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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by Charles Huang
November 06, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the Weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
November 6, 2009
>>CEI Blasts Antitrust Lawsuit Against Intel
CEI’s Ryan Radia criticized New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and his groundless antitrust case again Intel.…
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A statement from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo this morning announces the launch of an antitrust lawsuit against chipmaker Intel. Intel supposedly is “bribing” and “coercing” computer manufacturers like Dell, HP into using its chips.
Intel gives them money and rebates to use Intel chips. Think about that; they don’t have to pay as much, and get paid themselves, to use Intel chips rather than AMD ones.
I like it when I get rebates and cash, myself, but I’m just crazy.
Let’s…
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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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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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Liberals are busy sending each other twitters falsely claiming that Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, said that he would have voted to uphold school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite!
A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East…
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The federal government has no problem paying exorbitant sums of money to people who head failed government agencies like Freddie Mac. Its CEO will receive compensation estimated at $5.5 million. The Federal Housing Finance Agency took direct control over Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise, after it ran up tens of billions of dollars in red ink buying risky mortgages, without adequate capital reserves. At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac is now running up $30 billion in losses to…
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Expect to see more bad mortgages as a result of a House committee’s vote Thursday to create the so-called “Consumer Financial Protection Agency.” That agency, contrary to its deceptive name, will harm savers and consumers by forcing banks to make loans to people with bad credit, leaving banks with less money to pay interest. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.”
Government pressure on banks to make more risky…
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Next week, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold three hearings on S. 1733, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” also known as Kerry-Boxer after its co-sponsors Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Kerry-Boxer is the Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), also known as Waxman-Markey after its co-sponsors Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA).
Part A of Title VII of Kerry-Boxer sets forth the emission reduction targets…
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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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The mortgage meltdown was caused partly by the government, which created an artificial market for bad mortgages. The Washington Examiner cites a recent study by Peter Wallison, who had prophetically warned about risky financial practices for years, finding that two-thirds of all bad mortgages were either “bought by government agencies or required to be bought by private companies under government pressure.” Now, the Federal Housing Administration is ramping up its purchases of low-quality mortgage loans, threatening taxpayers with hundreds of billions of dollars…
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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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Rep. Diana DeGette is, without any apparent cognitive dissonance or trace of irony, proposing:
1) Require, by law, that people buy health insurance.
2) Remove health insurers’ antitrust exemption. But only after legally requiring everyone to buy their product.
You figure it out. Insurers are set to receive one of the largest coroporate welfare grants in history. No wonder so many firms are salivating over this year’s health care legislation. But they may pay an antitrust price for their legally mandated windfall.
Perhaps this…
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Bank of America recently announced that it will impose annual fees on some of its cardholders. This is in response to the CARD Act (Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009), which effectively shifts costs to responsible people from irresponsible people, forcing banks to increase charges to responsible credit card holders.
The CARD Act has also wiped out many cash-back and rewards programs and rebates on credit cards, something earlier chronicled here. Despite that fact, its passage was trumpeted by President Obama…
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Recently, the Senate voted to ban defense contractors — that is, much of American business — from contractually mandating arbitration of employment discrimination disputes. The bill’s sponsor, Al Franken (D-Minn.), pushed the bill by claiming that arbitration provisions in an employment contract kept Jamie Leigh Jones from suing her alleged rapists. But they didn’t: a federal appeals court ruled the arbitration provisions didn’t apply to Jones’ case, leaving her free to sue in court.
Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors…
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My weekend is starting out fine, thanks to this happy news.
Peter Glaser, an environmental attorney with Troutman Sanders, just sent around his analysis. Here it is:
California Federal Court Dismisses Global Warming Common Law Nuisance Lawsuit
In another chapter in the continuing saga of whether energy companies can be sued under tort law for emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs), a federal district court in California yesterday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Kivalina Alaska Native Village and others against a large number of energy…
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George Mason University Professor Ilya Somin explains how the Obama administration is expanding the awful policies that caused the mortgage crisis, like having taxpayers effectively underwrite risky-mortgage loans by bailing out GSEs at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, the administration is stepping up Federal Housing Administration subsidies for risky, junky mortgage loans that are likely to default in large numbers.
(The Obama administration doesn’t seem to have learned history’s lessons overseas, either. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn cites as…
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