Free Republic

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking ways to "reinvent" journalism, and that's a cause for concern. According to a May 24 draft proposal, the agency thinks government should be at the center of a media overhaul. The bureaucracy sees it as a problem that the Internet has introduced a wealth of information options to consumers, forcing media companies to adapt and experiment to meet changing market needs. FTC's policy staff fears this new reality. [snip] In other words, government policy would encourage a tax on websites like the Drudge Report, a must-read source for the news links of the...

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has used the power of government to seek documents from the University of Virginia regarding its former professor and Climategate figure of "hockey stick" fame, Michael Mann. Mr. Cuccinelli is investigating whether Professor Mann engaged in fraud to obtain taxpayer money to fund his research. The civil investigation is making some people sweat, and raised howls of protest from sources ranging from the liberal Washington Post to the libertarian Reason. Academicians are protesting it as a threat to academic liberty. Daniel Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, penned a letter calling...

[snip] U.S. fiscal policy has been going in the wrong direction for a very long time. But this year the U.S. government declined to lay out any plan to balance its budget ever again. Based on President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a deficit that starts at 10.3% of GDP in 2010. It is projected to narrow as the economy recovers but will still be 5.6% in 2020. As a result the net national debt (debt held by the public) will more than double to 90% by 2020 from 40% in 2008. The current Greek...

'We all should have done a better job." So said Senator Chris Dodd yesterday in discussing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in what ought to go down as the understatement of the young 21st century. Yet such general and less-than-abject remorse wasn't enough for Mr. Dodd and his fellow Democrats to vote to reform the money-losing government-owned companies and clean up the mess they made in the mortgage market. As Banking Chairman, Mr. Dodd was declaiming on the Senate floor that the toxic twins absolutely, positively, no doubt about it, need to be reformed—just not yet. He thus opposed Arizona...

European stock markets pushed sharply higher Monday, while sovereign debt markets slumped, as market participants reacted to news of a hefty €750 billion ($955 billion) rescue package to stabilize the euro and prevent the Greek debt crisis from affecting other member countries.

... Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, was a leading opponent of the insecticide DDT, which remains the cheapest and most effective way to combat malarial mosquitoes. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," misleadingly linked pesticides to cancer and is generally credited with popularizing environmental awareness. But other leading greens of the period, including Nelson, biologist Paul Ehrlich and ecologist Garrett Hardin, were also animated by a belief that growth in human populations was harming the environment. "The same powerful forces which create the crisis of air pollution also are threatening our freshwater resources, our woods,...

WASHINGTON -- Sections of court papers filed by scandal-scarred former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich that were mistakenly made public show a deeper involvement by President Obama in picking his Senate successor and call into question the president's public statements on the case. According to passages in the papers filed Thursday by Blagojevich's lawyers -- which were blacked out under a judge's order but made visible by a computer glitch -- Obama, then president-elect, spoke directly to the disgraced governor on Dec. 1, 2008. But just one week later -- on the day Blagojevich was indicted -- Obama told reporters flatly,...

Free markets depend on truth telling. Prices must reflect the valuations of consumers; interest rates must be reliable guides to entrepreneurs allocating capital across time; and a firm's accounts must reflect the true value of the business. Rather than truth telling, we are becoming an economy of liars. The cause is straightforward: crony capitalism. Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century Victorian essayist, unflatteringly described classical liberalism as "anarchy plus a constable." As a romanticist, Carlyle hated the system—but described it accurately. Classical liberals, whose modern counterparts are libertarians and small-government conservatives, believed that the state's duties should be limited (1) to...

Different Americans have different and often intense preferences for all kinds of goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for beer and distaste for wine while others have the opposite preference -- strong preferences for wine and distaste for beer. Some of us hate three-piece suits and love blue jeans while others love three-piece suits and hate blue jeans. When's the last time you heard of beer drinkers in conflict with wine drinkers, or three-piece suit lovers in conflict with lovers of blue jeans? It seldom if ever happens because beer and blue jean lovers get what they...

House Democrats last night passed President Obama's federal takeover of the U.S. health-care system, and the ticker tape media parade is already underway. So this hour of liberal political victory is a good time to adapt the "Pottery Barn" rule that Colin Powell once invoked on Iraq: You break it, you own it. [snip] We have never understood why pro-lifers consider abortion funding more morally significant than the rationing of care for cancer patients or at the end of life that will inevitably result from this bill. But in any case Democratic pro-lifers sold themselves for a song, as they...

Has there ever been a political spectacle like the final throes of ObamaCare? We can't recall one outside of a banana republic, or, more accurately, Woody Allen's 1971 classic "Bananas." Capitol Hill resembles nothing so much as that movie's farcical coup d'etat in San Marcos as Democrats try to assemble the partisan minimum of 216 House votes—if only for an hour or so at some point on Sunday—and no bribe is too costly, no deal too cynical, no last-minute rewrite too blatant. View Full Image Getty Images .Yesterday, Democrats defeated 222 to 203 a GOP resolution that would have required...

No bill can become law unless the exact same text is approved by a majority of both houses of Congress. Democratic congressional leaders have floated a plan to enact health-care reform by a procedure dubbed "the Slaughter solution." It is named not for the political carnage that it might inflict on their members, but for Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.), chair of the powerful House Rules Committee, who proposed it. Under her proposal, Democrats would pass a rule that deems the Senate's health-care bill to have passed the House, without the House actually voting on the bill. This would enable...

[snip] Liberals are making a bid to restore the "public option," ObamaCare's most controversial and destructive inspiration. Some 18 Senators as we went to press—led by Colorado's Michael Bennet and growing to include New York's Chuck Schumer on Thursday—have endorsed slipping this government-run insurance entitlement in the reconciliation process that would let Democrats abuse Senate rules to hustle ObamaCare into law with 50 votes. Vehemence among House progressives is also at a fever pitch, though it always is. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius joined the mob, telling MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that if the public option is "part of...

A couple of trillion dollars in new deficit spending later, President Obama yesterday signed an executive order creating a Bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Yes, that's really what he called it. And you wonder why Americans are cynical about politics? Having proposed peacetime records for spending as a share of the economy—more than 25% of GDP this year and next—Mr. Obama now promises to make "the tough choices necessary to solve our fiscal problems." And what might those choices be? "Everything's on the table. That's how this thing's going to work," Mr. Obama said. [snip] ... Democrats...

This column was scoffing at global warming back when global warming was still cool. But even we have been surprised at the extent of the past three months' "meltdown" of global warmism, to use the metaphor that everyone seems to have settled on. As we've written on various occasions, we didn't know enough about the substance of the underlying science to make a judgment about it. But we know enough about science itself to recognize that the popular rendition of global warmism--dogmatic, doctrinaire and scornful of skepticism--is not the least bit scientific. The revelations in the Climategate emails show that...

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard. First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper. [snip]

Those unversed in the arcana of Congressional procedure should familiarize themselves with "reconciliation." It's just another word for nothing left to lose—that is, it's the tactic Democrats seem increasingly likely to use to bypass the ordinary legislative rules and railroad Obama Care into law with a bare partisan majority of 50 Senators, plus Vice President Joe Biden. ...

No, it is not 1860 again. But with all the talk of the 10th Amendment, nullification and interposition, states rights and secession -- following Gov. Rick Perry's misstatement that Texas, on entering the Union in 1845, reserved in its constitution a right to secede -- one might think so. Chalk up another one for those Tea Party activists who exploded in cheers when Sister Sarah brought up the dread word in endorsing Rick Perry in the primary. Looking back in American history, however, these ideas, these sentiments, decried as insane inside the Beltway, were once as American as "The Midnight...

Climate Change: A new study shows that Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset. A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe. .. The new study, ..show that...

A Delta Airlines flight 59 from New York landed in Tokyo was undergoing maintenance when a body was found in the landing gear. The body of a man was discovered by a mechanic during a routine maintenance check. The Boeing 777-200 landing gear compartment only accessible just before take off. Japanese authorities suspect the man was a stowaway and looks to have died of hypothermia and frostbite. There didn't appear to be any other injuries to the body. Experts explain that during flight the landing gear and luggage compartments temperatures can fall to as low as minus 58 degrees on...