Major newspapers around the country including the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal are urging President-elect Barack Obama to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in the lame duck session. The Los Angeles Times said it bluntly, “It’s time to stop playing games with a trade pact whose economic and political benefits are good for both nations.”

Some reports of the meeting between the president-elect and President Bush said that the president had pushed for the trade agreement in exchange for support of the auto loan package, but that was denied.

CEI has strongly supported the passage of this agreement based on its own merits – it provides surety for continued liberalized trade for Colombia, it opens up Colombian markets to U.S. goods without high tariffs, and it helps cement the close relationship with a Latin American ally besieged by leftist neighboring governments.

O’Reilly writer Andy Oram makes the case that the assertion President-elect Barack Obama’s victory is in large part due to his campaign’s effective use of the internet is an overstatement, to say the least.  Oram counters that when all is said and done, the mainstream media is what had the most significant impact on the elections.

I feel I have to temper the hype over how the Internet has changed elections. There’s no doubt that the Internet provides enormous potential, and that people have been using it in burgeoning numbers over the past four years to search for information, share ideas with friends, and form online coalitions. But several key observations show that the tipping point hasn’t arrived.

He goes on to give three points that illustrate why he feels this is the case:

1. Fund-raising proves the primacy of the mainstream media
2. Viral videos also prove the primacy of the mainstream media
3. Elections themselves have no Internet component

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The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes has a scare story in today’s Wall Street Journal. He warns of a lurch to the left if Barack Obama wins today’s election. Barnes, a partisan Republican, wrote a book about President Bush in 2006 titled Rebel-in-Chief. He is also a McCain supporter.

Suppose Obama wins, and this lurch to the left happens. Why is Barnes opposed to it? A leftward turn would simply be a continuation of large swaths of Bush administration policy — which Barnes endorses.

True, most people think of President Bush as a conservative, not a liberal. And yes, President Bush is socially conservative and hawkish on foreign policy.

His liberal credentials are still impressive.

For example: President Bush has enacted the largest new entitlement program in forty years; made the tax code more progressive; skyrocketed federal spending on education; overseen 51,000 new regulations to rein in unfettered free markets; transferred billions of dollars from taxpayers to alternative energy researchers; the list goes on.

In short, the federal government, both in spending and in doing, has grown faster under Bush than even Lyndon Johnson could muster. McCain’s limited government credentials are on roughly equal footing.

Barnes and Obama do see things differently on foreign policy and on some social issues. But when it comes to core principles, there is little difference. Barnes, Bush, McCain, and Obama all favor a large, active federal government. Barnes’ distaste for Obama — and support for McCain — is more likely motivated by partisanship than actual philosophical disagreement.

The truth is, no matter who wins, people who favor limited government will probably lose.

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers’ lawsuit against God has been thrown out of court because God couldn’t be served papers informing him of Chambers’ suit.   The court threw out the suit by Nebraska’s most famous liberal lawmaker because of his failure to serve God with a summons. 

But law professor Ilya Somin believes a better reason for dismissing the suit would be that any lawsuit against God, who is Almighty, would be “unredressable” by earthly officials, who could not force God to do anything.  (”Redressability” is one of the elements for showing standing to sue under the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife). 

Last year, I predicted the dismissal of Chambers’ lawsuit here.  Like Somin, I argued that “Chambers’s suit fails the constitutional requirement for standing, that a harm be judicially redressible before it can be challenged in a lawsuit. It would be an exercise in futility for an earthly court to order God to do anything.”  Chambers’ lawsuit also should have failed because it was simply a “generalized grievance,” and been barred based on principles of sovereign immunity.

Chambers’ bizarre lawsuit, strange antics, and vitriolic speeches, have not kept him from being courted by liberal presidential candidates or receiving accolades from journalists, such as being called a “national treasure” by Mother Jones magazine, and being praised by reporters and liberal politicians for his “conscience,” “heart,” and “empathy.”

On the front page of the Washington Post, writer Steven Pearlstein contradicts himself by writing that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being “rescued from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments,” undercutting arguments for “privatization, deregulation, and a faith in free markets.”

But the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is hardly an indictment of the free market: Fannie and Freddie are “Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” not products of the free market or the private sector.

Moreover, mortgage lending is not exactly an unregulated, free market. Just a few days ago, Pearlstein himself admitted in his column that federal affordable-housing mandates deserved a “good chunk of the responsibility” for the Fannie and Freddie failures that he now blames on the free market. (Earlier, we noted that federal regulations promoting “affordable housing” and “diversity” helped cause the real estate bubble and the mortgage crisis). Read the full story