Next, they came for the craft beer and you said nothing

Want to know how to goon up a perfectly good win-win situation for all participating parties? You get the federal government involved, that’s how.


The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will now be regulating the spent grains from the brewing process because of pet food or something.

For centuries, brewers have given or sold the leftover grain from the brewing process to local ranchers and dairy farmers for cattle feed. But new regulations proposed by the Food and Drug Administration threaten to end that relationship.

"The whole brewing community was shocked about it," said Josh Deth, co-owner of Revolution Brewing in Chicago, Ill.
Deth, whose title is "Chairman of the Party," says it's always been a great deal for both sides. The ranchers get the grain, and the brewers get those leftovers removed from their facilities for free.

"We're trading, giving something of value to each other and working it out. I think that's one of the really great things, and people really hate to see the government get involved in something where they can just as easily stay out of this."

Under the FDA's proposed regulations, so-called spent grains would be regulated the same as pet food.


Deth said the regulations would make it far too costly for him to prepare the grains to be passed along to farmers. The only remaining option would be sending it to a landfill, which would cost more than $100,000 a year.

That would be bad for dairy and cattle farmers like Jim Minich, who gets 30 tons of spent grain from Revolution Brewing each week. Not only does the grain save him more than $100,000 a year in feed costs, his 750 cows also produce more milk after chowing down on their "happy hour."

"I mean it's just basically grain and it's got a lot of yeast in it and it's wet, so it adds to the palatability of the feed so they eat more," he said.

The regulations are part of the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act, a sweeping new food safety reform law signed by President Obama in 2011. According to the FDA, the purpose of the law is to improve the safety of animal food.

And just like that, farmers like Minich will be adding $100,000/year to their operating costs and breweries like Revolution Brewing will be doing likewise all in the name of animal food safety?


In Placentia, California, this is known as a solution in search of a problem as the article readily explains.

There's no record of spent grains causing any problems for cows or humans, though, according to Chris Thorne, a spokesman with the Beer Institute.

"We already meet or exceed the goals that the FDA would like us to see. So we see these regulatory procedures as completely unnecessary," Thorne told Fox News.

The FDA was flooded by comments from brewers, distillers and cow farmers when the proposed rule was announced.
Responding to the outcry, the FDA said in a statement it is now looking to revise the language for the rule this summer before issuing a final decision sometime next year.

"We are working to develop regulations that are responsive to the concerns expressed, practical for businesses, and that also help ensure that food for animals is safe and will not cause injury to animals or humans," the FDA said.

This represents a classic example of a sprawling federal bureaucracy looking to justify its existence by creating a make-work program, if you will, that accomplishes nothing but to the detriment of the dairy/cattle and brewing industries.


For you big government types, regulations are all fine and dandy when they don’t effect you. However, think of this completely unwarranted and unnecessary intrusion into a completely voluntary and mutually beneficial business arrangement the next time you are pedaling your fixie over to Toronado for a Pliny the Younger.

Why are "The Feds" in the rock'n'roll business...?

...we've heard their stuff and it blows.



Consider this our contribution to Reason.com's Nanny of the Month feature:


Young Pacific Northwestern Asian-American lads being denied the ability to trademark their band name.


From the Daily Caller:

A six-member, Portland, Ore. band composed entirely of Asian-Americans has been fighting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for over four years in an effort to trademark the band’s name — “The Slants.”

When the band first applied for the trademark in 2009, the PTO refused on the grounds that the name was offensive to Asians, citing two crowd-sourced reference sites — Wikipedia and the ever-colorful Urban Dictionary — in the denial.

The PTO cites some ancient "lewd and lascivious" legislation as grounds for denial but when you also cite Urban Dictionary, you've pretty much lost us.


Exit question(s) for our legal beagles out there: In this context what's in a trademark? And given this, is there anything preventing "The Slants" from just slapping that name on their bass drum, their van and performing gigs under that name?



If this music video is any indication, then, no.






Consider ourselves troopers in Slants Army!

Risk mitigation 101... or not

*

Being in the federal acquisition business, one of the things we worry about during the design of whatever U.S. Navy platform we happen to be working on is technological obsolescence. On its surface, it sounds pretty straight forward but in addition to that particular technology getting by-passed by newer technology there are the collateral concerns of whether, say, that particular technology will be supportable in way of upgrades, tech support, repair parts, regulatory restrictions, etc.


When choosing an oily water separator for your ship which has to purify, by law, engine room oily waste up to 15 ppm (parts per million), do you go with the model that does indeed do that or do you plunk down the additional money for the model that purifies waste oil to 5 ppm? That regulation is coming but you just don't know when. So, you balance the risk of buying the cheaper model that complies with current regulations and work towards getting grand-fathered vs. taking the plunge on the more expensive model knowing that the more restrictive regulation is inevitable and that the infrastructure support for the entire industry is moving in that direction anyway.


Team O, when putting together the online exchanges for the new healthcare law, bypassed all that heavy-lifting and appeared to say, "chuck it" when they employed technology for these exchanges that was already 10 years old.


From USA Today:

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY.

The site could be perfect, but if the systems from which it draws data are not up to speed, it doesn't matter, said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, a cloud computer service provider.

"It is a core problem in the sense of it's fundamental to this thing actually working, but it's not necessarily a problem that the people who wrote HealthCare.gov can get to," Engates said. "Even if they had a perfect system, it still won't work."

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer's cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

We're not quite sure what Engates meant in that paragraph above but as, admittedly, not the most tech-savvy folks, we will take a shot anyway.


There appears to be a next generation of smart phone that comes out every 6 months or so, currently. With the exponential growth of this technology, how in god's name are you going to find the people and the fixes for technology that is... 10 freaking years old?


One of the most basic functions of federal acquisition ignored entirely. This should all be completely inconceivable but... here we are.




And in other entirely related news:


Radio show host Roger Hedgecock has put out a challenge to his listenership to call in if they have a) successfully enrolled in ObamaCare and b) wound up with lower monthly premiums because of it. It seemed like really slim pickings until one lady, who along with her husband are self-employed, called in a few days ago with her success story.


After several false starts, she successfully enrolled into a health insurance plan and is now paying in the neighborhood of $150/month when previously she was paying upwards of $1100/month. Wow. That's quite a reduction, no? The woman then revealed she was getting subsidized to the tune of $1250/month. Dude. So, what this really breaks down to is that without the subsidy, she would be paying $1400/month in premiums or $300 more than she was paying previous to signing up for ObamaCare.

But, hey, a deal's a deal, right? Her out of pocket expenses on a monthly basis did indeed plunge $950/month thanks to the U.S. taxpayer. When you hear all that "scaremongering" about ObamaCare being the biggest middle class tax hike in history, this is why and that example is precisely how this represents not healthcare reform but a massive income redistribution scheme.







* That would be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, owner of this entire mess.

Some thoughts on this... "shutdown" and... outhouses?

A good friend posted the following on FaceBook regarding the shutdown and its effect on our National Parks:

My hope is that all those who have professed love for the parks and monuments -- and outrage over their closing these past 16 days -- will think long and hard before voting for people that end up constantly slashing the NPS budget to the bone. My fear is that there was a lot of feigned outrage over them for political reasons, however. Too bad, because our parks are in dire need.

We commented:

(M), I know this probably isn't the forum for it - we can discuss later - but my travels to our National Parks have not indicated any sort of underfunding. They are clean, well-maintained and properly staffed. This is just my anecdotal observations, your mileage may differ.

"M's" reply:

Big maintenance backlog.

In addition, there's all sorts of things that are cattywampus out beyond the pavement in any given park -- from invasive species of plants endangering delicate ecosystems that need to be yanked, Burmese Pythons being loosed and reproducing by the thousands in the Everglades that are tearing through native fauna populations, to the cutting of ranger programs.

Old buildings needing to be replaced, maintained, updated. That's just starters. 90% of all pavement on park roads in the system are in fair to poor shape per NPS "Critical Maintenance Backlog", plus 28 publicly accessible bridges are structurally deficient. NPS fleet vehicles are older than dirt. 6,700 miles of trail out of 18,600 are in "poor" or "seriously deficient" condition. Not to mention things like cleaning up after the dipsh*ts and their J-Tree tag-athon.

There's a lot more to these places than the 2-5 days we customarily get can expose us to.

And where we responded in kind:

(M), show me a federal service, department or bureau that doesn't consider itself to be underfunded and I will show you the Easter bunny. It's simply in the nature of bureaucracy to always cry poor mouth. As an employee of the DOD/DON, I know this to be fact. So, with a finite "pie", it becomes a matter of priorities. Back in 09, a $800 billion stimulus package was made law. The big selling point of it was that it would be put to use on the very roads, trails and bridges of which you speak. If the tremendous backlog of work iis as dire as you claim, then the powers that be apparently did not deem it worthy of consideration. $800B is a lot of money, after all. So having said that, and respecting your devotion to our Parks, I will certainly heed your advise with respect to lever-pulling for folks who would treat so shabbily those same Parks.

Our point was demonstrated in a article we posted 3 years ago after we visited Canyonlands NP (Utah) for the first time. Here it is:

NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHT FROM THE ROAD

... and where we heap effusive praise upon the government... in a manner of speaking...



Heavy thunder showers across central and southern Utah and the four corners region, including a couple of tornado touchdowns in northern Arizona, is threatening our road trip but there is some collateral benefit to this inclement weather which we will share later.




One of the things promised by Porkulus was that they would spend between $2 and $4 billion on infrastructure upgrades in our National Park system of which we were assured was in dire need (this was in addition to radio spots begging for donations to the NPS for the same reason). Being frequent visitors to various sites of this nation's best idea, we were skeptical as the eye test simply did not warrant this outlay. Sure, an upgrade here and there, but upwards of $4 billion worth?

After giving it some thought, we felt that perhaps the easiest and most accurate way to assess the infrastructural health of an individual national park would be to grade what is probably the most representative feature of the efficiency and aesthetics of any publicly-held land and that would be...


.... the block house.

After a random sampling of 4 outhouses inside Canyonlands National Park, let's look at the scores.


Lighting: With plenty of windows for natural lighting, even with the stormy/overcast conditions: Good

Cleanliness: Probably the most important factor: Excellent

Quantity/Availability: Adequate

Provisioning: Eight rolls of TP good enough for you?: Again, Excellent.

And bonus points for each one being outfitted with an anti-bacterial (scented!) gel dispenser.



And let's all bear in mind that Canyonlands NP, located where it is in southeastern Utah is, by definition, remote.

In all seriousness, if the overall condition of the park infrastructure (visitor center, road conditions, camp site maintenance, condition of hiking trails, etc.) of Canyonlands NP is to be taken as an example, then our skepticism is only confirmed.

And if the National Park Service is truly operating under budget, then they should be held up as an example of a federal agency that is doing a masterful job with limited resources.

Overall, the Park Service does an outstanding job with balancing the desires of the public with respect to access on one hand and on the other, not turning our park system into a paved, four-lane, amusement park.

A Bravo-Zulu to the policy-makers and men and women in uniform of the U.S. National Park Service.

All during this alleged shutdown, the federal government was up on the throttle at 87% full power. The closing of memorials and National Parks and the cancelling of air shows was all bulls**t. Totally unnecessary. The administration was determined to exact as much pain out of that 13% as possible and to make life as miserable as possible for people like our friend and those of us who do indeed love our park system.

Cruzapalooza!

Some tweeted thoughts from us and others as Ted Cruz (R-TX) is in the middle of his not-quite-a-filibuster for the ostensible purpose of defunding ObamaCare and the related issue of a government shut-down if the President vetoes the spending bill sent to him by Congress.

If the federal gov't shuts down, who is it that will weaponize Syrian jihadists? #DefundObamacare

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

If the federal gov't shuts down, who will be left to blame incomptence and derelection of duty on a crappy Youtube video? #Benghazi

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

@GOPBlackChick @DavidVitter Crystal can you do us a favor and tell those GOP Senators hiding under their desks to man up #StandWithTed

— Thomas Marchetti (@Ryanexpress77) September 24, 2013

Those poor people who couldn't afford health ins in the first place,will now HAVE to buy it. #ObamacareRevolt

— J (@customjewel) September 24, 2013

If the gov't shuts down, who wil prevent people like those in the New Black Panther Party from intimida... uh, never mind. #DefundObamacare

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

And a Wendy Davis reference...

The press would love Senator Ted Cruz If only he filibustered In pink tennis shoes BURMA SHAVE

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 24, 2013

If the government shuts down, who will exempt the politically-connected from crappy laws? #DefundObamacare

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

Ted Cruz is attempting to do for everybody precisely the same thing President Obama has already done 4 the politically-connected. #ObamaCare

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

The hypocrisy is galling. This law is apparently so wonderful, everybody is lining up at the White House (including the very people who wrote the damn thing) to get out from under it.


Yet, precisely because ObamaCare is the man's "signature piece of legislation", there is no way in hell the President is going to sign legislation that defunds this horrible law.

A shut down of the government will require an act of commission by the President. He owns it. #Veto #DefundObamacare

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

And a thought for the week-kneed out there:

Fallout? Did not the GOP pick up seats in House & Senate after '96 shutdown & while running a lackluster candidate for President? #ObamaCare

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) September 24, 2013

And speaking of which and which also remains one of our biggest "Sliding Doors" what-ifs of the past 20-30 years: what would this country and the GOP be like if it was Jack Kemp at the top of that '96 Presidential ticket instead of the other way around?

We believe he could've won and would've been successful in institutionalizing the Reagan legacy.

Good to know

.

Ever vigilant, the F.B.I. lets us know who to look out for:

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

They're looking at you, Ron Paul supporters.



Teriffic. That from a federal government that will whack it's citizens overseas without due process, detain those same citizens indefinetely without cause and force religious groups to violate thier conscience.

And it's those audit-the-Fed types that are a threat to our safety and liberty?

.

Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious update

.

Do you remember when they told us that if we voted for McCain it would mean just four more years of secretive and non-transparent governance in a Presidential administration? Well, they were right.



Documents related to the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry where guns directly linked to the botched spectacularly successful Justice Department gun-running operation, have been sealed by the Obama administration.

The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

This means information will now be kept from the public as well as the media. Could this be a cover-up on the part of the “most transparent” administration in history? After all, the rifle used to kill the federal agent (Brian Terry) last December in Arizona’s Peck Canyon was part of the now infamous Operation Fast and Furious. Conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the disastrous scheme allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.

Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of more than 1,000 guns which have been used in numerous crimes. In Terry’s case, five illegal immigrants armed with at least two semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and Terry got hit.

The case against Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, one of the charged gunmen in the Terry murder has been sealed. Also sealed was the judge's reason for sealing the case.

Border Patrol officials familiar with the case say that the behavior and tactics of the gunmen indicate a level of military training.

And after praising legacy media outlets like the L.A. Times and CBS News for covering matters surrounding Fast and Furious, there is only silence.


And in other totally related news, that miserable hack that runs the Justice Departments whines to the Daily Caller to back off on calls for his resignation.

Embattled Attorney General Eric Holder today demanded The Daily Caller stop publishing articles about the growing calls in Congress for his resignation because of the failed Operation Fast and Furious gun-walking program.

As Holder’s aide was escorting the attorney general offstage following his remarks Tuesday afternoon at the White House, a Daily Caller reporter introduced himself and shook Holder’s hand. The reporter asked him for a response to the growing chorus of federal legislators demanding his resignation.

Holder stepped towards the exit, then turned around, stepped back toward the reporter, and sternly said, “You guys need to — you need to stop this. It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it.”

Holder then walked offstage without answering TheDC’s request for comment about calls for his resignation.

Organic!

It just doesn't have that grass-roots authenticity, we can only assume from what the miserable hack is talking about.


This is disgraceful. Holder does need to sacked and the court records unsealed. Your own federal government has been operating a gun-running scheme which has resulted in the death of a federal agent and god-knows-how-many innocent Mexican civilians and officials. And that same federal government simply wants to brush it underneath the carpet, aided and abetted by a criminally complicit media wing who, as we all know, would be in full throat if something remotely similar to this were to occur, say, 4 or 5 years ago.

World upsidedown

Via KT:



And from KT:

Ignore the "Those crazy Frenchies are striking again" meme and consider this: every time they nationalize an industry, its problems become political, not economic. That is, there is an upper limit on what unions working for a private firm can demand because they don't want to bankrupt the company. When you work for a government that can print money, that limit is practically unimaginable.

KT's right. There is no rational purpose behind public-sector unions. Government bureaucracies do not have bottom lines and balance sheets in the same way private enterprises do. In the private sector, when the unions and management sit down to negotiate a new labor contract in good faith, there is an understanding on both sides of concessions that can be made and new benefits granted. When management can print money, what is its pain threshold? What new benefits that labor is going to demand will hurt management's bottom line?

We suppose Europe is finding out the answer to this question, right now.



P.S. As federal employees, we do not belong to a union. The AFSCME set up shop in our office about 6 months ago and we decided not to join, not only out of principle as explained above, but also because the labor rules governing the conduct of the union turn the traditional concept of labor-management relations completely on its head. It's a parody of a union to the degree that an old-school union type would not recognize it.

Let's put it this way: Under AFSCME labor rules, labor and management are basically in bed together. Scandalous? Perhaps. But the completely perverse concept of public-sector unions, as it is, actually makes this arrangement sensible.

Your tax dollars at work

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is now the biggest outside spender of the 2010 elections, thanks to an 11th-hour effort to boost Democrats that has vaulted the public-sector union ahead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and a flock of new Republican groups in campaign spending

The 1.6 million-member AFSCME is spending a total of $87.5 million on the elections after tapping into a $16 million emergency account to help fortify the Democrats' hold on Congress. Last week, AFSCME dug deeper, taking out a $2 million loan to fund its push. The group is spending money on television advertisements, phone calls, campaign mailings and other political efforts, helped by a Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on campaign spending.

"We're the big dog," said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME's political operations. "But we don't like to brag."

Contrary to what the President is insisting of other campaigning organizations, no need to ask who is funding this massive effort, just look in the mirror.


Full disclosure: We're employed by the feds, though we do not belong to the AFSCME union.

Fun with numbers

Today has been brought to by the numbers 135 and 312.

135 rhymes with the amount of money in billions that the federal government took in revenue for the month of October.

And 312 rhymes with amount of money in billions that same federal government spent in the month of October.

Having fun with that Hope and Change?

H/T: Chris Reed

A time but mostly a place for everything (UPDATED)

(please scroll down for update)


When you go to these management seminars one of the management-speak axioms you may learn is, “Under-promise, Over-deliver”.

This is the concept of initially lowering expectations so that you give yourself a greater opportunity of exceeding those same expectations when its time to deliver the goods later on and all of which makes you look like a star. It is a concept that is lost on the federal government when it comes to the H1N1 vaccination effort but to its credit, it can’ help itself.

Earlier this month, the government was forced to announce that only about 28 million doses would be available by the end of this month, about 30 percent below the 40 million it had previously predicted. That is not enough to satisfy panicky people who are lining up for vaccine around the country or desperately phoning their doctors and public health departments.

But the October shortfall was not the first. Indeed, since the outbreak of the H1N1 swine flu occurred in April, federal projections have been consistently and wildly overoptimistic and have had to be ratcheted down several times. As recently as late July, the government was predicting having 160 million doses by this month.

And to show you are hearts are in the right place, let’s just start by saying this is not an Obama thing just as Katrina wasn’t a Bush thing in the way it was portrayed in the media. What this is, however, is a big, unwieldy, emotionally-detached bureaucratic thing.

And when undertaking huge national efforts like this, we are not necessarily saying the federal government with all its assets and infrastructure is not the best entity to handle a massive undertaking as potentially vaccinating hundreds of millions of people.

As Americans, we accept inefficiencies and under-deliveries when it comes to efforts like this. We accept the fact that the armed forces are going to be an extremely wasteful and inefficient entity while waging war. The goal is victory and not the carbon footprint. And the goal here is simple: produce the vaccine, distribute the vaccine, and administer the vaccine. We said simple, not easy.

But the finer and more intricate details of healthcare and in particular the personal aspects of you and your family’s healthcare is not served well by this blunt force trauma “Win the War” mindset of the federal government.

This is why it is so curious to hear about the savings that will be accrued in healthcare by actually having more federal government involvement. The government will only make things more efficient, or more accurately, less expensive by limiting the choices to what health care options we have already. This is an inescapable fact.

At the end of the day, the federal government is no more qualified to be directly or indirectly involved in your personal healthcare decisions than was the Delaware National Guard in defeating the Nazis and Imperial Japan in World War II.

(UPDATE #1): B-Daddy has a more cynical take on Obama’s reasons for declaring the swine flu a national emergency but were not inclined to be so much so. The President is in a small bind here. Let’s say the swine flu does indeed blow-up – the President will look like he was not out in front of this. He’s hedging on the side of caution and for that we can’t blame him.

Now, we won’t deny that there is some political motivation behind this. With his current dithering on the Afghanistan question, he needs something… anything in which to appear as the more forceful and decisive Commander-in-Chief than what we are seeing currently.

Doing the Jobs the Feds won't.

Not to be outdone by the L.A. Times, the New York Times gets in on the sympathy-mongering with respect to illegal immigrant deportations. The NYT’s angle on this story, though, is legislation being passed at the state level that gives law enforcement folks at the state and local levels greater latitude in enforcing immigration laws while the Feds drag their feet or simply refuse to enforce these laws.

Ever since we started this blog, we’ve been banging on illegal immigration pretty hard so we don’t want to sound entirely unsympathetic to the families and particularly the children who had no say in this, especially with regard to the actions of their parents. Any time, you allow an illegal socio-economic phenomenon to grow and develop unchecked, any attempts to slow, alter or even stop its progress will indeed appear reactionary and even draconian.

We get it – we understand it, that is why the charges of “racism” and “nativism” never bother us. It bothers us far more that a government for the people (it’s citizens) and by the people (again, it’s citizens) that has been at least tacitly complicit in this phenomena seems more concerned with the welfare of those who aren’t supposed to be here than with those who are.

It appears, though, that some levels of government have received the message. Congress may still be a little slow on the uptake (and who is that 1 person in 5 who actually thinks they’re doing a good job?) but they’ll get the message, eventually. They’ll get it like a 2x4 upside the head.