speech

Democrats’ grand plan for this election year doesn’t seem to include free speech. The group that drafted the Democratic Party platform recently called for the Justice Department to prosecute energy companies that don’t see eye-to-eye with Democrats on climate change.

Throughout the past four years, climate change activists have been secretly coordinating with one another regarding ways to prosecute individuals, organizations, and companies that are their ideological foes. They met to develop a strategy to use RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), which was intended to provide stronger weapons for prosecuting organized crime, against those who speak out against the Obama administration’s war on fossil fuels.

As they don caps and gowns, endure commencement speeches and take their diplomas, many high school and college graduates face bleak prospects in an economy that grew a dismal 0.5% the first quarter.

“The Revolution devours its children,” wrote French royalist Jacques Mallet du Pan in 1793, but in the case of the American left, the children are now devouring their masters, both literally and figuratively. For the progressive war on free speech is nowhere more evident than on campus, where it has taken on sinister aspects completely apart from Title IX, about which we wrote in Part Two of this series.

As we digested events from last week in the light of President Obama’s Executive Order about gun control, it became clear that gun control was secondary to his attempt to marginalize the NRA. There was lots of sizzle, but no steak in the end. Even diverting attention from Gitmo, ISIS, North Korea, China, and the Middle East played a minor, but useful role.

Given that the USTelecom v. FCC appellate challenge of the FCC’s Open Internet Order is so important to net neutrality, the FCC’s authority over the Internet, and broadband providers’ future, and given that Judge Tatel’s thinking is so important to the outcome of this case, wouldn’t it be important to better understand Judge Tatel’s personal reasoned public explanation of how courts adjudicate cases just like USTelecom v. FCC?

Part 1 published yesterday at Illinois Review, Thursday, October 1, recounted the stellar and above-board behavior of Attorney General Edwin Meese when serving President Reagan, as remembered by Joseph Morris, an honored member of the Chicago Federalist Society, who held the position of Reagan’s Assistant Attorney General during part of Meese’s tenure as Attorney general. Introductory comments by John Fund were included as a teaser to whet the appetite for further Fund reflections and trust-worthy opinions in what is now Part 2.

It is depressing beyond words that we will have to endure two and a half more years of an endless stream of lies about climate change from President Obama.

On June 14 he gave a commencement speech to graduates of the University of California at Irvine, using it to tell Big Fat Lies, not the least of which was that the Earth’s temperatures were rising when in fact they have been falling for nearly eighteen years.

The Obama administration announced last Friday that it will grant industrial wind farm operators 30-year permits to kill legally protected bald eagles and golden eagles without fear of legal repercussions. U.S. wind turbines already kill 1.4 million birds and bats each year, including many endangered, threatened and protected species such as California condors, bald eagles and Indiana bats.

President Obama’s speech yesterday on inequality is being lauded as one of the best of his life, by people who paid attention to it. It’s a sad speech to read, in some sense, since it contains within it the promise of a presidency that we never saw come to fruition – the sort of policy effort that might have been launched to bipartisan success in the first year of his presidency, instead of his effort on Obamacare.

Heartland’s CEO Joe Bast spoke recently at the “Yes, We Did Build It” rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, sponsored by the Citizens for Responsible Government. (That’s Wisconsin Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, at…

Tonight’s address before a joint session of Congress by President Obama might be the most predictable presidential speech in modern times. Budget & tax experts at The Heartland Institute have…