Data show 2009 was a record year for lobbying on energy issues. 1747 clients (firms and groups) hired lobbyists to work in the area of energy and nuclear power. This is a stunning 93 percent increase from 2006. This increase may be stunning, but it isn’t surprising. With literally trillions of dollars put into play by various cap-and-trade bills over the last three years, it would have been surprising if lobbying hadn’t grown by leaps and bounds. Though initially offered as legislation to fight global-warming, the justifications for cap and …
Over at National Review Online they asked experts to weigh in on the situation with Iran and Heritage Expert Peter Brookes was asked to share his thoughts. Hey, Mr. President, how’s that engagement policy with Iran working out for you? Not so well, from what I can tell. While you were busy hoping for a breakthrough, holding fast to the Pollyannaish foreign-policy notion that “if we’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us,” the situation in Iran has only gotten worse over the last year — and precipitously so. …
Red tape – rules, regulations, restrictions and mandates imposed on America – rose alarmingly in 2009, mirroring the overall decline in economic freedom in the United States, as reported in this year’s Index of Economic Freedom. That’s the conclusion of an upcoming Heritage Foundation report detailing trends in federal regulation. In fact, the cost of new regulations imposed on Americans during fiscal 2009 was the highest in 17 years, weighing in at over $14 billion per year. Perhaps surprisingly, most of these new regulations were adopted by the Bush Administration. …
If Energy Freedom Day seems like a long time ago, it was. It’s been since September of 2008 since the Congressional restrictions on energy leasing in 85 percent of America’s territorial waters, which have been renewed annually since 1982, were allowed to lapse. Along with the White House restrictions rescinded by President Bush, it opened nearly all of our federally controlled waters for energy leasing. A lot has happened since, but there’s been no real movement forward on drilling. The leasing process began with a comment period – extended six …
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) this month has been trying to threaten the U.S. economically. However, their plan could actually harm China, not America. Many, many Chinese see reunification with Taiwan as a deep emotional issue. But much of the PLA sees it as a way to pad the military budget. Any attention to Taiwan has Chinese generals demanding some sort of strong action or another, while naturally observing that the controversy justifies more money for them. This happened again with the recent announcement by the Obama Administration that it will provide limited arms to Taiwan. The …
Tomorrow, NBC (which is owned by General Electric) will begin broadcasting the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver, Canada. Only two events are scheduled for the opening day (alpine skiing and ski jumping), but even those events will be difficult to pull off. Why? There is no snow in Vancouver. And International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge knows exactly what is to blame: global warming. Rogge tells AFP: “Global warming of course is a worry, it is a worry for the entire world.” Considering that NBC/GE was a target of TARP …
At his impromptu press conference yesterday, President Barack Obama again defended his health care plan this time claiming: I don’t know if people noted, because during the health care debate everybody was saying the President is trying to take over — a government takeover of health care. I don’t know if anybody noticed that for the first time this year you saw more people getting health care from government than you did from the private sector — not because of anything we did, but because more and more people are …
We knew this was coming eventually. It came from Bryan Walsh, writing in Time: As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven’t we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? … …There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. … That’s in part because of global …
Last week the District of Columbia’s Board of Elections and Ethics (BOEE) rejected, for the third time, a request by five D.C. citizens to put the issue of same-sex marriage to a popular vote. If the Board’s decision is upheld by the D.C. Superior Court and appeals fail, only the U.S. Congress will be able to ensure that a vote occurs before the same-sex marriage law approved by the D.C. Council takes effect early next month. Advocates of the traditional definition of marriage, represented by the public interest law firm …
At Econbrowser, Dr. Menzie Chinn provides a succinct summary of my critique of CEA’s “Economic Impact of the Stimulus” report when he writes, “…these implied increments to growth rates do not jibe with the inferences drawn by Dr. Campbell — that the impact on GDP is much smaller than CEA asserts when using forecasts from the other agencies and firms.” (italics mine). My critique was that the CEA’s method for estimating the economic impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) cannot be used to make a meaningful inference …
