For years, supporters of Internet regulation have argued that it is a political winner—that voters would flock to candidates who promised to impose so-called neutrality rules on the Web. Last week, that proposition was put to the test, as a group called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) released a statement signed by 95 candidates for Congress pledging to support net neutrality regulation if elected. At the time, a spokesman for the PCCC predicted that “the announcement would help generate enthusiasm for net-neutrality legislation in the next Congress.” The test …
It doesn’t matter who asks the question (CNN, Gallup, Pew, Fox, ABC, or CBS) the answer is always the same: the American people believe President Barack Obama’s $814 billion economic stimulus failed. The White House believes that this is a failure of communications not a failure of policy. Enter newly minted White House Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and 1991 college National Debate Team of the Year champion, Austan Goolsbee. Goolsbee has begun doing a series of videos trying to convince Americans that, despite nearly a trillion dollars …
Maybe international treaties do send perfectly good jobs overseas after all; it’s just that these treaties do so by regulating commerce at home rather than facilitating it abroad. The Kyoto Protocol is evidence of this fact. Less than a week ago, as the European Environment Agency was celebrating reducing carbon production by close to 17%, the Guardian reported that, based on consumption of carbon rather than production of it, European greenhouse emissions actually increased significantly over the past decade: The original 15 EU member states who signed Kyoto have dropped …
“Fraud,” “deceit,” and “exploitation.” Those words were used this week at a hearing about the Head Start program–the federal government’s long-standing preschool program for low-income children. An investigation carried out by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), revealed several cases of underreporting of income and the falsification of addresses by Head Start employees in order to “qualify” children for the program. Head Start grantees receive money based on the number of children they serve. As reported in an Education and Labor committee hearing on May 18, reports of two fraudulent cases …
As the old saying in Washington goes: if you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger. Nobody knows this strategy better than the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a big labor union known for bullying anyone it disagrees with into submission. And that is why they are turning their “activists” against the Lewin Group, a nonpartisan, independent health care research firm. In the past couple weeks, thousands of conservatives have taken to Twitter to say #handsoff and push for health care reform that leaves medical decisions in their hands and not …
