As pundits bet that Sen. Hillary Clinton is a done deal for Secretary of State, today’s editorial in the Financial Times calls it a poor choice for a variety of reasons. In the piece extolling President-ele

ct Barack Obama’s picks for his economic team, the FT says that’s not the case for Hillary and hits her lack of experience, her ambitions, and her personality.

Economics aside, the biggest surprise among Mr Obama’s rumoured appointments is Hillary Clinton, whose selection as secretary of state is…

Read the full story

Some of the brightest minds in the online conservative movement — John Hawkins, Patrick Ruffini and Mark Tapscott — are discussing what it would take to build a “rightroots” movement, aimed at replicating the political activism of the left “netroots.” As Patrick makes clear in a further post, this is not about building a partisan shilling machine (if it was, the effort would deserve to fail), but about a grassroots-driven insurgency and about harnessing ideological lightning (of which lots more later) to…

Read the full story

If you wanted to communicate over long distances in real-time 25 years ago, you had little choice but to rely on your local phone company for carriage. Email and mobile phones were still oddities, and neither SMS text messages nor tweets had even been conceived.

Federal regulators, concerned that some companies might not maintain a  high level of service, imposed reporting requirements so the FCC could monitor phone companies and ensure calls were being handled properly.

Fast forward to 2008, and the traditional phone company…

Read the full story

Oh, Happy Day! And it certainly is for all those who value freedom, responsibility and the true free market in which individuals are free to profit from their risks on the condition that they don’t stick the rest of us with their losses.

It’s not hyperbole to say the Republican and Democratic backbenchers who defied both parties’ leadership to defeat this $700 billion package of Wall Street socialism literally saved America. Whatever their reasons, this defeat (or rather victory for freedom),…

Read the full story

Though the bill may have been defeated for the wrong reasons—like the lack of freebies, giveaways, and handouts that many on the left had hoped for—the defeat of the bailout bill in the House has brought stocks out of their decent. The Dow Jones is now climbing.

But how can this be? How could a bill that was designed to save our economy, our country, and the world be the cause of the Dow’s drop today? Easy, the bill was introducing…

Read the full story

Check out me and Richard Morrison doing another episode of CEI’s weekly podcast, Liberty Week.  This week we cover:

The “meltdown” on Wall Street
Hurricane Ike
Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to offshore drilling
The War on Bottled Waterâ„¢
A breakthrough for Paralympic athletes

Also, this week we have Radu Burnete (our Romanian intern) joining us to consider how European Union rules have made short cucumbers, uncurved bananas and unpasteurized cheese crimes against the people.

Read the full story