Some time ago I said that President Bush’s chronically low approval ratings were a good thing. Evidence of widespread skepticism about politicians. Or at least one of them.

This is why I welcome today’s news that 52% of people — a clear majority — have an unfavorable view of Congress. There is still much to do, though. Even after enduring two simultaneous land wars in Asia, record spending, record deficits, a housing crisis primarily of congress’ creation, bank bailouts, cap-and-trade, and cash…

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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes back guest co-hosts William Yeatman and the Capital Research Center’s Jeremy Lott for Episode 57 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with Blue Dogs and health care legislation, cash for clunkers running on fumes, and AT&T’s response to an iPhone controversy. We continue on with the scandal that wouldn’t die and the architectural historian’s version of Olympic News.

SPECIAL BOOK FEATURE: Shattered Lives: One Hundred Victims of Government Health Care. This book documents stories from Canada, the…

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The Transportation Department announced today that it will wind down the Cash for Clunkers program, which the Obama administration promoted as a way to both help the economy and clean up the environment, by Monday. It was supposed to spur car sales while replacing older cars with more fuel-efficient models.

As I noted here in an earlier post, “The car buying site Edmunds.com compared car sales under Cash for Clunkers with typical car sales over a similar period as that of the program’s…

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Reason TV hits a home run:

Massive savings from your own pocket!

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Congress plans to spend $200 million on luxury jets for liberal House leaders, even though it earlier denounced the automakers for having corporate jets, and even though the luxury jets the House plans to buy emit vast amounts of pollution and greenhouse gases. Now they’ll be able to go on foreign junkets and hob-nob with wealthy lobbyists in style.

As Victor Davis Hanson notes, this excess and hypocrisy is typical of a House Speaker “Pelosi who rails about carbon footprints, but wants the…

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Former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Tim Carney, highlights the high cost of the Cash for Clunkers program, which I wrote about here yesterday.

Two experts — car-selling Web site Edmunds.com and economic modeler Macroeconomic Advisers — estimated that a vast majority of the trade-ins that take advantage of Cash for Clunkers would have happened anyway.

But were Cash for Clunkers mere waste. The program has created some winners.

One lobbyist for this bill was Nucor Steel. In Cayuga County, N.Y., Nucor turns scrap steel into…

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As Frederic Bastiat succinctly noted long ago, when determining the effects of a specific action, it is necessary to consider not only “what is seen” — the observed effects of that action — but also “what is not seen” — opportunities forsaken for the chosen course of action. In public policy, this means that it is necessary to look not only at the alleged benefits of a specific policy after it’s enacted, but also at what would have happened if…

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The auto bailouts keep expanding. Billions more are going to be spent on wealthy auto-dealers, cash-for-clunkers, politically-correct cars few people will buy, and excessive benefits for autoworkers who are richer than the average American.

The Administration’s cash-for-clunkers program has already run out of money, burning through the $1 billion it was supposed to cost. The program rewards people who bought ancient gas-guzzlers, giving them, and not more environmentally-responsible people, federal tax credits for trading them in to buy new cars. The new…

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