Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!
A National Day of Unity: it begins. Inauguration day saw a flood of orders, proclamations, and revocations. It evinced an energy belied by the campaign and took on a very progressive cast. Lowlights include:
- Rejoining the Paris Accords
- Revoking the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit and a bunch of executive orders that expedite environmental reviews; defining stakeholders as “State local, Tribal, and territorial officials, scientists, labor unions, environmental advocates, and environmental justice organizations;” requiring cost/benefit analysis of all environmental regulations—oh, but the costs analyzed are the “social costs” of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide; and generally treating global warming as the existential crisis it isn’t
- Rolling back any deregulatory or reformist tendencies that the Trump administration had
- Enacting regulatory reform that “promotes policies that reflect new developments in scientific and economic understanding, fully accounts for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify, and does not have harmful anti-regulatory or deregulatory effects” and “propose[s] procedures that take into account the distributional consequences of regulations, including as part of any quantitative or qualitative analysis of the costs and benefits of regulations, to ensure that regulatory initiatives appropriately benefit and do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized communities.” Further: “[t]hese recommendations should provide concrete suggestions on how the regulatory review process can promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations. The recommendations should also include proposals that would ensure that regulatory review serves as a tool to affirmatively promote regulations that advance these values.”
- Embedding racism in every executive decision and program, both explicitly by promoting “equity” at every turn and implicitly by revoking Executive Order 13950—possibly the most effective federal anti-racism (in the good sense) program in the modern era. The likely worst part of this EO in the long-term is the disaggregating of datasets “by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, income, veteran status, or other key demographic variables.” This will foster “disparate impact” lawsuits and actions with wide-ranging effects.
This is going to be a long ordeal.
“Yingling said one of the administration’s messages was that the bankers “need to understand the public’s anger.” ”
Instead of trying to educate the public out of their irrational biases, or to defend their rights to freely entered-into contracts, the most productive members of society must cater and give in to it.
Or to put it another way, we politicians need to get re-elected, so we’re going to take advantage of the public’s irrationality towards that end and you will have to be the whipping boys. But don’t worry, (wink, wink) we’ll take care of you if you just play ball with us. Sad
I guess Mike N. wins by default.
We’ve had some great comment contest Fridays but the last couple have been duds. The problem, of course, is with my selection. Those who participate always bring great insights so I just need to find better fodder.
I’m open to suggestions for how to improve it, but at present I’m thinking that I’d like to feature articles that are good in many respects but deficient in some striking way. Or I could find articles that are worth dismissing with one-liners and witty sarcasm—I always enjoy a good smack down.