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Examiner Connect

Op Eds

"It's practically Halloween, already"

Years ago a friend advised me that I should think through well in advance what family rules I'd expect my teenagers, once I had them, to follow. I remember looking down fondly at the pack of little children around my ankles and thinking, yadda yadda, whatever, I've got ages - ages! - before I need to establish a grand system of Rules for Adolescents. Read More

Environmental organizations are biting the hand that feeds them

Lawmakers have made it abundantly clear to bailed-out banks and automakers that federal money comes with strings attached. New rules on executive compensation are only the tip of the iceberg for TARP-funded banks. For bailed-out automakers, Congress has inserted itself into decisions about plant closings and dealerships. The president even fired GM’s CEO. Read More

Leftist foundations work against coal miners

Coal mining in West Virginia provides more than 50 percent of the nation’s electricity, but left-wing donors like the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund have funneled thousands of dollars to groups opposing construction of needed new coal-fired power plants and favoring cap-and-trade limits on carbon dioxide emissions while showing little regard for coal miners’ jobs. Read More

Obama is an exception to most-beloved presidents

As early as May 2008, Newsweek was warning us that Republicans would try to make President Barack Obama “The Other” — a strange, foreign entity, a “dangerous black man,” a Muslim, an alien, a stranger to all we hold dear. Read More

Democrats win lobbyists but lose basic reforms

As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry let slip another deadline in their attempt to fashion a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions. Read More

Lobbying can be sordid, but it's not a crime

The U.S. government says Kevin Ring, onetime colleague of jailed influence peddler Jack Abramoff, was a crooked lobbyist who should go to jail for wooing lawmakers and their staff. But absent any evidence of a specific illegal act of corruption, prosecutors have been forced to try Ring for simply being a lobbyist. Read More

Dear Senator: Why you should vote against cap-and-trade

Earlier this year the U.S House of Representatives approved the Waxman-Markey bill to establish a so-called cap-and-trade program designed to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Cap-and-trade is a gee-whiz name, but all it means is that the government would establish a total limit for annual CO2 emissions, auction or otherwise distribute ration coupons for the right to emit, and then allow the holders to buy and sell coupons in a legal secondary market. Read More

Is tort reform the answer?

Tort reform is not addressed in any of the Democrat-sponsored health care reform bills now before Congress. Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean says it’s “too tough” to take on tort reform at the same time as health care due to the powerful lawyers lobby. Read More

Aristocrats can afford car-free days

In the early 1800s, when railroads first began to spread across Great Britain, the Duke of Wellington reportedly sneered that this innovation would “only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” Read More

Without Bush, media lose interest in war caskets

Remember the controversy over the Pentagon policy of not allowing the press to take pictures of the flag-draped caskets of American war dead as they arrived in the United States? Critics accused President Bush of trying to hide the terrible human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read More
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