Featured · Government · Liberty · Politics
As Americans pause to celebrate the 238th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it well may be one of the saddest Fourth’s in decades. The six and a half years of the Obama regime has failed to unleash the nation’s capacity to recover from the 2008 financial crisis and has left the nation saddled in debt and dependency.
Featured · Government · Politics
Slowly but surely, Washington is waking up to the idea that the current surge in populism is not some flash in the pan, but a real and sustained trend in politics on the right and left. Distrust and frustration with an economic and political system that rewards, defends, and bails out the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected while leaving the middle and working class to get squeezed by stagnant wages and the higher costs of the basic staples of life, has made things which were once considered humdrum politics as usual suddenly controversial.
Featured · Government · Politics
Limiting the term of office served by elected politicians has been a controversial issue in the United States for many years. At one time the federal government had no term limits, with the president and Congress allowed to remain in office as long as they could get reelected. Today, the president is limited to two terms, but congressmen and senators are still free to run again and again. And they do.
Environment/Energy · Featured · Regulation
For years we argued that the farming community should respect OUR right to be organic. Now we’ve switched to denying our neighbors THEIR rights. And that goes against everything it has ever meant to be organic.
Eisenhower in his farewell addresswarned that a “scientific-technological elite” dependent on government money would exert undue influence on government policy.
FreedomWorks’ CEO Matt Kibbe’s new book Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff was the topic of discussion Tuesday at Heartland Institute, and due to flight delays and re-direction the author himself had to reschedule his presentation for Wednesday. However, having read Kibbe’s book Joe Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, and Jim Lakely, ably filled in for Kibbe’s absence in a discussion about liberty.
Featured · Legal Affairs · Liberty · Politics
The siren song of independence and national self-determination has sounded once again across Europe. It is a song that holds echoes of a century ago, when the internal force of nationalism convulsed the European empires into world war. Yet, while the song remains the same, the tune has changed.
Featured · Internet/Telecom · Regulation
Aside from whether you think the proposed Comcast – Time Warner Cable merger ultimately should be approved or not, it’s hard to suggest that Comcast’s announcement that it will divest 3.9 million subscribers does not advance the company’s pro-merger case by alleviating claimed competitive concerns. Without getting into the complexities of the proposed three-party subscriber divestiture transactions involving Comcast, TWC, and Charter Communications, the end result is that, as Comcast promised when the merger was announced in February, Comcast’s total number of subscribers, post-merger, will be less than 30% of the total number of U. S. cable subscribers.
Environment/Energy · Featured · Regulation
Mischa Popoff is one of the most formidable opponents of the organic food movement, as this video of his speech to the Far West Agribusiness Association clearly shows. The simple fact that he is carrying to the masses is that the organic industry, particularly the organic certification industry, is a big racket.
Environment/Energy · Politics · Science
Wouldn’t making it in America be easy if you could just pass laws to put your competition out of business? That’s precisely what’s being attempted by anti-GMO organic activists across America today.
I started covering some of the shenanigans from the solar industry last summer when I wrote about the “Green Tea Party” in Georgia. I had no idea what a can of worms I’d opened. In September, I wrote about the net-metering battle taking place in Arizona—and pointed out the national implications of what was playing out there. The following month, I addressed, what I believe, is an organized effort by the industry, to co-opt the language of the free-market/conservative/limited-government thinking population in an effort to convenience them that government-mandated and -subsidized solar energy was a good thing. Last month I warned consumers of solar scams in a column I wrote titled “Clouds on the solar horizon.”
Environment/Energy · Featured · Science
The release of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) has sparked a predictable backlash from the mainstream media and the scientific community. Yet it is a document that cannot be quashed with the usual dose of scorn; it’s far too well-researched for that!
Featured · Government · Health Care
Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s brother and one of the key ObamaCare advisors, has been on quite a roll lately. Consider some of the headlines just from the past few weeks or so. In every instance his message is that he knows better than you do what is good for you. He knows a better way to do insurance than you do, he knows that you don’t really need a choice of doctor or hospital, he knows that you don’t really need a doctor at all for most services, and he knows that “things are actually going well” for ObamaCare despite the fact that you and most Americans don’t like it.
Education · Featured · Government · Politics
Charter schools offer many cities a palatable mechanism for offering greater choice to families in the field of education. They do take some public funding, and they often rely on state infrastructure to operate, but these qualities ought to be weighed against the alternative, which is incompetent and corrupt state monopoly of education, especially in cities with greater levels of low-income households. The choice alone has helped revitalize competition in one of the most sclerotic and venal arms of the government apparatus. With the proven enhanced performance, wide popularity, and general social improvements charter schools provide it would seem like a no-brainer for city government to support.
Yet in New York City, the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has been waging all-out war against the burgeoning charter school movement in his city.
Taking their cue from their brusque and combative boss, Christie’s aides obviously let their limited power overwhelm their good judgment, assuming they ever had any.
Economics · Featured · Legal Affairs · Media
The reaction to the Skilling sentence reduction has been almost uniformly negative. That is regrettable because there were serious problems with Skilling’s conviction.
Budgets/Taxes · Featured · Politics · Regulation
In this recent excerpt from The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today, James Taranto and a reader give serious consideration to what has long been unthinkable in polite[...]
Budgets/Taxes · Featured · Podcast · Politics
Heartland’s Communications Director, Jim Lakely sat down with former Illinois Senator Roger Keats to talk about his new book, Chicago Confidential.
Featured · Internet/Telecom · Legal Affairs · Liberty · Random
Just before this latest scandals avalanche, President Barack Obama urged a class of imminent college escapees – I mean graduates – to: “Reject these voices” who “incessantly warn of government[...]
Suffice it to say that – four decades after Watergate – nothing much has changed when it comes to the abuse of Executive Branch power, and the famous dictum of Lord Acton remains true: power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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