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Jewish World Review July 18, 2011 / 16 Tamuz, 5771 National Mall sprawl?. . . Coming clean with FTC By Lisa Hoffman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
WASHINGTON --- The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian occupies a prime piece of real estate on the National Mall. A few blocks away, construction of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture is scheduled to begin next year.
Earlier this year, a presidential commission recommended that the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Latino be established down the hill from the U.S. Capitol. And, last month, lobbyists flocked to the Hill to press Congress to support creating the National Women's History Museum.
Now come Rep. James Moran, D-Va., 11 bipartisan House cosponsors and more than 130 ethnic and minority groups with plans for the Museum of the American People, which they want to build on yet another corner of the capital's prime ceremonial real estate.
To those who note that the Smithsonian's 47-year-old National Museum of American History -- packed with 3 million national treasures and which draws 4 million visitors a year to its central Mall location -- ably tells the nation's story, Moran says it does not do justice to the "melting pot" that is America.
Moran sees such a new museum as a "national pilgrimage destination" -- as well as a way to curb the trend of building more narrow-interest museums on the increasingly crowded Mall.
The Federal Trade Commission is considering fiddling with those little cleaning-instruction tags attached to your clothes.
With a wryness rarely found in a regulatory agency, the FTC refers to its long-standing "care labeling rule" as "clothes captioning." But it takes its responsibilities very seriously, weighing with painstaking deliberation what the definition of, for instance, "cold," "warm" and "hot" should be.
Since 1971, the rule has been amended three times, most significantly in 1997, when the FTC gave the nod to stick symbols signifying whether using bleach is OK, whether the garment should be dry-cleaned or hand-washed, and how it should be dried.
Now, the agency is revisiting the rule -- officially titled the "Rule on Care Labeling of Textile Wearing Apparel and Certain Piece Goods as Amended" -- and is asking for public comments on the costs, benefits, necessity, and regulatory and economic impact of the labeling law.
It also is inviting input on the use of care symbols, whether instructions should be mandated in languages other than English, and on whether to add guidance for the practice of professional "wetcleaning," which involves specialized detergents, computer-controlled equipment and dye-setting agents that reduce color bleeding.
Instructions for commenting on the instructions can be found at www.ftc.gov.
The White House has embarked on a mission to corral government Web sprawl.
There currently are nearly 1,800 major federal ".gov" domains, which host an estimated 24,000 individual websites -- a number that Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra proclaims is way too many.
This past week, Kundra established a task force to begin to cut back the online federal kudzu that spread over the past decade as virtually every nook of the executive branch took to the Internet to inform the public, brag, and honor people and programs.
According to NextGov.com, an online publication that tracks technology and government, all federal agencies have been ordered to produce a list by Sept. 12 of sites that can be consolidated or scrapped. A website-proliferation freeze is in effect until September.
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© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
