Surreality: CARB contemplating a "skeptical science" regulation with penalties

As the world turns…
Similar to the federal side and the EPA, TSA, DOE, etc and other out of control bureaucractic agencies
CARB needs to be defunded, along with the CEC, etc.
If the TEA party sticks together… the FEDS will not be able to Bail out Calif again, and the state will have to go bankrupt…
I find it ironic (or is that moronic) that the state supposedly re-elected moonbeam, since he is at the root of the problems.
The state of CA is consistently screwed up.

Dear Rational Debate
Information per your request
Primary System developed:
– Explosive Destruction System see details at http://www.cma.army.mil/nscmp.aspx
Primary mission locations:
– Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, 2001-2004 – destroyed over 60 weapons.
(various fills)
– Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Colorado, spring and summer 2001 – destroyed ten
recovered 139 bomblets (sarin filled).
– Former camp Sibert, Alabama, late 2002 – destroyed one world-war II 4.2 mortar
(phosgene filled)
– Fort Richardson, Alaska, July 2003 – destroyed various agent identification sets with
rapid response system.
– Spring valley, Washington D.C., summer 2003 – destroyed fifteen world-war I
75-mm projectiles (mustard filled) .
– Most of 2005, involved in the destruction of the Newport chemical weapons facility
in Newport Indiana (VX facility). see here:
http://www.cma.army.mil/newport.aspx
Regards, kforestcat

@Rational Debate:
“My question for you is related to the 1st Amendment – clearly it prohibits Congress from making any laws of this nature – but has that/does that translate down to the state level, e.g., are states similarly prohibited from making such laws? I suppose I’ve always assumed that to be the case either by president or however it has worked legally (and one of your comments implies this is the case), but in thinking about it more directly I wonder if that is actually the case?”
This is a common misconception regarding the First Amendment and Free Speech Clause. The U.S. Congress is allowed to pass certain bills limiting freedom of speech in a number of categories, which are then signed into law by the President. State governments also may pass such laws. The example above, at 18 U.S.C. 1001, is a Federal law of this type. It is a valid restriction on Free Speech. Other valid restrictions include obscenity, defamation, and fighting words, among others.
The speech category involved here is known as Content-specific speech, in which this type of law is included. The controlling case, from the U.S. Supreme Court, is R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) in which the Court held that laws prohibiting speech based on that speech’s content are Constitutional if two conditions are met: 1) the state (i.e. the government) has a compelling interest in regulating that speech content, and 2) the law is narrowly tailored to meet that compelling interest.
The case of R.A.V. v City of St. Paul is available on the internet, along with much scholarly commentary due to its high importance in U.S. law. One such link for the case is
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0505_0377_ZO.html
This case is fairly long and full of Supreme Court legalese. Warning: this case may be offensive, as it deals with burning a cross on the lawn of a black family’s home.

David A. Evans says:
November 21, 2010 at 12:19 pm
‘RichieP says:
November 21, 2010 at 10:22 ‘Gasoline is $1.91 per imperial gallon’
Er no, not at all. Don’t you mean per litre? That’s what I’m paying in SE England. Per (uk) gallon that would be $5.08 or so (though, unlike some climate scientists, I’m quite prepared to have my calculations challenged).
I calculate it closer to $8.60 US
DaveE.’
Er thank you for the correction, maths was never my best subject – and anyway, I’ve lost the original data now. 🙂

@ur momisugly Larry Sheldon, re the First Amendment.
“What part of “Congress shall make no law respecting…” are we not understanding.
Please answer without quoting unauthorized revisions by judges, pundits, and bar-room authorities.”
You raise a very interesting point. The language of the Constitution, and the Amendments, seems to be very clear. However, the Constitution was written, negotiated, revised, and finally approved with the understanding that it was impossible to write into the document all the nuances and situations that would someday require addressing. There is a fascinating history of the Constitution found at several places on-line.
The First Amendment was one of the most complex, yet succinct, portions of the entire Constitution. The Founding Fathers left it to the Congress and the President to write various laws that further define the Constitution , and left it to the Courts to decide if those laws passed muster and were Constitutional. That’s how our system works, in our system of checks and balances. (by the way, the Fourth Amendment also is very short, but has millions of words written on what it means in practice. Same with just about every part of the Constitution.)
As one example, what exactly is “abridging the Freedom of Speech?” The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches together have hammered out over many, many years that certain categories of speech are not “free,” meaning that laws could be passed to restrict such speech, and provide penalties for violating those laws.
I gave a few examples in the earlier comment: obscenity, defamation, and fighting words. There are several others, such as death threats to a President, inciting a riot, inciting the overthrow of the government, hate speech, and a few more.
The underlying theme is a balance between having a society in which citizens are free to express themselves without fear of retaliation from the government, versus having a dis-orderly society with a badly functioning government. Taking the Presidential death threat as an example, one can imagine how society would be if anyone could threaten the President at any time. Government resources would be expended needlessly on excessive security.
For a fairly exhaustive resource on the First Amendment, one could spend a year or more reading and digesting the material at this link:
http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/constitution/amendment01/index.html
Note that the material at that link is almost entirely from U.S. Supreme Court cases, which illustrates how very, very important it is to wisely elect a President and Senators, because those are the ones who choose Supreme Court Justices. (these are not from pundits, or bar-room sources you mentioned.)
In the USA, we entrust those nine Justices with critically important matters such as Free Speech, even when it concerns something as mundane as climate science.

Well the problem with the US Constitution is that it is written in plain English, instead of the mediaeval Roman gobbledegook that Lawyers talk. Albeit, in English of a different era; but English just the same.
So we the people can read it and know exactly what it means; because it is written so we can do that.
Lawyers like to talk about “interpreting” the Constitution. Interpreting, means, replacing words with other words; and when you replace words with other words; you get other meaning.
So I prefer to stay with the words that the framers wrote.
“”””” The Founding Fathers left it to the Congress and the President to write various laws that further define the Constitution “””””
Well not exactly. The last clause in Article I Section 8 says that (The Congress shall have the Power) to make all laws which shall be NECESSARY AND PROPER…..
And we all know exactly what “NECESSARY” means:
A is NECESSARY for B if, and ONLY if, Absent A, B is impossible, no matter what.
So Congress is authotized to make only NECESSARY LAWS; not any law that comes to their little pea brain heads.
And a law is NECESSARY only if there is only one way to do something. If a certain problem can be addressed in five different ways; each the result of a differett law; then NONE OF THOSE LAWS IS NECESSARY, because there are four other ways to do the same thing (at least). In which case the States are more than capable (or the people) of choosing which way they want to address the issue, and The Congress has no business getting involved.
The Congress has even been known to pass laws that absolutely nobody out of the whole 535 of them in the Congress has ever read or written a word of. Such a law is hardly necessary if they pass it without reading it.
And when it comes to the first amendment, it seems to me that no law really means NO LAW. The problem is that they pay attention to the “respecting an establishment of religion,” but they completely forget about that “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” part.
And how come when it says : “the right of the people to peaceably assemble” the words “The people” mean “The poeple” but somehow magically you go another 30 words into the Bill of Rights; and somehow now the words “The people” mean the National Guard (which is an arm of the US military) or some other militia. Total BS.
Howcome NOBODY ever mentions article nine of the Bill of Rights; which in essence says that “the people”; that’s US, not the national guard, retain ALL of our rights that are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution (well the Bill of Rights); and that does include THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY.
Even staunch conservatives claim there is NO Constitutional Right to Privacy; like Judge Robert Bork for example. Well he’s right in a sense; in that the Constitution grants us NO rights at all. We all ready declared in the Declaration of Independence that we were born with all our rights; well we said god gave them to us.
The Constitution literally takes rights away from US, and gives them to the Government “in Order to form a more perfect Union” ALL of the ones that aren’t mentioned in the Constitution; like the right to privacy; we the people retain under Article nine.
Well but y’alls already knew that; right ?
Well IANAL; but I can read ENGLISH.
And I don’t seem to remember that part of the Constitution that tells the President that he can write laws; seems like that is for the legislative branch to do. My memory must be slipping; perhaps I should look up the Constitution on wiki or google and see what it really says. But that article IX, I do remember what that says.

George,
Thanks for the comments on the Constitution. It certainly makes it clear that the US Congress has wandered very very far from the directive of making ONLY NECESSARY LAWS.
I wonder what the founding fathers would think of bill S210 regulating farms?
From the text of the bill:
(2) Registration
An entity (referred to in this section as the “registrant”) shall submit a registration under paragraph (1) to the Secretary containing information necessary to notify the Secretary of the name and address of each facility at which, and all trade names under which, the registrant conducts business and, the e-mail address for the contact person of the facility or, in the case of a foreign facility, the United States agent for the facility, and when determined necessary by the Secretary through guidance, the general food category (as identified under section 170.3 of title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, or any other food categories as determined appropriate by the Secretary, including by guidance) of any food manufactured, processed, packed, or held at such facility. The registration shall contain an assurance that the Secretary will be permitted to inspect such facility at the times and in the manner permitted by this Act. The registrant shall notify the Secretary in a timely manner of changes to such information. ”
From the experiences of petting farm operators I have talked to this mean you MUST inform the FDA every time you leave the farm or face a possible fine. – House arrest anyone? The agent WILL inspect your kitchen cupboards, frig, bathroom medicine cabinets. Again from the actual experiences of petting farm operators I know.
“…In S 510, the FDA is instructed to follow all international agreements. One of the issues with international ‘guidelines and standards’ is “good agricultural practices”. Well those are not necessarily good. Most GAP certifying bodies have checklists about 25 pages long for growers to follow. They all require traceability (ie. NAIS) they also require auditing, verifying and certifying the processes used to produce a consumable product for human or animal feed. Every step in GAP costs the grower of food money and a good deal of paperwork. ….” http://nonais.org/2010/11/12/s510-cloture-vote/
“…The take-away message is clear: the US can’t require foreign producers in less developed nations to have a system that is equal to ours; we have to accept their different or lower standards as equivalent to domestic standards. Nevertheless, the legislation will hold domestic producers to higher standards than foreign producers. Once you understand this reality, the argument that the legislation is needed to improve the safety of imported food reveals itself to be a fraud.
Despite the fact that the World Health Organization identifies globalization of the food supply as a key cause of foodborne illness worldwide, such trade will increase, even displacing US production. We are legally prohibited from doing anything meaningful about it, unless we’re willing to sustain vast fines or withdraw from the WTO….” http://www.opednews.com/articles/3/Food-Safety-Reform-and-t-by-Nicole-Johnson-100426-437.html
Sec. 105 Standards for Produce Safety also creates a similarly named new section in the FFDCA that contains sub-paragraph 419(a)(1)(A) which begins, “Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, the Secretary,…, shall publish a notice of proposed rulemaking to establish science-based minimum standards for the safe production and harvesting of…fruits and vegetables…”
one doesn’t have to have a crystal ball to know what type of rule the FDA will almost certainly write. One need only look at similar documents the FDA has already published. Take for example the 3 guides to minimize microbial food safety hazards (tomatoes, melons and leafy greens) published in July 2009. Links to each are at http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/GuidanceDocuments/ProduceandPlanProducts/default.htm.
The one for leafy greens is 15,294 words and takes 35 pages as a Word document. The others are similarly long and the FDA has already stated its inclination is use that technique. How does a small farming growing 40 different crops keep up with that?
As for the rules for the HARPC plans, Silliker (one of the top consultants in food safety) did a full feasibility study in late 2009 for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) in western MA entitled “HACCP for Salad Greens.” Except for 2 proprietary parts of the study, everything else is at http://buylocalfood.org/page.php?id=285. The requirements and cost estimates are well beyond EVERY grower I know.
Comment by Harry Hamil at http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/11/senate-to-take-key-vote-on-food-safety-bill-today/
Forget locally grown food once this is passed.

The wheat farmer case, Wickard v Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) did involve a small dairy farmer, who grew wheat on 23 acres for his own farm’s and family’s consumption; although he did sell a small surplus from time to time. The amount of wheat he sold into the market was 239 bushels – not a great amount of wheat by any measure.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0317_0111_ZO.html
The decision was justified on the grounds that even individually small market entries could disrupt interstate commerce, if this was practiced by millions of small entities.

I received this email from CARB, announcing the postponement of the December 1 workshop:
From: owner-arbcombo@listserv.arb.ca.gov on behalf of wfell@arb.ca.gov Sent: Fri 11/26/2010 1:00 PM
To: post-arbcombo@listserv.arb.ca.gov
Cc:
Subject: arbcombo — POSTPONEMENT of Dec. 1 workshop to discuss possible false statement regulation
“The workshop scheduled for December 1st to discuss approaches to
prohibit dishonest statements or submittals offered to the Board
or its staff has been postponed to accommodate numerous requests
for more background information about the purpose of the draft
proposed rule. The workshop will be rescheduled after the New
Year.
For more information, contact Will Brieger at:
wbrieger@arb.ca.gov“