Free Republic

Op-Ed Contributor Washington IT’S Christmas in August for hopeful scientists. The National Institutes of Health is now sending out its annual “priority scores,” the indicators of whether grant requests will likely receive financing from the agency. And hearts are beating faster than ever, as the federal stimulus package has poured an additional $8.2 billion into the institutes’ budget specifically for research. However, for those grant-winners whose studies will involve human volunteers, another big hurdle remains: federal ethics regulations. No one denies the need to shield human subjects from undue risk. But current regulations have become so stringent and unwieldy that...

About 15 years ago, Don and Roxanne Carpenter went into business after buying what they said wasn't much more than a shack at Taylor and Morris streets. They installed ice cream machines, pop machines and cooking equipment and set up shop as the Dog-Out, a walk-up hot dog stand. To be honest, it wouldn't strike people as the best place to open a business. It's a little out of the way. But there were 500 people living within walking distance, Don Carpenter says, and several large factories were nearby, and business flourished. Word of mouth brought customers to the little...

Restaurants in New York City with 15 or more outlets nationwide now must conspicuously post the nutritional content of each item on their menus. Similar legislation is coming to San Francisco and Seattle, and is under consideration in about a dozen other cities and state legislatures. At first blush, this seems like a good idea. Why not force restaurants to let their consumers know the nutritional value of what they're about to eat? If we're to believe what the public health world says about our bulging waistlines, perhaps a little more information would be a good thing. The American Prospect's...

The owners of the 300-unit Seabury Heights Apartments in Worcester, Mass., got in trouble last year when they turned on the building's air conditioning in early June. As reported in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, some of Seabury's elderly tenants complained, first to management, then to the city, about being cold. In the end, Seabury was forced to turn the heat back on because in Massachusetts, it's against the law — against the law! — for landlords to turn off their furnaces before June 15. You see where this is going. Chastened by last year's run-in with the government, Seabury...

German red tape and a lack of will on the part of officialdom is putting some Muslim women in a very dangerous position. Instead of protecting them from the threat of honor killings, some of the bureaucracy actually increases the risk. The little girl with the pigtails stands at the window staring into the green courtyard. She wants to go outside with her mother to play. "No," the young woman says, "it just rained." In truth, the sun was shining on the major western German city last Wednesday. But the mother is trying to shield her four-year-old daughter from the...

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS TV) - Gov. Mark Sanford is signing legislation that lets people shampoo hair in salons without having taken the mandated 1,500 hours of training for a cosmetology license. The measure exempts from licensing requirements salon employees whose sole duty is to wash hair. Sanford says the current law for shampooing is an example of the wacky South Carolina laws that shouldn't be in place. A 'top 10 list' of such laws and proposals provided by the Governor's office follows: 1. State law requires an individual to complete 1,500 hours of instruction to become a cosmetologist. It takes...

An architect's wickedly sarcastic replies to pointless questions on a planning form have made him an unwitting champion for all those exasperated by bureaucracy. John Jessop earned a cult following among his colleagues after his withering comments were leaked in an e-mail which has been sent all round the country. After being asked to fill in a “design access statement” for a storage shed on a small farm, he wrote: “The density is like on a farm, the social context is a farm in the country, the economic context is farming in the United Kingdom in 2008 (which is not...

ANNAPOLIS (AP) — A $10 million plan to bring less-expensive high-speed Internet access to rural parts of Maryland is on hold because of a bureaucratic dispute that critics say is a case of red tape getting in the way of progress. State lawmakers voted two years ago to set aside the money to build a "spine" of fiber-optic cable in three rural regions of the state — Southern Maryland, the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland — where Internet-service providers don't always provide high-speed access. At the time, supporters said the Maryland Broadband Cooperative would bring big-city Internet access to underserved...

SACRAMENTO - While California voters approved $9.5 billion in bonds to improve the state's water infrastructure last year, little of that money has been allocated despite a lengthy drought and growing strains on the system. Political infighting and bureaucratic red tape have slowed spending of the 2006 water bonds, even as state lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger consider asking voters for billions of dollars in additional water bonds on next year's ballot. Only about 14 percent of the Proposition 1E water bond approved by voters last year - and about one-third of the Proposition 84 water bond - have been...

A pensioner has been told she must stop tending a public flower bed unless she agrees to wear a fluorescent jacket, put up warning signs and use a lookout. June Turnbull, 79, of Urchfront near Devizes, has nurtured the blooms on the plot for six years. But now she is being told to obey health and safety rules after being spotted by a county council official. Mrs Turnbull said: "I was very angry, I mean it seems so petty bothering with what I do here. There's just no point." Peter Hanson, divisional highways manager at Wiltshire County Council, said: "We...

Bay State dogs may soon end up on a shorter leash if state and local legislators get their way. From lap dogs to pit bulls, none of the state’s pooches will escape the latest round of canine crackdowns. “You can’t allow people to be afraid all the time,” said Avril T. Elkort, vice chairwoman of the Canton Board of Selectmen, where a new ordinance limits residents to one pit bull per household. “It was a public safety issue.” Canton animal control officer Ellen Barnett objected to the new regulation. “The problem I had with it is that it was too...

I have posted several times in the past about this topic, this is just an update for you techheads who might be interesetd...oh, and anyone who uses the internet... which is...everyone. Most people have no idea what CALEA is. It is a law to assist law enforcement's ability to intercept phone calls. It was written and passed and signed into law in 1994 by Congress. It mandated that digital switching equipment technology be required to have certain specific capabilities which would make tapping a person's phone calls, and making the call history easier to get. Congress ante'd up millions to...

Business at Weidmann Electrical Technology in St. Johnsbury is booming. So much, the company is looking to expand its operations. But that expansion will not take place in Vermont due to high taxes and a strong impression by investors that Vermont is unfriendly to business, according to a letter sent April 2 by John Goodrich, vice president and general manager of Weidmann Technology. "The paradox of the situation is this: we are extremely busy but are unable to expand in Vermont," ... Vermont needs to decide if it indeed wants to encourage in-state businesses to expand and new industry to...

Women civil servants in India have expressed shock at new appraisal rules which require them to reveal details of their menstrual cycles. Under the new nationwide requirements, female officials also have to say when they last sought maternity leave. Women civil servants say the questions are a gross invasion of privacy. One told the BBC she was "gobsmacked". Annual appraisals and health checks are mandatory in India's civil service. The ministry was unavailable for comment. But one of its most senior bureaucrats was quoted in the press as saying the new questions had been based on advice from health officials....

WASHINGTON, March 29 — Lapses in using a digital medical record system for tracking wounded soldiers have led to medical mistakes and delays in care, and have kept thousands of injured troops from getting benefits, according to former defense and military medical officials. The Defense Department’s inability to get all hospitals to use the system has routinely forced thousands of wounded soldiers to endure long waits for treatment, the officials said, and exposed others to needless testing. Several department officials said the problem may have played a role in the suicide of a soldier last year after he was taken...

Benefits agency closes 309 offices The Swedish Social Insurance Administration, which handles all Swedish pension and sick benefit payments, plans to close 309 of its 330 offices. Customers are to be encouraged to use the Internet and telephone to communicate with the organization. "Many of our customers have been dissatisfied with long telephone waiting times and long waits for their cases to be dealt with," said Maivor Isaksson, production director at the organization, known in Swedish as Försäkringskassan. It is planned for Försäkringskassan to cooperate with other state authorities in many 280 communities in Sweden, in order to provide some...

Zhang entered one of China's top universities before he was 13 years old. Let's see: when I was 13, I was still waiting to go through puberty. Zhang replaced Lee Kai-fu, (I have written quite a few blogs about Lee) as director of Microsoft's research center in Beijing in 2000. One thing that Zhang could do that no one else could before him was convince the Chinese government to award post-doctoral degrees to a foreign company for the first time. Zhang seems to be especially skilled at dealing with Chinese officials and his ability to cut through red tape to...

See for example this thread first. I'll tell you why there's such a fuss: A four-year-old outran a BUS! (He's Indian, you know. where buses are slow.) They should outsource their transport to us.

LOS ANGELES, California - A vibrant suborbital space travel industry, including space hotels, and treks to the Moon and beyond are attainable, but only if governmental regulations don't stifle creativity and breakthroughs in building affordable and safe public spaceliners. Those are a few of the views Burt Rutan, head of the Mojave, California-based Scaled Composites--and leader of the team that designed, built and flew the milestone making SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed suborbital rocket plane--shared today with attendees of the the 25th International Space Development Conference. The event runs here May 4-7. Rutan also took the time to fault NASA's...

SACRAMENTO - Three Central Valley lawmakers unveiled flood-control bills Wednesday as part of a larger rollout of public works legislation sponsored by Assembly Republicans. Stockton's Greg Aghazarian, Fresno's Mike Villines and Richvale's Doug LaMalfa are carrying the legislation, all of which would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for levee repairs. Assembly Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said the proposals, along with others to streamline road-building projects and protect highway money, represent their stance in the larger debate over public works that is dominating discussion at the Capitol. Suspending CEQA, as the act is known, strips layers of bureaucratic...

Europe's most successful companies are turning their backs on EU markets because of red tape, a high-level report said yesterday. The companies that Europe needed to survive were instead investing more money than ever in the United States and Asia, concluded the report, presented to the European Commission in Brussels. The lack of investment was so dire that it threatened Europe's "comfortable" way of life. "Europe has to act before it's too late," said the report's author, Esko Aho, the former prime minister of Finland. The findings made unsettling reading for the EU leaders, ripping into their pledges to build...

At the front edge of the rainy season, flood-control channels countywide are choked by silt, reeds and brush. In years past, maintenance crews would have cleared the channels as part of routine cleanup programs. But state and federal agencies are clamping down on cities' flood-control maintenance and emphasizing that wetland protections extend to floodways. The regulators' goal is to curtail the once-common practice of dredging San Diego County's waterways without permits. Hundreds of miles of creeks and rivers drain the region's watershed to the ocean. Some are natural waterways and others are lined by concrete. The regulators contend that some...

My colleague Bruce Reed says that President Bush waived the Davis-Bacon "prevailing wage" rules for post-Katrina federal construction projects "because a group of conservative members of Congress saw a convenient opening to drive liberal members crazy." _______Snip_____________ Let's hear from someone who does know something about Davis-Bacon! Kausfiles has received an e-mail from a seemingly well-informed source deep within the federal bureaucracy:. I am a Federal Government Contract Specialist (job title: means I award contracts on behalf of the government) and know a lot about this law and have dealt a lot with this law. ... [I]f you want to...

The personal, commercial and civic desolation left by Hurricane Katrina has inevitably bred comparisons to another scene of unthinkable loss and ruin: lower Manhattan after 9/11. While the recovery effort on the Gulf Coast is unique, one area in which New York's experience provides an example is its support for small business reconstruction. Like Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks destroyed or crippled thousands of the smallest local businesses and nonprofits... the "soft" infrastructure of any commercial or industrial district.... After 9/11, Seedco became the primary organization assisting these businesses. We tailored a specific response to the challenges faced... Our approach...

WE MIGHT have had a faster response to Katrina, and prevented the 9/11 attacks altogether, if only we'd followed the advice of Dick the Butcher. Dick the Butcher is the character in Shakespeare's play Henry VI who says: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Dick is a repulsive character. Shakespeare's point is that lawyers are vital to the functioning of civilized society. They are the oil in the gears of commerce, the engine of democracy. But when we have too many lawyers, and we pay them too much deference, that oil can turn into sand.

My friend Ralph Peters told me his sources in the Pentagon told him lawyers for FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security spent the weekend before Katrina struck arguing about what they could or couldn't do -- the emphasis was on couldn't -- absent certain permissions from Blanco. Former members of Able Danger, a military intelligence unit, have claimed they had identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the members of his cell more than a year before 9/11, and had tried to pass this information on to the FBI, but were forbidden to do so on the advice of Pentagon...

19 September 2005 EXCLUSIVE: UP IN FLAMES http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16147117%26method=full%26siteid=94762%26headline=exclusive--58--up-in-flames-name_page.html Tons of British aid donated to help Hurricane Katrina victims to be BURNED by Americans From Ryan Parry, US Correspondent in New York HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned. US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees. Instead tons of the badly needed Nato ration packs, the same as those eaten by British troops in Iraq, has been condemned as unfit for human consumption. And unless the bureaucratic mess is cleared up soon it could be sent...

<p>A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi-hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity.</p>

The government promised banks a hands-off approach in overseeing nearly $5 billion in Sept. 11 recovery aid to small businesses. What it got in return was numerous loans to companies that didn't need terror relief - or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press found.

BATON ROUGE, La.--Over the past few days, America has been both moved and disturbed by television footage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. But for those of us in Louisiana still struggling to cope, the troubling images are of opportunistic politicians playing the blame game while there is so much real work to do. Rather than point fingers, we should be fixing the situation on the ground. And that will include taking steps to ensure that red tape doesn't stifle the continued security and rebuilding efforts. There have already been a number of instances in which an overly inhibitive bureaucracy prevented an...

The Red Cross Blocked The Fox News Channel's Major Garrett was just on my show extending the story he had just reported on Brit Hume's show: The Red Cross is confirming to Garrett that it had prepositioned water, food, blankets and hygiene products for delivery to the Superdome and the Convention Center in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but were blocked from delivering those supplies by orders of the Louisiana state government, which did not want to attract people to the Superdome and/or Convention Center. Garrett has no paper trail yet, but will follow up on his verbal confirmation...

¸ Local FEMA manager said he is sad processing for aid takes so long. By ROBBYN BROOKS Daily News Staff Writer Mississippi evacuee Luan Morgan tried to keep the tone of her voice pleasant for the sake of her 5-year-old daughter Sunday, but her anger was easy to see. “I need help now,” Morgan said. “We don’t have any way to get home. There’s no gas. There’s no nothing.” Morgan evacuated from her Lumberton, Miss., home the Saturday before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. She brought her daughter, Nichole, three days worth of clothing and not much else. “I...

Sen. Trent Lott berated both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and his own state's emergency management, MEMA, for being mired in red tape at a time of urgent need given the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. Lott said he has been trying to get FEMA to send 20,000 trailers "sitting in Atlanta" to the Mississippi coast, and he urged President Bush during a meeting Monday to intervene. He said FEMA has refused to ship the trailers until contracts are secured. "FEMA and MEMA need to be saying, 'Yes' to Mississippi's needs, not, 'No.," the former majority leader said in a...

PENSACOLA, Fla.,Sept.6-Two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to safety. Instead, their superiors chided the pilots, Lt. David Shand and Lt. Matt Udkow, at a meeting the next morning for rescuing civilians when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast. "I felt it was a great day because we resupplied the people we needed to and we rescued people, too," Lieutenant Udkow said. But the air operations commander at...

Hundreds of would-be rescuers are wending their way to the Gulf Coast in buses, vans and trailers. But critics say government red tape has hampered many who are trying to help Hurricane Katrina's victims. Long lines of volunteers are reportedly being stopped on freeways on their way into New Orleans. "The military was worried about having more people in the city. They want to limit it to the professionals," said Kevin Southerland, a California firefighter whose rescue team was sent to New Orleans at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Aaron Broussard, president of Louisiana's Jefferson Parish,...

Kristi Richie Press-Herald Staff The nine school buses Webster Parish sent to New Orleans Friday to assist with evacuation efforts returned only with their drivers. The buses stopped at a checkpoint in LaPlace and sat for several hours. “Somebody came and told them they didn’t have a mission for them, so we loaded up and came home,” Webster Parish Schools Superintendent Butch Williams said. Webster wasn’t the only group of buses turned away, though. Several hundred school buses, which were sent by order of Gov. Kathleen Blanco, were also turned away with no evacuees — possibly because the buses are...

Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, died in New Orleans because Mayor Ray Nagin did not issue a mandatory evacuation order until Sunday morning, well after the Saturday mid-afternoon order issued by neighboring parishes. The blogosphere has been wondering what took Nagin and the city so long; Glenn Reynolds has found the answer: President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, authorizing federal emergency management officials to release federal aid and coordinate disaster relief efforts. By mid-afternoon, officials in Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, Lafourche, Terrebonne and Jefferson parishes had called for voluntary or mandatory evacuations. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin...

The U.S. Public Health Service said a prison morgue near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. And more than 125 were known dead in Mississippi. [snip] And the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, warned that there will be gruesome sights in the days ahead. "We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Chertoff told Fox News . "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in the floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine." Meanwhile, help for the living was an uphill...

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - Dr. Jeffrey Orledge and his medical team provided care in New York City after the 2001 terrorist attacks and in Florida last year after Hurricane Ivan. None of that prepared them for the bedlam of the past week, he said on Sunday. Dispatched to Alabama from its home base in Augusta, Ga., on Aug. 28 in preparation for the hurricane, the team drove from place to place in Mississippi and Louisiana. Each time, it found it had nothing to do or could not provide assistance. Finally, early on Thursday, the team decided to go to...

(source: http://thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050904/NEWS01/509040328/1002&template=printart) Thetowntalk.com material cannot be directly posted or linked. Summation: the article is an interesting and worthwhile read about inefficiencies and many, many gripes about Red Cross ineptness and bureaucracy, and how both storm victims and facilities providers are ignoring them and turning away from them to FEMA and the Salvation Army.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (AP) -- Volunteer physicians are pouring in to care for the sick, but red tape is keeping hundreds of others from caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors while health problems rise. Among the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital, developed with millions of tax dollars for just such emergencies, marooned in rural Mississippi. "The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We...

CROW AGENCY, Mont. The Crow Indians rode with Custer at Little Bighorn, but they have since reconsidered. On the anniversary of the battle Saturday, they cheered during a re-enactment when Indians drove a stake through his fringed jacket and carved out the heart of the soldier going by the name of Yellow-Hair in Blue Coat Who Kills Babies, Old Men and Old Women. Their revised opinion is understandable considering what has happened to them since that battle to get their valley back from rival tribes. Today it's a Crow reservation with enough land and mineral resources to make each tribe...

Strangled by red tape Russia's business reality By Christian Lowe 53 minutes ago MOSCOW (Reuters) - Every time Russian property developer Denis Semykin sells a new apartment, he is required by law to register the deal at a special government office. But there is a snag: the office does not exist. "We ... go to every office that might look like this place so they can put the stamp on the piece of paper but they say: 'Sorry chaps it's not us.' Everyone sits there scratching their heads," said Semykin. Months of newspaper headlines about the Kremlin dismantling oil major...

The U.S. military is the toughest and most professional in the world, but one force it usually can't beat is the bureaucracy back in Washington. The Defense Department has 200,000 acquisition personnel, whose insistence on doing everything "by the numbers" slows to a crawl efforts to get vital equipment such as armor into the field. But the bureaucracy can be defeated, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated last week when he invoked his new "Rapid Acquisition Authority," allowing him to cut through the red tape to meet urgent battlefield needs. By invoking this power, Mr. Rumsfeld has given the Secretary...

In the predawn semidarkness of a small West Toledo apartment, Dae and Yung Jung stumbled toward the thumping at their front door. Seconds later, officers in dark jackets emblazoned with Homeland Security crammed into the couple's living room demanding passports and drivers' licenses. Mrs. Jung was escorted to jail. Upstairs, the couple's son, Andrew, hid, stunned and baffled. Now, five weeks later, immigration officials still press for Yung and Dae Jung's deportation to their native land, South Korea. But the couple - Dae Jung is a sushi chef; Yung Jung is a longtime school volunteer - are finding that their...

The American Red Cross gave World Trade Center widow Russa Steiner a $27,000 check yesterday — just before she told a House panel about months of red tape she has had to endure. Steiner expressed only gratitude toward the organization, but her problems quickly became emblematic for panel members, angered by the organization's handling of $550 million in Liberty Fund donations since Sept. 11. "Something is wrong," Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) said, pounding his fist. "A separate fund was established for these families. We are hearing from families that their needs are not being met." So far, the fund has ...

Swedes left with a monster problem THE placing of a mythical monster on Sweden’s endangered species list, in an apparent fit of bureaucratic zeal, has caused an administrative problem for the country’s authorities. "During a routine inspection of the environment court in Jaemtland recently, we came across a decision that attracted our interest," said Nils-Olof Berggren, a Swedish parliamentary ombudsman. "The court had turned down an application from a man who wanted to search for and hatch the monster’s eggs, probably believing [the application] was just a joke." However, Mr Berggren found there was an actual decision from 1986 placing...

Arnold Schwarzenegger has launched his most ambitious project to date with a scheme to save California "hundreds of millions of dollars" on the $4bn the state spends each year on goods and services. The governor's plan to centralise purchasing in a single agency is the first and relatively modest step in his much-anticipated California Performance Review - he calls it "blowing up boxes" - to clear red tape, bureaucracy and waste. Observers expect the Republican governor to make the performance review the centrepiece of his first term in office. Plans already drafted, including disbanding some 200 state boards and commissions...

In a sign that no matter is too small to affect international diplomacy, the US State Department has issued an edict banning its longtime standard typeface from all official correspondence and replacing it with a "more modern" font. In an internal memorandum distributed on Wednesday, the department declared "Courier New 12" - the font and size decreed for US diplomatic documents for years - to be obsolete and unacceptable after February 1. "In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman...

Among the garish signs of bagel shops and chain bookstores, next to the familiar golden arches on the north side of Route 347, a plain white board with stark black lettering is a sign of bad times for town Republicans. "WELCOME TO CROOKHAVEN TOWNSHIP," it reads. Erected by Stony Brook native Bill Sullivan last week outside B. Sullivan's, his now-defunct catering hall, bar and club, the sign provoked double-takes from some drivers. Others stopped to take a photo. Still others clapped Sullivan, 39, on the back and commended him for his "guts." LOOK! AN EXCERPT!