Free Republic

The coronavirus crisis calls for an urgent review of Germany's climate targets under goals set by the European Union, the leader of the economic council of the conservative Christian Democrat party (CDU) said on Saturday. The COVID-19 pandemic is "putting the German economy to the test," and the EU should consider a "deferment of climate policy targets," Wolfgang Steiger said in comments published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Steiger said the fallout from the pandemic on the economy could amount to a new "de-industrialization" of Germany. Experts are predicting a global recession as a result of the business shutdown...

Would the Steiger amendment benefit chiefly the rich, as the President says? Not really. Undeniably, a cut in the capital gains tax below the present top rate of 49% would help mainly people in (or above) the 50% tax bracket, who are more likely to own stock and other assets. To be in that lofty bracket, one needs taxable income of about $40,000 or more. But a lot of "average" taxpayers leap into the higher brackets a few times in their lives—when they sell a house, a farm, or the stock that Aunt Tillie left them; or when they collect...

NEW YORK Managing Editor Paul Steiger of The Wall Street Journal and Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. of The Washington Post were both asked to be part of last weekend's unique joint Op-Ed piece by the editors of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which defended the publication of stories about the secret SWIFT bank monitoring program, E&P has learned. But each declined. "We had talked about doing something together," Steiger said. "But when I looked at it and thought about it, our position was so different from theirs -- that nobody asked us not to publish [our...

...[N]ews organizations are trying to outwit a new generation of prosecutors and protect reporters and sources in what they believe to be an increasingly antagonistic environment. In some instances, news executives are issuing guidelines to educate and retrain their staffs about taking precautions to protect their notes and other source materials from being sought as evidence in legal cases. Some are also looking at technological fixes like heightened encryption and e-mail messages that expire after a period of time.... Several news organizations had already begun clamping down on the use of anonymous sources and tightening the rules for when they...

DEATH OF A PATRIOT: BOB STUMP Nov . 11, 1999: "This is Bob Stump," snapped the crisp voice on the other end of the line, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee and veteran Arizona congressman was telephoning me, as he always did, without using a secretary to place the call or having a press secretary handle my request (Stump never even had a press secretary or a congressional web page, never issued a press release nor did media "events"—dismissing all that as "self-promotion crap."). He was calling me to talk about the Veterans Day breakfast Bill Clinton had...