The problem with Russia is not corruption per se, or even Putin per se. Russian government is not corrupt because Vladimir Putin has absolute power. Russian government has been corrupt and will always be as long as anyone has absolute power.
From 1859 to 1971, the U.S. oil industry grew virtually continuously, in the process serving mightily to drive our economy and win our wars. But that growth was stopped dead in 1971 and sent into decline thereafter, as the advent of the EPA and the accompanying National Environmental Policy Act made it increasingly difficult to drill.
In the courtroom of science, if you have the facts on your side, you don't need a gun - and juries would be well advised to distrust the case of those parties who choose to use weapons to silence adversarial witnesses.
I own a small aerospace company that does some business with the U.S. government.
The issue comes down to this: The NSA metadata-collection program costs lots of money, and had funds not been expended on it, they could have been used to support other programs that might have been far more effective in saving American lives.
If we are to assess the rationality of government expenditures to protect the lives of Americans through massive domestic surveillance, we need to compare this program to others aimed at saving American lives.
America is a country defined by a set of ideas, and when people choose to accept those ideas, they should be able to become Americans, as fully so as any - and perhaps more so than most - regardless of how recently they or their ancestors arrived upon our shores. This is the true American tradition, which as conservatives we must defend.
The bedrock foundation of any rational immigration policy should be to benefit America rather than benefiting potential or existing immigrants, or any other specific group, whether favorable or antagonistic to them.
The anti-American policy is the one that keeps oil prices up. The way to do that is to help OPEC limit the amount of liquid fuel available.
In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.
The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty.
Putting aside for the moment the question of whether human industrial CO2 emissions are having an effect on climate, it is quite clear that they are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. As a result, they are having a strong and markedly positive effect on plant growth worldwide. There is no doubt about this.
In the wake of the disaster caused by Tropical Storm Sandy, various allies of the Obama campaign have rushed to claim that the event was caused by anthropogenic global warming, thereby justifying the president's program of crushing the economy with regressive carbon taxes, a supposedly necessary measure to prevent future bad weather.
Global warming would increase the rate of evaporation from the oceans. This would increase rainfall worldwide. In addition, global warming would lengthen the growing season, thereby increasing still further the bounty of both agriculture and nature.
Government attempts to ban fracking should be aborted. The government should lift the burdensome regulations that have made the construction of nuclear power plants excessively expensive, thereby freeing up even more natural gas for direct use or for methanol manufacture.
It should be noted that the EPA's banning of methanol is categorically absurd from the point of view of environmental protection.
The relationship between carbon consumption and human well-being is causal, not coincidental.
Europe certainly needs a genuine conservative movement to combat the creeping bureaucratic collectivism that is stifling the human potential of the Continent.
The problem with Russia is not that it has laws restricting promotion of the gay lifestyle. The problem with Russia is that it has no laws that effectively constrain the strong or protect the weak.
The policy of the Obama administration is to employ regulatory strangulation to drive up the price of energy. This must be exposed and opposed for what it is: a policy of forced economic contraction.
