In remarks on World Environment Day, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Pascal Lamy, pointed out that, “Trade opening has much to contribute in the fight against climate change and to the protection of the environment.” Indeed, the most practical improvements in energy efficiency and protecting the environment over the past decades haven’t stemmed from government regulatory mandates. As shown in the analysis of the Index of Economic Freedom, the most progress has been driven by advances in freer trade and economic freedom. These unleash greater economic opportunity …
Labour leadership contender John McDonnell’s comments on Margaret Thatcher are a sickening disgrace, and a stain on his party. In a leadership debate today, McDonnell stated that if he could return to the ‘80’s he would “assassinate Thatcher”. As LabourList recorded (hat tip: Jonathan Isaby): John McDonnell says he was on the GLC – and that if he could go back in time and do one thing, he would visit the 1980s and “assassinate Thatcher”. I have had the honor of working for Margaret Thatcher, and, like anyone who has …
Tomorrow, a new documentary, The Lottery, will premier in Washington, DC. The film is based on the Harlem charter school lottery: a luck-of-the-draw process to determine who of thousands of vying New York City children will be offered 475 charter school slots. Specifically, it tells the stories of four New York families hoping to break free from New York City public schools to increase the likelihood of their children’s educational success. Madeleine Sackler, the film’s director tells the Wall Street Journal: These are parents who don’t have the means to …
Friday brought yet another grim jobs report. The economy created 431,000 jobs in May according to the report, but 411,000 of them were temporary government jobs working on the Census. All those jobs will disappear when the Census is complete. The jobs report is the latest signal that the stimulus has failed to create jobs and that the economy is still far from full recovery. With the economy still in a precarious position, this is no time to raise taxes on anyone. Yet that is just what Congress and President …
On Monday, two men were arrested trying to leave JFK Airport in New York. The men, Moahamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte planned to fly to Somalia to join al Shabab—a known terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda. The arrest of these two men is a victory no doubt—and very well could have stopped a future terror plot before it could even get off the ground. However, what these guys were doing is anything but ground breaking. As my colleague Jim Carafano emphasizes they were joining a terrorist …
I previously reported for National Review Online on the memorable going-away speech by Christopher Coates, the former career head of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, who had been relieved of his post and “transferred” to South Carolina by the division’s new political leadership. Coates’s frankness and willingness to call out those who had criticized him for trying to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral manner surprised and shocked the other career lawyers in the section, particularly since such evenhandedness runs …
When the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not ban books in order to protect incumbents from critical speech, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann compared the decision to Dredd Scott, warning that after Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: It is almost literally true that any political science fiction nightmare you can now dream up, no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, it is now legal. Because the people who can make it legal, can now be entirely bought and sold, no actual citizens required in the campaign-fund-raising process. …
Last week my wife and I bought a used car, the better to ferry our children between sports events. For this we went to the websites of nearby dealers, researched different cars online and, after settling on one vehicle, quickly called up its history–inspections it had passed, the fender bender in 2007, etc. Our online investigation helped us make an educated decision that fit our family budget. It was just another example of how the explosion of information online has transformed the lives of everyone for the better. Now comes …
The United States isn’t the only country in North America grappling with the fiscal problems caused by an aging population and mounting federal deficits—Canada faces a similar fate. The difference is that, while the United States just passed a $1 trillion-plus government overhaul of health care, incorrectly justified by claims that it will reduce health care spending, Canada’s provinces are trying to figure out how to pay for their nationalized health care system, a major source of out-of-control growth in government spending. Reuters reports that each province is scavenging for …
Last Friday’s Department of Labor jobs report, which showed private sector job creation fell by 190,000 between April and May of this year, jolted markets worldwide including the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which fell 3.2% Friday to its lowest level since early February. In total the U.S. economy has now lost a net of 2.2 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill, and his administration is now 7.2 million jobs short of what he promised his $862 billion stimulus would help create by 2010. This morning on …
