In the face of substantial budgetary problems, California’s legislature voted to shut down its more than 400 redevelopment agencies that used tax dollars to partner with developers to redevelop blighted areas. Governor Jerry Brown proposed shutting down those agencies, saying the $5 billion they spent annually could be better spent elsewhere. One reason this...
Read More »

As if the climate alarmist scams revealed in Climategate I and Climategate II were not enough, not to mention the deliberate misrepresentations in Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, we now learn that the BBC faked a key scene in the £16 million, seven-part TV series, Frozen Planet, in which polar bears were...
Read More »

The following was nationally distributed in the United States by the Associated Press and appeared in the New York Daily News on Friday, November 4, 1949. The measures being referenced are those in the Fair Deal, the cradle-to-grave welfare state proposal of President Harry S Truman to follow up on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal...
Read More »

As reported in The Guardian and elsewhere, a new batch of 5,000 emails (“FOIA2011″) has just been leaked that follow up on Climategate of 2009 and the more recent scandal of the BEST studies that further reveal the deliberate and coordinated efforts by key climate alarmist scientists to distort the scientific record in order...
Read More »

The following invocation was delivered by the Very Reverend Alan W. Jones, Dean Emeritus at Grace Cathedral of San Francisco, at the Independent Institute’s 25th Anniversary Dinner: A Gala for Liberty, November 15th, in San Francisco: INVOCATION We thank you that you have called the human family into freedom and shown us its painful...
Read More »

Insider trading (buying and selling securities based on non-public information) is illegal for most people. But, insider trading is not illegal for members of Congress. Of course not. They are the ones who write the laws. Here is a story about insider trading done by Rep. Spencer Bachus, when he was ranking member of...
Read More »

The New York Times reports in “A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search” that NRG Energy is receiving nearly $1.6 billion in government subsidies for its new compound in California of almost one million solar panels. The Times further notes that: Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and...
Read More »

In the aftermath of the Solyndra cronyism debacle, the Los Angeles Times now reports that a no-bid contract was awarded last May to a firm controlled by a billionaire Obama supporter for the highly unlikely national security threat of a small pox attack: Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a...
Read More »

This past week, most of the world’s major media, including The Economist, Washington Post, and Nature, reported uncritically the claims of global warming by Richard Muller of the University of California at Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST), that has recently completed a series of four studies. However and in response...
Read More »

Economic “stimulus” packages that don’t revive the economy and that increase federal deficits and undermine private investment and job growth? Check. Laws meant to protect endangered species but which incentivize landowners who have them on their property to “shoot, shovel, and shut-up”? Check. Anti-poverty programs that foster dependency and hinder participation in the job...
Read More »