Higher Registration Fees For Hybrid Vehicles – What’s Up With That?
Awhile back, a good friend of mine spent half an hour complaining to me about having to pay an additional $100 when he registered his Prius hybrid vehicle. That caused me to wonder why West Virginia would want to discourage the ownership of these vehicles with a whopping big tax. Hybrids consume lots less gasoline and emit proportionately less greenhouse gasses from the tailpipe. That’s a good thing, right? The answer, of course, is not so simple.
Industry To West Virginia: We Can’t Be Bothered
They’re at it again. Under the cover of the Covid pandemic, when citizens can’t rally in numbers, the West Virginia legislature is poised to gut one of the key protections of the Aboveground Storage Tank Act enacted after the 2014 water crisis that left 300,000 West Virginians without safe drinking water. The bill is pushed by tank owners and backed by industry. The reason? As Charlie Burd of the Gas and Oil Association of WV says, the regulation is too burdensome. Translation: We can’t be bothered.
Can Trump Pardon Himself?
The stink from the pile of Trump’s pardons is palpable – it is the stink of corruption and abuse of power. A high percentage of these pardons have gone to those with a personal or political connection to him. Those receiving his favor include murderers, dishonest politicians, fraudsters, thieves, and liars. The question of the moment is whether a president can pardon himself. The power to pardon has been exercised by presidents over 20,000 times and never once has anyone attempted to pardon himself. We may be about to witness a president try to absolve himself of his own criminal conduct for the first time. Can Trump get away with this?
Finding Where Your Rights End and Mine Begin
I get annoyed by inane government rules and being told what to do by officious clerks. I have always had a small authority problem. I’ll wager I am not alone in this, but a developmental task toward adulthood is recognizing this as a personal failing. It is not evidence of some natural or constitutional right to be ornery.
The Electoral College: How it Works – and Doesn’t Work.
Let’s start with a simple proposition with which most everyone these days would agree – the President of the United States should be elected by a majority of voters. Over this nation’s more than 240-year history, our understanding of democracy has come to mean one person one vote, with each of those votes being equally valuable. Nowhere should that be more important than in the election of the President. But our Founders had a different notion of how the election of the President should work.
Regulating Hate Speech in Social Media
Recently, Facebook released an audit of its policies relating to hate speech and other troubling forms of speech. The audit blistered Facebook for being too slow and too tepid in its response. Facebook has traditionally been a proponent of “free expression” and its reluctance to regulate any kind of speech is laudable in many ways. But this is not a First Amendment issue. Facebook is a non-governmental actor not subject to the First Amendment. It can create whatever rules it wants for its platform. Facebook’s decisions on what speech to forbid or regulate are heavily influenced by the desires of its advertisers and other stakeholders – you and I. So what speech is permitted on Facebook is really the product of community self-regulation.