“Swine flu has killed 540 kids, sickened 22 million Americans,” screamed USA Today’s page 1 headline, sub-headed “CDC: Cases, Deaths are Unprecedented.” “Swine flu cases in the U.S. are rising at the fastest pace for influenza in four decades,” breathlessly declares a Bloomberg News article lede. Another article’s title referred to a “national swine flu spike.”

Scary stuff! Phony stuff! And a desperate effort to distract from an alarmist media’s greatest nightmare: That the epidemic has peaked, as I write in National…

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Earlier this week my colleague Ryan Young posted a blog about the FCC’s proposal to increase access to and decrease the cost of broadband technology by charging consumers more for land-based telephone services.

He makes some excellent points about the pointlessness of taxing telephone usage to subsidize broadband services and the fact that it is innovation not intervention that will propagate and push new technologies while decreasing costs to consumers.  As Mr. Young notes, land-based internet is neither cost effective nor as…

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More cash/Fewer Clunkers

Via the Von Mises blog:  According to the consumer pricing index report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the price of used cars rose 3.4% in October thanks to the government’s cash-for-clunkers that spirited away a large portion of the used-car inventory. So, for those of us who chose not to buy a new “greener” car last month, and who want to purchase a dirty old used car, we have a smaller pool from which to select.…

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It’s not exactly what Pogo meant when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” But it works out that way. The greatest threat to our national security isn’t terrorist groups, rogue nations with nukes or China. It’s an inability to stock our armed forces with top-quality men and women because too many applicants are uneducated and overweight.

About three-fourths of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds can’t join the military, largely due to these problems, says a report from…

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ABC News broke the story this week of an executive administration that, ambitious to appear in control of the economy during this steep recession, reported patently false stimulus-related employment information. The Recovery Board, a task force created to track the $787 billion in federal stimulus spending, published on its website data for jobs “created or saved” in congressional districts that don’t even exist!

In one example, the stimulus tracking website reported that 30 jobs have been “created or saved” in Arizona’s…

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A little known part of British history is coming to light - its migrant program for young children in England , who were sent to Australia, Canada, and other British Commonwealth countries. Such programs, which began in the late 1800s and persisted well into the 1960s, shipped about 150,000 poor children, orphans, and illegitimate children to Commonweath countries where they were sent to institutions, foster homes, farms, and other places where they worked as laborers.  A House of Commons report published in…

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Here’s an interesting video from ReasonTV (a Reason Magazine offshoot) that mimics the popular UPS whiteboard commercials. In this video Nick Gillespie details the war UPS is waging against FedEx in the regulatory arena. The fight centers on labor laws. Because UPS ships by ground while FedEx ships via air they are governed by two different sets of labor laws. The laws that govern UPS workers makes it easier for them to unionize, raising the labor costs for the company. Instead…

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Yes, even as the media twist and turn the numbers in the new CDC estimate (about which I’ll be publishing an article) the evidence continues to come in that swine flu in the U.S. has peaked and is sliding down the right side of the epidemic slope.

Here we see a sharp decline in both new deaths and hospitalizations.

Last week there was a massive decline in samples submitted to the CDC surveillance labs and a small decline in those testing positive. This…

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The FDA is getting into the business of mixing drinks.  Employing a dangerously questionable array of regulatory powers, the agency is trying to determine if the  the combination of caffeine and alcohol is a tempting and harmful brew for underage drinkers. Rather than do any investigative work of their own, they are giving producers of these drinks 30 days to prove that the alcoholic energy drinks are safe.

What makes them think these drinks are not safe? As difficult as this is…

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I’m a hit in the Czech Republic, a land renowned for beautiful architecture and even more beautiful women. Well, at least I got mentioned in a Czech language publication, CDN.CZ, which roughly states:

Other data collected by Michael Fumento from the Washington Times, reveal that people are panicked in the U.S. to seven percent of all visitors to clinics! Most of those who not been affected by H1N1 virus. And they have struck again with such weak signs that do…

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With unemployment up yet again, it must be reassuring to Americans that job-seeking veterans are being helped so much by the government, and by all those Web-based organizations with such names as VetJobs.com, MilitaryHire.com, RecruitMilitary.com, HireVeterans.com, and Military Job Zone.

Except that they’re not. Remember the expression “Don’t forget; hire the vet”? We’ve forgotten.

Read my Philadelphia Inquirer piece, “No Medals for Hiring Vets,” and be enraged.

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On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (see CEI’s video celebrating that), it’s interesting to note that a pizza parlor in Shirlington, VA is promoting heroes of communism and Marxism.  And the source of that information is none other than the Washington Post’s Reliable Source today, which records an email exchange between a customer objecting to posters of Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara on the walls of Busboys and Poets restaurant and the owner’s response praising those…

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Well, what swine flu isn’t doing this week is apparently less than what it wasn’t doing last week. In other words, it appears to have peaked.

How do we know?

Here we see it’s going down the right side of the bell curve both in terms of deaths and hospitalizations.

And there’s both a massive decline in samples submitted to CDC surveillance labs and a small decline in those testing positive.

College infections have essentially gone flat.

And finally we see from the Australian swine flu data in…

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The Free Kareem protest is going on today at 12 pm outside of the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau on New Hampshire just south of Dupont Circle. If you’ll be in the area, please stop by and show your support for Kareem Amer, the blogger who is serving a four-year prison sentence for criticizing the Egyptian government.

UPDATE: Check out photos and video from today’s rally.

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Last Sunday’s Packers-Vikings game was a big one. Brett Favre beat his old team on its home turf. If you’re not sick of all the hype, check out my take on what the game means for Packer fans over at The American Spectator Online.

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A new Harvard poll, in a ranking of 13 leadership categories, found Congress and the media ranked 11th and 12th respectively. They probably would have been even lower had there been a category for used car salesmen.

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In the wake of two new biographies of Ayn Rand, MarginalRevolution’s Alex Tabbarok today reposts and links to some of his and Tyler Cowan’s writings on her 100th birthday in February 2009, and draws attention to her “virtue ethics.” For that same event, CEI’s Fred Smith had an eloquent tribute showing how Rand explored the moral foundations of economic liberty and provided insights into the assault on free enterprise.  Here are some excerpts from Smith’s article that are especially relevant in today’s…

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From a letter to the editor of the Washington Post:

It is ridiculous that The Post has dedicated so much of the A section the past several weeks to the swine flu outbreak. Being a young “survivor” of the swine flu, I have to say that it was the most anticlimactic experience I have ever had. No deathbed, no fever.

The way the media continue to portray the virus is creating unnecessary panic around the world. Many people infected with the virus don’t…

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The recent announcement that the GDP grew in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent was referred to by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as proof that the economy is finally improving.  But a quick glance at history demonstrates that this is not the case.

Between 1934 and 1937—during the heart of the Great Depression—GDP grew at by an average of 9.5 percent annually.  In 1934, GDP grew by nearly 11 percent, but it would be six more years…

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Okay — it’s almost Halloween, so I should be forgiven for a non-policy posting on the Top Ten Scariest Movies.  I’ve picked a sample of top ten listings to check out any unanimity in the selections.  Not really, ‘though several films appear on almost every list - Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978).  Most of the scariest are horror or sci-fi films, with lots of gore and special effects, but a significant number of the top…

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