Stupid: Two states still have laws on the books prohibiting you from pumping your own gas...

Chris Christie's New Jersey is one, but that may be changing. The other is the liberal mecca of Oregon. 

Via The Oregonian:

If a New Jersey lawmaker has his way, Oregon could become the only state in the U.S. where it's illegal to pump your own gas.
On Friday, New Jersey Assemblyman Declan O'Scanlon (R-Monmouth) announced his plan for a phased-in approach to end the Garden State's decades-old ban on self-service gasoline.
According to NJ.com, the bill includes a provision to allow gasoline station employees to continue to fill customers' tanks if they so choose. Earlier this month, NJ.com reported that state officials hadn't enforced the self-service ban in at least two years.
"I'm amazed at how many folks raise this issue with me. It's the right thing to do, so we'll see," O'Scanlon told NJ.com.
Oregon's gas-pumping law has been on the books since 1951.

I can't remember the year I last had someone pump my gas. It was decades ago.

Change: Obama's EPA has released almost 25,000 pages of new regulations...

Via CNS News:

Since Jan. 20, 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published 2,827 final regulations, which equal 24,915 pages and total an estimated 24,915,000 words in the Federal Register.
Those 24,915 pages of regulations are more than 19 times the number of pages in the Gutenberg Bible, which is 1,282 pages and published in two volumes.
In addition, at 24,915,000 words, the EPA regulations have 38 times as many words as the Gutenberg Bible, which has 646,128 words; 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series, which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words; 5,484 times as many words as the U.S. Constitution, which has 4,543 words, including the signatures; and 17,088 times as many words as the Declaration of Independence, which has 1,458 words including signatures.
Using the Regulations.gov website and the Federal Register itself, CNSNews.com found 2,827 distinct rules published by the EPA since January 2009 covering, among other things, greenhouse gases, air quality, emissions and hazardous substances.
Keep on reading…

Stupid: Bleachers built with parents money for boys' baseball torn down because they were nicer than girls

How did we end up with government officials this stupid micromanaging our lives? 

Via The Blaze:

The U.S Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has forced a school in Michigan to tear down a brand-new set of bleachers for its boys’ varsity baseball team because the new seating is nicer than the girls’ softball bleachers.
The raised seating deck for the boys’ baseball team, which was paid for with money raised by parents, was put in place because fans who’d come to watch games at Plymouth High School in Canton, Mich., were having a hard time seeing the game through the chain-link fence WJBK-TV reported.
The parents installed the new bleachers themselves and even added a new scoreboard to the field, the station reported.
But after an investigation by government officials, which was prompted by an anonymous complaint, the school was told it had to remove the new seating because it was “no longer equal” to the adjacent girls’ softball bleachers, which have yet to get a makeover of their own.
Keep on reading…

This proves once again, modern liberalism is a form of insanity.

Scary: EPA wants vastly expanded regulatory power to implement “sustainable development,”

Sustainable development is about making the EPA more “anticipatory” in its approach to environmental issues. In other words, they will implement regulations on unproven models and predictions, not actual occurrences or events. This will be the "future crimes" version of environmentalism. It is time to disband the EPA and start over again.

(Fox News) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyzes problems and makes decisions, in a way that will give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable development,” the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June.

The major focus of the EPA thinking is a weighty study the agency commissioned last year from the National Academies of Science. Published in August, the study, entitled “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” cost nearly $700,000 and involved a team of a dozen outside experts and about half as many National Academies staff.

Its aim: how to integrate sustainability “as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.” The panel who wrote the study declares part of its job to be “providing guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable-development trajectory for the United States.”

Or, in other words, how to use existing laws to new ends.

Read more here…

Scary: Our Government has almost a million pages of what President Obama calls "commonsense safeguards"

President Obama claims he wants to reduce government regulation, but will not get rid of "commonsense safeguards." On the unlikely possibility he is serious, he has plenty of materiel to work with.

President Barack Obama recently promised a war on red tape, joining a line of American presidents stretching back to Jimmy Carter. This promise is frequently made — but seldom kept.

The number of pages in the Federal Register (a frequently cited measure of government red tape) has skyrocketed in recent decades, from 170,325 in the 1960s to 730,176 in the 2000s. The most recent estimate of the cost of all this federal regulation to businesses, their employees and their customers is $1.75 trillion per year.

Despite lip service to the contrary, too many presidents (and politicians in general) hold the wrongheaded belief that government has the power to cure what ails us.

Interestingly, there is a study that claims we could create 100 new jobs anually for every regulator fired.

This regulatory drag bears an economic cost: A new study by the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Policy Studies estimates that, on average, eliminating the job of a single regulator grows the American economy by $6.2 million and nearly 100 private sector jobs annually.

I seemed to have missed that part of President Obama's new jobs plan.