Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,” the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from “any direct communication” with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: “The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.” Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.

The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she’s yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn’t ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency.

For more on the study the Obama administration did not want you to read, see here and here.

The Washington Examiner has an editorial entitled “Obama sides with Chavez, Castro against Honduran democracy.” Obama is joining the Cuban dictator Castro and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in demanding the Honduran ruler’s return.

“Honduras’s military acted under judicial orders in deposing President Manuel Zelaya, Supreme Court Justice Rosalinda Cruz” told Bloomberg News. “’The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,’ Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. ‘There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.’”

Investors Business Daily says Honduras had ample reason to remove its dangerous, out-of-control President, who had repeatedly violated his country’s constitution and laws:

“Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries. Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway. As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.” . . There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).”

The Wall Street Journal notes that Zelaya’s removal was a “democratic” response to “rule by the mob,” and that “the military didn’t oust President Manuel Zelaya on its own but instead followed an order of the Supreme Court. It also quickly turned power over to the president of the Honduran Congress, a man from the same party as Mr. Zelaya. The legislature and legal authorities all remain intact.” John Fund of the Journal earlier called Zelaya’s ouster a “triumph” of the law:

“Many foreign observers are condemning the ouster of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, a supporter of Hugo Chavez, as a ‘military coup.’ But can it be a coup when the Honduran military acted on the orders of the nation’s Supreme Court, the step was backed by the nation’s attorney general, and the man replacing Mr. Zelaya and elected in emergency session by that nation’s Congress is a member of the former president’s own political party? Mr. Zelaya had sacked General Romeo Vasquez, head of the country’s armed forces, after he refused to use his troops to provide logistical support for a referendum designed to let Mr. Zelaya escape the country’s one-term limit on presidents. Both the referendum and the firing of the military chief have been declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Mr. Zelaya intended yesterday to use ballots printed in Venezuela to conduct the vote anyway. All this will be familiar to members of Honduras’ legislature, who vividly recall how Mr. Chavez in Venezuela adopted similar means to hijack his country’s democracy and economy. Elected a decade ago, Mr. Chavez held a Constituent Assembly and changed the constitution to enhance his power and subvert the country’s governing institutions. Mr. Zelaya made it clear that he wished to do the same in Honduras and that the referendum was the first step in installing a new constitution that would enhance his powers and allow him to run for re-election.”

What happened in Honduras was “not a coup,” agrees the Honduran lawyer and former Minister of Culture Octavio Sanchez in his July 2 column in the Christian Science Monitor. He notes that under Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution, the President automatically lost his right to remain in office by seeking to extend his term in office: “According to Article 239: ‘No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.’ Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says ‘immediately’ – as in ‘instant,’ as in ‘no trial required,’ as in ‘no impeachment needed.’ Continuismo – the tendency of heads of state to extend their rule indefinitely – has been the lifeblood of Latin America’s authoritarian tradition. The Constitution’s provision of instant sanction might sound draconian, but every Latin American democrat knows how much of a threat to our fragile democracies continuismo presents. In Latin America, chiefs of state have often been above the law. The instant sanction of the supreme law has successfully prevented the possibility of a new Honduran continuismo. The Supreme Court and the attorney general ordered Zelaya’s arrest for disobeying several court orders compelling him to obey the Constitution. He was detained and taken to Costa Rica. Why? Congress needed time to convene and remove him from office. With him inside the country that would have been impossible. This decision was taken by the 123 (of the 128) members of Congress present that day. Don’t believe the coup myth. The Honduran military acted entirely within the bounds of the Constitution. The military gained nothing but the respect of the nation by its actions.”

If Richard Nixon had been impeached and convicted for Watergate, and then refused to leave office, until being forced out by the military, would that have been a “military coup”? Of course not. But Obama and many in the press are taking essentially that position in demanding the reinstatement of Honduras’s would-be dictator.

Even the Cato Institute, which espouses antiwar positions and a dovish, liberal foreign policy, approved of Honduras’s removal of its oppressive ruler. Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo notes that “the removal from office of Zelaya on Sunday by the armed forces is the result of his continuous attempts to promote a referendum that would allow for his reelection, a move that had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court and the Electoral Tribunal and condemned by the Honduran Congress and the attorney general. Unfortunately, the Honduran constitution does not provide an effective civilian mechanism for removing a president from office after repeated violations of the law, such as impeachment in the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless, the armed forces acted under the order of the country’s Supreme Court, and the presidency has been hastily bestowed on a civilian figure — the president of Congress — as specified by the constitution.”

Reporting for duty in ethanol’s counterattack: Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former NATO commander, who signed on in February as co-chairman of an upstart ethanol trade group called Growth Energy. Clark, 64, has fully embraced the private sector since ending his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. In addition to co-chairing Growth Energy, Clark is on the board of Dutch wind-turbine maker Juhl Wind and serves as chairman of the New York investment bank Rodman & Renshaw (RODM). At Growth Energy, Clark has lobbied against efforts in California to hold ethanol accountable for deforestation in Brazil, he’s pushed back against claims that diverting corn to ethanol drives up food prices, and he’s spoken out in favor of a Growth Energy proposal to increase the maximum allowable ethanol blend in conventional gasoline to 15% from 10%.

Without support for corn ethanol now, Clark says, the industry won’t be able to fund advances in second-generation cellulosic ethanol made from nonfood inputs such as switchgrass. [Emphasis added]

Such brazenness in rent seeking should not be surprising in an industry that’s running out of arguments for why it should receive public subsidies.

But try as they will, ethanol’s champions don’t seem to be doing a very good job of convincing the public, as some consumers’ reaction to the availability of ethanol-free gas attests. Reports Florida Today:

Gasoline without ethanol has become a hot commodity for the only two vendors who sell it in Brevard County.

“We just recently started bringing it in because there’s been such a hue and cry for it from the marinas,” Ken Marshall, vice president of Glover Oil in Melbourne, said Thursday.

Favored by boaters and motorcyclists, the fuel — known as recreational gasoline — was put on sale to the public last month by Glover Oil.

“It’s a more rare product,” Marshall said. “A year ago, everything started going to ethanol.”

There’s good reason to avoid ethanol.

Ethanol absorbs water and can degrade rubber seals and gaskets. Boat engines, weed trimmers, lawn blowers, generators, motorcycles and older auto engines are most affected. Ethanol contains one-third less energy than gasoline. And many makers of lawn care machinery, marine engines, motorcycles and high-performance autos recommend avoiding gasoline with ethanol.

However, by 2011 all gasoline sold in Florida must contain ethanol, with the exception of fuel sold for boats, collector cars and small engines. Federal law requires that 36 billion gallons of ethanol a year be blended with U.S. gasoline by 2022.

“You don’t get as much gas mileage with the ethanol in it and it clogs up your catalytic converter in your car and it ruins your boats,” James Blizzard, 75, of Cape Canaveral said as he filled up his SUV at Neil’s Riverside BP station in Melbourne, the other public source of non-ethanol gasoline in Brevard. “I get two or three miles per gallon more out of the ethanol-free gasoline.”

Considering that Brevard County is near Cape Canaveral (the region known as the Space Coast), consumers of the ethanol-free should start calling it “rocket fuel.” (Thanks to Margaret Griffis for the Florida Today link.)

For more on ethanol, see here.

Given its desire to maintain and sell access to the Obama White House, it’s no wonder the Post has been so sympathetic to Obama in its coverage, absolutely refusing even to cover many controversies and scandals in the Obama Administration, such as Obama’s letting racist left-wing thugs escape justice for menacing white voters in Philadelphia, or his firing an inspector general who uncovered misuse of federal funds by an Obama supporter and tried to stop him from accessing federal stimulus money, or his repeal of welfare reform and replacement of investments with welfare in the job-killing $800 billion stimulus package.

It’s scary that the Post would seek to sell access to a health-care lobbyist, given that the Post’s reporting has already shown a dim grasp of basic health-care facts and math, and a bias in favor of the health-care proposals backed by Obama. In “’Public Option’ May Be Highest Hurdle in Senate” (June 24, 2009, pg. A11), the Post misstated the cost of an Obama-backed health care plan by a factor of a thousand, claiming that its “price tag” had been “drastically reduced” down to “$1.2 billion.” In fact, the cost is at least a thousand times higher — $1.2 trillion — and it won’t even cover most uninsured Americans, covering just 16 million of the 40 million uninsured. (The Post’s incorrect figure was corrected days after the fact, after I protested the figure. But virtually no readers saw the correction, which did not appear in the print version of the story).

As I noted in the Washington Examiner on Monday, “much of the media are ‘in the tank for Obama.’ That’s why they failed to report on how his stimulus package repealed welfare-reform, and how it will shrink the economy ‘in the long run,’ according to the Congressional Budget Office. When the Obama Justice Department let thugs get away with menacing white voters in Philadelphia, despite protests from the Civil Rights Commission, the press largely failed to report it. And it failed to cover how his proposed financial rules would increase pressure on banks to make risky, low-income loans. When an Obama adviser concluded that his proposed ‘barrage of tax increases‘ could ‘kill any chance of an early and sustained recovery,’ journalists ignored it. And when Obama broke his pledge of a ‘net spending cut‘ through budget increases and $9.3 trillion in projected deficits, they ignored that, too.” (See “Media Ignore Negative Aspects of Obama Agenda,” Washington Examiner, June 29, 2009, at pg. 18).

Meanwhile, the White House press corps are behaving like puppets. They pretend to the public that White House press conferences are spontaneous, when in fact they are carefully stage-managed events in which Obama decides long in advance of the press conference who will ask him questions, and about what, to avoid difficult and probing questions. (Recently, Obama pre-arranged a question about Iran from the liberal Huffington Post). Even veteran liberal reporter Helen Thomas is appalled by this, noting that even Richard Nixon didn’t try to control the press this way.

According to the rules of the game, if the player, Ricdic, had stolen only the online money he wouldn’t have been thrown out.  His venture into the real world for real cash got him excluded.  Here’s that part of the story:

Ironically, if Ricdic had merely stolen the online money he could have stayed in the game. But exchanging the virtual cash for real dollars broke the rules and CCP banned Richard’s EBank accounts.

“It unbalances the game,” Coker said.

Players can only buy virtual money with real money, or use virtual cash to pay for playing time, but they cannot exchange game money for the real thing.

Arguello, who had opposed Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s, recently joined President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista party to run for Managua mayor. His shifting political allegiances are not that unusual in a country where political alliances can shift in unexpected ways. More surprising was his entering politics in the first place.

As a boxer in the 1970s, he dominated the light weight divisions, winning featherweight, super-featherweight, and lightweight titles. As Nicaragua’s first world champion of anything, he became a national icon. I remember as a kid in Nicaragua in the 1970s how the country would stop for one his fights — everyone from all walks of life and all political persuasions would be in front of a TV whenever Alexis stepped into the ring. Here’s hoping Nicaragua can find that kind of unity again.

Iconic status aside, he was also a fun fighter to watch. Here’s one great KO I remember.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Consumer Product Safety Commission ($63.25 million 2008 budget, 401 employees).

CPSC’s latest rule latest proposal would require:

each manufacturer of a durable infant or toddler product to: Provide with each product a postagepaid consumer registration form; keep records of consumers who register such products with the manufacturer; and permanently place the manufacturer name and contact information, model name and number, and the date of manufacture on each such product.

Quickly, ask yourself: how much safer will this make our children? How much more expensive will the affected goods be? How many people actually bother to send in those registration cards, anyway? CPSC isn’t saying.

The proposed rule is open to comment until September 14. You can weigh in at regulations.gov if you like.

Details on pages 30,983-30,990 of the 2009 Federal Register.

Much ink has been spilled over the claim that the US is “falling behind” in broadband. Most of that rhetoric centers around a single statistic: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranks the US 15th in the world in broadband connections per capita. The accuracy of that ranking has been criticized (as have other measures of our alleged lag), but today we’re going to play ball. Suppose the United States is 15th. So what?

“At the turn of the century,” wrote the Free Press earlier this year, “broadband was present in about 2 percent of American homes. Today, that figure stands at nearly 60 percent. No other technology even comes close to competing with this pace of adoption—not the telephone, television, the automobile, cable TV, cellphone, or even the computer itself.” If America’s rip-roaring pace of adoption trails the broadband explosions elsewhere, should we be worried? Just how bad is 15th place?

We did some digging, and if we are in a ranking crisis, it’s even broader than we feared. The US ranks 12th in the world in per capita pork consumption, behind such unlikely competitors as Spain, Sweden, and Canada. We’re 12th and 13th in coffee and beer drinking, trailing Northern Europe by embarrassing margins. Once famed among the comelier peoples of the world, America now sits at a homely 19th place in plastic surgeries, out-beautified by Slovenia and Greece. Somewhat more to the point, the US is 72nd in the world in mobile phones per capita. Seventy-second! To underscore just how useless that ranking is, note that Japan comes in just behind us at 73rd. Even if we do have fewer phones than our friends—and though that ranking overstates the difference, we do—it’s just not that big a deal.

Even if these rankings were meaningful by themselves, we can’t expect to win them all. We’re still at the top of the world by large margins in radio, television, and automobile ownership. We’re 4th in personal computers and 2nd in fax machines. The only people who go to more movies than we do are the Icelanders. Maybe that’s why we’ve been slow to roll out the broadband. And of course, “slow” here means just ahead of Japan. Again.

On June 17, the Internet Innovation Alliance held a conference on the future of broadband in America. Several speakers touted the heavenly virtues of bandwidth and advocated subsidizing the broadband industry. West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin had to remind the attendees that money must go not merely to any good use but only to its best possible use, that there are areas of the US without so much as clean running water, and that our Little Leap Forward will come at the expense of prosperity in other sectors. It wouldn’t be the first time.

* Rankings not cited inline are from NationMaster. We haven’t verified their correctness, but that’s beside the point.

It is truly amazing to me that some people who call themselves “liberal,” “progressive,” and “tolerant,” are so irrationally afraid and intolerant of anyone who holds a differing viewpoint to the degree that they feel the need to lash out, discredit and attempt to purge them from the intellectual discussion of ideas. Recently, I was shocked to discover that such people were trying to accomplish this by employing methods I thought hadn’t survived beyond the Nuremberg trials.

I saw this spectacle when Keith Olbermann interviewed Janeane Garofalo on April 16th in which they discussed the phenomenon of the modern tea party protests. She received plenty of backlash from her statements that the gatherings were really about “hating a black man in the White House,” and from calling attendees “nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”

But not nearly enough attention was paid to her comment about the the motivation of right-wingers/republicans/conservatives (a.k.a. anyone not sharing her philosophy).

“You can tell these type of right wingers anything and they’ll believe it. You tell them the truth and they become — it’s like showing Frankenstein’s monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don’t know, because their limbic brain, we’ve discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it’s pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring.”

It’s ironic that in the same breath she accuses the tea party-goers of being intolerant of the president’s policies because of the color of his skin, she can claim that the only reason someone would disagree with her and the other enlightened Obama disciples is due to a physical defect in their brains.

As a self-proclaimed progressive feminist it is absolutely shocking that she would recognize that she is using almost the exact same logic as anti-suffragists who claimed women shouldn’t be allowed to vote because of the physical differences between men and women. According to a prominant anti-suffragist back in 1911:

“The difference is fundamental owing to physiological reasons which no training can obliterate. Women are more easily swayed by sentiment, less open to reason, less logical.” To modern people that type of thinking is not only dismissed as ridiculous science but also as insulting and prejudiced.”

Perhaps soon Ms. Garofalo will demand that government rescind the right to vote for any registered republicans. Or worse, she might ask that anyone who isn’t a full-blodded, liberal, progressive feminist be rounded up and sent to reservation somewhere. That certainly would make the public debate a lot easier for her and other intolerant progressives who are unable to make a convincing intellectual case for their ideas.

For those of you who aren’t racist or brain damaged and yet still manage to find a reason to be angry and fed up with the direction America is heading, you’re welcome to come to the July 4th Tea Party in Washington, DC or a local tea party where, as Keith Olbermann’s suggested we won’t be offering franks n’beans.  But we will be serving a heaping helping of liberty.

Full disclosure [While I am not a liberal, I am not now nor have I ever been right-wing, republican, or conservative]

Example 7: A college student who has earned a reputation as a video game expert maintains a personal weblog or “blog” where he posts entries about his gaming experiences. Readers of his blog frequently seek his opinions about video game hardware and software. As it has done in the past, the manufacturer of a newly released video game system sends the student a free copy of the system and asks him to write about it on his blog. He tests the new gaming system and writes a favorable review. The readers of his blog are unlikely to expect that he has received the video game system free of charge in exchange for his review of the product, and given the value of the video game system, this fact would likely materially affect the credibility they attach to his endorsement. Accordingly, the blogger should clearly and conspicuously disclose that he received the gaming system free of charge.

As you can see, the proposed guidelines target bloggers who are paid in hard-money and soft-money (free demo copies of products, etc.) compensation to blog on certain topics by sponsors, which are connected to the bloggers through media advertising companies such as Pay Per Post. Bloggers critical of sponsored “monetized blogging,” such as those at TechCrunch, label the phenomenon an online version of radio payola, and BusinessWeek goes as far as saying that sponsored blogging is “Polluting the Blogosphere.” Enter the FTC to save the day, right?

Well, the blogging community has historically defied traditional regulation (which helps explain why its growth was so explosive), and according to this AP article, “Bloggers complain that with FTC oversight, they’d be too worried about innocent posts getting them in trouble, and they say they might simply quit or post less frequently.” I would add that these are not “complaints” but rather legitimate concerns about overly heavy-handed federal retribution towards the very people we have to thank for the blogging revolution in the first place. Marketers have additionally voiced similar concerns.

This move could potentially spell bad news for the blogging community, which up until now has enjoyed a measure of immunity from the regulatory standards imposed on traditional news outlets. But as the line between professional journalism and independent reportage begins to blur, increasing numbers of voices in the blogosphere have been calling for more uniform disclosure agreements among themselves. And seeing as how the general blogging community is generally suspicious of itself and especially wary of posters who accept compensation for their work, the system will generally work to scrutinize, discredit, and stigmatize bloggers that choose to accept compensation for reviews without a prominent disclosure statement. Since policing the series of tubes for nondisclosure would be akin to trying to catch a waterfall in a paper cup - a daunting task even for Big Brother - perhaps self-mediated blogger honesty and transparency may be, in fact, the best policy.

The plot of Drag kicks off when our attractive protagonist, Christine, a loan officer at the local bank, denies an elderly gypsy woman a third extension on her mortgage. Cursed for eternity, Christine spends a few days second guessing herself until, realizing the illiberalism of her ways, she finally admits that granting another extension would have been the right thing to do. Birds chirp and sun shines, and the audience moves blithely on to the predictable conclusion—something about demons.

There’s nothing wrong with tropes, even housing crunch tropes, but this particular trope illustrates much that’s broken in how we think about charity. When we see someone in need of help, and someone else who can help them, we assume that only selfish greed could possibly come between the two. As Henry Hazlitt described more than 70 years ago, we are totally blind to unseen costs.

The money that our heroine denies to mystics with bad credit does not come from some bottomless pot of wealth. It comes from the bank’s vaults, which are—as we’ve recently learned—very much finite. An extension granted to one debtor means an extension denied to another. A loan given to an unworthy borrower is a loan taken away from someone worthier. How many people, nodding along to what Christine “should have done,” give a moment’s thought to whomever gets that loan instead off-camera? Maybe the loan goes to a family man investing in his kids’ education, or to a small business owner looking to hire some new hands. Why does our soul-damning antagonist deserves credit more than anyone else?

This mistake is so common, and arises so many forms, that it has earned its own name: the broken window fallacy. That name comes from a story:

One day, as a baker is bringing out his morning bread, a young boy runs by and throws a stone through his window. The baker yells after the boy, and a small crowd gathers to inspect the damage. Most of the passers-by remark on the virtue of a good switching for such boys, but one man, who fancies himself terribly clever, looks at the situation rather differently. “Just think,” he says, “of what will happen next. Our baker, in need of a window, will soon employ the efforts of our glazier down the street. After receiving his price, the glazier will turn around and buy a new pair of boots from our cobbler. And just so, a wave of new production will spread through town. Why, we should thank that little boy and his heroic rock!” Newly enlightened, another gentleman picks up a stone and generously shatters some more windows.

The conclusion is absurd. By that logic they should raze the whole town to “stimulate production.” But where did the clever man go wrong, and what does that have to do with Drag? His mistake is that he considers only on what happens, and ignores what would have happened instead. If the baker hadn’t needed to replace his window, he would have bought a new pair of boots for himself. The same wave of production would be created, but this time the town would be exactly one window richer. In Drag, those funds can build new homes and new businesses, instead of sending people to Hell. Good trade.

Government pressure on banks to make low-income loans was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Yet Obama’s disturbing proposal would empower the new agency to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act without regard for banks’ financial safety and soundness.

Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul would reinforce the corrupt political status quo while mandating more risky, low-income loans.

The Community Reinvestment Act was a key contributor to the financial crisis.

The mortgage crisis was also caused by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates.

But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.”

Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and it expands the reach of regulations that have been used by left-wing groups to extort pay-offs from banks.

Read the opinion piece “Parsing the health reform arguments” by George Newman in the Wall Street Journal today for concise rebuttals of oft-repeated claims about government health plan.

“With support from President Obama, Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL) introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2009 for Father’s Day, a bill cosponsored by then-Senator Barack Obama in the last Congress.” The bill will “ensure that child support payments to families do not count as income and result in loss of food stamps.”

Intact families, and widows, usually have every dollar they make considered in whether they qualify for food stamps. But under the Obama-backed proposal, unwed mothers, and divorced mothers, would not, since the child-support dollars they receive would be arbitrarily excluded.

Take a hypothetical widow and divorced woman, both of whom have children to take care of. The widow’s household has an income of $25,000 a year, based solely on the widow’s salary for working in a meat-packing plant. The divorced woman, who does not work, has an income of $48,000, $12,000 from alimony, and $36,000 from child support — the actual amounts received by a divorced mom with one child in Freedman v. Freedman, 730 N.E.2d 913 (Mass. App. 2000).

Under Obama’s plan, the divorced woman is eligible for food stamps, even though she is not poor, because her child support is arbitrarily excluded from her income.

But the widow, who makes much less than the divorced woman, and works much more, is not eligible for food stamps, simply because her income is from working, not from child support. Instead, she ends up paying for the divorcee’s food stamps with her hard-earned tax dollars. (I’ve actually understated the case, since the earnings for my hypothetical divorced mom are based on a 2000 court decision in Massachusetts, where child support levels have since risen radically).

The Obama-backed bill also increases the federal matching funds states receive for maximizing their collection of child support payments, giving them an incentive to artificially jack up child support obligations in order to reap federal money (as many states did in the aftermath of the 1988 Family Support Act), even if that means forcing fathers who have never missed a payment to pay much more than the actual cost of raising a child. I have previously written about how court-ordered child support payments generally exceed the actual cost of raising a child under most existing state child-support guidelines.

(The other way for states to increase their collections, and thus reap federal matching funds, would be to increase rates of compliance with child support obligations, rather than increasing the obligations themselves. But that is much more difficult for states to do, since deadbeat dads tend to be low-income men who cannot possibly pay all that they have ordered to pay under state child support guidelines, which typically order divorced fathers to make payments that exceed what the fathers spent on their children back when they were married, financially destroying some of them in the process. As Glenn Sacks observes, the “Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement’s own data show that two-thirds of ‘deadbeat dads’ earn poverty-level wages, and only 4 percent earn even $40,000 a year.” It is much easier for states to ratchet up the child-support obligations imposed on middle-class fathers who already pay their child support, than to collect unpaid child support owed by low-income fathers.)

By the way, I am not divorced, and have never been ordered to pay child support.

Are these the winds of change we’ve been anticipating?  Something is floating on the breeze, but it smells disappointingly familiar.  That’s because all this has been done before, and by the administration of George W. Bush, no less.  In late 2007, then-President Bush signed an energy bill into law that established long-term efficiency standards for automobiles and household appliances and ordered a phasing-out (ban) of the incandescent light bulb by 2014.  For all his hot air about changing the country’s direction and breaking from the strides of the previous administration, Obama hasn’t even shown originality in his determination to send the economy into a tailspin.

As with his predictions regarding jobs and unemployment, Obama’s stated expectations for this new light bulb bill are, quite frankly, hogwash.  He says consumers will save up to $4 billion annually in energy costs, erroneously assuming away the greatly increased energy and light bulb prices that would result, which would drive down purchases.  Also, any replacements that do take place would be piecemeal — replacement and installation costs alone would be enough to encourage most consumers to hang on to their incandescent bulbs and older appliances for as long as they can.  Why pay and risk more for light when you can avoid it?

The biggest problem with this legislation, as with most government intrusions into the economy, is its total disregard for business incentives and consumer self-interest.  Businesses fully recognize that efficiency, especially energy efficiency, is consistently in high demand throughout the market, so any serious drive toward boosting profits must necessarily focus on innovations that they can use to entice cash-strapped consumers.  An added benefit brought by the resulting savings is that consumers have more money to spend.  So the incentives are there.  Improving technology is a win-win situation all around, but only if it is voluntary.

Simply commanding progress does not make it happen.  If some imagined and desired technology does not exist, ordering people to work harder will not make it arrive faster.  It’s not as if any industry wants to lag behind technologically.  The incentives are there.  Sure, a business can seize upon an underdeveloped idea like, for example, a car motor fueled by something that produces water vapor as its only exhaust, and pour its resources into making the motor work, but the fact that the idea is still inadequately understood would mean inevitable waste and likely failure for the business.  Maybe it turns out that the motor has to be too big to make it worth installing in a car.  Maybe it depletes this clean fuel more quickly than current motors expend current fuel.  Maybe it’s more dangerous.  Maybe only a certain car model can effectively use this motor, and consumers don’t like its size or shape.  Maybe a better idea comes along, or the motor and fuel cost too much even for die-hard environmentalists to use regularly.  The bottom line is that taking such a leap is a huge risk that no savvy investor would touch with a ten foot pole.  Even if something profitable finally does come out of such an investment, so much money would be wasted in the process of developing, refining, and marketing this unfamiliar product that the business may go bankrupt by the time the car hits the market.

So it is with lamps.  Energy efficiency is great, but without market efficiency, any products that do come out of this forced innovation (there’s no shortage of oxymorons in government) will be dead on arrival.

Then again, the economic illiteracy of the aformentioned bills’ supporters is only part of the problem.  Without even trying to understand how such regulations would affect their constituents or considering the idea that private expenses are private matters, the government is already charging ahead with more controls, more limits on liberty.  The private sector has solid incentives to innovate.  The government does not.  That is why it should come as no surprise when this legislation, which is mystifyingly supposed to help prevent climate catastrophe, ultimately inflicts more damage on the United States than a category 5 hurricane.  At this point, any change in the winds would be welcome.

Last week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a 98 page report written by Alan Carlin, a 38 year veteran of the EPA, on the shaky science employed by global warming alarmists. Mr. Carlin had submitted the report to his superiors for the EPA to consider as it deliberated whether or not carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare. As noted by my colleague Marlo Lewis, an “endangerment” finding isn’t mere bureaucratese. Instead, it’s a legal tripwire that would spark an economically ruinous regulatory chain reaction under the Clean Air Act (to read more, click here).

But the EPA would not consider Carlin’s report. In a series of incriminating emails, Carlin’s boss bluntly informed him that his report would remain secret for political reasons.

Late Thursday night, CEI went ahead and posted a draft version of the document, which you can read here.

In a not-so-subtle dig at the supposed scientific backwardness of his predecessor four months ago, President Obama said that science is “about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.” Now we learn that his administration has done just that by silencing Mr. Carlin’s voice at the EPA. Is this the change we were promised?

Members of Congress are suitably outraged. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), cited the report on the floor of the House of Representatives last Friday. Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) told FoxNews that he intends to investigate the matter further.

The story has made waves in the media. For accounts, click on the following links: New York Times, San Francisco Examiner, Michelle Malkin, Dow Jones (Subscription Req’d), American Spectator, and National Review.

As Investors Business Daily notes, Honduras had ample reason to remove its dangerous, out-of-control President, who had repeatedly violated his country’s constitution and laws:

“Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries. Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway. As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.” President Obama on Monday called the action ‘not legal,’ and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president. There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).”

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal call’s Zelaya’s ouster a “triumph” of the law:

“Many foreign observers are condemning the ouster of Honduran President Mel Zelaya, a supporter of Hugo Chavez, as a ‘military coup.’ But can it be a coup when the Honduran military acted on the orders of the nation’s Supreme Court, the step was backed by the nation’s attorney general, and the man replacing Mr. Zelaya and elected in emergency session by that nation’s Congress is a member of the former president’s own political party? Mr. Zelaya had sacked General Romeo Vasquez, head of the country’s armed forces, after he refused to use his troops to provide logistical support for a referendum designed to let Mr. Zelaya escape the country’s one-term limit on presidents. Both the referendum and the firing of the military chief have been declared illegal by the Honduran Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Mr. Zelaya intended yesterday to use ballots printed in Venezuela to conduct the vote anyway. All this will be familiar to members of Honduras’ legislature, who vividly recall how Mr. Chavez in Venezuela adopted similar means to hijack his country’s democracy and economy. Elected a decade ago, Mr. Chavez held a Constituent Assembly and changed the constitution to enhance his power and subvert the country’s governing institutions. Mr. Zelaya made it clear that he wished to do the same in Honduras and that the referendum was the first step in installing a new constitution that would enhance his powers and allow him to run for re-election.”

The press coverage of the Honduran crisis, which refers to the ex-president’s removal as a “military coup,” is amazingly biased. As Tom Palmer, who has helped promote democracy abroad, notes, what really happened in Honduras is that “a President who seeks dictatorial powers in an illegal move” was “removed by the Congress and by the Supreme Court“:

“Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?”

If Richard Nixon had been impeached and convicted for Watergate, and then refused to leave office, until being forced out by the military, would that have been a “military coup”? Of course not. But Obama and many in the press are taking a similarly extreme position in demanding the reinstatement of Honduras’s would-be despot.

Even the Cato Institute, which espouses antiwar positions and a dovish, liberal foreign policy, approved of Honduras’s removal of its oppressive ruler. Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo notes that “the removal from office of Zelaya on Sunday by the armed forces is the result of his continuous attempts to promote a referendum that would allow for his reelection, a move that had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court and the Electoral Tribunal and condemned by the Honduran Congress and the attorney general. Unfortunately, the Honduran constitution does not provide an effective civilian mechanism for removing a president from office after repeated violations of the law, such as impeachment in the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless, the armed forces acted under the order of the country’s Supreme Court, and the presidency has been hastily bestowed on a civilian figure — the president of Congress — as specified by the constitution.”

While Obama is busy ignoring the Honduran President’s violation of his citizens’ constitutional rights, he is busy extending U.S. Constitutional rights to foreign terrorists overseas. The Obama Administration is needlessly making investigators give Miranda warnings to captured terrorists and enemy combatants in Afghanistan. It is doing that even though Miranda rights do not apply to aliens captured in Afghanistan, a foreign country, and neither Afghan law, nor human-rights treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, mandate such warnings.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the U.S. House of Representatives (435 employees, $4 trillion budget).

The Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill that passed the House last week contains 397 new regulations, according to CEI Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman and former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Jeremy Lott. The legislation now heads off to the Senate.

It is worth noting that just minutes after the final vote came in, Washington was hit by a fierce hail storm; not that Congress’ doings have any cause-and-effect relationship with the weather (ahem).

You can read the bill — Congress didn’t — by clicking here.

I was a colleague of Mary Lou’s when I worked at the Washington Times’ magazine Insight. She could always tell a great remembrance of her 50 years in Washington journalism. She mentored Carl Bernstein and others at the now-defunct Washington Star. In a future post, I will relate her explanation about how FCC rules banning the ownership of a newspaper and TV station in the same city — aimed at prventing monopolies — actually  killed the Star by denying the newspaper the TV station’s revenue — making Washington a one-newspaper town until the Times came along.

It was after I came to CEI in 2004, however, that I got to work with her as an editor when I submitted op-eds to the Times. She was the best kind of editor a very light touch. You wouldn’t even notice her changes, unless you compared what ran in the paper to your original copy, and notice how much better her “little” changes made you sound.

There is one particular anecdote that illustrate her incredible stamina even in her 80s (She was 83). A couple of years ago she and I and others were at a party on American Sentinel newsletter editor Lee Bellinger’s yacht/houseboat known as the “Off the Record.” To get to the upper deck — the very roof of the boat — you needed to climb this set of stairs that was more like a ladder. Almost 50 years younger, I even had trouble navigating those stairs. But MaryLou — grabing someone’s hands — insisted climbing up.

Anyway, here is Fred’s statement on behalf of CEI.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute mourns the passing this week of Mary Lou Forbes, a distinguished journalist with a career that spanned over 50 years.  Throughout, she possessed the key qualities of perceptiveness and curiosity. In 1959, she became one of the first female reporters to garner a Pulitzer Prize, for her coverage of desegregation for the Washington Star.

In the 1980s, she created the multi-page Commentary section of the Washington Times, which she continued editing up until her passing.  She opened the Washington media to voices of free-market economics and sound science and, in fact, was one of the first to publish the iconoclastic writings of my friend, Warren T. Brookes.  After his death, Mary Lou helped us establish the Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellowship at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.   In the years that followed, she was invaluable to CEI in reviewing and publishing many an opinion article from CEI scholars.  She was also a frequent guest and sometime-integral presenter at CEI’s annual dinners.  Indeed, she just attended our 25^th Silver Anniversary dinner on June 11 this year.  She will be sorely missed as a vital voice in the free market of ideas, and her helpful guidance to news writers and policy scholars will always be remembered.  Washington has lost a fine journalist and a great lady.