Last Time For The First Team

My Saturday morning started off with a groan, as I stumbled onto the computer after my late night New Year's fun... only to discover that one of my favorite radio shows was coming to a sudden and unexpected end.

Thanks to the internet this Canadian political junkie has spent the last decade tuned in to radio stations from around the world, freed at last from having to settle for only my local provincial fare.

I particularly liked to spend my Saturday morning waking up and working at my desk while listening to 1580 AM The Patriot, out of Minnesota. Every Saturday since 2004 The Patriot had featured a lively line-up of several programs hosted by Minnesota bloggers; the format evolved over the years, but lately had cemented into two sequential two-hour programs: "The Headliners", with Ed Morrissey and Mitch Berg, and "The First Team", consisting of Powerline blogger John Hinderaker and Fraters Libertas' Brian Ward.

This Saturday, as it turned out, was to be The First Team's final appearance. To our horror, faithful listeners were told that the boys would be unceremoniously replaced... by infomercials! Apparently the station can make more money running infomercials in their broadcasting time slot, over the money they were making from the commercial sponsors buying time during that two-hour block. Yet, I wonder: what regular listener will forgive and forget this loss long enough to buy whatever product or service is stepping into that time slot??

When political blogging emerged as a media phenomenon in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, new media maven Hugh Hewitt quickly headlined several of the more effective conservative bloggers in blue-state Minnesota, and jokingly began referring to them as "The Northern Alliance". National exposure from both Hugh's radio show and high-profile blog led to these Minnesota bloggers to adapt the name into the Northern Alliance Radio Network, as they made a successful bridgehead into local Minnesota radio.

Now the NARN, as they have taken to calling themselves, are to be one team short.

It's been my pleasure to have been a listener from the beginning, and Saturday's finale, with its solid wall of callers expressing their gratitude for so many hours of insightful commentary and thought-provoking interviews, brought six years of memories crashing out of my brain like an avalanche.

The First Team introduced me to many worthy authors, and in turn to their books:

• Peter Robinson, and the stirring memoir of his days a Reagan speechwriter (probably one of the most helpful books I've ever read)
• Peter Schweizer, and his remarkable revelations of liberal hypocrisy,
• the feisty Vox Day and his surgical dissection of the logical loopholes of modern atheism...
• and especially, particularly, the unforgettable Father Richard John Neuhaus. I'm a different person today, for having listened (and thoughtfully chewed over) this one interview, and the book, Catholic Matters, that it led me to.

Each hour would end with either the Loon Of The Week, spotlighting some crackpot comment from the cracked left, or, my favorite, This Week In Gatekeeping, as the familiar musical theme of "This Week In Baseball" would accompany an increasingly unbelievable degree of shoddy journalism and reporting that the boys had spotted that week in the mainstream press. (Many of their choices were inevitably featured at Regret The Error, an online collector of such stories.)

Radio reaches us in ways that reading can't, and certainly television never will. John, and especially Brian, with his quick wit and sense of humor, feel like friends I've never met, to borrow a phrase I recently heard over another show on the Patriot.

Sorting out my recollections of all the First Team's political coverage, I'm hard-pressed to settle on my favorite guests (probably Father Neuhaus), or funniest wisecracks (maybe Brian's dissing John over his age)... I find myself drifting instead to memories of the annoucement of Brian's wedding, former co-host Chad's becoming a father for the first time, and many other personal stories the First Team hosts shared with their listeners.

Each week it felt like catching up with what some friends had been up to... and that's a feeling that reading their individual blogs can't match.

Thanks, guys, for some wonderful radio memories.

[Now it's a race against the clock to download and stockpile my favorite episodes from the online First Team archive, currently still available here, back to 2006...!]

Wednesday Wonder

The more I learn, the less I realize I really know. Here are some stories learned on a rainy Wednesday morning...:

Kangaroo Care: A reminder of the value of even the simplest contact between one person and another: the emerging trend to nurture premature babies through the oldest of treatments, skin-to-skin contact.

"Even in educated families, there's a sense of fatalism if a baby is born preterm. There's no expectation they can do anything," Lawn said. "With pretty simple solutions, these deaths could be halved, but it doesn't seem to be a priority."
She points to Malawi, where traditionally new mothers have tied babies to their backs as they go about their day. Today, mothers of preemies are taught to tie them in front, under their clothes, kangaroo care-style, she said.
The skin-to-skin contact keeps the infants' body temperature more stable, a key to survival, and they can nurse at will, promoting weight gain.

The test of faith that comes with the birth of a premature baby is ironically further challenged by the idea of such simple remedies being more effective than our scientifically advanced incubation technology...:

The benefits for all babies on KMC [Kangaroo Mother Care] are that they stabilize faster on skin to skin care than in the incubator (they do not stabilize in the incubator in the first six hours of life)
Then KMC babies have stable oxygen rates and breathing. The heart rate is stable. The temperature is most stable on the mother (in skin to skin care the mothers chest automatically warms to warm a cold baby, and the mothers core temperature can drop if her baby has a temperature.) Another of the essential factors of KMC is breastfeeding: breastmilk production is stimulated by skin to skin care so baby gets all the benefits of breastmilk including the correct milk for humans. (Formula is made with cows milk which is designed for baby calves.
The main protein in cows milk, casein, is actually toxic for the human baby’s gut so they get milk allergies on formula.)
The babies can breastfeed more often in KMC. This is necessary for growth as the baby’s stomach capacity at birth is only 5ml. After one week it is 30ml which only lasts for 90 minutes. Babies need to be feeding every one and a half to two hours.The baby smells the breastmilk directly so the rooting instinct clicks in quickly and there are less subsequent problems with breastfeeding.
On the mothers chest the baby also gets gestation- specific breastmilk, if the baby is a premature, the milk content is different. Breasts can even produce different milk specific to the needs of each twin. The breastmilk contains all of the nucleotides necessary for brain growth. The mother’s colostrum carries the antibodies needed to protect the newborn with immunity. In terms of protection, the baby will get antibodies and about a thousand other protective factors from the mother’s milk. There are less long term health problems for babies that have breastfed and had skin to skin contact. In skin to skin care the baby is in a relaxed mode so all of the hormones prepare the gut to absorb food maximally. The babies on KMC can grow at 30g per day which is three times that of an incubator baby. This will mean less time in hospital.
A major difference in skin to skin care is that babies cry less so they have less stress hormones like somatostatin circulating, so there are less brain bleeds which are very common in premature infants.

These benefits to Kangaroo Mother Care, along with many for the mother's health as well, outlined here.

Atheism 3.0 Believes In Religion, Just Not God: Fascinating article in USA Today on a wave of new books written by atheists with a decidedly different point of view than the recent 2.0 trinity of Dawkins Harris and Hitchens. Displaying more integrity than I did back during the days I had strayed from my faith, atheist writers like Bruce Sheiman have the honesty to admit to seeing the great good as well as the misguided bad that has been accomplished in the name of religious faith:

"More than any other institution, religion deserves our appreciation and respect because it has persistently encouraged people to care deeply — for the self, for neighbors, for humanity, and for the natural world — and to strive for the highest ideals humans are able to envision," Sheiman writes.

The Greatest Show On Earth: A double-meaning as far as I'm concerned, when Richard Dawkins sits for an hour-long interview on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, to discuss Dawkins' new book on evolution, The Greatest Show On Earth. From the transcript:

Richard Dawkins: ... What point are you making?
Hugh Hewitt: That complexity in design, and counterintuitive steps, et cetera, don’t disprove the idea of genius at work. Genius at work often works through complexity and through misdirection.
RD: I think that what you’re kind of saying is that God made the world look as though it had evolved in order to test our faith, when it didn’t evolve.
HH: No, not test our faith. I’m saying that the world has been made as it is to allow for faith, because if it was made too easy for the simple-minded, it would simply be routine, and everyone would believe, and then there would be no faith.
RD: That would be a pretty unpleasant sort of God. I think, I would say you’re welcome to believe in a kind of God who would do that, but it’s not the kind of God that would appeal to me.
HH: Well, it’s not about what appeals to us, it’s about what is. And you also write that a beneficent designer might, you’d idealistically think, minimize suffering. But not if the soul was infinite, and suffering was necessary for its wisdom.

Heroes With Both Two And Four Legs: Courtesy of Small And Simple Things, a video on training special dogs for special tasks, trained for special people. And after you watch the video I think you'll agree that they are definitely being trained by special people as well: what a lesson in the sacrificial nature of true love.

Thursday Revelations

Two stories this morning that reveal how we should be taking the news we receive through our media with far less than automatic acceptance.

Research: Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt interviewed MSNBC journalist Lawrence O'Donnell in the first hour of his radio program. As O'Donnell started gearing up for his criticism of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Hugh got the network news analyst to make some startling admissions about the priorities on his reading list in this post-9/11 world...: [my transcript]

[22:43] Hugh Hewitt: Did you read The Nuclear Jihadist by Douglas Franz...
Laurence O'Donnell: No.
HH: ... and Kathleen Collins.
LO'D: No.
HH: He's John Kerry's senior investigator on the foreign affairs committee, does he sound reputable to you?
LO'D: Keep going.
HH: The AQ Khan network is gone.
LO'D: I know they're gone, I know... and that's a great thing. But let's just get a couple of things straight: Cheney did nothing about it, not one meeting. From the day he was sworn in, until September 10th, he did NOTHING about Al Qaeda, NOTHING about the AQ Khan network, NOTHING. The guy wants you to rate his job starting on Sept 12th; do you want to start rating the Obama presidency on September 12th 2009?
HH: Larry, that's a specious argument, but I want to get one more piece of data out there... Have you read The Looming Tower yet?
LO'D: No.
HH: What was the last book you read about terrorism?
LO'D: The last... I don't think I've read a book about terrorism.
HH: Ever??
LO'D: [thinking] N-n-n-no.
HH: About Al Qaeda?
LO'D: No.
HH: About... How about the Mullahs in Iran?
LO'D: No.
HH: [pause] I'm... I'm just stunned!
LO'D: Well, I'll tell you, I've read Bob Woodward's books about the accounts inside the Bush administration, from what they were doing, from the day they got sworn in. Okay?
HH: You've never read a book about terrorism??
LO'D: There is no, there is absolutely no evidence, and I defy you... I defy you to point to me...
HH: Larry, You've never read a book about terrorism?
LO'D: ...point to me a citation, of one memo, or one meeting, that Dick Cheney was having, where he said anything about Al Qaeda...
[bumper music starts, signaling the end of the segment and the approach to a commercial break]
HH: Larry, I've got to go lie down. I really do. Do you think you're well-informed MSNBC, by MSNBC standards? Do you think you're above the grade of people at that network?
LO'D: That's a trick question, Hugh.

Context: TV talk show host Bill O'Reilly is so internet-savvy that he doesn't know the technical difference between a blog post and a comment left at one, as he refers to commentors as "bloggers".

It's sad to see guest Amanda Carpenter's non-reaction to O'Reilly's sarcastic comments about Hot Air.com, the second conservative site whose comment threads were quoted from in the segment. Amanda Carpenter isn't just any Washington pundit, she also happens to be a frequent guest on Hot Air's Ed Morrissey's daily blog talk radio show. (In case Bill O'Reilly stops by to read this: this is a call-in show done over the internet) Come to think of it, it has been a while since she's made an appearance on Ed's shows; maybe her indifference to O'Reilly's smear comes from agreement, and she really believes that one of the blogosphere's most polite, fair-minded, and cheerful political bloggers could actually have written something as purile as what was quoted by O'Reilly. Maybe she had a tiring day, and out of exhaustion simply didn't hear what O'Reilly was actually saying. Either way, Amanda Carpenter owes Ed Morrissey a big apology.
With friends like these...

Thursday Trails

Four-day work weeks are one of the smaller pleasures in life, but my, how they satisfy..! The weekend is already right around the corner, and it's hard to keep from thinking of its restful potential as we glance through the news on a warm Thursday morning.

Victory: Gurkha veterans have won their battle to live in Britain, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government reversed its earlier roadblocks to Gurkha resettlement.

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: 'This has been a great victory for Joanna Lumley and her well-run campaign that has publicly embarrassed Ministers and has reminded us all of the role that the Gurkhas have played in helping defend this country over the centuries.
'First and foremost this case was about basic decency. People from around the world have come to live in this country in the past decade.
'There was never a justification to deny that right to a group of people who have long lived in the nation's affections, and who have risked and often given their lives for its protection.
'It is just a shame that the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts and then through the crowds of Gurkhas outside parliament before it finally did the right thing.'

Scandal: And speaking of the UK government... On his talk show yesterday Hugh Hewitt interviewed firebrand pundit Christopher Hitchens to get his perspective on the unbelievable expense scandal unraveling within Great Britain's parliament. Items as petty as tampons and porn film rentals, and as grand as chandeliers and castle moat-cleaning, were approved as appropriate expenses by an amoral bureaucracy. In his assessment Hitchens makes a drive-by comment that puts a shape to the half-formed thoughts I had been having while following the scandal's parade of daily outrages. From the transcript:

Christopher Hitchens: Do you remember A Man For All Seasons? It’s just occurred to me to ask you.
Hugh Hewitt: Yes, I do.
CH: Do you remember when the man sells out for Sir Thomas More?
HH: Yes, I do.
CH: And he does it for a small sinecure?
HH: Yes. He should have been a teacher.
CH: Yes. And the man does it for a small sinecure in Wales. And Thomas More, I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but he says to him, I can see, I can imagine selling your immortal soul and your friends and so on for, as it might be, a kingdom. But he said but for Wales?
HH: For Wales.
CH: For Wales. What’s amazing is how it’s always the same with corruption scandals, I find, how little people will settle for before their integrity is all gone.

Integrity: While far-reaching, Britain's "home allowance" expense scandal is not all-encompassing; there are a few members who did not break the rules, or exploit them, and the British national newspaper The Telegraph, which first broke the news on the scandal, has given credit where credit is due to the honest representatives.

Leadership: Mal Fletcher uses the expense scandal as a backdrop for an eloquent lesson on the difference between leadership and management. The distinguishing characteristic is... character:

[W]ithout moral leadership - leadership based on conviction rather than pragmatism - administration is left hopelessly at the mercy of expediency.
At the end of the week, the moral of the story is this: we have very few true leaders in government and a great many followers. There are few who will go against "standard practice" - that is, what the rest of the pack are doing - and set out on a righteous path.
The nature of modern government, built as it is around a labyrinth of complex committees and regulatory bodies, allows very little scope for real leadership to develop among the representatives of the people.

Rick Warren On The Difference Between Mentors And Models

Interesting interview last Friday on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, which I finally got around to listening to tonight as a podcast. Pastor Rick Warren, author of "Purpose Driven Life", one of the highest-selling books of all time, and Saddleback Church fame was a guest for the final two hours of the broadcast.

The interview covered a number of worthwhile subjects, but I particularly enjoyed Pastor Warren's concluding remarks, which included this insightful guide on learning from the various types of relationships we can form with others:

“You need four people in you life: mentors, models, partners and friends.

You need a mentor who is alive, who can coach you… by the way, it’s good to have multiple mentors, you can have one mentor who helps you in an area, another that helps you in another. Because no mentor knows everything.

For instance: I’ve had in my life, many many mentors. Billy Graham mentored me in terms of leadership in culture; Peter Drucker mentored me for years and years on leadership and management of an organization. My own father mentored me in how you do relationships and get along with everybody no matter who they are. A man named Harry Williams, who was like a father to me, mentored me in evangelism. How to see each person’s need, and how to show how the Gospel can meet that need.

So different people teach you different things.

Then you need a model. Your model should always be dead. Don’t have a live model. You can have a live mentor, but not a live model. Because you don’t know how they’re going to end up yet. A lot of times you have someone as a model, and they flame out morally, and… you’re goin’: “what.. what happened?” So, have a dead model.

And then you need partners, the guys who’ll work with you.

And then you’re going to need friends, who are going to love you even though you’re
cracked.

Transcripts of the two Friday interviews can be found here.

CPSIA: "It's Hard To Remember Anything In The Last 20 Years As Crazy As This"

CPSIA update: Hugh Hewitt had a riveting first hour on his radio talk show tonight, as he continued his significant coverage of the economic carnage being wrought by the legal insanity known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which was let loose upon an unsuspecting America this past February. Hundreds of product lines have been unduly affected by this monstrosity born of good intentions, who-knows-how-many millions (or has it reached billions..?) of dollars worth of inventories are being needlessly destroyed, businesses are going out of business and there's no relief in sight.

Hugh Hewitt has been far and away the most responsive journalist in spreading awareness of this unbelievable economic scourge; as he himself points out later in the interview, he's even telling other journalists about CPSIA's infernal existence. For his program this evening Hugh interviewed a guest he's had on before on this subject, attorney Gary Wolensky, who represents the besieged motor bike industry, and the Manhattan Institute's indefatigable Walter Olson. It was a great discussion. Well, "great" is a relative term in this case, as the story being discussed is a preposterous example of the complete indifference that Congressional elites have for working class Americans.

The audio is here. It doesn't seem like Hugh is going to provide a transcript as he sometimes does with important interviews, so as my small contribution to keeping people informed on this story, I've quickly put one together myself. Here's part one [corrections welcome]:

[11:00] HH: ...We’re arguing about $165 million in bonuses to AIG, what is your best estimate about what the CPSIA has cost America?

Walter Olson: It’s hard to get a peg on it. Certainly billions of dollars. And it’s hard to measure what happens when a small business has to close down. What happens to that family, what happens to the employees. But, we know that in just one industry, the mini-cycle/dirt-bike industry, they’re talking about a billion dollars of damage this year. That’s just one of many industries affected by this.

HH: Now Walter Olson, we’ve talked in the past before, we know that sometimes laws lead to extraordinary hardships, wrongfully. In this instance, everyone knows what’s going on, but do you see any signs in Congress that they are going to move to save these billions of dollars, these tens of thousands of jobs, which they did not intend, at least they say they did not intend to kill.

WO: It’s very discouraging in a way, because even though you’ve now got a lot of talk going from people on the Republican side, even John Dingell, one of the Democrats is making some of the right noises, the ones in control are Henry Waxman and his counterparts on the Democratic side of the Senate, they are stonewalling, they are saying they will not even have hearings let alone amend the law.

HH: Gary Wolensky, Walter Olson mentioned ATVs, off-road vehicles, all-terrain vehicles; on this show on Friday, Chairwoman Nord of the Consumer Products Safety Commission told me there was going to be a hearing this week on this and I urged them to just pass an exemption regardless of what the law said. Has that hearing happened?

Gary Wolensky: The hearing has not happened up to now Hugh, and I have not heard that in fact there is going to be a hearing this week.

HH: Do you have… do you think she was shining me on? Did you hear that interview?

GW: I heard the interview. I think she’s a very nice person, unfortunately she’s irrelevant, because her hands are tied and she can’t get anything done. And she won’t go adversarial, which she can do but won’t.

HH: Walter Olson, my urging of the chairwoman on Friday was, they just instruct their staff, to pass exemptions out left and right, because this is a nutty law that is endangering children. Their mission is to protect consumers, but if you put kids on adult bikes they get injured, some of them get killed. Do you see any sign within the CPSC that their staff will do whatever it takes to stop this outrage from happening?

WO: Well, they are being driven by their legal staff on this, because I think that legal staff is telling them that the statutes are written to tie their hands, and they might lose a lawsuit if they ignore the crazy language that Congress put in.

HH: But Walter I was a General Counsellor to two Federal agencies, I know what it’s like to see crazy language, but I also know that I did what the boss said; if the boss came out and said “we’re not going to do stupid things, we’re going to give exemptions”, they have to go that way. If media generated some demand on the CPSC, do you think that would matter?

WO: [sigh] I’m fairly skeptic it would not have, because… remember, they tried to do a common-sensical thing on the inventories, the stuff with the plastic, and they got struck down in court. Apparently they were trying to soften the blow on some of the crazy things in the law, but they pointed to specific language, that “not any lead exposure”, so the mini-bike people, the ball-point pen people, who knows who else who can’t take the lead out of their products without losing the product, who knows what’s going to happen to them.

HH: Gary Wolensky, today a motorcyclist announced that he was simply going to sell the ATVs. “Screw ‘em”. “Tell them to come prosecute me.” What’s your reaction to such obvious civil disobediance? I’ll get his name off the printer at the break.

GW: I saw that. As a lawyer, giving my best legal advice, I certainly would not tell anyone to break the law.

HH: Do you think they’ll prosecute him?

GW: I don’t think they are going to prosecute him.

HH: Walter Olson, what do you think about that? Have you read that story yet?

WO: I’ve read the story, I think it’s going to rev up the press’ interest in this. He’s a very well-known person…

HH: His name is Malcolm Smith…

WO: Malcolm Smith, very famous in that sport.. it could be like H.L. Mencken on Boston Common, remember when he sold the banned book and he became a cause celebre. In that case I think they arrested him but nothing happened to him. In this case… you know, they’re not going to send someone to arrest him, it’s… it’s not as if a public citizen is going to do a citizen’s arrest, I don’t **think** anything will happen.

HH: What I worry about, Gary Wolensky, is that since there’s a private plaintiff’s action attached in the law, some idiot plaintiffs lawyer will go and lay a suit against Malcolm Smith Motorsports and that that lawyer will get a summary judgment.

GW: Well, I can see it coming two ways. Number one, a private plaintiff’s attorney, also, a state’s Attorney General, our state Attorney General sees something like the statement that you’ve just referred to, and he can start an injuction proceeding. I can also see a plaintiff’s attorney, getting a motion for summary judgment, and also compulsatory damages.

HH; Malcolm Smith, God love you. Malcolm Smith Motorsports located on Indiana avenue in Riverside, you can read about this on Motorcycle-usa.com. Walter Olson, what’s the interest of the readers of your blog? Obviously, you’ve covered litigation abuse for a decade now… you’ve been doing this for 17, 18 years now, and this really one of the most outrageous episodes in the law that I’ve ever covered; what’s the interest at Overlawyered.com?

WO: I happened onto it. I have to say, I neglected it last year when they were actually passing this darn thing, but as I began seeing the stories, I realized that in some ways this is the craziest legislation that I will get a chance to write about… [chuckles]

HH: Yes!!

WO: … in this decade. And it is so full of interest, there are so many different, innocent people out there, nice people, the sort of people you would want to be making things for your kids, but who are having their lives turned upside down by this. I can’t resist the human interest. Secondly, simply as a defiance of cost-benefit analysis and common sense, it’s hard for me to remember anything in the last twenty years that was as crazy as this.

HH: Now I also want to press you, Walter, as we’re both journalists, and we’re both lawyers – Mr. Walensky does not have to share the shame of being a journalist – I find mainstream media abysmally incompetent here. Now I’ve asked a number of my pals who’ve called in, guys I like a lot, like [Newsweek's] Howard Fineman, [the Washington Post's] E.J. Dionne, if they’ve even heard of the law. And they haven’t heard of the law. Mark Steyn has, by the way. Are you as astonished as I am that nobody cares about this?

WO: I am astonished, and I’ve even written about this, why is it the more you lead the press to this the more totally out to lunch they are on this issue. The east coast, the New York Times and so forth, they just have no clue what is going on out there, almost none of the good journalism has come out of Washington on this, even though that’s where the Agency is, that’s where most of the legal knowledge is and so forth. Instead, the AP is finally doing something good, after months and months, it’s coming out of Jefferson City Missouri, because they’ve got one good reporter there, who's actually figured out it’s a major issue.

HH: Last question for Walter Olson… if President Obama came out, and said, “I am going to fix this”, do you think that would be a huge political plus for him?

WO: Well I think it would be a huge political plus, because as soon as people learned about the issue, and of course you’ve got librarians and book people and so forth all suffering under the law, there would be overwhelmingly on his side. In fact all he would have to do is stare down Henry Waxman, which they’ll tell you in Washington is impossible. I don’t actually think it would be impossible, at all. Barack Obama, you can do it.

HH: I don’t know why Henry Waxman wants to dis-employ so many people....

[commercial break]

[Part two of the transcript continues here]

Consumer Product Safety Chairman On CPSIA: "There Are Some Real Problems Here"

The economic scourge caused by the CPSIA continues to destroy billions of dollars worth of inventories in this recessionary ecomony, and the US Congress doesn't appear in any hurry to amend any of the unintended consequences of their Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. They seem unable to admit they have made a mistake, and the final cost for this vanity is reaching an astonishing level.

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt continues to do an excellent job of covering this appalling story, in fact he's one of the only media voices giving this economic plague any regular attention. Yesterday Hugh Hewitt interviewed Nancy Nord, Chairman of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, looking for some answers to the obvious question: What is being done to fix this problem?

The good news: the commission knows about the economic damage the CPSIA is causing.
The bad news: there doesn't seem to be anything they can do to stop the damage from continuing.

From the transcript:

...
Hugh Hewitt: Congress and the commission are now sort of pointing fingers at each other. I’ve been forwarded e-mails from Senator Durbin’s office to some of the impacted business out there saying it’s up to you guys to grant exemptions. And I’ve read some statements from commission staff saying we don’t have the authority to grant exemptions. You know, so the finger pointing goes on, and the businesses are burning down. What’s happening?

Nancy Nord: Well, it really is something that we’re very concerned about. Congress passed this very well-intended piece of legislation in response to the recalls of 2007-2008. They did it very quickly, and perhaps did not give sufficient thought to some of the provisions. You raised the exemption provision, and that is a very, very good example of what I’m talking about. Although the legislation indicates that we can give exemptions from the lead provisions of the law, in certain circumstances, those circumstances are very, very limited. And Congress was very precise in telling us when we could give exemptions, and when we could not. And unfortunately, we are now seeing many, many more products that have trace amounts of lead, products that really are not going to harm consumers at all. They’re not unsafe. But they don’t meet the very, very strict standards of the law. And the way the law is written, our hands are tied. So Congress really needs to find, to help us find some wiggle room here, if you will. We’re very hard-pressed to find exclusions from this new law.

HH: Now if I were your general counsel, and I have been the general counsel of two federal agencies, OPM and NEH, I’d come in and I’d say to you, Madame Chairman, we’ve got to take a stand here, we’ve got to issue an exemption, for example, to all-terrain vehicles, regardless of the trace amounts of lead, because they’re dying, people are losing their jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory are lost, and let the chips fall. You’re not going to go to jail, I’m not going to go to jail, but these people are going to go out of business. How do you respond to that?

NN: Well, our job as a regulatory agency is to implement the law that Congress wrote as Congress wrote it. So that is what we need to do. You should be aware, I’m sure you probably are aware that we did try to take a reasonable approach with respect to implementing one of the provisions dealing with a substance called phthalates, which are used in plasticizers. It’s what makes a rubber ducky squeezable, if you will. And a federal district court overturned us and said no, our reading of the law was incorrect, that Congress really intended that everything in inventory, everything on store shelves, things sitting in container ships making their way to this country, they were all outlawed if they were not tested for phthalates.
...
HH: I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails, you probably have as well…from very small businesses, people who make a thousand dollars worth of products, or five thousand dollars worth of products. Now I’ve had big time lawyers on like Wolensky of Snell and Wilmer, and they represent sporting goods and all-terrain vehicles, and they can go argue the case to the commission. But these small timers, they’re just wiped out. Are you getting those e-mails as well?

NN: Well, of course we are. One of the problems with this law, and actually, I think one of the biggest problems with this law, is the fact that it basically is retroactive. It put in place a ban on lead in children’s products, and it applies not only to products manufactured after the effective date of February 10th, but it applies to all products sold in the United States after that date, which pulls in inventory, it pulls in products on store shelves, things that were deemed perfectly safe on February 9th, on February 10th, are deemed to be illegal. And that is perhaps not the best way to regulate...
...
The thing that I think you need to understand, and your listeners need to understand, is that the law has been pretty precise in what they have told us to do, and that is what we need to do. Our obligation as a regulatory agency is to implement the CPSIA.
...
Now as we have gone through this process, we have found that there are some real problems here. We have brought them to the attention of Congress. I would hope that we can work with Congress to solve these problems as quickly as we possibly can, because the last thing that we want to do, that I want to do, is to impose economic havoc on businesses that are really just trying to provide safe products to the consumers.

Mark Steyn On CPSIA: "Government By Insanity"

Mark Steyn was interviewed in the first hour of today's Hugh Hewitt radio show, primarily to get Mark's reaction to this week's political news. Hugh has been covering the legislated carnage courtesy of the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), and he raised the subject with the Columnist To The World:

MS: [...T]his safety thing has made every children's book printed before 1985 apparently a lethal weapon!

HH: Yes.

MS: It's illegal... if I happen to have a 1982 edition of Tom Sawyer lying around, it's illegal for me to sell that at my local rummage sale, because it'll kill the kid who reads it. This is rubbish! None of this stuff is needed... All of that gets in the way of the dynamic and productive part of the American economy.

HH: You know, Mark, it sideswiped the entire all-terrain vehicle industry, destroying a huge market segment where they would sell these vehicles to 12 and under, they can't do it now because of lead in the machines. It was not intended to do that, it just did it!

MS: Let me tell you something, I'm not going to pay any attention to that. In my little corner of New Hampshire, every 12-year old boy loves taking an ATV, loves riding it around up in the hills. And the idea that the lead in it is going to cause that kid to keel over, is preposterous. This is government by insanity...

How many businesses is this law crippling? Hugh posts an email he received as a result of the hour he devoted to CPSIA on his Monday program:

...I am a franchisee of a quick service hamburger chain sitting on $30,000 in obsolete inventory as a result of this act due to the phthalate content of our kids meal toys, which by the way had been deemed safe for years but have suddenly (first week of Feb 2009) and with no notice been determined to immediately be hazardous and non saleable. It’s a terrible blow to discard this inventory as I struggle to pay my bills in the middle of this recession.

After the Mark Steyn interview, Hugh took some listener calls, and heard from a pen manufacturer; the retailers that he sells to have apparently canceled all their fall back-to-school orders, because they are waiting to see what the long-term results of CPSIA will be. Unlike all-terrain vehicles, children may actually put pens (highlighter and otherwise) in their mouths...
How many small entrepreneurs is this law crushing? Can an outfit like Bugbitesplayfood afford to pay $10,000 for testing whether or not every component used in their hand-stitched ham sandwich is in compliance with CPSIA? What will be left of the handcraft industry if the law is left to stand? How many work-at-home mothers might have to find another way to earn an income... outside of the home, away from their kids?

If there's a silver lining to this legal monstrosity, it's the revelation of just how amazingly industrious a nation the United States has become. How many of us, for instance, were aware of the existence of an Irish Step Dance Apparel Industry?

[Hat tip to Overlawyered for the latest news of how CPSIA hurts the children's garment industry]

Mark Steyn Radio Interview

Mark Steyn was interviewed on Hugh Hewitt's nationally syndicated radio show last night, fulfilling his weekly Thursday appearance on Hugh's program.

The interview adds a few new details to the absurdity of the kangaroo court inquisition underway on Howe Street:

Mark Steyn: ... I’m glad to be able to shake off the fellows from the British Columbia Sheriff’s department. It’s very bizarre to me. They said they’d had, they’d been following me around everywhere in the building I go because they say there are security concerns. And it’s not clear whether it’s the security concern is that someone will try to kill me, or whether it’s me who’s the security concern.
...
Mark Steyn: You know, you mentioned this windowless basement I’m in.
Hugh Hewitt: Yes.
Mark Steyn: There’s no link with the outside world except a clock, which is stuck at 8:00. and that’s government bureaucracy for you. You know, in British Columbia, it claims to be able to eradicate hate, but it can’t get someone in to restart the clock.
...

Podcast of the interview available for downloading here. Transcript of the interview here.

Generation X, Meet Generation Zzzzzz.......

A reminder that as bad as things are, they can always get worse:

Only 1 of 2 students graduate high school in US cities

Three out of 10 US public school students do not graduate from high school, and major city school districts only graduate one out of two students, according to a study released Tuesday.

In a report on graduation rates around the country, the EPE Research Center and the America Promise Alliance also showed that the high school graduation rate -- finishing 12 grades of school -- in big cities falls to as low as just 34.6 percent in Baltimore, Maryland, and barely over 40 percent for the troubled Ohio cities of Columbus and Cleveland.
...
"Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in America's largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss," the study said.
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In the country's city schools, the study found that in urban areas generally, just 60.4 percent graduate, and in the principal school districts of the top 50 cities, barely half graduate.

Detroit, Michigan's main school district scored a graduation rate of 24.9 percent.

On yesterday's Hugh Hewitt radio show, Hugh asked columnist Christopher Hitchens for a comment on these depressing statistics. Hitchens grew even more despondent than usual as he spoke about his current experiences teaching a university class on English Litterature; with a sigh he explained how he has had to turn it into a history class, due to how little general knowledge his students possess about anything he is trying to talk about.

One example he offered was the shock he received when he discovered that his students had no idea that Mark Twain lived well before Ernest Hemingway.

Hugh countered with similar examples from his own current teaching experiences at law school, having to add considerable material on the US constitution at the start of his class now, in order for his students to understand the context for the rest of the curriculum he delivers.

There was only positive note to emerge from their exchange, and it's one that I've seen in my own limited experiences training and working with teenagers at our company. Many of them simply have no idea to what degree they are being short-changed in their education. Some know their schooling was of no value whatsoever, and they are fine with that, content with their lack of curiosity and lack of ambition. But some get angry, they get very angry, when they start to see just what they've been cheated of.

In that anger there is hope. Hope that one generation will not let the next one become satisfied with the low expectations and lower standards that they seem to have been hobbled with. Somehow a link in the chain has been broken, where parents were short-changed and therefore can't tell to what extent their children are being cheated in their turn.

Christopher Hitchens mentioned that after his extreme negative reaction to his discovery that not a single one of his students had ever heard of Henry James, his puzzled students went home to ask their parents, and their previous instructors, why this would make Hitchens get so angry. They went looking for an explanation for the extent of his negative reaction.

Neither their parents, nor their previous instructors, had ever heard of Henry James either.

That made the students very, very angry. And very determined to fill the hole they could now plainly see, since true wisdom tends to come from knowing what we don't yet know.

We need more of that kind of anger in students, and a lot less of the paralyzing cynicism they tend to be afflicted with, if we are to see any change in this ongoing downward spiral.

What's next... nobody graduates from high school...?