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- This Week in Trucking: Medical Card Extension, CDL Changes, and Industry Scrutin...
Key Trucking Updates: Regulations, Enforcement, and Industry Shifts This week in trucking brought several important updates affecting drivers, carriers, and industry operations. From regulatory extensions to enforcement actions and industry scrutiny, these developments highlight ongoing changes across the sector. As a result, trucking professionals must stay informed to adapt to evolving rules and market conditions. Paper Medical Card Exemption Extended The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has extended the use of paper medical examiner’s certificates. While the agency continues working toward a fully digital system, drivers can still use paper copies until October 11. This extension provides temporary relief for drivers and carriers. However, it also signals continued delays in transitioning to a digital medical certification system. Therefore, fleets should prepare for eventual digital compliance while using the extended timeline to adjust operations. Non-Domiciled CDL Issuance Resumes in Some States FMCSA also announced that several states can resume issuing non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs). Previously, these licenses were restricted due to concerns over inconsistent issuance practices. States now allowed to reissue these CDLs include: North Dakota and South Dakota Iowa and Texas Delaware and Utah Rhode Island, Minnesota, and New Jersey Meanwhile, enforcement actions continue elsewhere. For example, FMCSA is withholding $73 million in federal highway funding from New York. This decision is tied to the state’s alleged failure to revoke improperly issued non-domiciled CDLs. As a result, compliance remains a top priority for states and regulators. Chameleon Carriers Draw National Attention This week also saw increased scrutiny on “chameleon carriers,” which are trucking companies that frequently change their Department of Transportation (DOT) numbers to avoid enforcement. A recent “60 Minutes” segment brought national attention to this issue. The report focused on networks such as Super Ego, which involve brokers, carriers, and leasing entities. These operations often bypass safety regulations, creating risks across the industry. Therefore, increased visibility may lead to stricter enforcement and regulatory action in the future. Industry and Policy Developments Continue In addition to regulatory updates, the trucking industry saw movement in both business and policy areas. Key developments include: Private equity firm STG acquired Carrier Logistics, a transportation management system provider The company plans to shift toward an AI-focused strategy for operations A proposed federal bill aims to increase minimum carrier insurance from $750,000 to $5 million Although most proposed bills do not become law, this proposal reflects ongoing discussions… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - The Clock Is Ticking to Secure the Midterms — Here’s What the Experts Say
Free and fair elections are a powerful tool of democracy, even in a backsliding democracy… just ask Viktor Orbán. That’s why there’s growing concern across the political spectrum about protecting the integrity of this fall’s midterm elections in the United States. The issue has been politicized, with Democrats and Republicans seeing different electoral threats. The current impasse in Congress over the SAVE America Actand President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting are only the latest signs that politicians aren’t on the same page. So POLITICO Magazine reached out to non-partisan voting experts with a simple but urgent question: What is one concrete, realistic step that should be taken now to protect the midterm elections? Our experts proposed a mix of technical fixes, policy changes and public communication strategies, and most of them don’t need help from Congress or the president — they are things that state and local officials can be doing right now to ensure that November’s voting is seen as legitimate by all parties. Some of them might surprise you. Here are their suggestions. Who: State election officials and legislators How: Review and reinstate deadlines immediately BY EDWARD B. FOLEY Edward B. Foley is a professor of law at the Ohio State University. Timing is everything for this year’s midterms. Congress will convene on January 3 to swear in the election’s winners. If states haven’t wrapped up all their procedures for certifying the winners by that date, it could enable either of the political parties to unfairly keep control of the House of Representatives by refusing to seat members whose states don’t certify their victories until after that date. To avoid this, it is essential that states do whatever it takes to complete all of their necessary procedures for certifying the results of their House elections — including any recounts and litigation — before January 3. The details of these procedures differ from state to state, but some general points apply. First, the chief elections officer in each state should conduct a review of their state’s laws and deadlines, as well as past disputed elections, to assess the vulnerability of an election remaining uncertified on January 3. Where those vulnerabilities exist, the state legislature should tighten the timetable, and if new legislation is not possible, then election administrators should determine what they can do to shorten the schedule. Many states give more time than is necessary… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Tinker Tailor Campaigner SpyWhen Dwight Eisenhower wanted toensure that Japanese voters stuck with U.S.-friendly prime minister Nobusuke Kishi in the 1958 elections over socialist and communist challengers, the clandestine machinery of the national-security state whirred into action. American spiesrecruited key officials within Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party to funnel inside information to the Central Intelligence Agency and arranged a secret meeting at a Tokyo hotel with a former prime minister to deliver campaign funds to the party — in events so deliberately obscured that historians and intelligence analysts began topiece it together only a half-century later. When Donald Trump wanted to make sure that one of Kishi’s successors kept Japan’s government in Liberal Democratic Party hands, he dispensed with the cloak and dagger. He just tweeted it out. “The Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has already proven to be a strong, powerful, and wise Leader, and one that truly loves her Country,”Trump wrote in a Truth Social post addressed directly to Japanese voters three days before they cast ballots in January. “it is my Honor to give a Complete and Total Endorsement of her, and what her highly respected Coalition is representing.” The surreptitious foreign election interference of the Cold War has given way to brazen cross-border campaigning from Washington and Moscow, nowhere more visible than in the run-up to last week’s Hungarian parliamentary vote, where both governments let at least some of their efforts to aid Prime Minister Viktor Orbán play out in the open. The White House appeared to draw from the same playbook it uses to boost down-ballot Republicans closer to home. There were supportive visits from the vice president and Cabinet officials, engineered for amplification on social-media, backing up Trump’s promise that “the full economic might of the United States” would help Hungarians if they voted the right way. Then aget-out-the-vote reminder from Trump, along with the same “complete and total endorsement” language he used for Takaichi — and indistinguishable from how he backed candidates forTexas agriculture commissioner andNassau County executive. While Russia continued to work from an older model — reportedly plotting covert social-media campaigns from its Budapest embassy and even allegedly scheming a potential botched assassination of Orbán by its intelligence services — it also played explicitly to Hungarian public opinion. In the weeks before the vote, the Kremlin promised Hungary would receivepreferential access to Russian gas supplies and released Hungarian prisoners of war. The beneficiary of those… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- The California Governor’s Race Is a Debacle
On a chilly Saturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over. He attached a just-published Washington Post article reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel was seeking to release files relating to a decade-old investigation into Swalwell that had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. If true, the Post story presented a publicity godsend to Swalwell’s campaign, further elevating his status as a nemesis of the vindictive president.The family-guy tableau of the Little League game felt consistent with the wholesome image that the campaign had been straining to project of late, for reasons that would become clear soon enough. Our interview occurred on the same weekend that Swalwell released a video of him and Brittany holding hands on a boardwalk stroll, while she called him a “really great dad” and a “really good husband.”As we sat together in the bleachers, Swalwell introduced me to Brittany, dropped the names of his better-known endorsers, and referred to Nancy Pelosi as his “work mom.” He also mentioned Adam Schiff, his former House colleague, whose trajectory into statewide office Swalwell had watched closely. Like Schiff, Swalwell had become a ubiquitous antagonist of Donald Trump—about as good of a credential as any for leading the de facto capital of Blue America.“I am the only candidate whose name the president knows,” Swalwell told me.[Read: Donald Trump’s gift to Adam Schiff]A few weeks later, a lot more people know Eric Swalwell’s name, which has now been stained immeasurably. He is leaving Congress; his campaign is over, probably his political career too; and the California governor’s race is even messier than the colossal fiasco it had been before.Swalwell’s collapse has been sudden and swift, if not surprising. Recurrent talk of bad behavior toward women had trailed him around Washington for years, and proliferated as he approached front-runner status. Late last week, the rumors detonated: Multiple women, one of them a former staffer, accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, unwanted advances, and explicit Snapchat messages. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Asking the Wrong Questions About Hasan PikerLast week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.[Read: The limits of the Democrats’ big tent]The Pod Save America appearance offers a case in point. While discussing his personal opposition to Israel’s founding, Piker marshals an unexpected ally: Albert Einstein. “My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism,” he tells the co-host Jon Favreau. The Jewish physicist, Piker said, “was actually asked to be the first president of Israel.” But Einstein, in Piker’s account, assailed the Israeli project from the start: He saw “the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in” before “the IDF existed, before Israel existed,” and “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.”Most listeners probably took little notice of this historical riff. Favreau does not remark on it. But for me, it was a flashing-neon sign. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages on two continents. And just about every bit of Piker’s potted portrayal is either misleading or false.Far from an opponent of the Zionist endeavor, Einstein assisted it for decades. In 1921, he raised money across America for the Hebrew University alongside Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. In 1923, he delivered a guest lecture at the school’s campus… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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