Free Republic

On Friday, the day to bury unpopular news, the Obama administration announced the extension of its Keystone XL review. A final decision is unlikely before the November midterms. The administration claims it needs this delay to resolve legal complexities. But let’s be clear: This is the submission of governance to partisanship. And it comes from the president who proclaims himself the maestro of infrastructure investment. It’s impossible to overstate the absurdity of this situation. After all, the State Department recently found that Keystone XL would have no significant impact on the environment — a conclusion upheld by the department’s inspector...

The president and CEO of TransCanada had some harsh words Monday after another process delay was announced by the U.S. Department of State for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. “We are extremely disappointed and frustrated with yet another delay,” Russ Girling said in a statement released Monday. “American men and women will miss out on another construction season where they could have worked to build Keystone XL and provided for their families. “We feel for them.” The Department of State (DOS) announced last week it will seek input from eight federal agencies to determine whether the project meets National Interest...

Political scientist Matt Grossmann discussed the results of his research on federal government growth in the Washington Post last week. I combed through hundreds of history books covering American public policy since 1945, tracking the most significant domestic policy changes that made it into law and the actors that historians credit for those changes. Of the 509 most significant domestic policies passed by Congress, only one in five were conservative, in that they contracted the scope of government funding, regulation or responsibility. More than 60 percent were liberal: They clearly expanded government. The others offered a mix of liberal or...

In "Insatiable" the Economist says "The cost of stopping the Russian bear now is high—but it will only get higher if the West does nothing". Economist: Mr Putin has used the Ukrainian crisis to establish some dangerous precedents. He has claimed a duty to intervene to protect Russian-speakers wherever they are. He has staged a referendum and annexation, in defiance of Ukrainian law. And he has abrogated a commitment to respect Ukraine’s borders, which Russia signed in 1994 when Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons. Throughout, Mr Putin has shown that truth and the law are whatever happens to suit him...

It’s easy to get discouraged if you believe in small government and individual liberty. It seems that the burden of the public sector is always expanding and that politicians and bureaucrats are always figuring out new ways to restrict our freedoms. But let’s not lose hope. We still have a lot of economic liberty, particularly if you count non-fiscal policy factors. And we still have the Second Amendment. Heck, we don’t just have the right to keep and bear arms, we exercise that right in massive numbers. Take a look at this impressive graphic. We’re #1 in some bad ways,...

Doesn’t it seem odd that Obama and the Federal government are going full force after rancher Cliven Bundy and his cattle grazing issue, but they basically bend over backwards to diplomatically deal with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and now Ukraine? It seems that the Obama administration and the Democrats like Harry Reid are hell-bent on persecuting, harassing and demonizing American citizens while foreign dictators, aggressors and terrorists get little, if any pushback. Why is that? I understand the issue with rancher Bundy.Yes, he is taking a stand on what he believes to be right and perhaps he could have...

A disturbing story out of the Sooner State this week, noted by Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. Under the terms of a recently passed bill, expected to be signed by Governor Mary Fallin, homeowners who install their own private solar or wind turbine energy resources and sell some of the juice back to energy companies will be paying a fee for the privilege.

Thus marks the end of the United Auto Workers’ foray into unionizing Southern auto manufacturing. Despite cooperative management at Volkswagen, the UAW failed to convince workers in its Chattanooga facility to unionize. The union alleged interference and demanded a hearing at the National Labor Relations Board to force a revote, but unexpectedly withdrew just before the hearing was scheduled to start:

The English had the longbow. The Spanish had steel. Tawny crazy ants have their own formidable weapon—a protective acid sheath—that protects them against fire ant enemies. The revelation comes from a new study published this week. Named for their butterscotch color and erratic movements, tawny crazy ants are the newest insect invaders sprawling throughout Texas and the Gulf states, unseating the reigning imported fire ants that have infested the region. Teeming out of electrical outlets and short-circuiting electronics, the tiny reddish-brown crazy ants have been making headlines as their numbers climb in the southeastern U.S. In some locales they can...

Morgan Stanley and New York Life recently sponsored a banquet held by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in US history. In that trial, CAIR was identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front group and an affiliate of HAMAS. In addition, in 2008, the FBI broke off relations with CAIR due to its ties to HAMAS, an officially-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

....Compensation $225k (for a nine month salary) + a generous array of benefits, research assistance, moving expenses, start-up support and the like...

~snip~ "Let there be light," said the Lord. And there was light and there was energy, and there was solar energy for all of us. You and I are born equal under the sun, with equal rights to the use of our sun's energy. Unless the path in the delivery of solar energy changes, some of us will be making rent payments to some of our neighbors for the use of solar electricity for the rest of our lives, making the wealth divide even more isolating. This article attempts to throw some light on this reality. The fossil fuels that...

Sure… Sunday was Easter Sunday (the most important day of the year for the world’s 2-3 billion Christians). But, c’mon! It was 4:20 dude! And while millions of Americans flocked to their churches and Cathedrals, the Denver Post thought the front-page story of the day ought to be Colorado’s annual “toke-out” at Civic Center Park in Denver. Heck… The 15 year anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting was even pushed back to accommodate the “high times” of Civic Center potheads. Living a mere handful of blocks from Denver’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, I can personally attest to...

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Chrysler bankruptcy. President Obama will doubtless mark the occasion by talking about how his intervention saved the auto company. More noteworthy, however, is how the lawlessness of that intervention created tremendous uncertainty, which still chills the economy today. Todd Zywicki has written an excellent summary of President Obama’s actions in the Chrysler bailout. A shorter version goes like this. Starting under President Bush and continuing under President Obama, the federal government used TARP funds to keep Chrysler afloat. This gave the government effective control over Chrysler. As a result, the Obama administration...

The United Auto Workers announced Monday it is withdrawing an appeal of the outcome of a union vote at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Tennessee. In a statement released one hour before the scheduled start of a National Labor Relations Board hearing in Chattanooga, Tenn., UAW President Bob King said the union decided to put the “tainted election in the rearview mirror” because the challenge could have taken months or even years to come to a conclusion. …

MOSCOW, April 21. /ITAR-TASS/. The man who earlier on Monday seized a subsidiary of Bank Zapadny in Belgorod, a city located 700 kilometers south of Moscow, has been detained, according to the press service of Russia's Interior Ministry. The man will get back his 23 million rubles (about $639,000) from his bank account, head of regional police headquarters Viktor Pesterev has told ITAR-TASS. The man has been detained, the press center of the Russian Interior Ministry reports. Pesterev, who conducted negotiations with the man, explained that he had tried to withdraw his money on Sunday, but could not do so...

This winter's brutal weather took a toll...according to a survey of economists....But the group expects business to pick up again....

Amidst ongoing corruption trials, a scandal involving top cops who've been changing crime statistics to show crime going down when it’s not, and an economy reeling from the twin salvos of runaway tax increases, and a public pension mess, Chicago has come up with a solution to their economic woes and maybe to their crime fighting woes as well. The city is going to fund giant street performing puppets, some as high as 50 feet tall, for merely millions of dollars. Yes, apparently the performing puppets that they have at City Hall, at police headquarters and crawling all over...

Less than two years after closing its Lincoln Road location, David’s Cafe on Collins Avenue stopped brewing Cuban cafecito for good. The South Beach staple closed its doors for the final time at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 20th.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thirty years after failing to convince the Supreme Court of the threat posed by home video recordings, big media companies are back and now trying to rein in another technological innovation they say threatens their financial well-being. The battle has moved out of viewers' living rooms, where Americans once marveled at their ability to pop a cassette into a recorder and capture their favorite programs or the sporting event they wouldn't be home to see. Now the entertainment conglomerates that own U.S. television networks are waging a legal fight, culminating in Tuesday's Supreme Court argument against a...