One of the greatest achievements in the life of an astronomer is to discover a new planet or solar system. In the political world, the equivalent is uncovering a new voting bloc.

Read Full Article

Obama claims 95% of Americans would get a tax cut under his tax plan. Yet only 70% of Americans actually pay federal income taxes. How does this compute? Is he going to give more money to nontaxpayers?

The math simply does not add up. You can't give a tax cut to 95% of Americans if only 70% of them pay federal income taxes in the first place. Then again, math may not be Obama's strong suit, and judging by his earlier foray into "improving" education, it isn't a priority.

Read Full Article

Imagine a world in which you can't get money from your bank or can't get a loan. You can't get money from your ATM even if it's within walking distance. You can't drive to one because your car won't work. No, it's not what would happen if the Congress doesn't pass a bailout bill.

This is a small snapshot of what would happen if a hostile power detonated a nuclear weapon high over the United States generating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry virtually every circuit and electronic device in the U.S., sending America and its economy back a century or more in time.

Read Full Article

CJR: Yes, Ifill has a conflict of interest

Ifill: I never told the Commission about the book

Video: I’m sure Ifill will do a professional job, says McCain

McCain: On second thought, they probably could have gotten a better moderator, huh?

New McCain ad: Just a reminder that Biden’s an idiot

Novak: Ask Obama to define “loophole”

Robert Novak makes a mockery of his retirement — thankfully — with an observation about Barack Obama and his populist rhetoric on tax policy.  When John McCain pressed Obama to explain how he would pay for the hundreds of billions in new spending Obama proposes without raising taxes broadly, Obama said he would “close loopholes” to recover the revenue.  Novak doesn’t think Obama can define “loophole”, at least not broadly enough to find over $300 billion a year in revenues:

How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that John McCain claimed in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were elected president? Obama replied, by “closing tax loopholes.”

Obama was no more specific in the debate, and tax experts doubt that structural changes without increasing taxes can raise anything close to that amount of money. …

Obama has made clear that he would try to roll back President Bush’s tax cuts, but that does not come under the definition of a “loophole.” A loophole consists of a conniving tax attorney discovering a weakness in the Internal Revenue Code or such a weakness intentionally legislated by Congress under the instigation of crafty lobbyists. The only specific tax legislation contained in Obama’s paper would raise the capital gains rate for most shareholders, restore taxation on dividend income to pre-Bush standards and restore the full estate tax.

In other words, Obama doesn’t have a clue what “loophole” means.  When he talks about closing loopholes, what he really means is that he will impose higher taxes on investments and savings as a means to soak the rich.  Obama isn’t interested in closing gaps in the tax code, but in hiking the rates demanded by the code.  It’s redistributionism, the kind of populist pap that won him the nomination, and which Obama hopes will win him the White House.

In the early 1990s, I attended a conference designed to teach journalists the tools of an emerging field known as computer-assisted investigative...

Read Full Article

One of the hottest sessions explained how journalists could replicate stories that other papers had done locally using computer tools, including one especially popular project to determine if banks in your community were discriminating against minority borrowers in making mortgages.

One newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had won a Pulitzer Prize for its computer-assisted series on the subject, and others, including the Washington Post and Detroit Free Press, had also weighed in with their own analyses based on government loan data. Everyone sounded keen to learn if their local banks were guilty, too.

Although academic researchers leveled substantial criticisms against these newspaper efforts (namely, that they relied on incomplete data and did not take into account lower savings rates, higher debt levels and higher loan default rates for many minority borrowers), bank lending to minority borrowers still became an enormous issue — mostly because newspaper reporters and editors in this pre-talk-radio, pre-blogging era were determined to make it so.

Editorialists called for the government to force banks to end the alleged discrimination, and they castigated federal banking regulators who said they saw no proof of wrongdoing in the data.

This, then, became the dominant government position, even though subsequent efforts by other researchers to verify the Fed's conclusions showed serious deficiencies in the original work.

For instance, one economist for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. who looked more deeply into the data found that the difference in denial rates on loans for whites and minorities could be accounted for by such factors as higher rates of delinquencies on prior loans for minorities, or the inability of lenders to verify information provided to them by some minority applicants.

Regardless of how well Sarah Palin does in Thursday's debate, conservatives would be astounded if the major media acknowledged her success.

Read Full Article

For the most part, the media have decided the appropriate response to the governor is to sneer, and sneering at great conservative leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh, has been a liberal pastime for decades.

What makes Gov. Palin unique from the other three candidates in this race is she seems so normal. She worked her way through college, married a good local guy, stayed home with her children for several years and has an impressive professional resume as well.

If press interviews are granted, the criterion should be: "Has the interviewer ever done a fair interview with a conservative woman?" That would save the governor a lot of energy and let her share her message with the millions of Americans hungry to hear more from her.

Liberals are extraordinarily chagrined that the first woman in 24 years to be on a national ticket isn't Hillary, but a conservative. And while they critique and disrespect Palin with gusto, they underestimate the backlash of support they've created for her, even from many Americans who don't think of themselves as conservatives.

Make no mistake: The left-wing criticism of Sarah Palin is not an honest look at her readiness, but a criticism of her core values and her Reaganesque philosophical conservatism. For liberals, a movement conservative will never be ready.

Palin's answer to those who question her readiness should be: "I don't know every issue. And I didn't know every issue when I became governor of Alaska. But 80% of the people of the state approve of my work."

Read Full Article

Basing its recommendation on the theory that the greenhouse gases emitted by meat and dairy production are principal contributors to global warming, the Food Climate Research Network, operating out of the University of Surrey, strongly suggests that meat and milk consumption in developed countries be rationed.

This nonsense emanating from an institute of supposedly higher learning is alarmingly similar to the madness spouted by Rajendra Pachauri, the vegetarian chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who wants people to "give up meat for one day (a week) initially, and decrease it from there."

The limit prescribed by the British group is four ounces of meat every other day and one liter of milk, "just about enough for cereal in the morning" — or 100 grams of cheese — each week.

Tara Garnett, author of the Surrey report, reportedly believes that simply encouraging voluntary changes in habits doesn't work and supports government restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. It's reasonable to assume that she would embrace state-mandated food rationing, using her group's guidelines, as well.

It wasn't hard to see this coming. The forces that want to scare the world about global warming wish to dictate how the rest of us live, from the homes we live in to the automobiles we drive and, now, to the food we eat. They want people to believe that they have only the public interest at heart, but in reality their goal is to set themselves up as autocrats who can shape the world so that it suits their tastes.

Read Full Article

Read Full Article

On Monday, the House of Representatives voted to block the $700 billion package to bail out the struggling financial sector. The Senate is expected to consider similar legislation Wednesday.

But even this staggering cost—and the $140 billion already spent to bail out AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—pales in comparison to the massive bill taxpayers will face for runaway spending on entitlement programs.

A new Heritage Foundation graphic sent to news media demonstrates that this $840 billion is just a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term liabilities from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

"Together, these programs hold unfunded obligations totaling $41 trillion - 60 times larger than the proposed Wall Street bailout," Heritage's Brian Riedl writes in the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is a real crisis we face, Riedl explains. "Imagine a taxpayer bailout even larger than what's proposed for Wall Street. Now imagine it recurring every year in perpetuity. That's our fiscal future unless we fundamentally reform these unsustainable entitlement programs."