A former socialist, Fred Smith is now president and founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank dedicated, according to its website, “to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.” As a conservative intellectual and Washington observer, Smith is critical of both Democrats and Republicans who abuse power. (more)
Minnesota may become the first state to move on a groundswell of opposition from banks and communities to an amendment on debit card fees in the sweeping Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. (more)
A series of letters solicited by top GOP oversight official Rep. Darrell Issa put the Environmental Protection Agency in crosshairs, urging the aggressive new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate a series of strict new regulations finalized by the Obama administration. (more)
“And what manner of man dares to assume the post of insurance commissioner?” LA Weekly columnist Hillel Aron asked recently. It is an important question to consider. Early next year, 29 new governors will take office. Twenty-five of them have the authority — in some cases shared with other executive branch officials — to appoint insurance commissioners. (more)
As predicted, because it is by now absurdly ritual, early the day after the scheduled conclusion of this year’s talks to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, negotiators emerged hailing a breakthrough agreement on “global warming.” The Washington Post offers its take which, although it provides no word whether I won the CEI office pool on the number of European diplomats crying (the “over/under” was five), nonetheless opens risibly: (more)
One of the biggest failures of climate science is the fact that the data sets created to justify global warming are not independently reviewed or subject to standardized quality control procedures, such as ISO 9000. The very people who write scientific papers on global warming, lobby Congress to take action, and even get arrested protesting about climate, such as NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, are the same ones who are the keepers of the world’s most-cited climate data. (more)
| 1.) Democrats angry that Obama is letting the ‘terrorists’ hold America for ‘ransom’ – Welcome to 2010, the year American Democrats made a mockery out of the many lives lost here and abroad over the last decade by comparing the fight over taxes to the acts of Islamic militants and Mexican drug cartels! “Just as we do not negotiate with international terrorists, we must stand up to the political terrorism of the Republicans in the United States Senate,” wrote California Democratic Party chairman John Burton in an email to California Democrats. Back in Washington, Pres. Obama’s offhand comment that Republicans are “hostage-takers” has inspired a liberal group to launch the “Hostage Prevention Initiative.” In actual terrorism news, Sergeant Jason Peto passed away at Bethesda Naval Medical Center yesterday from wounds inflicted by actual terrorists in late November. |
| 2.) House passes bill aimed at denying stupid immigrants citizenship – With the aid of a handful of Republican members, House Democrats yesterday passed the DREAM act. First proposed in 2001, the act “extends conditional legal status for five years to those illegal aliens who were younger than 16 when they entered the country, have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, and have a degree from a U.S. high school, or the equivalent,” reports The Hill. In addition, “beneficiaries can apply for an additional five years of conditional nonimmigrant status if they’ve completed at least two years of higher education or military service. Afterward, they could apply for permanent legal status.” Assuming Senate Democrats are able to muster enough votes, 17-year-olds, stupid kids, and pacifists will soon have to hike their happy asses back to the third-world war zones from whence they came. |
| 3.) Senate Republicans defend decision to set money on fire – Among all the hoopla about increasing the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars and giving the unemployed another full year to sort their business out, Republicans and Democrats from the midwest teamed up to defend ethanol subsidies. “Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, said in no uncertain terms that the new tax deal will include an extension of those ethanol subsidies,” reports The Daily Caller’s Amanda Carey. Grassley, who is a ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, said that ethanol will somehow save us from having to buy oil from Venezuelan peckerwood Hugo Chavez. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that is a lie. “If it’s such a great bargain,” Lewis said, “why do we need a law to force us to buy it? The answer is it’s a great bargain for corn growers,” and “an incredible scam” for everybody else. Incidentally, Grassley is probably aware that our need for ethanol is bogus. “It’s important to remember that the incentive exists to help the producers of ethanol compete with the big oil industry, and remember the big oil industry has been well supported by the federal treasury for more than a whole century.” Shorter version: If you’re going to give pork to oil barons, why not give it to farmers, too? |
| 4.) Obama cronies continue to make mockery of president’s campaign promises of transparency – The civil liberties and open government group Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see if Freedom of Information Act requests under Obama had improved, per the president’s promise more than a year ago that they would. So the EFF decided to file multiple requests for the same FBI documents in order to see if the FBI withheld or redacted the same aspects every time. You won’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t. “In several cases, the FBI redacted more information in later-produced documents than it did in earlier-produced documents,” reports EFF. “In other cases, the FBI redacted differing amounts of information when it produced two copies of the same report in response to the same FOIA request. Sometimes the agency blocked out whole paragraphs, while at other times it blocked out only the key words that explain the details of its acts. What is interesting is that the FBI claimed the same FOIA exemptions in each version; it just applied them differently.” So, not only are agencies getting more secretive under Obama, they are apparently getting stupider as well. |
| 5.) Unemployment situation is worse than you thought – “Nearly 6 million Americans looked for work but weren’t able to find employment at all last year,” reports the Wall Street Journal. A report released Wednesday by the Labor Department “highlights the long-term unemployment problem that’s likely to linger for years. Some 5.8 million job-seekers were without work for the entire year in 2009, an increase of 2.7 million from a year earlier.” The problem is so bad, in fact, that the Labor Department is going to change how it tracks unemployment. “Starting in January,” reports the WSJ, “the Labor Department will begin tracking unemployment durations for up to five years instead of two years.” |
| 6.) Nobody is happy with the House spending bill – The spending bill that the House passed last night “would cap the annual operating budgets of federal agencies at the $1.2 trillion approved for the recently finished budget year — a $46 billion cut of more than 3 percent from President Barack Obama’s request,” reports the AP. The Senate version will be even bigger as “Senate Democrats are working on a different approach that would provide slightly more money and would include thousands of pet projects sought by lawmakers.” |
Since Americans have been mixing rum with caffeinated cola beverages for over a century, and in recent years, voraciously downing Red Bull vodkas, you’d think the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in breathlessly moving to ban Four Loko and other alcoholic energy drinks this week, would have distinguished the two. (more)
Vice President Joe Biden recently said that, “Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century, and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.” To Biden, progress doesn’t just happen. It has to be systematically ordered, top down. Call it the intelligent design theory of economics. Biden is a classic example of the “man of system,” as Adam Smith explains in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: (more)
Americans living in the most industrialized regions of the country have a special stake in the outcome of a California ballot initiative that would suspend implementation of that state’s global warming law until after unemployment drops, according to policy experts who favor a free market response to energy needs. (more)
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just finished collecting yet another round of comments in the “net neutrality” debate over proposed regulation of Internet traffic management (you may find CEI’s latest filing by Ryan Radia here). It is important to appreciate the profound significance of the fact that the FCC is unwilling to even affirm that it will leave future managed, specialized Internet services alone. And wireless services? The FCC is chomping at the bit to regulate those. (more)
Want pigs to fly, brussels sprouts to taste like Twinkies, and Justin Bieber to get a haircut? By the government’s logic, just make a rule mandating that it must be so and…voila! All of a sudden beachfront property can now to be purchased in Kansas! (more)
In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the country of what he called the “military-industrial complex,” a reference to the growing relationship between the military industry in the private sector and the federal government. Today, there is another industrial complex taking shape. Only this time, the president is not warning anyone about it – he’s actually directly involved in its growth. (more)
With yesterday’s Senate vote in the books, Elena Kagan has finally passed through the confirmation gauntlet and earned the title of Justice. Now she has some time to take a breather and ponder the role of the court that she will help guide for the next two decades or more. Based on her recent statements, she believes the judiciary should almost always defer to the other branches. Justice Kagan should reconsider that stance. (more)
The Federal Communications Commission has called off closed-door talks with tech lobbyists, talks meant to iron out a government driven compromise on “net neutrality.” The talks ended today in the wake of as-yet-unconfirmed reports that Google—the leading neutrality proponent—and Verizon may have reached a separate agreement enshrining non-neutral treatment of online content. No firm could ever actually support the policy as a general principle, and if this development hadn’t made that plain, it’d have been something else eventually. (more)
Free market organizations that are now mobilized against the possibility of a repackaged version of “card check” legislation should remain mindful of administrative actions that could enshrine union favors without congressional approval. With mid-term elections looming, union bosses who spent millions to elect a Democratic president and congress are going for broke to secure transformative policy changes that could reinvigorate their membership rolls. (more)
Heritage Action for America, the Heritage Foundation’s grassroots advocacy spin-off, is urging congressional leaders to sign on to Iowa Rep. Steve King’s discharge petition, aimed at repealing Obamacare. (more)
President Obama traveled to Michigan Thursday for the ceremonial groundbreaking of a new power plant that will manufacture batteries for electric cars. The Compact Power Inc. factory received $151 million in stimulus funds, and according to the Associated Press, will do its part to reverse the state’s climbing unemployment by creating 450 jobs by 2013. (more)
One of the best parts of getting published is getting feedback from readers. Some point out supporting arguments I may have missed. Others make opposing arguments challenging my position. This kind of engagement has led me to facts, data, and sources that made my subsequent articles better. Knowing that readers will pick even the smallest nits keeps me on my toes. (more)
Could your cell phone be killing you? A lot of people seem to think so. Some activists say that talking on your phone for 30 minutes a day over several years can cause brain tumors. They say governments need to address the problem with regulations. The alternative? “[D]o nothing and wait for the body count,” according to the University of Albany’s David Carpenter. (more)
