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The Senate Finance Committee, by a 15 to 8 vote, rejected an amendment proposed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) to Committee Chairman Max Baucus’s (D-Mt.) health care bill that would have added a government-run, or ”public,” health insurance option to the overhaul proposal.  Joining all ten of the committee’s Republicans in voting “no” were five Democrats, including Baucus himself, Bill Nelson (Fla.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), and Thomas Carper (Del.).  A second, and slightly less bad ”public option” amendment, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)…

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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,…

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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…

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants Bush Administration officials prosecuted for facilitating torture. Fair enough. But if they get prosecuted, she should get prosecuted, too. She knew of the torture and knowingly funded the very programs that engaged in it. She only objected to it after Bush’s poll ratings went down.

Andrew Sullivan, who detests the Bush Administration, observes that “The Speaker was briefed on waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the White House. She was part of the select group of congressmen and women told…

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Many of those bogus orange alerts that inconvenienced and alarmed travelers since 9/11 had an unsavory source: torture. The Bush Administration, with the tacit support of Congressional leaders of both political parties, tortured terrorists and other detainees into confessing imaginary plots. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), who recently called for an investigation of the Bush Administration, herself knew of the torture for years, having received over 30 intelligence briefings, and Congress knowingly funded the precise programs that practiced torture).

“When CIA officials subjected their first…

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The Federal Reserve has just cut the federal funds rate for loans to banks to an unprecedentedly low rate — ranging from 0.0% to 0.25% — well below its prior 1 percent rate.  After taking inflation into account, the Fed is literally giving money away.  The Fed’s low interest rates since 2001 helped spawn the current financial crisis and the mortgage bubble, greatly weakening the value of the U.S. dollar and reducing capital investment in the U.S.

The Fed’s rate cut will also have the effect of reducing already…

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Ah, that slippery slope. All of a sudden, Nancy Pelosi has come to the conclusion that ensuring union retirees receive large amounts of taxpayers’ money is central to the country’s financial stability. And after all, it’s only $25 billion (or maybe $50 billion, still nowhere near $700 billion, or maybe $2 trillion). As my colleague Sam Kazman commented, even though multi-billion dollar bailouts may no longer be the rarity they once were, that does not entitle either the auto industry…

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Today — five days after a courageous independent vote against Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout for Wall Street — the U.S. House of Representatives disappointingly approved the same basic measure. Many of the bill’s other “sweeteners”, such as earmarks and a regressive increase in deposit insurance for upper income bank customers –will also cost taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars.

All this week I and my colleagues have pointed out ways this bailout could, in addition to being costly,…

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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.

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