[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwXj1spgK5A[/youtube] Last night’s agenda on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart was: Socialism is awesome! As more and more Americans worry about the growth of government in their lives here in the U.S., the Daily Show travelled to Sweden to put those worries to rest. They wanted to show us that we should embrace Socialism rather than fear it. Well, by playing fast and loose with the facts, as usual, we fear even one person believed their nonsense. So yes, while the Daily Show is very astute to notice that …
The Obama Administration tried to portray the plan as no big deal, akin to simply filling in a loophole. The idea was to provide the FDIC with authority to seize failing “non–banK” financial institutions such as holding companies, insurance firms and hedge funds, similar to the powers they already have to take over failing banks. Such power, it argued, is necessary to avoid disruptive failures of huge institutions, which could threaten the financial institution as a whole. In particular, the Administration pointed to the AIG debacle, saying that the proposed …
As we reported this morning, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson was forced to admit she had not even read the Waxman-Markey carbon taxing bill before her agency released a report claiming the economic impact of cap and trade legislation would be “modest.” Asked how the EPA could produce a report on a bill they hadn’t even read yet, Jacson said: “We had to make assumptions.” What were some of those assumptions? For starters, as University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke notes, the Obama EPA used GDP growth estimates far below those …
Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary and Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt warned yesterday that a public health insurance option in any comprehensive health reform would be the “Trojan horse” that would force Americans into a single-payer health system. Proponents for a public health insurance plan, which has been suggested to be modeled after Medicare, employ “a real clever use of language,” using words like “choice” and “competition” when discussing the plan, Leavitt said in a conference call — one of his first commentaries since leaving the federal health agency …
Testifying on Capitol Hill yesterday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood, and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson all pitched the latest cap and trade bill in the House as a “jobs bill.” Jackson told the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “This is a jobs bill, and it is a jobs bill that focuses our country’s energy on the growth industry of the future.” But when Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) asked Jackson how her agency was able to release a cost estimate of the bill after she admitted she had …
Yesterday, we learned that the State Department had flown a delegation of new media experts to Iraq to consult with government officials and entrepreneurs on digital technology. The delegation made sense for several reasons, including the vast amount of digital talent that had been assembled. However, we couldn’t understand why Blue State Digital was in Iraq? This was a company that unlike AT&T, Twitter, Google, MeetUp and Wired, was relatively unknown and not an industry leader in really anything. It was then discovered that Blue State Digital is the official …
Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner’s message, written five years ago, is still very much relevant today: Almost all the settlers who arrived here hundreds of years ago were subsistence farmers. They cleared hundreds of millions of acres of trees. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, “A single household could consume 20 to 40 cords of wood annually.” Economic growth changed all that. First, we progressed from wood to coal. This allowed us to begin replacing millions of trees. Plus, coal was more efficient and easier to …
The Weekly Standard has done yeoman’s work exposing the insane logic of an MIT professor, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Center for American Progress. The controversy centers around a study by MIT professor John Reilly that shows a carbon cap and trade would cost the average American household $3,9000 a year. $800 of that figure comes from, according to Reilly, “the cost to the economy [that] involves all those actions people have to take to reduce their use of fossil fuels or find ways to use them without releasing …
It’s the day of the year that the world celebrates being green and there’s certainly a lot to be “green” about today. The Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published their yearly Index of Leading Environmental Indicators showing major progress in cleaner air and safe drinking water. Despite the apparent “sky is falling” mentality of many environmentalists and Members of Congress, there are good things going on outside of government-directed environmental progress. The report indicates that not one American or Western European city ranks among the top …
General Motors today took one more step toward what is increasingly looking like an inevitable bankruptcy when its chief financial officer declared that it did not plan on making a bond payment due to creditors on June 1. That’s also the date given by the Obama Administration to the troubled company to get its house in order or to declare bankruptcy. While GM made some hopeful noises about expecting to reach an agreement on a debt-for-equity exchange with creditors by that date, the CFO, Ray Young, was more blunt, calling …
