Free Republic

During her tenure as speaker of the House, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi invited investment banker William Hambrecht to participate in multiple economic meetings with her party’s leadership without revealing her extensive personal and financial relationship with him. The links between Hambrecht and Pelosi are a matter of public record. Hambrecht was Pelosi’s son’s boss between July 2009 and September 2011. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, has holdings in a half-dozen companies linked to Hambrecht. The Pelosis purchased a team in Hambrecht’s nascent United Football League for $12 million in 2009, just days before the then-speaker invited Hambrecht to participate in an economic...

Rules: A bill encouraging the use of natural-gas-powered vehicles will give the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases while rewarding the Democratic left's patron saint. We like natural gas. It's the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, the U.S. has lots of it and, thanks to technologies such as hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking"), we can get even more of it from the vast shale formations that dot the country. Others like it, too, which is why a bill floating through Congress, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011 (HR 1380), or Nat Gas Act, has seen a number of...

The EPA's New MoveIs the NAT GAS Act an EPA Trojan horse? The debate over the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011, or NAT GAS Act, has focused mostly on the question of whether the federal government should use hefty subsidies — $64,000 per truck — to interfere with the free-market allocation of resources. On that point, a surprisingly large number of Republicans are siding with their central-planning-advocate colleagues on the other side of the aisle. But why are so many Democrats enamored with big corporate-welfare giveaways to the natural-gas industry in the first place? The...