Free Republic

The bureaucrats in the Environmental Protection Agency no longer aim to protect our air and water from pollution. In fact, you could say they should pat themselves on the back. Mission accomplished: America enjoys the cleanest air and water in the industrial world — by far. But to keep itself busy, the EPA is imposing — via President Obama's direction — draconian mandates that do virtually nothing to keep the environment clean, but do a ton to destroy industry, jobs, and personal property rights. The Heartland Institute is circulating the “Citizen’s Petition to Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency.” Join the fight more...

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner attended last week's climate conference at The Heartland Institute in Chicago and made it clear: The alarmists will not be setting policy in the US if he has anything to say about it. Watch the video here: http://climateconferences.heartland.org/jim-sensenbrenner-iccc7/

The Federal Reserve does not want the world to know details of "emergency loans" it made to banks in the financial panic of 2008, but the Supreme Court this week effectively said the Fed must tell us. It did this by today rejecting an appeal of a lower court ruling to force the Fed to reveal the information. This leaves intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records.

The right's long-justified annoyance at taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio's elitist and insulting liberal bias — accidentally expressed by one sacked executive named Schiller, and quite viciously by another sacked executive named Schiller — has finally gained traction among the greater culture.  Heads are rolling at the DC offices of NPR. I never thought I'd see it, and I can't say I'm not kinda enjoying it. NPR's chief fundraiser Ronald Schiller not only saw his planned smooth departure from his NPR gig accelerated, he lost his "fall back" at the Aspen Institute, too. His job-killing crime? Dragging his insults of the folks...

The answer to the above headline is "a whole Congress" (and a senseless president "W").  As Stephen F. Heyward noted the other day, the ban of the incandescent light bulb — thanks to the federal mandate of compact fluorescent light (CFL) for all Americans starting in 2012 — will be the stupidest "energy conservation" law since Jimmy Carter spearheaded the national 55 mph speed limit. I'd rather wear a sweater. We can only hope this scheme will be much less short-lived. Writes Heyward: We’re going to sock it to industry with new air-quality regulations to reduce airborne mercury, but we’re going to subject...

Teachers’ unions in Wisconsin are scurrying to win school district of teachers union contracts before Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill gets approved.

The Heartland Institute knows all about global warming skepticism. Indeed, you could say we wrote the book. So we were surprised that a play about global warming skepticism called "The Heretic" is now running in London — and that the left-wing Guardian newspaper gave it favorable notice. A quick summary of the play: [It] starts from a promising premise: the isolation of Dr Diane Cassell, a leading light in the earth sciences department of a Yorkshire university. Her speciality is measuring sea levels in the Maldives, and her pragmatism leads her to conclude they have not risen in 20 years. Inevitably her...

And, no, the term “child dinner” does not mean that moppets are on the menu. They are handed one, though, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education. Via Julie Gunlock at NRO’s The Corner blog, we learn that the Obama administration is expanding its child-dinner program from 13 states to all 50 (or, if Obama gets his way, all 57 … or is it 58?). Anyway, Gunlock has the details: ... This bit of government expansion, by the way, is courtesy of the lame-duck session of Congress. ... And what’s next for the (nearly literal) nanny state after this? AmeriCorps...

On Saturday, about the time of the shooting in Arizona, I was on my way to see a movie with my wife. When we returned, my wife opened up her laptop and said: “Oh, God.” She then read to me the tragic news the world had then learned. I at first felt shock and great sadness — and I still do. But I could still not stop this next thought from entering my head: “No matter the truth, the MSM and the left are to pin this on the Tea Party.” And I hated myself for that thought even...

The folks over at Powerline Blog have an insightful post on the mindset of our current president. It comes by way of Bobby Jindal’s book, “Leadership and Crisis,” where Jindal recounts an encounter with Barak Obama discussing the moratorium on deep sea drilling. The president went on to assure me that anyone who lost their job would get a check from BP. When I explained that BP might not write them checks because it was the federal government that imposed the moratorium the president said, ‘Well, if BP won’t pay the claim, they can file for unemployment.’ I was amazed...

Slate’s David Weigel has complied his list of the five biggest political gaffes of 2010 that weren’t really gaffes. But before we get to Weigel’s gaffes, I want to highlight his lead, which lays out well the forever-changed media landscape: The 2010 midterms marked the final handover of political news judgment from the professionals to the amateurs and operatives. Consider: Four years ago, when then-Sen. George Allen of Virginia, then running for re-election, called a Democratic video tracker “Macaca,” you could not see the video on your phone. You couldn’t tweet it. It was largely up to news organizations whether...

The Federal Communications Commission today moved in to regulate the Internet, which is the wonder of the modern age exactly because the FCC hasn’t been able to get its hands around its throat. Don’t just take it from me and others at The Heartland Institute. Some guy named Steve Wozniak wrote in The Atlantic that the little tech company he helped found would have never fundamentally transformed our economy and our lives if the rules the FCC just imposed were in place years ago. I believe this is the end of the Internet as we know it. If the...

Bruce McQuain — a blogger at the libertarian site Q&O and a good friend of The Heartland Institute — offers his take on the filibuster of the extension of the Bush-era tax rates by self-proclaimed socialist, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont. Though Sanders spoke for many hours non-stop — and he deserves credit, at least, for trying to conduct a "real" filibuster, as opposed to the phony ones we get today — his day-long political theater can be boiled down to the 2-minute found here. To quote Sanders again, he says “the rich” are “crybabies” who are “making out...

"Drop that brownie, young lady! You're in violation of Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010." A bit of rhetorical hyperbole? Actually, that might not be too much of an exaggeration of what's in store under the new child nutrition law Congress passed Thursday. The bill, which gives the USDA power to regulate fat and sugar in schools, squeaked through the House thanks to heavy lobbying from sundry "public health" and child welfare groups. First Lady Michelle Obama's support probably didn't hurt, either. The feds will also be empowered to regulate fundraisers where food is sold -- i.e., bake sales. And...

In last months of his successful campaign, Gov.-elect John Kasich — in a statement that almost all politicians would deem risky due to fear of inflaming the Big Green lobby — told the Dayton Daily News that he would seriously consider a repeal of Ohio’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard. These mandates for utilities to generate minimum percentages of their power generation from expensive renewable sources drive up electricity rates for everyone. Paul Chesser has a piece in the Cincinnati Enquirer that encourages Kasich, now that he’s won, to push for the AEPS repeal and its associated job destruction and Big...

We all hate buzzwords, just like the writers for "The Simpsons." who made fun of them a while back (and ... well ... always. But there's a new list out this year of the most execrable buzzwords of 2010. They include "win-win," "synergy" and "ping." Are you guilty of using some of these in 2010? I must admit. I've used "metrics" a lot to discuss online traffic and other "measurables" (ugh) that I'm responsible for in my job.

Last week I read an article which asked the question: Why aren’t we seeing any Chevy Volts yet? This car promises to be the ‘green’-est mass production vehicle to date, but there is nary a one on the road. Here’s the reason: The EPA–yes, the same organization forcing a pseudo-scientific anti-corporate agenda down your throats through excessive regulation–is too incompetent and bureaucratic to use their own (federally-mandated) EPA fuel-efficiency labeling system. Says the article: It’s illegal to sell new cars in the United States without an EPA fuel economy label — and the government still hasn’t figured out how to...

Bjorn Lomborg notes in a November 12 piece in The Wall Street Journal that the momentum for re-ordering the world in a decidedly socialist and wealth-confiscating direction by dramatically reducing carbon emissions to “save us” from “environmental catastrophe” seems to have slowed. And while Lomborg’s voice has been valuable for the non-alarmist side of this debate — his book, and now movie, “Cool It” has garnered worthy attention — many of us “skeptics” still have bones to pick with the amiable Dane. The WSJ today published a letter of response by Heartland Institute policy advisors J. Scott Armstrong of The...

Climate catastrophe? The end of civilization as we know it? The new documentary, “Cool It,” tries to cut through the fog of the alarmists and get some real answers. The film features among its scientists friends of Heartland Richard Lindzen of MIT, Freeman Dyson of Princeton and Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute.

I love all those "green future" commercials companies like Exxon and BP ("Beyond Petroleum") run. They never fail to get a chuckle out of me, no matter how often I see them. I can’t remember who is responsible for the latest one in which an “engineer” and a “teacher” (both actors, of course) speak almost simultaneously in split screen. They both talk about how we need to get off of carbon-based fuels like petroleum. I’ve only seen it once — and will likely see it 100 times more — but my initial guffaw line was when the “teacher,” in exasperation,...