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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Two EPA lawyers criticized the cap-and-trade energy bill passed by the House as a scam, noting in The Washington Post that it will be manipulated to profit politically connected corporations and reward certain kinds of pollution, while not cutting greenhouse gas emissions. A similar scheme enacted in Europe in the name of fighting global warming enriched polluters, while not reducing emissions, which actually rose faster in most of Europe than in the U.S.
The Washington Examiner explains how the bill will lead to deforestation, and thus increase greenhouse gas…
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A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review. Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.
Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline:…
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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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In the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson explains in the “Public Plan Mirage” how the so-called “public option” contained in congressional health-care reform bills is just a gimmick: “It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn’t.” Steve Chapman wrote earlier about the “‘Public Option’ Health Care Scam.”
In other news, a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that the provisions in the Senate health care “reform” bill sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would add $1,700 a year…
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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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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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The American Enterprise Institute held a panel discussion yesterday on food safety. They discussed congressional proposals aimed at addressing contaminants in our food, such as pathogens like Salmonella and E. Coli. Panelists actually agreed on a few things … well, actually, they agreed on what they don’t know.
First, no one could answer the question as to whether legislation would significantly reduce risks, nor could anyone determine where the real risks lie. And no one could provide an adequate justification for increased government action…
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The UK Royal Society’s long-awaited study on improving agricultural productivity and increasing food security was released this morning. Although I’ve only had a chance to skim the report, it seems to have lived up to its promise of eschewing politically correct pop-environmentalism and instead embracing the use of science and technology for producing more food on less land. The report acknowledges that farming is an inherently un-natural and ecologically disruptive endeavor. But, it suggests that a healthy concern for protecting the environment necessitates…
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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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Veteran political commentator Michael Barone reports that liberal congressional leaders are pushing policies to “inflate the housing bubble again,” even though “our financial system broke down because we had, thanks to government policies, a housing bubble.”
Congressional leaders are ignoring warnings from experts across the political spectrum, such as conservative Peter Wallison’s October 16 piece in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Barney Frank, Predatory Lender,” and liberal Charles Lane’s recent piece in the Washington Post, “Doubling Down On the Wrong Housing Policy.” (Wallison, a banking expert, prophetically…
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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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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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Sorta depends on who you ask.
The read about the flu in the mainstream media, you would think men are going through the streets with carts calling “Bring out your dead.” But to look at the statistics, there’s not even an epidemic yet. Read my article in the New York Post. “Swine Flu: the Real Threat Is Panic.”
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The Supreme Court is back in session. Today, it is hearing a challenge to a federal law banning depictions of cruelty to animals brought by a defendant convicted of selling pit-bull dogfight videos. A federal appeals court struck down the 1999 law as a violation of the First Amendment. The government is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate the law, and rule that animal cruelty depictions are not protected speech, the way some other kinds of speech, like obscenity, are considered unprotected by…
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“Twenty-one thousand college students are sick,” begins a Fox online news report titled: “H1N1 Picks Up Steam One Week Before Vaccine Becomes Available.” Wow! That’s a lot of sick kids! Tell us more!
But there is nothing more on those 21,000. Lots of talk about people swamping emergency rooms and school closings, yet not a single number regarding actual flu cases in a 765-word article.
What if it began “Flying saucers land on the White House lawn” and no flying saucers were mentioned…
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Thanks to their union, bus drivers for Washington’s Metro system can be dangerously incompetent and still draw a government paycheck, avoiding discipline for repeated accidents. (Metro employees sometimes make more than $100,000 per year).
Yet the Obama administration wants airline security and Amtrak to become more like Washington’s inefficient Metro, by increasing the power of unions and making it harder to get rid of problem employees.
As Radley Balko notes at Reason magazine’s Web site,
“Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority fired Metro bus driver Carla A. Proctor this week…
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Every Friday the CDC website publishes a situation update on swine flu with figures updated through the previous week, though some of the data is newer. And every week the hysteria-minded media ignore it. Statistics get in the way of articles filled with doom and gloom, of body bags and cemetery land set asides.
Anyway, why consult the data when you can offer plenty of anecdotes about people suffering from a “flu-like illness?”
But for those who do care about how our alleged…
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The National Journal had an interesting article this week describing the difficulty Democrats have been having getting young adults interested in the health care debate. Two-thirds of voters 18 to 29 pulled the lever for Barack Obama last November, and over 40 percent of the uninsured are young adults age 18 to 34. So, the Dems assumed they would be big proponents of the Obama agenda, including his hallmark proposal on health reform. It turns out, though, that America’s youth were…
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New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris has a front page article in today’s paper on the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Oncology Drug Products, Richard Pazdur. As the article notes, Pazdur has come under severe criticism in recent years for obstructing the approval of numerous innovative cancer drugs. Some of this criticism is unfair, and Harris is clearly attempting to defend Pazdur and the FDA, while proving the critics wrong. After all, Pazdur has implemented reforms that…
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