Free Republic

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that had proponents of the bill claiming Americans could save the planet for just $175 per household. That was the figure CBO estimated cap and trade would cost households in 2020 alone.[1]Both the CBO's analysis and the subsequent legislation are troubled: The analysis grossly underestimates economic costs while the legislation will have virtually no impact on climate. Overall, there are a number of basic problems with CBO's analysis: Their allowance cost numbers do not add up; They ignore economic costs such as the decrease...

Washington Paper Hires Right-Leaning Pundits, Reporters to Take on the 'Nanny State' For the first few years of George W. Bush’s presidency, Mark Tapscott was a journalist without a newsroom, shouting from the sidelines about his industry’s swift decline. Tapscott ran the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy, and trained reporters in the use technology for research and crunching numbers. When he considered how few conservatives, libertarians, or real skeptics of federal power were working in newsrooms, he saw a problem that was making the growth of government possible. “The [Freedom of Information Act],” wrote Tapscott in a...

On the eve of Friday’s election in Iran, President Barack Obama told reporters: “We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran. Whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact there has been a robust debate hopefully will advance our ability to engage them in new ways.” But almost immediately after the polls closed, election authorities miraculously claimed to have counted millions of paper ballots and named the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner. Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then went on state television Saturday to declare the result a “divine...

Sunlight fills the bedroom. It's past 8 a.m., and it's cold. Why didn't the alarm go off? The bathroom lights are out. The house is without power. The battery-operated radio plays nothing but static. The phone is dead. What on earth has happened? In fact, what happened was not on Earth. It was above it. A nuclear weapon has detonated high over North America, an explosion so far up that neither the flash nor bang disturbed anyone slumbering in darkened bedrooms across the United States. Electrical systems and computers from New York City to San Francisco cease to function. City...

Let's face it folks, we have the liberal media on the ropes. Drive by newspapers are dying. liberal broadcasts are setting record lows. Liberal cable outlets are always claiming 2nd, 3rd, etc best to Fox. So what's the next step?

Before the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (also known as the "stimulus bill"), President Obama and his chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, stressed that the government's response to the economic crisis needed to be "timely, targeted, and temporary." As predicted by a Heritage Foundation analyst,[1] the bill is neither timely nor targeted. Only time will tell if it is temporary. Not TimelyGovernment agencies have spent only a tiny fraction of money planned to be spent in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Moreover, agencies have not allocated most of the money that has been directed toward...

"Whoopi Goldberg Rails Against Her Taxes." Now if only she can convince Obama to stop proposing ever new taxes, like today's Sugar Tax, yesterday's estate tax hike proposal and the grandaddy of them all - the Global Warming Tax.

Judge Sotomayer supposedly is the leading candidate on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court. Not because of her outstanding record of judicial excellence or expertise in constitutional law (such silly concerns are now irrelevant), but because she's the perfect nominee for partisan Democratic party Identity Politics. She kills three birds with one stone: she's Hispanic, female and a liberal judicial activist. In the video she makes it very clear (despite her levity about the matter) that a judge's role is not to interpret the Constitution but to legislate from the bench. A couple more like her and we won't...

Jack Kemp was a great player in the world of ideas, with a mind as strong as his arm. His strength and friendship will be missed greatly.

      May 1, 2009 A Tribute to Margaret Thatcher--30 Years On  by Robin Harris, D. Phil. WebMemo #2419 Thirty years ago, Britain embarked upon a conservative revolution that not only transformed the country but left an indelible and unmistakable impact on the rest of the world. Only two British Prime Ministers--Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher--have by force of personality and power of example done anything like this.In The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote of his initial thoughts after his election as Prime Minister in May 1940: As I went to bed at about 3 a.m., I was...

This week marks Barack Obama’s historic first 100 days as President. Highlights of his Presidential actions are listed below. Impact on Spending, Debt, and Taxes• President Obama’s $3.69 trillion budget will raise taxes on all Americans by $1.4 trillion over the next decade, and will permanently elevate federal spending to nearly 23 percent of the entire economy by 2019—a level reached only three times since the end of World War II. • The President’s budget dumps a staggering $9.3 trillion in new debt—$68,000 per household—into the laps of America's children and grandchildren. This is more debt than has been accumulated...

On April 17, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an endangerment finding, saying that global warming poses a serious threat to public health and safety. Thus, almost anything that emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the first official action taken by the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide.The endangerment finding is the initial step in a long regulatory process that could lead to the EPA requiring regulations for almost anything that emits carbon dioxide. Automobiles would likely be the first target, but subsequent regulations could extend to a million...

President Obama's decision to slash funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository not only creates big problems for his administration, it raises concerns about whether the nuclear renaissance will stall in its tracks. Failure to come up with an adequate solution to storing the nation's spent nuclear fuel could prevent new nuclear plants from being built despite worries about Americans' growing energy needs. For Obama, it's not enough just to oppose opening Yucca Mountain, as he did during the campaign. About 60,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are presently stored onsite at the nation's 104 commercial nuclear reactors,...

Here is video of Sen. John McCain speaking to the Heritage Foundation today on the subject of "Generational Theft." McCain has said repeatedly that the massive spending of the Obama Administration amounts to stealing from the future generations of Americans. . . . . . (Watch Video)

Maybe JAY LENO should host Meet the Press. Leno pressed Obama hard on the House's vote to strip AIG employees of their retention bonuses via the tax code: "Well, here's something that kind of scared me. They passed this thing that says we're going to tax 90 percent of their bonuses. And the part that scares me is, if the government decides they don't like a guy, all of a sudden, hey, we're going to tax you and then, boom, and it passes." And taxpayers should be scared by this Administration. Especially considering Obama's answer: "The change I'd like to...

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, H.R. 1409, S. 560) does more than take away secret ballot elections: It empowers the federal government to impose contracts on newly organized companies. The government would set wages, benefits, work assignments, promotion procedures, and any major changes to business operations. Because EFCA has no meaningful small businesses exemption, it would authorize federal control of up to 4 million small businesses employing 39 million Americans. Consequently, bureaucrats with no management experience would effectively control these small businesses, says James Sherk, the Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy at the Heritage Foundation. The misnamed Employee Free...

Senator John Kerry stressed that the economy cannot be a scapegoat for not implementing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas reductions. He went so far as to call doing nothing a “suicide pact”.Forget cost and forget the recession, says Kerry: “Climate change is not governed by a recession, it’s governed by scientific facts about what’s happening to Earth. And you either accept the realities of the science or you don’t. You don’t enter a mutual suicide pact because the economy is having a hard time right now.” Senator Kerry has one thing right; it should be governed by scientific facts....

But the steady substitution of private health care for a government run plan is only half of the nationalized medicine equation. As even President Obama noted yesterday, expanding government health care to more and more Americans will be extremely expensive. That is where the health care rationing comes in. President Obama already laid the groundwork for health care rationing by dramatically expanding funding for the Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) council in the stimulus bill, and even without former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) his health care plan will include a Federal Health Board that will turn that research into regulation.... But...

The Wall Street Journal [1]’s Kimberley Strassel reports today that the businesses in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are beginning to realize that the cap and trade was never about global warming: “People are learning,” says William Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which has been cautious about embracing a climate plan). “The Obama budget did more to help us consolidate and coalesce the business community than anything we could have done. It’s opened eyes to the fact that this is about a social welfare transfer system, not about climate.” Nothing...

Over the past few weeks, America has seen President Obama, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel and former Campaign Manager David Plouffe channel much of their focus on what they see as a major problem facing America. You might think the object of this affection is the spiraling economy, which has led them to declare war on moderately successful investors and small business owners while they refuse to acknowledge a war on terror. That is certainly a focus. Secondarily, you might think it is the housing crisis, where they are attempting to cram down irresponsible mortgages so that responsible...