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…

Read the full story

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…

Read the full story

I pay my power bill online, so whenever I get something from Dominion Virginia Power over snail mail it catches my attention. Usually, it’s some notice about utility work nearby. However, the mailing I got today was unusual. It was an appeal to sign up for Dominion’s Green Power initiative.

The scheme appears simple enough. The mailer says, “When you sign up for Dominion Green Power, you add a little extra to your monthly bill which Dominion will use to purchase…

Read the full story

Your host Richard Morrison welcomes guest co-host Jeremy Lott and Editorial Director Ivan Osorio for Episode 63 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with CEI’s FOIA fight with the U.S. Treasury, 7-Eleven’s attempt to give consumers a big gulp of government and the solution to a jobless recovery. We then move on to union pension politics, Ireland’s regrettable embrace of EU hegemony and some scantily-clad Olympic News.

Read the full story

In his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama talked a lot about “bipartisanship,” but in office, he has governed from the far left, on both domestic and foreign policy, by meddling overseas in favor of left-wing would-be dictators, and at home in support of powerful left-wing unions, at the expense of taxpayers, airline security, the Constitution, and the rule of law.  (One possible exception to his left-wing path is his support for the obscene Wall Street bailouts, which disgusted left and right…

Read the full story

In today’s Politico, I take a look at one of the 397 new regulations in the House version of cap and trade legislation. If the bill passes, almost all homes for sale would be required to undergo an environmental inspection. The home cannot be sold until it is up to code.

One unintended consequence could be the end of fixer-upper homes.

Another would be lower home ownership rates. Which, of course, directly contradicts of decades of federal policy.

Read the full story

The Associated Press is now chiding President Obama for falsely claiming that his proposed tax on uninsured people is not a tax.   It is a tax increase, the AP says, and it would be enforced by the IRS: “Memo to President Barack Obama: It’s a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance - and fining them if they don’t - isn’t the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic…

Read the full story

Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host William Yeatman and special guest commenter Ryan Radia to the program for Episode 61 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the FCC’s just-announced proposal for “net neutrality,” Treasury documents that reveal the true cost of cap-and-trade legislation and the plan for getting over California’s great depression. We then move on to the G20 Summit’s potential path to prosperity and the ever-expanding scandal that is ACORN.

Read the full story

Last week, on the free-market energy blog MasterResource.Org, I posted a two-part column on climate change and national security. In a nutshell, I argued that global warming is likely not an important geopolitical or military “threat multiplier,” and that the national security risks of climate change policies likely outweigh those of climate change itself.

One of the great things about “publishing” on the Internet is that readers can quickly and easily share other insights and information the author had not considered.

Climate scientist and fellow blogger Chip Knappenberger called my…

Read the full story

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen (D) is criticizing Obama’s health-care plan as “the mother of all unfunded mandates,” saying it will force states to spend so much that they will have to either massively raise taxes or run large budget deficits that violate state constitutions. Earlier, Martin Feldstein, one of Obama’s economic advisors said his health-care plan would explode the federal budget deficit and lead to “crippling deficits,” as well as “higher taxes, debt payments, and interest rates” that would cut America’s…

Read the full story

Today the Washington Post carried a follow-up article on CEI’s release of Treasury’s estimates — through a FOIA request –  on the cost of cap-and-trade legislation.  The article by Steven Mufson was quick to find and quote those who said CEI’s interpretation of those costs - an extra $1,761 each year for each American household - were built on false assumptions.  What was more interesting about the article, however, is the subtle slant the reporter gave in his depiction of both…

Read the full story

The middle class is facing big tax increases thanks to Obama and liberal congressional leaders.

Even the trimmed-down version of Obama’s health-care plan recently announced by a ranking Senator contains lots of tax increases for the middle class (see below).

And the costly cap-and-trade energy legislation passed by the House and supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases in the name of fighting global warming, Administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think…

Read the full story

The global-warming industry would probably still be solely owned by assoted cranks and romantics (and the odd vice president) if it weren’t for a bunch of CEOs taking a leaf from Enron’s playbook and attempting to monetize the issue. Playing the bootleggers in a classic bootleggers and baptists alliance, these businessmen have realized that they can get the government to increase their profits by means of “cap and trade” and similar regulatory interventions, at the expense of other businesses and the paying…

Read the full story

Obama’s racist, communist, America-bashing Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, has resigned after revelations that he was a 9/11 “Truther,” who believed that George Bush may have been behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

But Obama has long been aware of Jones’ extremism, wacky statements, and arrest record, which would have come to light months ago during the White House vetting process, as former White House staffer Jeffrey Lord and National Review’s Andrew McCarthy note. The Secret Service would have investigated Jones’ past and Marxist views…

Read the full story

Read the full story

People aren’t willing to pay much to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to fight global warming, according to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll. 52 percent said they would support a law that “significantly lowered greenhouse gas emissions” — but only if it cost them less than $10 a month. Only 39 percent said they would support such a law if it cost them $25 a month — which is vastly less than it would actually cost.

In the name of…

Read the full story

Even though 4 Democratic Senators are so nervous about the electricity tax called cap-and-trade they are urging their leadership to drop it from the global warming bill, no-one should count on that happening yet. More Senators need to wake up to the significant problems cap-and-trade has, and there is no better example of those than the European version of the scheme. With that in mind, my colleague Roger Abbott and I have written a piece for the American Spectator today that…

Read the full story

Today’s excerpt from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, is on cap-and-trade.  

What is cap and trade?

Cap-and-trade is Al Gore’s (and the environmental community’s) leading “solution” to the alleged “climate crisis”–the centerpiece, for example, of the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty.

There are many technical  issues in the design and implementation of a cap-and-trade program, but the basic idea is as follows. 

The government establishes a legal limit–a “cap”–on the total quantity of greenhouse gases that regulated (”covered”) entities may emit. Each covered entity must acquire one federally-created or -certified allowance (permit,…

Read the full story

CNN notes that there are “5 freedoms you’d lose in health care reform” as promoted by the Obama Administration: the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as…

Read the full story

In 2008, Obama promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. But he is now breaking that promise by proposing to tax some middle-class families to pay for health care. Obama has also falsely pledged that if you like your health insurance, you will be able to keep it under his plan. But the Congressional health-care bills he backs would destroy countless inexpensive health-care plans by gutting a federal law called ERISA that makes it possible for employers to offer…

Read the full story