Have a listen here.

Fellow in Consumer Policy Studies Michelle Minton breaks down the FDA’s behind-the-scenes push to regulate dietary supplements nearly as strictly as prescription drugs.

-Both U.S. Senate candidates in Massachussets want to strictly limit political speech. They believe their campaigns should have free rein, but they don’t want other people to have the ability to publicly express their opinions. Jeff Jacoby has more in a wonderful column titled “Shut Up, They Explained.”

-The 2012 Federal Register is already up to 4,456 pages. It’s still January.

-The most bizarre regulation of the year could well be this Alabama bill “prohibiting the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses.” SB 1418 would ostensibly ban embryonic stem-cell research in the state.

-A local ordinance in Suffolk, Virginia prohibits driving motorized vehicles under their own power within city limits.

-The IRS is once again making noises about wanting to do your taxes for you. I’ve written before on why this is a bad idea, but it looks like I may have to explain myself a little more clearly.

That’s an average of 4,196 rules per year for Bush, and 3,603 for Obama — nearly two fewer rules per day. For those who believe that Bush was a free-marketeer, Obama has given us another nail for that myth’s well-sealed coffin.

But that doesn’t mean President Obama is less of a regulator than his predecessor. He has passed fewer rules, but they tend to cost more. Regulations are classified as “significant” if they cost over $100 million per year. There are different technical definitions for “significant,” “economically significant,” and “major.” And the Federal Register gives different counts than NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration.

With those caveats in mind, the Federal Register data have President Bush passing 30 economically significant regulations in his first three years. Obama passed 953.

The difference is more than a factor of 30. Roughly one quarter of one percent of Bush’s rules were economically significant.  Almost 9 percent of Obama’s are.

What the President said on Tuesday is technically correct. But, as with almost all political statements, there is more to the story.

This picture is not a joke. The regulation is genuine. But it isn’t unique; I once wrote a Regulation of the Day about a similar federal rule.

(via Radley Balko and John Stossel)

• The 2012 Federal Register is already over 1,000 pages long. After four working days, it’s already up to 1,007 pages.
• The 2011 Federal Register weighs in at 82,419 pages. That’s 328 pages per work day. Adjusting the count for skips, jumps, and blank pages would probably yield around 81,000 pages. That adjusted count should come out soon. The all-time record adjusted page count is 81,405 pages, set in 2010.
• My colleague Wayne Crews has set up TenThousandCommandments.com, which has daily Federal Register updates and other nifty features. Wayne talked to me about the site in this podcast; there is also a 10KC Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for the public to keep an eye on the regulatory state. Of course, agencies and OMB should already be doing this already. Since they aren’t, CEI is doing it for them.
• Sam Patterson compares the size of the 2011 Federal Register to a lengthy reading list of classic books totaling about 7.3 million words. How do they compare? “[Y}ou’d have to read every single one of these books ten times over to achieve the same word count that was added to the Federal Register in a single year.”
  Also worth noting: in the publishing industry, a manuscript page has 250 words. Or at least it’s counted that way; every page is different. So a 200-page manuscript is considered a 50,000-word book. The average Federal Register page has about 1,000 words. Patterson used 900 words per page to err on the side of caution. Using his numbers, a paperback edition of the Federal Register would be about 292,000 pages instead of 81,000.
• It’s not pornography, it’s the TSA: “’When Bruch reached into Russell’s groin area he ‘lifted up to feel,’ ‘ wrote 9th Circuit Judge Margaret McKeown in the opinion.”
• Having solved all of Indiana’s other problems, state Rep. Randy Frye wants to criminalize novelty lighters.
• Jim Gattuso and Diane Katz list the ten worst federal rules of 2011. There are some doozies.

This is called regulatory capture, and George Washington University’s Susan Dudley gives some examples in the video below. Click here if the embedded video below doesn’t work.

Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews talks about why 2011 was a record year for both new regulations and their cost. He also talks about his efforts to make the opaque regulatory state more transparent. Besides his annual “Ten Thousand Commandments” report, Wayne has started a new TenThousandCommandments.com website to update regulatory data in real time. There is a also a 10KC Twitter account and a Facebook page to make it as easy as possible to keep an eye on what regulatory agencies are up to.