Free Republic

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps made a case for a government hand in media policy in a speech to the FCBA on Tuesday. "The commission can act now. It should have acted on the media before now. I am disappointed that it has not," he said. The decline of "real journalism" justifies federal involvement, according to Copps. "The news is suffering from a bad case of substance abuse," he said. The Democratic commissioner pointed to Fox News' Bernie Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly as examples of the problem with today's media landscape,

Tax Deal: The media are touting a rating agency's schizophrenic claim that keeping the Bush tax rates helps the economy, but hurts the country's credit standing. Are ratings firms even relevant anymore? Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas, in her richly detailed analysis of the roots of the financial crisis, "After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington," pulls back the curtain and exposes the ugly reality of the once all-powerful credit ratings agencies Moody's, Fitch and Standard & Poor's. "Reliance on ratings agencies contravenes market principles," Gelinas warns. "The ratings-agency world is small and homogeneous, populated...

After almost 100 years, the State Compensation Insurance Fund is pulling 755 of its 830 jobs out of town, having determined that San Francisco is just too expensive - and its workforce too dumb - for the agency to continue doing most of its business here. Workers called to a recent meeting at the Herbst Theatre were told that 293 jobs will move to Pleasanton, 422 to Vacaville and 40 to Sacramento, with 75 employees remaining in the city. "It's part of a whole geographic strategy to reduce our footprint in high-cost areas like San Francisco," said agency spokeswoman Jennifer...

Today is the Environmental Protection Agency’s 40th birthday. Thank you Richard Nixon: you left us a heck of a legacy on this one. The media is sure to tout the remarkable environmental progress in the United States over the past 40 years, and indeed we have never had cleaner air, cleaner water, or more plentiful wildlife. By any objective measure, environmental progress has been remarkable over the past 40 years, but it was also remarkable for decades before the creation of the EPA, and indeed every advanced economy has seen dramatic environmental improvement, regardless of its regulatory model.

After six years, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has faced questions about leaders' pay and the lack of medical breakthroughs. But its chairman plans to ask voters for another $3 billion in bonds. When millionaire Silicon Valley real estate developer Bob Klein launched his ballot drive to create a $3-billion state fund for stem-cell research in 2004, he pitched it as a way of taking politics out of science and focusing on cures. One particularly heartbreaking campaign ad showed former big screen Superman Christopher Reeve paralyzed in a wheelchair, struggling for breath and imploring California voters to "stand up...

Today Elizabeth Warren is in California talking about the special role technology will play in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a blogpost on the White House website. Warren touts that she was asked by the president “to get to work starting the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was clear about his goal: Level the playing field for American families and fix the broken consumer credit market—and do it as quickly and effectively as possible.” (Snip) The White House has refused to appoint Warren as interim director of the Bureau, even though the legislation creating the agency requires

Immigration enforcement officials have started to cancel the deportations of thousands of immigrants they have detained, a policy they said would pare huge case backlogs in the immigration courts. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the new approach was part of a broad shift in priorities at the agency, to focus its efforts on catching and deporting immigrants who have been convicted of crimes or pose a national security threat. The policy — announced in an Aug. 20 memorandum from John Morton, the head of the agency — drew praise from immigrant advocates, who called it a common-sense strategy, and...

FORT BELVOIR, Va. (AP) -- Letitia A. Long became the first woman director of a major U.S. intelligence agency Monday, taking her post as chief of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at a ceremony at the agency's half-built, high-tech campus in Springfield, Va....

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan's main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group's leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday. The findings could heighten tension between the two countries and raise further questions about U.S. success in Afghanistan since Pakistani cooperation is seen as key to defeating the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul in the 1990s with Islamabad's support. U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency,...

With one questionable phone call to a Colorado Senate candidate, the White House has again found itself on the defensive over its maladroit political operation. If it does not want a reputation as a full-employment clearinghouse for unapproved candidates, or further invite an investigation, the administration needs to impose some common sense on that operation — and soon. Last week, the White House was fumbling to explain why it dangled a presidential appointment in front of Joe Sestak to get him to drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary. This week, the controversy is over Andrew Romanoff, the former speaker...

DETROIT — A group that says it helps Muslims quit their faith sued Detroit's regional transit system Friday for violating its First Amendment rights by rejecting bus ads that ask, "Fatwa on your head? ... Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers!" A self-described Christian rights legal center representing the group said the bus company showed its double standard by accepting earlier atheism advocacy ads.

MINNEAPOLIS – As Major League Baseball prepares for its annual Jackie Robinson Day on Thursday, one prominent African-American player questioned teams’ commitment to employing black players past their prime years. “You see guys like Jermaine Dye(notes) without a job,” Minnesota Twins second baseman Orlando Hudson(notes) said Monday. “Guy with [27 home runs and 81 RBIs] and can’t get a job. Pretty much sums it up right there, no? You’ve got some guys who miss a year who can come back and get $5, $6 million, and a guy like Jermaine Dye can’t get a job. A guy like Gary Sheffield(notes),...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is forming a new agency to study and report on the changing climate. Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planned to announce Monday that NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean Service. NOAA recently reported...

Obama's Consumer Agency Bill May Be in JeopardyPor Charlie Ericksen - Hispanic Link 16:57 | 01/27/10 WASHINGTON, D.C. — Multiple news reports indicated that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) — in an effort to garner bipartisan support — is considering dropping the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency from legislation to reform U.S. financial regulation. After securing numerous compromises with moderate Democrats, the consumer agency is a key component of President Obama’s vision for regulatory reform. The Administration has repeatedly fought back attempts to eliminate the agency as a standalone entity. Such an agency is seen by supporters...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing. The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in...

Federal authorities say the temp agency that supplied an East Stroudsburg factory with undocumented workers in 2007 is involved in an extensive and complicated web of fraud. They say, in court papers, that H&T Staffing Services, operating under that and other, similar names in Pennsylvania, fraudulently raked in nearly $2.5 million in one year. • Pocono Record: Coverage of the Iridium Illegal Immigrant Raid People involved in the staffing company have been brought through United States Middle District Court of Pennsylvania ever since the June 2007 raid of Iridium Industries in East Stroudsburg. During the raid at the plastic-container plant,...

(CNSNews.com) – Less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency restarted a controversial dredging project on the Hudson River, dredgers operated by the General Electric Company dislodged wooden beams that are the last remnants of one of the largest British forts in the American colonies. The EPA now says that the beams are contaminated with potential carcinogens known as PCBs and therefore must be buried in a landfill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration plans to streamline U.S. bank oversight and put the Federal Reserve in charge of monitoring big-picture economic risks in a sweeping regulatory overhaul to be formally unveiled on Wednesday, a senior administration official said. The Office

Obama announced the appointment of Jeffrey Zients, a founder and managing partner of the investment firm Portfolio Logic, as chief performance officer. Zients, who also will serve as deputy director for management of the Office of Management and Budget, will work to streamline processes and cut costs. "In the coming weeks, I will be announcing the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective," he said. "In this effort, there will be no sacred cows and no pet projects. All across America, families are making hard choices, and it's time their government did the same." Homeland...

This is great news, but I still wonder what took the FBI so long. "FBI Cuts Off CAIR Over Hamas Questions," by Mary Jacoby for IPT News, January 29 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm): The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has cut off contacts with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) amid mounting concern about the Muslim advocacy group's roots in a Hamas-support network, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned. The decision to end contacts with CAIR was made quietly last summer as federal prosecutors prepared for a second trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF),...