Free Republic

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

Last week the Obama administration issued a report purporting to show that the President’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan had saved or created exactly 640,329 jobs. Such a precise number for such a fuzzy concept as jobs “saved or created” immediately raised doubts about the veracity of the report in any honest American’s mind. And since that report was issued, a once compliant press has filed story after story tearing the credibility of the Obama administration’s job creation claims to shreds. Just enter the words “stimulus”, “jobs”, and “report” in a Google News search and these are just some of...

Starbucks Sabbath Allie Winegar Duzett, November 3, 2009 In recent years, the American family has been falling apart. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, as have births outside of marriage; non-traditional families are on the way to becoming the norm in society. Brad Wilcox spoke of the “unprecedented family revolution” in America at a recent Heritage Foundation event, Religious Practice and the Family: What the Research Says. This family revolution, Wilcox argued, has “undercut marriage as a fundamental institution” in American society, which matters because religion and familial stability typically go hand in hand. As Wilcox pointed out, “couples who share a...

Politics: Move over, John McCain and Olympia Snowe. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is fast becoming the Democrats' favorite Republican as he partners with John Kerry to push cap-and-trade through the Senate. Earlier this year, eight Republican congressmen made it possible for Waxman-Markey, the 1,400-page job- and economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation, to barely pass the House of Representatives. At the time it seemed dead on arrival in the Senate if it was brought up there this year. Once again, as with their medical plan, the Democrats seek to better the odds by putting a GOP hood ornament on a Democratic clunker....

Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the planned missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland, the...

Strategic Defense: With Iran on the verge of a deliverable nuke, the administration tells our allies in the dead of night that we will scuttle missile defense plans in Eastern Europe to please the Russians.Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after...

Ambassador John Bolton will be addressing the First Principles on First Fridays monthly lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale College's Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on September 11, 2009 in The Allison Auditorium at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Ambassador Bolton will be speaking on "Obama's Foreign Policy: A Report Card". To RSVP, please go to http://www.hillsdale.edu/firstfridays.asp or call 202-248-5084 and ask for Jennifer Powell.

Over the course of the health care debate, the bloggers at Verum Serum have done a true service to the cause of honesty in public discourse by posting video after video of liberal politicians and intellectuals all admitting that, despite his claims otherwise, President Barack Obama’s public option is designed for the sole purpose of being a Trojan Horse for government-run single payer health care. Now Verum Serum has edited all their public option videos into one clip. So the next time an Obamacare supporter tries to tell you that the public option is all about “choice and competition”, respond...

Senior policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation believes "cap-and-trade" legislation will increase an already bloated federal government. David Kreutzer tells OneNewsNow that if cap-and-trade legislation -- sometimes referred to as "energy ration and tax" by opponents -- passes the Senate, it will add more than $8 billion in additional government staff. "This is not the cost to the economy from the higher energy prices -- that's much, much higher; that will be thousands of dollars per family...$9.4 trillion over the first 24 years," Kreutzer explains. "The eight billion [dollars] is just for the staff in Washington to handle the paperwork."...

Share a NiteCap and an interview with HonestConservative and Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation as we discuss the healthcare scam and how socialists goals have changed little in our lifetime, just ask Ronald Reagan, whose conservative philosophy will be with us through the glories of audio technology.

An Analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 by David Kreutzer, Ph.D., Karen Campbell, Ph.D., William W. Beach, Ben Lieberman and Nicolas Loris Center for Data Analysis Report #09-04 After a truncated debate and last-minute changes, the House of Representatives narrowly passed climate-change legislation on June 26, 2009, designed by Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA). The 1,427-page bill would restrict greenhouse gas emissions from industry, mainly carbon dioxide from the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas.Since energy is the lifeblood of the American economy, 85 percent of which comes from CO2-emitting fossil fuels,...

For many Americans, the 2008 presidential election was historic, both in its outcome and the number of citizens who voted, many for the first time. The overall turnout of the votingeligible population was 61.7 percent, the highest turnout since the 1964 presidential election.[1] Local election officials in many states reported high levels of voting by many individuals who have not traditionally participated in the election process. The same, however, cannot be said for America's military members and their votingage dependents ("military voters"). For these voters, especially those serving in dangerous combat zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 presidential...

1.Millions Will Lose Their Current Insurance. Period. End of Story: President Obama wants Americans to believe they can keep their insurance if they like, but research from the government, private research firms, and think tanks show this is not the case. Proposed economic incentives, plus a government-run health plan like the one proposed in the House bill, would cause 88.1 million people to see their current employer-sponsored health plan disappear. 2.Your Health Care Coverage Will Probably Change Anyway: Even if you kept your private insurance, eventually most remaining plans—whether employer plans or individual plans—would have to conform to new federal...

Climate Change: The EPA has prepared a finding for review that global warming is a public health threat, the first step toward regulating the American economy down to your lawn mower.We are often told how the pursuit of alternative energy will help save the earth from climate change and create lots of green jobs. Advocates rarely use the phrase "global warming" any more because the earth is in fact no longer warming, and hasn't for a decade due to a decline in solar activity and other natural factors. They prefer the phrase "climate change" because it can cover a multitude...

Energy: While members of Congress take vacations their constituents can no longer afford, a country prepares to end its dependence on foreign oil by extracting supplies from shale rock. It's not the U.S. It's in the Middle East.Jordan imports 95% of its oil. Unlike the U.S., the desert kingdom plans on doing something about it. It does not, however, plan to cover its flat open spaces with solar panels or wind farms. It's going to do something the Democratic Congress has refused to do — get oil from its abundant shale rock. On Sunday, Maher Hjazin, head of the Jordanian...

Palin Vs. Kerry (And MoveOn.org) By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 15, 2009 4:20 PM The political death of Sarah Palin has been greatly exaggerated. In a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post, Alaska's governor exposes the cap-and-tax fraud that has nothing to do with earth's temperature and everything to do with government control of the economy. She also exposes the stealth socialism ambitions of the Democratic left and once again points out the availability of abundant "shovel-ready" resources under America's soil, off America's shores and even in America's rocks. Judging from the reaction from Sen. Kerry and...

Great IBD Editorial Regarding My "Cap and Tax" Article Yesterday at 7:20pm The political death of Sarah Palin has been greatly exaggerated. In a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post, Alaska's governor exposes the cap-and-tax fraud that has nothing to do with earth's temperature and everything to do with government control of the economy. She also exposes the stealth socialism ambitions of the Democratic left and once again points out the availability of abundant "shovel-ready" resources under America's soil, off America's shores and even in America's rocks. Judging from the reaction from Sen. Kerry and the political arm of George...

Politics: John Kerry, replying to an op-ed Sarah Palin wrote on cap-and-trade, suggests the Alaska governor "check the view from her front porch." What she sees from there, senator, is energy wealth going to waste.The political death of Sarah Palin has been greatly exaggerated. In a devastating op-ed in the Washington Post, Alaska's governor exposes the cap-and-tax fraud that has nothing to do with earth's temperature and everything to do with government control of the economy. She also exposes the stealth socialism ambitions of the Democratic left and once again points out the availability of abundant "shovel-ready" resources under America's...

Since World War II, the U.S. military has used air power as a decisive force multiplier to prevail in peacetime and in combat. In fact, "American ground forces have not come under attack from enemy air forces since the Korean War."[1] Usually, the military with the best and most fighter aircraft achieves air superiority (control of the airspace over the operational zone). Accordingly, Air Force leaders consider their air superiority mission their second highest priority, behind only nuclear deterrence.[2] The U.S. military has consistently gone one step further by establishing air supremacy, in which "the opposing air force is incapable...

Climate Change: Supporters of economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation not only misquote the Congressional Budget Office's report lowballing the costs. They ignore how CBO cooked the books to get its numbers.We have often cited the CBO in our editorials. It's a nonpartisan entity whose staffers normally do a decent job analyzing data and crunching numbers. But as regards the true cost of climate change legislation, they have fallen victim to the computer-age trap: garbage in, garbage out. In recent weeks, ABC's "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos twice misquoted a CBO analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill that claims that we can save the...

Climate Change: Channeling King Canute, G-8 leaders agree to wreck the world's economy, and ours, by pledging to prevent temperatures from rising more than 4 degrees by 2050. What if the Earth has other plans?Canute was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. He was The One of his time. He once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. As the story goes, he was exercising his ego when in fact he was giving his followers a dose of reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. We were...

Regulation: Ignoring the first rule of holes, a bankrupt state passing out IOUs welcomes an EPA waiver allowing it to further kill its economy. Too bad the state can't stop the air pollution imported from a growing China. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday granted California its long-standing request — denied by the Bush administration — for a waiver to allow it to impose even more stringent air pollution rules than currently required by the federal government.The way is now clear for implementation of a 2002 state law requiring new cars to increase their fuel economy 40% by 2016....

Climate Change: A switch of four Republican votes would have defeated Waxman-Markey, the Democrats' global warming legislation. But like the Clinton Btu tax, the bill could die in the Senate and turn the House over to the GOP.What were these RINOs thinking? The GOP is supposed to be the party of low taxes and free markets. Rep. Mike Castle, one of the eight offered an explanation right off of President Obama's teleprompter. "Nations around the world are surging ahead with emission reductions and developing new energy technologies," Castle, Delaware's at-large congressman, posted on his House Web site. "The United States...

Climate Change: A switch of four Republican votes would have defeated Waxman-Markey, the Democrats' global warming legislation. But like the Clinton Btu tax, the bill could die in the Senate and turn the House over to the GOP. What were these RINOs thinking? The GOP is supposed to be the party of low taxes and free markets. Rep. Mike Castle, one of the eight offered an explanation right off of President Obama's teleprompter...Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who has senatorial ambitions to replace the choice of impeached former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sen. Roland Burris, demonstrates why GOP fortunes in the Land...

Regardless of the scientific merit behind doomsday predictions of global warming, President Obama and Congress seem intent on instituting a U.S. policy regime to address the specter of climate change.The debate on the most effective way to "green" America--cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, tough energy standards and regulations, some hybrid approach, or sticking to open markets--will be a heated one. With affordable green technologies still in development, policymakers need to recognize that the economic cost of limiting U.S. production of greenhouse gases on U.S. consumers and companies will be high--high enough to question whether the costs are worth the equally uncertain...

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump...As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once...

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump.Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact.

It has become quite clear over the past several months that placing a cap on carbon emission--via rationing, taxing, and eliminating consumer choice--will have major implications for American families and the economy. An analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill (as reported out of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce) by The Heritage Foundation found that unemployment will increase by nearly 2 million in 2012, the first year of the program, and reach nearly 2.5 million in 2035, the last year of the analysis. Total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion. The national debt would balloon as the economy...

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...

Yesterday,  just days after President Barack Obama signed his economic stimulus measure, the White House released a statement claiming credit for the reopening of a window and door factory in Chicago. Vice President Joe Biden said, “The reopening of this factory and the rehiring of these workers provide an excellent example of how the money in the Recovery Act is targeted to spur job creation quickly.” If the Obama Administration is going to claim credit for every job created since  Obama and Biden were elected, then if they are honest, they should also take the blame for every job lost....

In 2008, the Bush Administration, responding to litigation from an environmental group, listed the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Bush Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne also made some changes to the implementation of the ESA in order to limit the adverse consequences. But now, the omnibus appropriations bill, first passed by the House and now being debated in the Senate, seeks to reverse these common sense limitations.If successful, this revised polar bear policy would greatly threaten economic growth and serve as a powerful anti-stimulus measure, not just in the polar bears' Alaskan habitat but throughout...