The left’s brilliant lie

Liberals want to take away your light bulbs, pickup trucks and family sedans, but they aren’t honest enough to admit it. On the House floor last week, Democrats insisted regulations prohibiting the sale of cheap sources of illumination beginning in January are about increasing consumer choice. Likewise, the Obama administration’s forthcoming 56-mile-per-gallon fuel-efficiency mandate for automakers is supposedly a boon for consumers.

“I continue to hear my colleagues promote the fantasy that government has banned the incandescent light bulb,” said Rep. Jason Altmire, Pennsylvania Democrat. “They think if they say it over and over again that it will be true. But it’s not true.” Proponents of the bulb ban also claim misleading efficiency increases. There’s a good reason to be skeptical; legislative acts don’t create engineering breakthroughs. The sole purpose of the law signed by President George W. Bush was to eliminate the sale of 25-cent light bulbs because the greens want to force everyone to switch to fluorescent lighting.

Home Depot Co-Founder: Obama Is Choking Recovery

Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot (HD) in 1978 and brought it public in 1981 as the U.S. was suffering from the worst recession and unemployment in 40 years. The company thrived, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and redefining home improvement retailing.

But Marcus says Home Depot “would never have succeeded” if it launched today due to onerous regulation. He recently helped launch the Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit of CEOs and entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving the free enterprise system. IBD recently spoke to him about jobs and the economy.

The Chosen One

In our time, asking how a young man of scarce achievement got into position to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president courts the contemporary synonyms for “impious”: “birther,” “conspiracy theorist,” and, of course, “racist.” Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii’s most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones. No wonder some of Barack Obama’s supporters treat him as if he were anointed by an extraterrestrial power.

A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria

At a time when the push is on to subject humanity to more crazy, shortsighted progressive environmental programs (read carbon regulations) to “save the earth” from its human population, a brief look at progressive airy predictions of the past is in order.

Enlightenment from the campus teach-ins of the 1960s and early 1970s slowly invaded conventional college classrooms so that the hippie-generation mentality of the time eventually became the hip academic norm. But, excitement over such topics as the planet’s imminent collapse from too many people and too much ice quickly waned when population increases yielded no global food fights and Mother Earth began to melt her once-advancing ice caps.

Editorial: Greece’s Only Cure Is The Free Market

Debt Crises: What a sorry spectacle to watch Greeks rioting in the streets in reaction to austerity measures. As if tantrums can change reality. It’s Exhibit A of how socialism infantilizes citizens. The only cure is free markets.

As Greece’s legislature heads for a vote Wednesday to cut the size of its government by $40 billion in exchange for the last $17 billion of a $156 billion International Monetary Fund bailout on July 3, the world’s television screens are flooded with images of young “indignantes” calling a riotous 48 hour-strike in Athens.

The Republican Who Can Win

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?

It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens. Germany was no place to return to and in Kielce, Poland, 40 Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed in a pogrom one year after the war ended. The European Jew, circa 1945, quickly went from victim to international refugee disaster.

Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations?

Weiners, Wusses and Wonks

What hath Anthony Weiner wrought? Clarity.

It is now crystal clear that our elites — the ruling class, the insiders who tell us where, when, and how to live our lives–are nothing more than a collection of Wieners, Wusses and Wonks. And as surely as the words of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse (“What hath God wrought”) signaled the beginning of the modern mass communication era and the transformation of the United States for the 20th century, so will this Democrat leader’s grotesque digital dissemination of his private parts bring about the transformation needed by this century — the realization that our political and media elites are among the worst this nation has to offer.