A Muslim solder, Nidal Hasan, shot dead 13 people at Fort Hood yesterday. Hasan had earlier exhibited extremist, anti-American propensities, including applauding terrorist attacks against U.S. soldiers. There are different theories as to how this could have happened.
One school of thought attributes the tragedy to politically-correct double standards imposed on the military that kept the alarm bells from going off.
Other commentators point to a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face…
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It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.
The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.
The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…
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Regulation begets rent-seeking. When government assumes the power to regulate imports, domestic firms will lobby to use that fact to their advantage.
Case in point: Home Products International (HPI), an American company, makes ironing tables. So does Hardware, a Chinese company. I personally have no idea which firm makes the better ironing table. That’s for consumers to decide.
Or at least it should be for consumers to decide. But it doesn’t always work that way in practice. HPI seems to have already…
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Some people want to cure malaria by reducing carbon emissions. Others want to cure it with mosquito nets, better health care and sanitation. Which is a more effective use of our limited resources? The answer is important; malaria kills about one million people every year. Getting it wrong costs lives.
According to Bjørn Lomborg, “For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives. ”
Let’s pursue those smarter policies, then.
…
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The small country of Honduras did not agree to return its authoritarian ex-president to power after all. Press reports said it did, but The Wall Street Journal says it merely agreed to submit a request for his return to Honduras’s Congress and Supreme Court, which previously backed the ex-president’s removal, in exchange for an end to U.S. sanctions and U.S. recognition of upcoming election results. Under continuing U.S. pressure, they may soon allow his return to office, but it hasn’t happened yet.
The…
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Under U.S. pressure, Honduras’s leader has reportedly agreed to return to power its authoritarian ex-president, Manuel Zelaya, in exchange for an end to U.S. sanctions and U.S. recognition of its upcoming election results, and Zelaya’s agreement to turn over control of the military to a tribunal. It is not absolutely certain, however, that Honduras’s Supreme Court or Congress will approve the agreement, which appears to violate Honduran law.
Honduras removed ex-president Zelaya after he systematically abused his powers: he sought to circumvent constitutional…
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The Obama administration and congressional allies like Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) are seeking to silence government lawyers who point out their mistakes and misinterpretations of the law:
“A month ago, the Law Library of Congress reviewed the removal of Manuel Zelaya from his post as President of Honduras, an act that the Obama administration called a ‘coup’ and demanded reversed for its illegality. To the embarrassment of the White House and State Department, the Congressional body determined that Honduras acted lawfully in removing…
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Today, President Obama signed into law a bill that will dramatically expand the federal hate crimes law, enabling prosecutors to bring federal charges against people who were previously found innocent of hate crimes in state court. The hate-crimes provisions were added to a defense appropriations bill, which the President signed in a White House signing ceremony this afternoon at around 2:30 p.m.
The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by…
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A quick point to add to Fran Smith’s excellent post on Sweden’s experiment in labeling food and menus for their carbon footprints: don’t read too much into the labels.
The New York Times notes that “the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.” With that much imprecision built in, if the labels change consumer behavior as much as supporters hope, it’s entirely possible that eco-concsious diets could result in more…
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Yesterday, Congress approved a measure to dramatically expand the existing federal hate crimes law, by adding it to an unrelated defense appropriations bill. The measure would expand current law to cover virtually all hate crimes already covered by state law (both by adding gender, sexual orientation, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law originally designed to protect racial minorities, and by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime effect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal rather than state court.)
The…
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Bjørn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus, brings some much-needed common sense to the global warming debate. Reporting from Vanuatu, he finds that many of the locals haven’t even heard of global warming.
Torethy Frank is one of them. She has other priorities, such as escaping crushing poverty: “Torethy and her family of six live in a small house made of concrete and brick with no running water. As a toilet, they use a hole dug in the ground. They have no…
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In USA Today, liberal law professor Jonathan Turley is criticizing the Obama administration for endorsing a “blasphemy” exception to free speech: “Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law.…
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The first half of Fall 2009 was a busy season in European politics.
On September 27, the general elections took place in Germany. The results were pretty optimistic–conservatives won the elections and kept the top spot, socialists lost and left the coalition, while liberals became a new member of a ruling coalition. The same weekend, elections took place in Portugal. The results were less optimistic, as the socialists stayed in power and will probably form a coalition with the Left Bloc,…
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Today’s New York Times carries an article, “Hopes fade for comprehensive climate treaty.“ It’s not that important an article about the lead-up to Copenhagen. What’s most interesting are the comments from these NYT readers — many expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming, confusion about the science, and linkages between energy use and economic growth. Here are some examples of those views - of course, the usual “sky is falling” comments are there too.
MrPitchfork
Maybe some day, someone will finally say, “Global…
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Last week, Bill Gates announced at the World Food Summit in Des Moines that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would be redoubling its efforts to improve agricultural productivity among poor farmers in less developed countries. He announced that the foundation would be making $120 million worth of new grants for agriculture research and development. Importantly, Gates eschewed the politically correct approach urged by major environmental organizations and explained, as Reuters put it, that:
“The fight to end hunger is being hurt by…
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The pending U.S. Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia are languishing in limbo, despite the fact that all three agreements will improve the flow of goods and services, foster economic growth and create jobs, and enhance the close relationships between the U.S. and those countries. That was the theme of the panel of speakers at The Heritage Foundation’s seminar today, “Getting America’s trade agenda back on track.”
The panel featured H.E. Han Duk-soo, Ambassador of the Republic of…
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Health-care “reform” always costs more than predicted, as ObamaCare provisions have at the state level. So the claim that the new, cheaper version of President Obama’s health care plan will cost only $829 billion, while not increasing the deficit, should be taken with a grain of salt.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted that the actual cost will be more like $2 trillion, and health-care experts have given it a similar price tag of more than $2 trillion.
The reason for the…
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A Scottish colleague brought this article by Richard Dawkins in the UK’s Guardian to my attention, and the title says it all: “Libel laws silence scientists.” I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t heard of this before now, but the physicist turned science journalist Simon Singh (author of such books as Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Code Book) has been sued in a UK court and, this past summer, found liable for libel for an April 2008 commentary piece in the Guardian…
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by Myron Ebell
October 13, 2009 @ 12:14 pm
Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published a curious op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times titled, “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Legislation).” The bill that they claim to support and that can pass the Senate is not the 821-page draft bill that Senators Kerry and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released two weeks ago. It is a fantasy designed to get the support of Senator Graham and other fuzzy-minded Senators with visions of lots of new nuclear plants, billions for technology…
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Drug companies are apparently forbidden from offering freebies to doctors in certain liberal states like Massachusetts and Vermont, under the theory that doctors’ loyalty can be bought simply by giving them free pens and beverages worth a few cents.
And the FTC just moved to restrict bloggers from praising books they receive as gifts from publishers, without disclosing the gift, under the theory that bloggers would praise dreck in order to receive it for free.
Yet when President Obama was awarded a far more…
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