Congratulations to Jason and our friends at Americans for Prosperity and the Moving Picture Institute for their recent anti-Sicko demonstration here in DC. Photos and video available here.

Better yet, the protest has garnered a mention in Jason Robertson’s story about Sicko in the Dallas Morning News:

Weeks before the film opened, some health care activist groups began sending e-mails to journalists disputing Mr. Moore’s assessment of America’s health care system, as well as the efficiency of systems in other countries.

Bureaucrash, an international…

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Entrepreneurs savored a small but significant victory last night in a surprise House vote that extended for one year an exemption for small public companies from burdensome requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley act. The measure’s success and support from a significant number of Democrats once again illustrates that Sarbanes-Oxley relief is has become a populist issue. Much of the public now correctly associates Sarbox with the burdens it places on honest entrepreneurial firms such as the Max & Erma’s regional hamburger chain,…

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Kimberly Ann Elliot, senior fellow with the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, contended that labor and environmental standards do have role to play, but that the FTAs are too intrusive as they are now. She claimed that the US does not do anything to have a true positive effect on the actual enforcement of labor laws. It is indeed anti-democratic and patronizing to force democracies to adopt certain standards by FTAs. However, she did not want to say…

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Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media quotes our beloved Fred in his column today about the Law of the Sea Treaty, and the debate over ratification that went on recently at the Heritage Foundation:

In a release, [House Republican Whip Roy] Blunt declared, “More than 25 years ago, President Reagan refused to commit this country to a treaty that would’ve weakened our sovereignty at home, and rendered American companies less competitive abroad…We need all the energy we can get, whenever and wherever…

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Fred Smith, the president of CEI, was featured in today’s Wall Street Journal in a letter to the editor responding to Robert Barro’s commentary on Bill Gates (”Bill Gates’s Charitable Vistas,” editorial page, June 19).

In the piece Fred argues that wealth creation is much more affective at reducing poverty than philanthropy, especially in the case of Mr. Gates:

Traditional philanthropy is collective, tribal, even. The donor feels noble; paternalism reigns; poverty is perpetuated. Extending the institutions of economic liberty — even to…

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Dave Weigel has a great post today on the Wacky World of Lyndon LaRouche over at Hit & Run. We often see the acolytes of LLR here in DC near Open Market World Headquarters on the corner of Connecticut and K Streets. They pass out pamphlets, they chant, they sing, but most of all they annoy with a vengeance. As Dave points out, though, this is the first presidential election cycle since
1976 that has not seen LaRouche running for the Democratic…

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It’s received wisdom that violent movies encourage violence and that if only we were like our enlightened European cousins and restricted violence in movie theaters, we’d move instantly to a cafe society with low crime rates and gang-bangers discussing Sartre over strong coffee. Yes, I exaggerate, but whenever a study comes out that looks at the neurological responses to violent movies, that is the subtext of every article written.

Yet as with everything CEI deals with, the real story is a…

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I testified yesterday at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on “global warming issues and the power plant sector.” Both my written and oral remarks began with a riff on Jonah Goldberg’s NRO column, “Global Cooling Costs Too Much.”

Here’s what I told the assembled saviors of the planet:

Thank you, Chairman Boxer and members of this committee for inviting me to testify today.

Jonah Goldberg, the columnist, notes that Earth warmed about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century while global…

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Our good friend Tim Carney has an excellent op-ed today in the Examiner on who’s getting screwed and who’s getting rich off of the energy legislation that’s currently making its way through Congress:

While raising the CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] requirements would be a stick in the eye of the Big Three (whose political action committees [PACs] in 2006 gave about $1.3 million to federal candidates), it would clearly be a gift to the ethanol industry, whose strong connections to…

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My colleague Marlo Lewis testified at a painfully comic hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday on “examining global warming issues in the power plant sector”. Marlo’s testimony is well worth reading, as is the testimony of two other witnesses: Bob Murray, chairman and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, one of the biggest independent coal companies in the country: and Tom Borelli of the Free Enterprise Action Fund.

But I write to discuss the testimony of three heads of…

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With national security worries about Iran everywhere these days, the gas riots there yesterday make the Ahmedinejad regime seem not only less fearsome, but just plain stupid. No, not crazy, stupid: stupid enough to be incompetent schemers, and stupid enough to try to fix a botched state intervention –  price subsidies — with another intervention — rationing — to reduce consumption after those subsidies artificially inflated demand. Who knew?

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In a new report, Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy, the FTC routed the empty arguments of the “net neutrality” crowd, marking a significant victory for those who believe in competition and freedom on the net.

Robert Kahn, the inventor of the TCP/IP protocol has referred to “net neutrality” as nothing more than a regulatory slogan. In a piece in The Register Kahn is quoted as saying “I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net.”

What kind of interesting…

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Silly reactions to the Federal Trade Commission’s new net neutrality report shouldn’t be surprising, but I didn’t expect the ridiculous-beyond-parody (over at Fark.com): “FTC shoots down net neutrality. RIP, Internet.”

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Wired blogger Scott Gilbertson is upset about the Federal Trade Commission’s report urging caution regarding net neutrality regulation.

The Chairman of the FTC Deborah Platt Majoras says in a statement accompanying the report that “in the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.”

In other words wait and see if it all goes south and then maybe consider doing something to fix it.

Gilbertson is essentially criticizing the FTC…

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The Supreme Court has overturned the race-based assignment of students in Seattle and Louisville schools. (The decision can be found here).

CEI filed an amicus brief arguing that schools shouldn’t receive deference from the courts when they use race, pointing to the bizarre racial statements made by the Seattle Schools.

CEI pointed out that the Seattle Schools, on their website, have falsely claimed that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” constitutes “cultural racism,” that only whites can be racist, that…

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…you make the passage of an anti-Ladies Night ordinance your primary goal in life. That’s the case with Coloradoan Steve Horner, who decided that Ladies Night promotions at bars were illegally discriminating against men. This led to a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which…agreed with him. At the Commission’s monthly meeting this week, they passed a resolution condemning Ladies Night promotions, helpfully suggesting alternate marketing strategies. Denver’s alt weekly Westword has the story:

…the commission made it through the…

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In the aftermath of the bipartisan deal between the Democrats and the Bush Administration, the question is whether the new enforceable environmental and ILO labor standards that are included in FTAs are the tipping point where they are overstretching into domestic affairs. Yesterday, AEI held an interesting panel discussion about this called “The Bipartisan Trade Bargain: Is the Deal Worth It?”

According to Jack K. Veroneau, deputy United States trade representative, the answer is no. We had the same discussion when…

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The Associated Press is reporting on the latest SCOTUS opinion from this morning, and as it turns out it’s one on which we filed an amicus brief (PDF link). In its decision on Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, the justices struck down the use of race by public school districts when admitting/assigning students to their various institutions. I’m sure legal maestro Hans will have much more to say later today (UPDATE: he has), but here’s the quick take…

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Today on CEI’s Rachelwaswrong.org blog, Barun Mitra of the Liberty Institute (New Delhi, India) makes a plea for greater awareness about malaria’s victims and the need for DDT. His comments are compelling and worth repeating here:

It is good news that the demand for DDT to fight malaria is on the rise. Last year, India’s government exported their first consignment of DDT in almost 20 years to Eritrea and Mozambique. This year they doubled their shipments from last year and expect orders…

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Lira Tantebeyava works for the women of Kyrgyzstan. Every day, she plots and executes strategies to bring equal rights to one half the people of that beautiful, mountainous country on the opposite side of the globe. She brooks sexism from no one in a society where it is cultural permissible for a man to kidnap a woman of his choosing to become his bride. Lira Tantebeyave is one tough hombre.

Lira is also a loving mother of five: 1 young woman,…

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