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Higher Registration Fees For Hybrid Vehicles – What’s Up With That?

March 2, 2021 in , , /by

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

February 23, 2021 in , , /by

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?

January 2, 2021 in , /by

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

November 6, 2020 in , , /by

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.

September 13, 2020 in , /by

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

July 12, 2020 in /by

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.

What President Biden Could Do for the Environment in His First Ninety Days

June 29, 2020 in , , , /by

There can be little debate that the Trump administration has been more hostile to sound environmental policy than any administration in modern history. From the start President Trump identified environmental protection as the territory of Obama liberals and played strongly to his populist base and big fossil fuel industry donors by dismantling every protection in sight. So, a Biden administration has a lot of work to do restoring the positive direction set in previous administrations. Here is where I think he should start.

Trump Flails Again at Environmental Law and Policy

June 11, 2020 in , /by

While we were distracted by a pandemic, a recession, and an uprising in the streets, Donald Trump attempted to upend decades of environmental law and policy with the stroke of his pen. In an executive order dated June 4, 2020, President Trump directed all federal agencies to use “emergency powers” to speed infrastructure work, specifically waiving or bypassing where possible the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Trump justified this order on the basis of the “economic emergency” existing in the country created by the national COVID-19 response. This shouldn’t surprise us – Trump has used every excuse to undermine environmental regulations from the start of his Administration, often favoring oil, gas and coal interests. But the scope of this executive order is audacious.

How to Move a Sofa

April 6, 2020 in /by

I have always admired the modern political philosopher Chris Rock. One late evening a couple of years ago, I was watching one of his comedy specials and he was talking about how to get things done even when you are at war with your spouse.  Concluding that biting his tongue and cooperating was the way forward, he said “It’s a hell of a lot easier for two people to move a sofa than for one person to do it.”

Solar Energy and the Legislature: A Power Play in Charleston

March 21, 2020 in , , , /by

For a state beholden to the coal and natural gas industries, solar energy generated a lot of heat at the recent West Virginia legislative session. Two initiatives concerning alternative energy, including solar, were introduced. One survived and will become law. Unfortunately, the survivor is a timid effort to attract a specific hi-tech enterprise that will involve no new solar energy facilities unless that enterprise locates here. But progress on renewable energy in West Virginia will have to be made in small steps, and this was a start.