2016

In episode #63 of the In The Tank Podcast, Donny and John are joined by Justin Haskins and Isaac Orr to talk about how the coming Trump presidency will affect health care, energy, education, and tax policy. Today’s podcast features work from the Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute.

With all the attending awfulness you expect. The laxness, the arrogance – the terrible performance. (See: ObamaCare, the Post Office, “green energy,” your Department of Motor Vehicles,….) And the willful denial of the fact that innumerable past failures – portend more of the exact same, should we be foolish enough to yet again try the exact same.

This is huge news – but it is hardly surprising. Google – President Barack Obama’s biggest crony in a sea full of armadas full of legions of Obama cronies – has been cozying up to the woman Obama just endorsed to succeed him: Hillary Clinton. And by “cozying up” – we mean warping their search results to hide Clinton’s decades of scandals and scandalous behavior. Last year, Wired magazine warned us about the election-manipulating power of Google…

Frustrated that nobody seems to care about climate change, “the country’s biggest individual political donor during the 2014 election cycle,” has pledged even more in 2016. Tom Steyer spent nearly $75 million in the 2014 midterms, reports Politico. He intends to “open his wallet even wider” now.

Many in the media and some among the voting public are focused, now, on the field of candidates who are offering themselves as the presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties.

The Supreme Court put public-sector unions in its cross hairs Tuesday, June 30, 2015 by agreeing to hear a constitutional attack on the mandatory representation fees that nearly all California teachers pay in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, we listen in as Heartland Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara joins The Larry Kudlow Show. Ferrara is the author of the recently released book on entitlement reform titled Power to the People. Ferrara and Kudlow discuss the potentiality and likelihood of a 4% growth rate in America.

New polling emphasizes support for traditional energy concerns has become a partisan issue. Large majorities of Republicans favor key energy issues—but voters of every ideological stripe say energy will be an important part of their voting decisions.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Managing Editor of Budget & Tax News Jesse Hathaway speaks with Veronique De Rugy. De Rugy is a Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center. De Rugy is on the podcast to explain how Congress is attempting to increase spending and bypass sequestration spending caps in the coming 2016 budget.

The heat on Common Core was high this spring, but I predict it will be even higher come state legislative sessions this January. It’s the last year states can conceivably avoid joining the train wreck that will be Common Core tests, which are due to replace state tests in March and following. But the earnest moms and dads that comprise the Common Core grassroots have been largely burned by their representatives, who either have responded to serious arguments by relabeling Common Core or diverting blame for it. They’re politicians, man, not representatives.

When Andrew Cuomo was elected governor of New York in 2010, he promised to root out corruption in the New York state government. He began belatedly to act on that promise in 2013 when he set up the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption. The commission quickly set about investigating corruption and government malfeasance. In one year, they had discovered evidence of potentially criminal actions by as many as 12 state lawmakers. The commission made a number of criminal referrals to federal prosecutors.

At the Examiner, Gene Healy writes about why the Rand Paul/Rick Perry initial sparring is good for the foreign policy debate on the right. Whether it’s good or bad in the long run, I do believe it illustrates a number of challenges Republican candidates in 2016 will have to deal with, and the difficulty of assessing where the Republican base is headed at a time when few leaders have run in tandem with its shifting views on national security and foreign policy.

This Telegraph interview with Chelsea Clinton reveals a number of facets of the once and future first daughter which make her the perfect representative of her Millennial generation. She has the fickle but sincere flightiness over everything from career to diet, the waywardness of the overeducated and underchallenged, the comfort of comprehensive knowledge of the new sins, the inner child of Bart Simpson, the gluten allergy … but of course the gluten allergy.