EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the Highway Bill, & Google

GLOBAL WARMING – SAM KAZMAN & MARLO LEWIS

EPA’s Global Warming Juggernaut Challenged in Court

This Week EPA’s economically ruinous plans for regulating greenhouse gas emissions are being challenged in federal court this week by a broad array of states and private parties, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, and FreedomWorks. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Tuesday and Wednesday in a set of cases challenging EPA’s decision to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The court will also review a series of major EPA regulations based on that decision.

HIGHWAY BILL – MARC SCRIBNER

Southbendtribune.com: A highway bill that everyone can hate

House Speaker John Boehner recently noted, “In the past, highways bills represented what was wrong with Washington: earmarks, endless layers of bureaucracy, wasted tax dollars and misplaced priorities.” He is correct that past highway bills have epitomized Washington’s corrupt, unserious and inept standard operating procedure. Unfortunately, that same characterization also applies to the current highway bill now moving its way through the House. The American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act has the distinction of being the first highway bill to be hated by almost everybody. Fiscal conservatives, progressives, budget hawks, transit advocates and environmental activists have all called for its defeat.

STATE AGs & GOOGLE – RYAN RADIA

There they go again. Attorneys General from 36 states fired off a letter to Google expressing deep concerns over the company’s privacy policies. CEI tech policy expert Ryan Radia commented on the matter to E-Commerce Times:

“This letter is pure saber rattling by the attorneys general. The notion that Google would change its forthcoming privacy policy in response to this letter is far-fetched.” The AGs didn’t raise issues that are of legitimate concern to privacy advocates, such as reports that Google circumvents a mechanism in the Safari browser to disable tracking, Radia pointed out, “which makes it sound as though they aren’t well informed about the true concerns.”