Another wacky bleeding heart liberal?
Not exactly.
An Arkansas lawmaker has dropped her proposal to require state colleges and hospitals to provide interpreters for some workers after she said activists flooded lawmakers with complaints about the measure.
Republican Sen. Ruth Whitaker of Cedarville on Wednesday withdrew her proposal and said she'd no longer pursue it during the session. Whitaker's proposal would have required state-funded hospitals, colleges and universities to provide an interpreter if an employee's English skills "would materially interfere" with a job requiring oral communication.
I honestly don't know what this woman was thinking.
ReplyDeletePandering to illegals at a state level?
ReplyDeleteActually, I can see interpreters to help with certain employees, such as a top researcher coming in as a lecturer, or a quality surgeon, but that is something that would not be forced onto the employer.
Her district is somewhere around Fort Smith. Call it a guess, but somehow I don't think that she's talking about top researchers or quality surgeons.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there's a backstory, but I can't find it. Who knows.
Whoa! You want wacky ... here is wacky!
ReplyDeleteFrom the WSJ link ... President Obama says he wants to purge regulations that are "just plain dumb," ... perhaps he should review a new rule that is supposed to prevent oil spills akin to the Gulf Coast disaster—at the nation's dairy farms.
Two weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that subjects dairy producers to the Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure program, which was created in 1970 to prevent oil discharges in navigable waters or near shorelines. Naturally, it usually applies to oil and natural gas outfits. But the EPA has discovered that milk contains "a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil," as the agency put it in the Federal Register.
In other words, the EPA thinks the next blowout may happen in rural Vermont or Wisconsin. Other dangerous pollution risks that somehow haven't made it onto the EPA docket include leaks from maple sugar taps and the vapors at Badger State breweries.
The EPA rule requires farms—as well as places that make cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream and the like—to prepare and implement an emergency management plan in the event of a milk catastrophe. Among dozens of requirements, farmers must train first responders in cleanup protocol and build "containment facilities" such as dikes or berms to mitigate offshore dairy slicks.
These plans must be in place by November, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is even running a $3 million program "to help farmers and ranchers comply with on-farm oil spill regulations." You cannot make this stuff up.
The final rule is actually more lenient than the one the EPA originally proposed. The agency tried to claim jurisdiction over the design specifications of "milk containers and associated piping and appurtenances," until the industry pointed out that such equipment was already overseen by the Food and Drug Administration, the USDA and state inspectors. The EPA conceded, "While these measures are not specifically intended for oil spill prevention, we believe they may prevent discharges of oil in quantities that are harmful."
We appreciate Mr. Obama's call for more regulatory reason, but it would be more credible if one of his key agencies wasn't literally crying over unspilled milk.
The more agency "rules" supplant law, the less relevant Congress is, and it is their own doing by writing vague documents that even they don't read.
Then agencies who expand their turf by absurd presumptions ... think EPA & CO2, FCC and Net Neutrality, etc. ... it never ends until you have multiple agencies "managing" the same thing (see USDA, FDA, and EPA vis a vis milk above).
Anyone know who's on first? Can you even tell anymore?