by Hans Bader
November 03, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
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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by Hans Bader
November 01, 2009 @ 7:07 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 31, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 28, 2009 @ 3:06 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 27, 2009 @ 3:20 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 26, 2009 @ 7:42 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 26, 2009 @ 1:34 pm
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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by Michael Fumento
October 25, 2009 @ 11:44 am
It’s a bunch of hog droppings. Watch for my upcoming article. In the meantime, read here on why we should not panic.
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by Hans Bader
October 23, 2009 @ 4:39 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 21, 2009 @ 4:44 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 21, 2009 @ 2:42 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 19, 2009 @ 11:47 am
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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by Hans Bader
October 16, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 15, 2009 @ 12:46 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 09, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
Drug companies are apparently forbidden from offering freebies to doctors in certain liberal states like Massachusetts and Vermont, under the theory that doctors’ loyalty can be bought simply by giving them free pens and beverages worth a few cents.
And the FTC just moved to restrict bloggers from praising books they receive as gifts from publishers, without disclosing the gift, under the theory that bloggers would praise dreck in order to receive it for free.
Yet when President Obama was awarded a far more…
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by Ryan Young
October 09, 2009 @ 9:54 am
It is ironic that the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. Even so, President Obama is in a prime position to work wonders for the cause of peace. He can institute free trade in America.
Trade is the ultimate act of peace. If someone has something you covet, you are faced with a choice. You could take it from him by force. Or you could trade for it. The first option is the root…
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by Hans Bader
October 08, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
Democrats are cheering a Congressional Budget Office decision to “score” the Senate Finance Committee’s version of ObamaCare as not increasing the federal budget deficit. But it pays for some of ObamaCare’s massive cost by expanding state Medicaid programs, shifting its cost to the states. That will radically increase state budget deficits. Moreover, this version of ObamaCare, while cheaper than the four other versions, still relies on mythical cost savings and massive cuts to Medicare that are likely to be canceled…
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by Hans Bader
October 07, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
When the Senate Finance Committee votes on President Obama’s health care plan, it won’t even have the text of the bill in existence. It will just be voting on a summary of what the bill will supposedly contain. Senate Democrats voted down Republican proposals that the bill’s text be made available to Senators and the public 72 hours before the vote.
And the bill itself is likely to be changed by Senate leaders at the last minute, right before the Senate…
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by Hans Bader
October 06, 2009 @ 1:09 pm
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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by Hans Bader
October 05, 2009 @ 11:39 am
Unemployment has risen to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.
That’s much higher than the Obama administration predicted unemployment would rise, if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package. The administration claimed unemployment would rise to 8 percent without a stimulus.
Small businesses are finding it more difficult than ever to borrow badly needed money to meet their payrolls. New financial regulations backed by the administration are contributing to a terrible credit crunch. Meanwhile, the wealthy Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, perhaps the…
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