Monthly Archives: September 2011

For the end of the third quarter, and to mark the end of a lousy month for the stock market (but not as bad as Obama’s months), how about something completely different, like some photos and posters. I would definitely buy this. If it was real. And this is a pretty good job of turning literary “decontructionism” on its »

The Durbin Amendment to Dodd-Frank was added to the bill at the last minute and had nothing to do with Dodd-Frank’s ostensible purpose, to address the causes of the 2008 banking crisis. The Durbin Amendment, named for Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, empowered the Fed to fix the fees that banks above a certain size can charge for debit card transactions. Such fees had been a good source of income for »

Over at Ricochet, Diane Ellis asks the question of the hour: If Chris Christie were to become a candidate for president, would his obesity constitute a road block to the White House? I think the answer to the question is, obviously, no. Voters are in a mood for the anti-Obama. Christie would provide the perfect contrast, right down to the waistline. Christie’s weight isn’t a glitch; it’s a feature. His »

For more than a week, it has been rumored that Bloomberg Markets is preparing a hit piece on Koch Industries. Mark Tapscott of The Examiner wrote on September 19 that “[a] couple of Bloomberg reporters have been digging dirt on the Kansas brothers who own one of the world’s largest private corporations.” According to Tapscott, Bloomberg is looking into an incident several years ago in which employees at a Koch »

In 1969, the United States Supreme Court held in Shapiro v. Thompson that a state’s one-year residency requirement as a condition for receiving welfare benefits was unconstitutional because it burdened the citizen’s right to travel freely within the United States. As a result, for years welfare offices in Chicago offered to buy clients a one-way bus ticket to Minneapolis. While Shapiro and subsequent decisions to a similar effect caused some »

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave Solyndra more taxpayer money even after Solyndra was in default on the government’s $535 million loan guarantee: Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged Thursday making the final decision to allow a struggling solar company to continue receiving taxpayer money after it had technically defaulted on a $535 million federal loan guaranteed by his agency. Chu spokesman Damien La­Vera said »

Remember all the fuss made when the Hitler Bush Administration supposedly put a gag on NASA’s chief climate wacko James Hansen? And this gag consisted of . . . having a low-level political appointee listen in on Hansen’s press calls. Wow, that’s some kind of gag. Especially for a public employee who has endorsed civil disobedience (that is, vandalism) against coal-fired power plants, which he calls “death trains to Auschwitz.” »

I’m still thinkin’ about President Obama’s speech to the annual awards dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation this past weekend. The White House transcript of the speech is here; the White House video is here. There was much of interest in the speech. It would be a mistake to pass over it too quickly. Obama administration policies have been a disaster for blacks, yet they they make up Obama’s »

Our friend Mark Falcoff writes to comment on the news that Hugo Chávez is in serious condition: The latest rumors out of Caracas — unconfirmed but not wholly without some foundation — are that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez may be fatally succumbing to cancer. If this is so, it won’t be long before the world knows it. The news certainly justifies some reflection on what might happen in that country »

Video is a powerful medium. This short video by the Institute for Energy Research may not tell you, as a sophisticated news consumer, anything you didn’t already know about the Solyndra debacle. But it is a powerful summary of the Solyndra scandal, especially for those who don’t follow the news obsessively. So I’d suggest you share it with your friends! »

Yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loan guarantees to “green energy” companies. Drudge is headlining the fact that, as reported by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, most of that amount–$737 million–is going to SolarReserve LLC for a solar-thermal project in Nevada. SolarReserve’s “investment partners”–I take it that means owners–include the Pacific Corporate Group’s Clean Energy and Technology Fund. One of Pacific Corporate Group’s principals is »

Today’s climate campaign embarrassment comes to us courtesy of Nature magazine once again, which has a story in the current issue about how the UN’s “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM), which was essentially a fig leaf for wealth transfers from industrialized nations to poor developing nations, isn’t working according to plan. The CDM is a prototype for a global cap and trade system, whereby industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions would »

Yahoo reproduced 16 photos that were submitted by readers to a National Geographic contest. Collectively, they are very cool; I recommend checking them out. This one is of dolphins. The person who took it wrote: I had just finished photographing surfers when this school of dolphins came through. For once I had my camera with me and was able to get the shot! OK, here is one more, of a »

Last week I criticized Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post reporter who writes a regular feature called “The Fact Checker,” for wrongly claiming that certain comments by Rick Perry on the Middle East were false. My last post on the subject is here. Yesterday, Kessler went after Perry–who seems to be a favorite target–once more, but this time, Kessler was right. He analyzed Perry’s claim in the last GOP presidential debate »

Of all the conspiracy theories of modern times, trutherism must be the silliest. The idea that the U.S. government was behind the September 11 attacks, or acquiesced in them, is absurd on its face; and yet, a great many Democrats believe just that–or tell pollsters they do, anyway. Apart from Democrats, most truthers are bitterly anti-American, certifiably insane, or both. One prominent truther is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Last week at the »

Ron Paul is leading President Obama in the latest Harris Poll. How can that be? Simple: President Obama is unpopular, so any Republican runs pretty well against him. But Ron Paul?! Sure: most people don’t know much about individual Republican candidates at this point, so they generally run about the same, distinguished mainly by name recognition. Some do worse than the norm, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann; this is »

Okay folks, your humble Power Line servant will be guest-hosting Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show tomorrow morning from 6 – 9 am eastern time, which I know is painfully early for those of you near Power Line World Headquarters in Minnesota, but is just about going-to-bed time for some of my west coast friends. (You know who you are out there, GB in Las Vegas.) My guests will »