In the March 24th Los Angeles Times Don Lee and Jim Tankersley provide details on a report that warns the U.S. economy will suffer because we’re falling behind other countries when it comes to clean energy investment. The Times says:

China overtook the United States for the first time last year in the race to invest in wind, solar and other sources of so-called “clean energy”, according to a comprehensive new report that raises questions of American competitiveness in a booming global market. The report warned that the current U.S. approach, in which states make varied efforts and the

… Continue Reading

Reporting on a new “study” on U.S.-China trade, Reuters reporter Doug Palmer writes:

Unfair Chinese trade and currency practices caused the loss of as many as 2.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2008, according to a study released on Tuesday.
The report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said China’s “currency manipulation” was a major cause of the United States’ trade deficit with China, though it said other Chinese practices contributed to the deficit.

While Palmer mentions that EPI is “left-leaning,” he fails to mention that the organization receives 30% of its funding from trade-averse labor unions, and that its … Continue Reading

A number of major media outlets, including a column in The New York Times, a post on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and on Newsweek are reporting that Rush Limbaugh said he would move to Costa Rica if the health care bill passed.

“[F]eel free to remind Rush Limbaugh that he promised to move to Costa Rica if health care reform gets implemented,” wrote Times columnist Gale Collins.

“You might remember Rush Limbaugh’s highly publicized promise that if health-care reform became law, he’d move out of the country.” penned Newsweek’s Liz White. “…Well, Rush, pack your bags.”

But if the writers had … Continue Reading

The March 22nd USA Today article by Richard Wolf and Alison Young titled “Health Care: What You Could See” reports:

The law extracts about $500 billion over 10 years from the future growth rate of Medicare, bringing it down from 6.6% to about 6%, says John Rother of AARP. In doing so, it extends the life of the program for nine years, which relieves some pressure to cut benefits or increase premiums.

This is just false. You can’t take $500 billion from Medicare, use that to fund a brand new entitlement, and then also use that money to say you have … Continue Reading

Bloomberg’s Pat Wechsler has a very good March 23rd article titled “States Sue Over Overhaul That Will Bust State Budgets.” Wechsler reports:

President Barack Obama faces a fight over the health-care overhaul from states that sued today because the legislation’s expansion of Medicaid imposes a fiscal strain their cash-strapped budgets can’t afford.

Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania are among 13 states that filed suit after the president signed the bill over the constitutionality of the burden imposed by the legislation. The health-care overhaul will make as many as 15 million more Americans eligible for Medicaid nationwide starting in 2014 and will cost

… Continue Reading

Covering President Barack Obama’s final push for his health plan, AFP’s Stephen Collinson reported on March 19th:

Democrats are also touting an estimate by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office which says the bill could cut 130 billion dollars from the bloated US deficit through 2019 and 1.2 trillion in the second 10 years.

But the CBO reported no such thing. Here is the report. The $1.2 trillion figure does not appear anywhere in it.

When National Review associate editor Robert VerBruggen asked the CBO whether or not they had arrived at the $1.2 trillion figure, the CBO responded: … Continue Reading

On March 10th, the Washington Post ’s Nicole Norfleet wrote a feature story entitled “Thousands rally to support health-care reform in downtown Washington.” It’s a pretty straight piece. It provides quotes from activists calling for passage of the health care legislation, and a brief rebuttal with the insurance industry’s perspective. Notably, the picture accompanying the story parrots the rally’s organizers estimates of the crowd—5,000—and in the second to last paragraph, Norfleet reports that:

No one was arrested during Tuesday’s demonstration, Elliot said. But there was a minor skirmish between police and protesters when

… Continue Reading

The March 15th Washington Post Express  ran what otherwise could have been an ad for the energy efficiency rebates that were part of the larger stimulus package. Titled, “A Bailout for Your Electricity Bill” the article says,

About three dozen states will soon offer you a rebate of as much as $250 if you trade in your clunky old clothes washer, refrigerator or water heater for a more efficient model. Besides the money back, you’ll welcome the savings on your electric bill.

If that’s the case, consumers shouldn’t need a rebate for such a good investment. But the article … Continue Reading

Reporting on the Democrats final push to pass the Senate version of President Barack Obama’s health care plan, Noam N. Levey and Janet Hook write in the March 16th Los Angeles Times:

A group of socially conservative Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, also continues to threaten to vote against any legislation that would allow women who receive federal insurance subsidies to buy polices that cover abortions, even if they write a separate check to cover the procedure. Stupak and others want to prevent women receiving subsidies from buying any policy that covers abortion.

The last sentence in the … Continue Reading

In a March 9th ABC News piece titled “Why Health Care Costs Keep Rising: What You Need to Know,” Huma Khan identifies five “drivers of cost increases” including: medical technology; administrative costs; disease and aging; medical malpractice; and prescription drugs. This is a decent list; technology and an aging population are definitely big contributors to rising health care costs.

But as Jason Fodeman and Robert Book detail, none of the factors mentioned above are the true driver health care costs:

To a large extent, increased health care spending is a consequence of this third-party payment system. In recent decades, the

… Continue Reading

Julia Baird has an article in Newsweek dated March 11th called “Voice of the Middle Class: Why Wall Street Hates Elizabeth Warren.” It is the puffiest of puff pieces. If you took out the friendly adjectives– “Warren has been transformed from mild-mannered Harvard professor to the sharp-shooting, feisty head of the Congressional Oversight Committee”; “Warren is concise, logical, and angry”—there would be nothing left.

Baird reports that Warren, “in a landmark study, found that more than half of all people who declare bankruptcy cite medical reasons.” That this finding has been fiercely contested—that the balance of evidence suggests that her … Continue Reading

It would hardly be International Women’s Day without a speech from an elected official repeating the mistaken notion that American women still suffer under systematic discrimination in the workplace as evidenced by the statistic that women, on average, earn 77 percent of what men earn.

Yesterday, President Obama included this statistic during his remarks to celebrate International Women’s Day: “The statistics of inequality are all too familiar to us — how women just earn 77 cents for every dollar men make.” This was dutifully parroted by those covering the event, including Dan Robinson’s Voice of America … Continue Reading

David Noonan, writing for ABC Australia on March 3rd argues that nuclear power is too expensive and too dangerous for Australia, giving the United States as an example:

Nuclear energy is not only hazardous, but reliant on government subsidies to survive. Australia would spend its money more wisely on renewables. The employment benefits that flow from government investment in renewable energy are far, far greater.

Attacks on the safety of nuclear waste are all too common. Nuclear power releases dangerous amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. Nuclear reactors are vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Nuclear power results in nuclear weapons proliferation. … Continue Reading

Stephen Dinan’s March 5th Washington Times article entitled “Climate scientists plot to fight back at skeptics” allows a climate alarmist  to assert that scientists “will never be able to compete with energy companies” when it comes to pushing their side of the debate.

The claim is false for several reasons:

• Energy companies have funded research on both sides of this debate, but spent more funding those “alarmists” who support claims of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (“AGW”).
• No

… Continue Reading

Reporting on the White House’s final push to pass their health care reform bill, Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray write in the March 3rd Washington Post:

Reconciliation is a procedure created in 1974 to help lawmakers advance politically difficult budget legislation, particularly measures that reduce the deficit. It has been used 22 times by both parties since 1980 to promote a variety of policies, including overhauling the welfare system, creating COBRA health benefits for people who lose their jobs, and cutting taxes in two huge packages championed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003.

This is all true but … Continue Reading

Writing about the mainstream climatologists’ attempt to restore their credibility on March 2nd, John Broder of The New York Times all but dismisses the flaws in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report:

No scientific body is under more hostile scrutiny than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which compiles the climate research of hundreds of scientists around the globe into periodic reports intended to be the definitive statement of the science and a guide for policy makers. Critics, citing several relatively minor errors in its most recent report and charges of conflict of interest

… Continue Reading

Tim Padgett has an item at Time titled “Chile and Haiti: A Tale of Two Earthquakes” that notes:

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile early on Feb. 27 was 500 times stronger than the 7.0 quake that killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians last month. And yet the number of casualties in Chile appears to be exponentially smaller, with the official death toll still in the hundreds. Far fewer people were rendered homeless than in Haiti, and much of the telephone service in Santiago and parts of central Chile had been restored within five hours.
…
Both Chile and Haiti sit atop large,

… Continue Reading