The Daily Signal

How Congress Stopped a Massive Obamacare Bailout - Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced that insurers who lost money selling Obamacare would not get a $2.5-billion bailout. It was great news for taxpayers, but it didn’t happen by chance.  Both chambers of Congress worked very hard to make those savings possible. And lawmakers will have to continue working hard to keep bailouts like this from happening in the future.  Here’s how Congress did it this time. But first, some background. Obamacare used generosity to overcome insurance companies’ objections to its excessive regulation. For starters, the law mandated that everyone buy their product. It created new subsidies to help people make those purchases. And it massively expanded Medicaid, which is largely administered by insurers.

Meet the Academic Who Wants Obama to Prosecute Climate Change Skeptics - Taxpayer-funded college professors and researchers who cite climate change to advocate regulations that would raise energy costs for consumers have some explaining to do, congressional investigators say…… investigators also are curious to hear a George Mason University environmentalist…..explain a growing disparity between computer models showing global warming and fresh scientific evidence suggesting that Earth’s temperatures have been flat for 18 years….“As evidence mounts that the dire predictions of catastrophic global warming are not confirmed by climatological observations, the alarmist camp has had to resort to witch hunts,” said Bonner Cohen, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research…. Steve McIntyre, a statistician noted for challenging the data and methodology used in United Nations climate reports, writes the Climate Audit blog.

McIntyre offers a detailed analysis of Shukla’s compensation and how it squares with university [and] the appearance that taxpayers are financing the environmentalist’s political activism……policymakers should take a hard look at the “Lysenko cult” that held sway in the days of the Soviet Union….The “falsification” and “bogus proofs” used to prop up Lysenko’s schemes is well-documented in the book “Power and Science: The History of the Destruction of Genetics in the USSR,” the Princeton physicist said.  Climate science has attempted to do the same thing.   In light of the “climategate” scandal that erupted in November 2009……it seems like those who manipulated charts to ‘hide the decline’ [in temperature] and conspired to prevent contrarian scholars from publishing in academic journals would be first on the docket.”

School District Stands Up to Government Over Transgender Students in Locker Rooms - When it comes to locker rooms, does a public school have the right to say it should be restricted to of the students of the same physiological sex?  Right now, a school district north of Chicago is squaring off with the federal government on that question.  Township High School District 211, like many school districts, is wrestling with how to balance the interests of transgender students with the privacy rights of other students. Here’s what the district does to accommodate transgender students, according to a newsletter the school emailed Oct. 12:

 Here's What Happened When Seattle Raised the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour - Data shows that the Seattle Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) lost 700 restaurant jobs from January to September of this year, and a report from the American Enterprise Institute suggests that this could be the product of adverse effects of minimum wage hikes on restaurant jobs. “What is also noteworthy about the loss of Seattle restaurant jobs this year is the fact that restaurant employment in the rest of Washington state is booming this year,” writes Mark Perry, an AEI scholar and professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.  A report by Perry, published Wednesday on AEI’s public policy blog Carpe Diem, notes that there has been an increase of 5,800 new restaurant job positions in the rest of the state of Washington.

The Problems With the 'Investigation' That Cleared Lois Lerner - Kadzik says they found no evidence that Lerner’s personal political views, which he describes in the personal emails the FBI examined, influenced her behavior. In fact, he compliments her, saying she tried to stop what was happening as soon as she “became fully aware of” it.  But then, we don’t really know what her actual explanation is for what happened, how it happened, or why it happened, because she refused to answer any questions from the House committee investigating the matter. All we have are Kadzik’s conclusions about why it happened—mismanagement, lack of guidance, ignorance—without any recitation of the actual evidence that was gathered from which to draw our own conclusions. 

Moreover, the Justice Department refused to enforce the contempt citation issued against Lois Lerner by the House for refusing to answer those questions. As previously explained, Lerner waived her ability to assert her Fifth Amendment right when she gave an extensive statement to the Justice Department. In this letter, Kadzik admits that Lerner voluntarily submitted to a 12-hour interview without any immunity agreement or promise of non-prosecution. Therefore, the decision by the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia this past March, when he refused to present the contempt citation to a federal grand jury was legally and factually wrong. But there is no mention of this in Kadzik’s letter.  Of course, there is also another glaring omission in Kadzik’s letter……. Given the “politicization [that] continues to go unchecked by this administration,” Rep. Goodlatte criticized the Justice Department’s decision….