Necessary Roughness

Note to Congress: Your bill is too flipping big when 34 pages goes missing and nobody on Capitol Hill catches it until the President has already vetoed it.

The AP reports that the Farm Bill was missing 34 pages, making the bill that the President signed different than the one Congress passed.

In order to avoid a partisan dustup, House Democrats hoped to pass the entire bill, again, on Thursday under expedited rules usually reserved for noncontroversial legislation, and the Senate was expected to follow suit. The correct version would then be sent to Bush under a new bill number for another expected veto.

Lawmakers also will have to pass an extension of current farm law, which expires Friday.

Take your time. Go home for Memorial Day, and if you’re one of those 100 Republicans at the trough, try to convince your taxpaying constituents how price supports in an artificially inflated economy and the lack of means testing make sense. Wouldn’t that be nice if they flipped the other way after getting a dose of common sense?

In another 1-½ hour course, Brad E. Bennett, Esq., of Downes, Hurst, & Fishel, presented “Engineering Legally Complaint Employee Handbooks For Your Engineering Firm.”

Some notes:

Again, Ohio generally follows the “At Will” doctrine, with 17 basic exceptions to the rule.

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Saturday’s three lectures were all led by lawyers of the firm Downes, Hurst, & Fishel of Columbus. I left feedback that this group had the best handouts of any of the presenters. The handouts were well formatted and provided more detail than the PowerPoint. They were also pre-drilled with three-hole punches so they could fit in our binders: nice touch.

Brad E. Bennett led off with “The A, B, C’s of Employment Law for the Professional Engineer.” I didn’t write nearly as much as previous lectures. Some notes:

An engineer or engineering manager may be held personally liable if a discrimination, retaliation, or harassment suit is brought against him and the company, Engineers need to know enough law to avoid these situations.

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FOX News reports that the FCC wants cell phone companies to change cancellation fees for their services. Angry customers are suing the companies, and the companies want out of state court.

I understand letting the customer try a service for a month or so and then canceling the service. There’s a chance that a phone may not work in a certain area, and so there’s a sense of fraud when a cell phone company says their phone will work when it doesn’t.

Wireless companies said the cancellation fees are necessary to recover the cost of cell phones, which they subsidize under long-term service contracts, and to defray their costs for signing up new customers. Consumer groups said the fees are unreasonable and intended to discourage customers from switching among providers.

The rest of this issue is all about federal and state intrusion into voluntary contracts. The judges of these state courts should stop salivating at the prospect of socking it to the cell phone companies. If this goes through, expect cell phone innovation to drop and monthly bills to increase. I don’t need a higher cellular bill, thank you.

The Washington Post reports that the dependency solicitation that is the Farm Bill has a provision in it that insures a farmer’s revenue stays as if high food prices were to continue to 2012.

But as the farm bill moved through Congress, lawmakers sweetened the subsidy provisions, in part to encourage more farmers to sign up. The final version of the program is more generous than ones proposed earlier by the House and the Bush administration.

The new program insures a farmer’s revenue at close to the current high prices. USDA estimates that a farmer could draw a payment even with corn prices at $4.39 a bushel.

If food prices were to drop, for example, because Congress drops the ethanol subsidy, we taxpayers would pay the farmers for their drop in revenue. Thank you, Senator Tom Harkin.