Many falsehoods were uttered by the President in his health care speech, as even liberal newspapers and Obama advisers have made clear. But the inept, George Soros-funded liberal lobbyists at the Center for American Progress (CAP) attempted to demonize ObamaCare’s critics anyway.

CAP recently shot itself in the foot by refuting its own claims in its September 11 “Progress Report.”

For example, it wrote that critics of big government and ObamaCare “include the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, corporate front groups that…

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The FDA is now moving towards banning a smoking alternative that could save many lives. Every year, millions of smokers like my wife try and fail to quit, because they are nicotine addicts. Many later die of smoking-related illnesses, which are caused by the smoke, not the nicotine. The obvious solution is to give smokers access to less hazardous products that provide the nicotine they crave without the deadly smoke, like chewing tobacco, or, better yet, electronic cigarettes or snus. (Electronic…

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Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”

Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously…

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Congress is about to enact a bill to subject tobacco to FDA regulation. Mark Berlind notes one anomalous feature of the bill: it would deny companies’ protection against “tort liability — even if they rigorously follow every FDA rule.” We wrote earlier about how FDA regulation might actually undermine public health by making it harder to market to smokers other tobacco products, like snus, that are not as lethal as cigarettes.

As Jacob Sullum notes, the law will require snus “to carry a…

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In today’s Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has an excellent column on how the bill to place tobacco under FDA regulation would reduce competition in the tobacco industry and enrich the biggest company — Philip Morris — at the expense of consumers and competitors alike. Although the bill is supported by leading anti-smoking groups (which indirectly receive money from Big Tobacco through the $246 billion Master Settlement Agreement), the bill’s “most important ally” is “Philip Morris, the largest cigarette maker in the world.” As Carney…

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But, alas, not as a litigator - the role that made him rich and famous - but as a defendant. According to Legal Newsline, Richard “Dickie” Scruggs is headed back to federal court to plead guilty to another count of trying to bribe a judge. He’s already serving a five-year sentence for a previous bribery attempt.

OpenMarket readers will remember Scruggs as one of the fattest of fat cat trial lawyers to emerge from the multi-state tobacco settlement reached between tobacco companies…

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