowed necessary environmental permit approval at its Miller Creek operations. It said it has been working on securing permits related to the Clean Water Act since November 2007, and said it continues to work through permit delays.”
The AP adds, “Consol has sought U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permits to redirect the Mingo County operations to mine land that would then become a 5-mile stretch of the King Coal Highway. . . . [Consol President Nicholas J.] DeIuliis noted that while the EPA had relented in objecting to one of the two permits sought, ‘that permit alone is not sufficient to allow miners to begin work.’”
Just last month, the AP reported, “Coal producer Alpha Natural Resources said Tuesday it’s cutting production by 16 million tons and eliminating 1,200 jobs companywide, including 400 with the immediate closing of eight mines in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. . . . [Chief Executive Officer Kevin] Crutchfield called it ‘a difficult day,’ but said the shutdowns and layoffs are a necessary part of ensuring Alpha survives in what has become a difficult U.S. market, where coal companies face a dual challenge: Power plants are shifting to cheap, abundant natural gas, while companies like his face ‘a regulatory environment that’s aggressively aimed at constraining the use of coal.’”
And of course, these layoffs have effects beyond the jobs for coal workers themselves. Recently, the AP noted that “Norfolk Southern Corp. says it has laid off about 200 workers in the railroad’s divisions based in Bluefield and Roanoke. Robin Chapman of Norfolk Southern tells the Bluefield Daily Telegraph that decreased coal traffic led to the furloughs.”
Related:
OBAMA WILL BANKRUPT THE COAL INDUSTRY Biden: No Coal !!!
Discussing President Obama’s interview with the Des Moines Register, The Wall Street Journal editors write, “[T]he larger reason to be skeptical [about Obama’s promises for the future] concerns Mr. Obama’s answer to another Register question: Whether he regrets pursuing ObamaCare and other liberal social priorities in his first two years rather than focusing on the economy. ‘Absolutely not,’ Mr. Obama told the Iowa journalists. ‘Remember the context. First of all, Mitch McConnell has imposed an ironclad filibuster from the first day I was in office. And that’s not speculation.’ Whoaaaa there, big fella. Mr. McConnell was then and still is the Senate Minority Leader, and in 2009 he had all of 40 votes. Mr. Obama could have pursued any agenda he wanted, and the Des Moines editors wanted to know why he didn’t focus on the economy first. Yet Mr. Obama’s instinctive reaction is to blame Republican obstructionism that never happened. . . . By spring 2009, when Minnesota’s Al Franken was seated, the White House had 60 votes and a GOP-only filibuster wasn’t even possible. ‘We have the votes. F—‘em,’ declared then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, according to the first-100-days chapters of Bob Woodward’s new book.”
Further, the WSJ editors explain, “The President is also missing the larger import of the Register’s question. As Mr. Obama likes to remind voters now, in 2009 the economy had suffered a financial heart attack and needed to be nurtured back to health. That required careful management and attention to reviving consumer and business confidence. Yet rather than work with both parties to fashion a growth agenda, he went all-in for a Keynesian spending blowout and subcontracted the details to House Democrats. And rather than wait to see how strongly—and even whether—the economy then recovered, he dove headlong into fighting to pass 40 years of pent-up liberal social policy.”
The most effort there, of course, went to President Obama’s massive, unpopular health care law. And as Republicans warned before the law was passed by the Democrat-run Congress, Obamacare is only harming the economy. The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson explains some of this in an important column from earlier this week: “Just recently, the Internal Revenue Service issued an 18-page, single-spaced notice explaining how to distinguish between full-time and part-time workers under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). The difference matters, because the act requires employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health insurance for those workers. At the same time, no company has to buy insurance for part-time employees, defined as those working less than 30 hours a week. . . . In September, 34 million workers, about a quarter of total workers, were part-time, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the bureau defines part time as less than 35 hours a week; Obamacare’s 30 hours a week was presumably adopted to expand insurance coverage. There are now 10 million workers averaging between 30 and 34 hours a week. To the bureau, they are part-time; under Obamacare, they’re full-time.”
Why is this important? Samuelson points out, “Employers have a huge incentive to hold workers under the 30-hour weekly threshold. The requirement to provide insurance above that acts as a steep employment tax. Companies will try to minimize the tax. The most vulnerable workers are the poorest and least skilled who can be most easily replaced and for whom insurance costs loom largest. Indeed, the adjustment has already started. As first reported in the Orlando Sentinel, Darden Restaurants — owners of about 2,000 outlets, including the Red Lobster and Olive Garden chains — is studying ways to shift more employees under the 30-hour ceiling. . . . The financial stakes are sizable. Suppose Darden moves 1,000 servers under 30 hours and avoids paying $5,000 insurance for each. The annual savings: $5 million.”
He concludes, “[Obamacare] creates powerful pressures against companies hiring full-time workers — precisely the wrong approach after the worst economic slump since the Depression. There will be more bewildering regulations, more regulatory uncertainties, more unintended side effects and more disappointments. A costly and opaque system will become more so.”
Thus, President Obama’s decision to set the struggling economy aside and focus instead on passing his 2,700 page health care law not only took our eye off the ball at a critical time, it has also made things worse economically by creating uncertainty, piling on regulations, mandates, and taxes, and discouraging employers from hiring more workers.
Following President Obama’s claim Monday that the defense sequester is “not something that I’ve proposed” and Obama Chief of Staff Jack Lew trying to claim it was the idea of Republicans in Congress, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler decided to fact check these assertions today. Kessler writes, “[I]n the final presidential debate, Obama sought to toss the hot potato of sequestration — the process that is forcing those defense cuts and reductions in domestic spending — into Congress’s lap. Fortunately, there is a detailed and contemporaneous look at the debt ceiling deal that led to the current budget crunch: Bob Woodward’s ‘The Price of Politics.’ The book clearly had the full cooperation of top White House and congressional officials. With the help of our colleague, we took a tour through the relevant sections in order to determine the accuracy of the president’s statement.”
Kessler reprints the relevant portions of Woodard’s book and summarizes them: “The White House proposed the idea of a compulsory trigger, with [White House national economic council director Gene] Sperling calling it an ‘automatic sequester’ . . . . [House speaker John] Boehner was ‘nervous’ about using it as a budget tool. . . . Once tax increases were off the table, the White House staff came up with a sequestration plan that only had spending cuts and sold Harry Reid on the idea. . . . [There is a] third reference to the White House putting together the plan for sequester. Granted, they are using language from a congressional law from a quarter-century earlier [Gramm-Rudman-Hollings], but that seems a thin reed on which to say this came from Congress. In fact, Lew had been a policy advisor to then House Speaker Tip O’Neill from 1979 to 1987, and so was familiar with the law.”
Kessler concludes, “Woodward’s detailed account of meetings during the crisis, clearly based on interviews with key participants and contemporaneous notes, make it clear that sequestration was a proposal advanced and promoted by the White House. In sum: Gene Sperling brought up the idea of a sequester, while Jack Lew sold Harry Reid on the idea and then decided to use the Gramm-Hollings-Rudman language (which he knew from his days of working for Tip O’Neill) as a template for sequester. The proposal was so unusual for Republicans that staffers had to work through the night to understand it.
“Oddly, Lew in Tampa on Thursday, publicly asserted the opposite: ‘There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger…. [It] was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure at the end.’ This prompted Woodward to go over his notes and interviews once again, to make sure he had gotten it right. ‘After reviewing all the interviews and the extensive material I have on this issue, it looks like President Obama told a whopper,’ Woodward said. ‘Based on what Jack Lew said in Florida today, I have asked the White House to correct the record.’
“We had been wavering between Three and Four Pinocchios. But in light’s of Lew’s decision to doubledown on Obama’s claim, we agree it’s a whopper. Four Pinocchios.”
The foundation of merit-based selection in American judicial systems is credited largely to the 70-year-old plan created in the heartland of this country. In one form or another, more than 30 states have been influenced by or have adopted a variety of Missouri’s non-partisan court plan.
The plan, implemented by the Show Me State in 1940, has served their judiciary well. It has reduced political party influence, abolished corruption – or at least the appearance of it – and created a transparent approach to the election of judges. Rarely has an attack been made on the quality of judges that have been selected under the Missouri Plan. In fact, since the system was initiated, only two judges have been ousted by Missourians.
In the state’s current form, judges are appointed by the governor from a panel of three applicants promoted by a nominating commission. After a 12-month period on the bench, the judges stand before the public in a retention election.
Every election, the legitimacy of Missouri’s court system is tested. The only stipulation of a plan designed so accountable to the people, is that the people must partake in it to work.
Early in the election season, Judicial Performance Evaluation Committees, comprised of both lawyers and non-lawyers, release to the public their recommendations on which judges to retain.
Recently, the Missouri Bar has produced www.showmecourts.org, a website intended to help voters use these evaluations to make their own decision and cast an informed ballot. The site makes available all evaluation statistics, juror and lawyer surveys, as well as written opinions.
The bar’s distribution of this information is done without state funding, and does so instead to secure that voters make an educated decision before heading to the polls.
Last week, The Washington Post reported, “President Obama is prepared to veto legislation to block year-end tax hikes and spending cuts, collectively known as the ‘fiscal cliff,’ unless Republicans bow to his demand to raise tax rates for the wealthy, administration officials said. Freed from the political and economic constraints that have tied his hands in the past, Obama is ready to play hardball with Republicans, who have so far successfully resisted a deal to tame the debt that includes higher taxes, Obama’s allies say.”
The Post notes, “[Obama’s] veto threat challenges Republicans to a dangerous game of chicken over a fiscal event that would raise taxes for nearly 90 percent of households, slice deeply into military and domestic budgets, and probably spark a brief recession. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Republican leaders are already complaining about the president’s “ ‘Thelma and Louise’ economic strategy.” (In the 1991 film, the lead characters drive off a cliff in a 1966 Thunderbird convertible rather than surrender to police.)”
Indeed, the president is joining Senate Democrats in threatening to plunge the country off the fiscal cliff in January unless they get tax hikes. Back in 2010, when President Obama actually signed of an extension of these tax rates he now thinks are unacceptable, he said raising taxes then “would have been a blow to our economy just as we’re climbing out of a devastating recession.” But economic growth continues to be weak. Now is not the time to raise taxes.
As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Senior Democrats are now openly acknowledging their plan to hold the economy hostage to massive, job-killing tax hikes, and espousing the fiscally irresponsible view that says the country should be driven off the fiscal cliff rather than Congress working toward bipartisan solutions to reform and strengthen entitlements without killing jobs. . . . The Speaker and I have called for extending all the income tax rates for a year, ensuring that no one sees an income tax hike in January and preventing the economic harm and massive job loss that will come if Sen. Schumer and Washington Democrats follow through on their threats to drive us off the fiscal cliff.”
On Wednesday October 17, 2012 Sinclair News questioned American Conservative Union Executive Director and former Sen. Jim Talent staffer Gregg Keller at the ACU HQ in Washington, DC.
Keller answered questions about ACU/CPAC goals of bringing conservatives from all walks of like into the ACU tent; Liberty Movement involvement in CPAC; Presidential Debates; Romney-Ryan; Benghazi; the Clintons; Occupy & the TEA Party. Read more…
Rachel Higgins is an education writer who profiles regional accreditation agencies in the US. In the tutorial-style article that follows, Higgins provides blog readers with a one-stop resource for both understanding and exploring regional accreditation. Her advice dovetails with information that has been previously provided on Missouri Political News Service about the need for an informed public when it comes to matters of education and schooling.
By Rachel Higgins
Most people have heard the word “accredited” in conjunction with higher education, usually when it comes to judging a school’s quality. Accreditation is often the difference between a school that is considered “legitimate” and one that is more suspect in terms of overall learning and value of degree earned. Particularly when it comes to online schools, accreditation is very important. Having a general sense of what the word means is often not enough to sort the good choices from the poor ones, however, which can lead to a lot of frustration and wasted resources. Today perhaps more than ever before, truly understanding the roots and basis of accreditation is an essential part of choosing the right higher educational program.
In the United States, accreditation is done on a regional, or semi-local, level. The country is very large, and the number of schools cropping up each year would make national evaluations and ratings something of a bureaucratic disaster. Education officials have instead elected to break the nation up into six regions, assigning each an independent accreditation body. These are:
These six regions were determined in 1885, when the process of regional accreditation began. Each is allowed to hire its own staff and set its own guidelines, within some parameters: the goals of each are similar, namely, to ensure consistent and rigorous education at all colleges, whether four-year or two-year, within the regional boundary.
Accreditation is not something that comes automatically. Schools must apply through their regional commission or association, then submit to rigorous reviews covering such things as teacher quality, student learning, and program rigor. “Today’s standards go beyond inputs and processes – for example, ‘Do students have access to learning resources and are they using them?’ – to focus increasingly on outcomes: How well are students gaining skills of finding, evaluating, and using information?” The New England Association of Schools and Colleges says of the process as a whole. This typically requires a great deal of institutional assessment and data collection over a period of semesters and years.
Most associations and commissions conduct school reviews in several ways. Officials will review school records, including course catalogs and student transcripts, but will also sit in on lectures, planning sessions, and student labs, often without prior warning. Reviewers are interested in collecting data that shows an improvement in student learning and information retention from the time new freshmen matriculate all the way through to graduation. As such, their information gathering is often extensive, and always authoritative. The United States Department of Education recognizes each regional body as equal, and trusts published recommendations completely.
There are several ways in which regional accreditation really matters to today’s student. First, loans and federal grants are usually only available for use at regionally accredited schools. Tuition has been rising across the nation for several years, making it harder and harder for students to pay for their education without at least some form of financial assistance. Choosing an accredited school is one way to earn a leg up in the race to qualify for government funding, which usually carries more attractive terms and repayment conditions than loans from private entities.
Transferability is also important to many people. Schools that are accredited by any of the six regional bodies enjoy reciprocity, which means that credits earned are presumed to carry their full weight, no matter where they were earned. A student transferring from a college in Nebraska to one in New York, for instance, will be able to rest easy that her credits will be recognized provided both institutions are fully accredited. The same is true for transfers from junior and community colleges into more traditional four-year universities. When the schools are accredited, registrars are usually obligated to transfer all credits without question.
Perhaps most importantly, earning credits or a degree from an unaccredited school can also be harmful when it comes time to look for a job. Employers in many sectors will not treat credentials from unaccredited colleges as legitimate, which can be a big problem. This is often most profound when it comes to online schools. Learning over the Internet can be an attractive alternative to classroom lectures for many students, but accreditation matters—often a lot. Though e-learning options are growing, there are still many employers who consider it a sub-par form of education. Attending an accredited program can assuage these fears, while an unaccredited one all too often only confirms them.
“Students need to know what their desired degree will allow them to do,” Russ Heimrich of the California Department of Consumer Affairs told the U.C. Davis Aggie newsletter. The CDCA handles a large number of complaints each year from students who paid for an education only to find out later that their degree is not universally recognized. “A mechanic’s certificate from an unaccredited school will enable you to become a mechanic, but some states won’t allow civil servants to be hired if they graduated from an unaccredited school. In California you can become a lawyer after graduating from an unaccredited school, but other states won’t recognize you,” he said. This can lead to financial trouble, particularly if loans were taken out, as well as professional embarrassment.
A number of online institutions have recently been involved in a scam known as “accreditation fraud,” in which they list on their website that they have been accredited by certain fictitious reviewing commissions. This can prove confusing to students who do not understand how accreditation works.
Using common sense is usually a good first step. “If a school is claiming to offer classes in dental hygiene that you only have to take online with no hands-on training, it’s a bit suspicious,” legal reference JD Supra said in an article about accreditation fraud. “If the school claims that there is a 100 percent chance that they can place you in a job, that’s suspicious, as well.”
Of course, actually doing some research before enrolling is usually the best way to ensure that a school really has the accreditation and status it claims it does. Each of the six regional accreditation bodies provides an online database of schools on its rolls, and most provide a toll-free number for inquiries, as well. The United States Department of Education is also an authoritative source, with a regularly updated list of accredited schools and institutions nationwide culled from the regional entities’ databases. Unless a school appears on these lists, the “accreditation” it claims to carry is likely not legitimate.
Understanding accreditation is an important part of pursuing higher education today. Though there are more options than ever before, there are also more ways to go astray. Knowing what to look for and where to go for help can be the difference between a degree that will take you places and one that will bring you down.
Reuters writes today, “U.S. consumer prices rose in September as the cost of gasoline surged, posing a threat to consumers’ spending power although inflation pressures look unlikely to derail the Federal Reserve’s ultra-easy policy path. . . . Most of the increase in consumer prices was due to a sharp rise in gasoline prices, which jumped 7 percent in September after climbing 9 percent the prior month. Higher costs at the pump force many American consumers to cut back on other spending.”
And yet the Obama administration continues to block energy projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from booming oil fields in North Dakota and Canada to refineries in Texas, creating tens of thousands of American jobs in the process.
Instead, President Obama has insisted on funding “green energy” projects with taxpayer money that were hastily approved and poorly considered, such as Solyndra. Today, another such company has filed for bankruptcy. According to Bloomberg News, “A123 Systems Inc, a maker of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, filed for bankruptcy after failing to make a debt payment that was due yesterday. . . . ‘The company may not have sufficient cash to fund operations and may need to seek the protections provided under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code,’ A123 said.”
Bloomberg notes, “A123, which received a $249.1 million federal grant in 2009 to build a U.S. factory, needed a financial lifeline after struggling with costs from a recall of batteries supplied to Fisker, the plug-in hybrid luxury carmaker. A123 announced in August that it was working on a deal with Wanxiang Group Corp., China’s largest auto-parts maker, for financing in exchange for a majority ownership stake. . . . President Barack Obama called A123 Chief Executive Officer David Vieau and then-Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm during a September 2010 event celebrating the opening of the plant in Livonia, Michigan, that the company received the U.S. grant to help build. ‘This is about the birth of an entire new industry in America — an industry that’s going to be central to the next generation of cars,’ Obama said in the phone call, according to a transcript provided by the White House.”
The reality has fallen far short of the president’s promises, as Bloomberg points out, “Electric-vehicle sales since 2011 totaled fewer than 50,000 through September, just 5 percent of Obama’s target to have 1 million such vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. . . . A123 has posted at least 14 straight quarterly losses. Its shares have fallen 85 percent this year to 24 cents at yesterday’s close in New York and traded at 16 cents at 8:29 a.m. before the start of regular trading.”
In the 1990s, Chris Koster Esq. Was arrested in Callaway County for writing bad checks. Many who have a checkbook for the first time may unintentionally write a bad check, but how many of us do it so often that a warrant is sworn out for our arrest? How many of us have had to be hauled before the magistrate in handcuffs for our “frivolous mistakes.” Read more…
