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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The Wall Street Journal calls the House version of President Obama’s health care plan “the worst bill ever,” noting that it will lead to “epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting,” and other problems.
At the Atlantic, Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama, explains how ObamaCare will cost much more than promised — at least $150 billion more. That’s true even if promised cuts to Medicare included in ObamaCare actually take place — but as McArdle notes, even…
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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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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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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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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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Was a time when “civil rights” meant things like equal opportunities in employment and schooling for racial and ethnic minorities. And “environmental” meant something affecting the environment. But government twists everything that’s good.
Now leaders in Arlington County, Virginia where I live say plans for three high-occupancy toll lanes on the nearby highways will make traffic worse on nearby roads. But it’s not just a transportation problem, they say in a federal lawsuit; it’s also a civil rights issue.
Yes, invoking 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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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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Creative destruction is never easy for an economy to digest, especially when the industry involved has an exceptionally loud megaphone to amplify its screaming. In a report released on Monday, former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr. (with co-author Michael Schudson) insists that Americans take “collective responsibility” for fostering journalism and news reporting (saving unprofitable, poorly-managed news outfits). Of course, Downie doesn’t directly ask citizens for money - that would be uncouth. Instead, he suggests that universities and nonprofits, internet…
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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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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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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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