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Archive for April, 2011
April 25th, 2011 at 1:01 am
More on “Who Decides?”

In my last post, I explained that Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) would cut far more Medicare services, without giving patients any real choice in the matter, than Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would ever do — and that Ryan’s would give patients control, whereas IPAB would leave them at the mercy of bureaucrats far removed from the scene. Again, the issue is, who decides?

That’s the theme in areas other than IPAB, too. Indeed, it is the central question of Obamacare. Obama’s system and its corollaries leave all authority in the hands of central planners — disembodied persons, as far as the patient is concerned, for whom the patients are little more than statistics on a spread sheet.

Fox news contributor and former Reagan-Bush in-house thinker James Pinkerton is rightly banging the drum for more options for patients and providers alike. In what he calls a “Serious Medicine Strategy,” Pinkerton explains that the best way to keep costs down is to encourage the development of cures rather than of merely managed treatments. As Pinkerton says, healthy people are less expensive than sick people. Therefore, intellectual property rights for researchers should be protected better, or longer, than they are now. The FDA should be more lenient, or more rapid, in approving medicines — at least for trial use, with appropriate warnings, perhaps. And so on. The idea is to provide more chances for more cures, and more choices for everybody involved — mostly through the free market.

There is a lot more to say on this and related topics. Again, though, the central message is this: Where bureaucrats and central planners exert too much control, or interfere too much, the ultimate provision of services is likely to be either worse, or more expensive, or both. But if people are freed to pursue their own best interests. They will. More on this as the weeks go by.

April 22nd, 2011 at 2:08 pm
The Trouble with California in One Paragraph

John Fund gives an excellent distillation for the reasons California businesses are relocating en masse to Texas:

Andy Puzder, the CEO of Hardee’s Restaurants, was one of many witnesses to bemoan California’s hostile regulatory climate. He said it takes six months to two years to secure permits to build a new Carl’s Jr. restaurant in the Golden State, versus the six weeks it takes in Texas. California is also one of only three states that demands overtime pay after an eight-hour day, rather than after a 40-hour week. Such rules wreak havoc on flexible work schedules based on actual need. If there’s a line out the door at a Carl’s Jr. while employees are seen resting, it’s because they aren’t allowed to help: Break time is mandatory.

Indeed, California policymakers are enjoying an extended break from economic reality by focusing on everything else but job creation.

If the trend of 4.7 businesses a week abandoning California continues, pretty soon the great weather will be the only reason to visit the once Golden State.

April 22nd, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Growth in Entitlements Kills Defense Capabilities

Byron York continues sounding a lone alarm over the connection between ballooning welfare spending and shrinking defense budgets.  With the United States largely abstaining from the lethal aspects of NATO’s Libyan adventure, entitlement-heavy countries like Britain and France are running out of missiles.

The reason?  Decades of budget decisions that favored butter over guns.

On a trip to Libya, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) reopens the straight talk express:

“…it’s a sobering fact that many NATO countries, even some of the big ones, are simply weak. They’ve been cutting their defense budgets for years as their welfare state commitments grew bigger and bigger. Now, they can’t mount much of a fight, even by the small-scale standards of the Libyan action. “No one will admit it, but both the British and the French are running out of precision-guided weapons,” says McCain. “They simply do not have the assets.”

Not that this evidence is convincing to modern liberals.  York also points out that members of Congress’ Progressive Caucus recently proposed a “People’s Budget” that raises taxes to expand entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while “reducing strategic capabilities, conventional forces, procurement, and research & development programs.”

We’ve seen the future, and it’s the near military impotence of Britain and France.  The United States can and must do better.

April 21st, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Transparently Dishonest About America’s Finances

Ruth Marcus focuses on the silver lining surrounding Standard & Poor’s downgrading the United States’ credit rating:

The more shake-’em-up warnings that could prod the political system into action, the better. From the Obama administration’s point of view, you don’t want the financial markets overreacting to the news and therefore making economic matters worse – hence Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s round of interviews saying that S&P was overly gloomy about the prospects for political agreement. At the same time, as long as the markets remain reasonably calm, as appears to be the case, the administration is happy to have the political classes riled up. Problem is, the administration has different messages for the two audiences but only a single microphone. (Emphasis added)

In this case, the Obama Administration isn’t suffering from a lack of transparency – it’s deleterious contradictions are all-too-easy to see as it walks America’s financial future right off a cliff.

April 21st, 2011 at 2:05 pm
1st Republican Announces Official Presidential Candidacy

According to CBS News, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson announced today that he is officially running for the GOP presidential nomination.  Though other higher profile potential candidates like former governors Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) and Mitt Romney (R-MA) have announced the launch of exploratory committees, Johnson is the first to make it official.

As governor, Johnson reduced the state workforce and downsized the budget.  He’s also known for libertarian positions on foreign affairs, drug legalization, and social issues.

In his announcement, Johnson promised to take his nickname “Governor Veto” to the next level:

“America needs a ‘President Veto’ right now,” Johnson said in his statement today, “someone who will say ‘no’ to insane spending and stop the madness that has become Washington.”

April 21st, 2011 at 11:03 am
On Death Panel, Who Decides?

Who decides? That is the most important question when it comes to Medicare savings. First, some background:

Conservatives suddenly are abuzz again with talk of an Obamacare “death panel,” and in substance they have a point: If the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) works anything like its model in Oregon… and if government health-care programs effectively crowd out private options so that the bureaucratic decision-makers in the government program are, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate arbiters of who receives which treatments… then people have serious reason to worry that their lives could be foreshortened by government fiat. Employing the phrase “death panel” has its advantages and disadvantages (the biggest of the latter is that it keeps the establishment media from giving the complaint any credence, even though the problems with IPAB are both real and acute), but the board’s potential for harm is evident in the fact that 72 Democratic House members last year joined Republicans in asking for the panel to be removed from the bill.

Meanwhile, the anti-Obamacare lawsuit which takes on IPAB directly (among other things), led by the Goldwater Institue, seems to me absolutely on target in challenging how the board is set up to be a power unto itself with no congressional oversight of any relevance or weight. That suit merits far more attention, via full columns rather than quick blog mentions, and conservatives are foolish not to rally in support of it.

With all the anti-IPAB talk bubbling up right now, though, the talk has been strangely disconnected from the budget debate that has been front and center of the American political universe for weeks. Yet with President “Don’t Interrupt Me” Obama jetting all over the country to spread demagogic scare tactics against the Medicare portion of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, those on the right really haven’t done much to parry the specifics of his attacks on the “voucherization” or “privatization” of Medicare. Yet the fact is that the president aims to save almost as much money from Medicare as Ryan does — except that he wants to use IPAB to do it.

That’s why conservatives should take up his challenge. We should answer that it is he, not we, who is (/are) for “cutting” Medicare. He does it by giving vast powers to unelected bureaucrats almost entirely unanswerable to Congress. We achieve savings, which may not involve actual cuts in care at all, by giving power to the patients themselves. Conservatives should do a very specific poll on Medicare Part D. If, as I suspect, it is still a highly successful program, then conservatives should say that all Ryan wants to do is to make all of Medicare work the same way that Part D does — except without the doughnut hole. The idea is to allow seniors themselves to achieve savings while finding the best care they can.

We save; Obama cuts. More importantly, we give the power to the patients; he gives it to bureaucrats with a mandate to chop costs by unaccountable orders.

So the question is, Who decides: The individual patient, or the government commissars?

When phrased like that, conservatives don’t even need to say the phrase “death panel.” For most listeners, the scary implications of Obama’s approach will be clear.

April 20th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Club for Growth to Lugar: Retire

Roll Call says Club for Growth President Chris Chocola is readying his group for another take-down effort of a moderate GOP senator.

Chocola, a former Congressman from Indiana who served in the House from 2003 to 2007, told ABC’s “Top Line” that his fiscally conservative organization is considering getting involved in Lugar’s 2012 re-election campaign in the Hoosier State. The club has already met with Lugar’s primary opponent, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R).

Club for Growth already helped scare former Senator Arlen Specter into switching parties rather than face one-time CG president Pat Toomey in a primary.  Specter wound up losing the Democratic nomination to former Rep. Joe Sestak.  Toomey ultimately prevailed in the general election.

With Lugar’s (lack of) residency in Indiana and tutelage of President Barack Obama likely to become campaign issues, Indiana just might elect a conservative the rest of America deserves.

April 20th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Obama’s Iran-Contra?

The Daily Caller reports that House Government Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is being ignored by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in his demand for documents pertaining to two ATF initiatives: Operation Gunrunner, and Project Fast & Furious.

No, I’m not making this up.  Here’s the thinking behind Operation Gunrunner:

…ATF allowed American guns to be smuggled into Mexico and sold to Mexican drug cartels. The goal of the program was to track the illegal weapons and drug markets after they were used in crimes and abandoned using ballistics information and serial numbers for the guns.

Operation Gunrunner is gaining particular notoriety on Capitol Hill because of the connection between tracked guns and American deaths.  William LaJeunesse of Fox News reported in March that a Gunrunner firearm was linked to the killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

At the time, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) complained of “getting the runaround” from the Department of Justice on its partnership with ATF on Gunrunner.  The Department of Homeland Security has also been tied to the scandal.

No wonder.  Whoever thought it would be a neat idea to intentionally sell weapons to drug lords and follow the mayhem should at least be hauled in for a congressional hearing.

Unfortunately, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) won’t allow Grassley to post the latter’s extensive documentation of the operation and cover-up, nor will he commence an investigation.

Enter Darrell Issa.  In his fight for more transparency from the Obama Administration, Issa may have found an out-of-control operation linked directly to deaths stemming from Mexico’s undeclared civil war.

If the revelations about Operation Gunrunner continue their trajectory, it may not be long before commentators see Iran-Contra in a new light.  At least then the federal government was trying to free hostages while supporting anti-Marxist guerillas.

April 20th, 2011 at 10:03 am
Gulf Blowout Was Terrible Anomaly

Following up on my column today on the execrable Obama response to last year’s Gulf oil spill, it’s worth reading pieces in the New Orleans Times-Picayune today so as to remind us of certain realities. First, as the caption accompanying this editorial notes (and as has been reported numerous times), this disaster hardly came out of nowhere. Instead, workers and mid-level supervisors had been reporting problems on this particular well for weeks.

Both widows including Courtney Kemp, of Jonesville, La. told committee members that their husbands, Shane Roshto and Wyatt Kemp, had told them in the weeks before the explosion about problems they had in controlling the well. “This well was different in the fact that they were having so many problems, and so many things were happening, and it was just kind of out of hand,” said Kemp.

Other reports confirm that these truths:

The AP recently obtained documents showing that a BP drilling engineer who worked closely on the blown-out well kept quiet about his misgivings in the weeks leading up to the accident.

In an email message to his wife on March 11, 2010, Brian Morel said his team aboard the rig was “out of control.”

“I can’t take it, so I am staying away from the issues today,” he wrote.

A few weeks earlier, the company had reprimanded Morel in a performance evaluation, cautioning him to pick his battles and “learn when to push and when to concede.”

In other words, this was eminently preventable. Warning signs were missed. Decision-making was terrible. And BP had a reputation, at least in some quarters, for cutting corners on safety.

What this means is that the risks of something like this happening again are very, very slim. If it hasn’t happened for many decades, and then when it does happen it turns out to have been preventable, and if everybody is now on the lookout for signs of trouble, and if new safety equipment and well-capping equipment has been developed and are ready at hand… well, then, it stands to reason that all other would-be drillers, and all the businesses and individuals who depend on the wells for their livelihoods, should not be punished by a “permitorium” on offshore drilling. Nor should American consumers nationwide, who are seeing energy prices (especially prices at the pump) rise to near-record levels.

Meanwhile, the T-P’s Bob Marshall (who was my boss nearly a quarter-century ago) updates us all on the continuing efforts to analyze the long-term ecological damages from the spill. This is crucial work. Conservatives rightly skeptical of EPA overreach on matters large and small, and property owners justly angry at the federal government’s assault on private property in the name of protecting “wetlands” that are no more than “prairie potholes,” sometimes forget that some ecological causes are indeed important. I have always argued that the most important of those are the health of the oceans and seas and the fisheries within them, which also means protecting the coastal eco-systems (actual wetlands/marshlands) that serve as the nurseries for those fisheries. Hunters and fishermen, innately conservative on so many levels, understand these things.

The trick to protecting these precious resources held in common is not to regulate people half to death, but to provide incentives for (or remove disincentives from) proper husbandry of the wetlands and seas. Government wetlands replenishment projects, to make up for the effects of government levee-building and canal-dredging, also are appropriate in some places — and they are less expensive than are disaster-relief costs to make up for damages caused by hurricanes whose effects would be far less fierce if healthy wetlands were still available to absorb some of the rising floodwaters and otherwise cushion the blow.

Nobody really needs a heavy hand from government; heavy hands too often come down with the force of a Rocky Marciano clenched fist. What is needed is a government that is responsive and smart, one which reacts quickly (Obama’s administration did not) but that does not overreact in ways that further punish the victims (which is what Obama did).

Future blowouts can be prevented without killing the regional or national economies. Again, the BP disaster was an anomaly. As my colleague Renee Giachino said on this site last week, the whole airline industry isn’t closed down when one plane crashes. Why should energy exploration be treated any differently?

April 19th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Just in Case You Thought Democrats Could be Serious About Entitlement Reform
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Faced with the decline and eventual insolvency of America’s welfare state, congressional Republicans led by Paul Ryan laid out a 73- page plan to reform entitlements for a new generation and right America’s economic course. Democrats, on the other hand, cut this ad, a new low in demagoguery:

I don’t ever want to hear another Democrat refer to the GOP as “The Party of No”.

April 19th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Quick Primer on Debt Ceiling Debate

The Washington Post has a helpful – and short – explanation of the debt ceiling debate, along with some interesting facts.  *My comments in ( )

  • Prior to 1917, Congress had to approve borrowing each time it came up (meaning that WWI combined with Progressive Era big spending made raising the debt much easier)
  • Members of Congress will most likely wait use July 8th as the drop-dead date (unfortunately, federal pensioners will see government contributions to their retirement funds halted when the U.S. passes the real deadline on May 16th)
  • The debt ceiling was less than $1 trillion in the 1980s, then $6 trillion in the 1990s; today it stands at $14.6 trillion and rising (and no, simple inflation is not the reason – it’s spending increases)
  • The budgets presented by President Barack Obama and Rep. Paul Ryan would both require a raise in the debt ceiling (Obama by $2.2 trillion; Ryan by $1.9 trillion)

Read the entire synopsis here.

April 19th, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Will Republicans Blink First on Debt Ceiling?

Byron York of the Washington Examiner says that although many Republicans will be tempted to let the debt ceiling debate go down to the wire, most of them will eventually vote to raise it.

The bottom line is, the debt ceiling issue won’t be settled before an extended game of chicken, one in which Republicans will undoubtedly win some concessions but will, in the end, have to give in.

With the Tea Party still licking its wounds after a much less-than-expected cut in current federal spending, don’t be surprised if raising the debt ceiling becomes the issue upon which many activists base their support for Republican members of Congress.

April 18th, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Government Imposes Tax on … Paying Taxes?
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You probably don’t need any more sources of gloom on this tax day. But what you do need is an understanding of just how destructive America’s current tax regime is. And for that you couldn’t do much better than the words of conservative economist extraordinaire Arthur Laffer, who writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government.

To start with, individuals and businesses must pay the government the $1 in revenue plus the costs of their own time spent filing and complying with the tax code; plus the tax collection costs of the IRS; plus the tax compliance outlays that individuals and businesses pay to help them file their taxes.

In a study published last week by the Laffer Center, my colleagues Wayne Winegarden, John Childs and I estimate that these costs alone are a staggering $431 billion annually. This is a cost markup of 30 cents on every dollar paid in taxes.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the equivalent of a 30% tax on … well, paying taxes.

April 18th, 2011 at 1:56 pm
S&P Lowers Long-Term Outlook on U.S. Credit Rating to “Negative”

Standard and Poor’s spooked markets and sent news rooms scrambling today with its decision to downgrade the long-term outlook for the U.S.’s credit rating to “negative” from “stable.”  In a statement released this morning, the ratings agency wrote:

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation is not begun by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.

The White House swiftly responded, calling the decision a “political judgment” with which it disagrees. 

Really?  The national debt is more than $14 trillion and climbing.  The federal government borrows more than 40 cents for every dollar it spends.  Entitlement spending is spiraling out of control.  And last week, the federal government was within minutes of shutting down because President Obama and Congressional leaders were haggling over what ended up being a paltry few hundred million dollars in spending cuts from this year’s projected $1.65 trillion deficit. 

While the credit outlook downgrade is being reported as a surprise, it shouldn’t surprise anyone. All S&P has done is acknowledge the obvious.  Let’s hope President Obama and Congressional leaders get serious about doing the same.

April 18th, 2011 at 11:34 am
A Spate of InJustice

Ashton this past weekend noted the latest failure of Eric Holder’s Justice Department. A spate of reports last week indicates that some of the Holder team’s other areas of inaction are even worse — and that its actions in still other areas are at least as bad as the areas of inaction.

In terms of inaction, there was the report from Pajamas Media, borderline frightening in its implications, that the Obama/Holder team is failing or, worse, refusing to prosecute instances of terror financing:

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts.

Then there is the Holder team’s highly politicized hiring practices, which are actually worse — more slanted in one direction, and deliberately so — than anything the much-maligned Bush DoJ did. J. Christian Adams updated the story at the Washington Examiner, which both he and the Washington Times had earlier (at different times) brought to light. As the WashTimes noted last October:

Among the new hires are: Sharyn Tejani comes from the National Partnership for Women and Families, a hotbed of liberal activism, where she served as one of the lead attorneys filing a Supreme Court brief supporting an explicitly race-based refusal to promote white firemen in New Haven, Conn. Aaron Schuham comes directly from Americans United for Separation of Church and State – a group so leftist, it has argued the Obama administration isn’t liberal enough. Audrey Wiggins comes from another liberal bastion, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which also filed a brief against the white firefighters. Bryan Sells comes from the American Civil Liberties Union, as does Meredith Bell-Platts.

As Adams concluded:

Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division should be legal technicians, not activists. The division is the only division of the Justice Department where cases are initiated and brought by low-level line attorneys.Every other division is reactive, not proactive. If adopting the agenda of outside activist groups constitutes “reinvigorating” the Civil Rights Division, the next Republican president needs to deinvigorate it soon after taking office.

Earlier in his column, he reported these bizarrities ignored by the establishment media:

Other bizarre cases have come out of the Holder Civil Rights Division. DOJ stopped the debut of the Amazon Kindle because it was not in Braille. It attacked South Carolina for providing special treatment to inmates infected with AIDS. It demanded that Dayton, Ohio, hire black police officers who failed the competency examination.

Then there’s this from former DoJ official Hans von Spakovsky, writing in the Washington Times, reminding us of two lawless, race-based actions by the Holder DoJ, both involving the jettisoning of neutral, fair entrance exams for police and firefighters. Von Spakovsky also has this over at his Heritage Foundation home, telling about DoJ’s abuse of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Finally (for now), while the news in the following case is more about bad judging than about any new DoJ shenanigans, the whole case on the Arizona immigration law stemmed from DoJ shenanigans in the first place. Again, von Spakovsky reports.

The Holder team is willfully abusive of the law as written and traditionally interpreted. It is a disgrace.

April 16th, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Eric Holder Holding the Last Straw

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Politico reports that the AG is being criticized as soft on pornography.

According to a letter sent to Holder by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT):

“Rather than initiate a single new case since President Obama took office, however, the only development in this area has been the dismantling of the task force. As the toxic waste of obscenity continues to spread and harm everyone it touches, it appears the Obama administration is giving up without a fight.”

Apparently, the AG isn’t content to be wrong on civilian trials for terrorists and closing down the Guantanamo Bay military prison.  Now, he wants to stir up a fight on an issue the Obama Administration can’t win.

For the sake of everyone involved, President Barack Obama needs to fire this man.

April 16th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Return of Supply-Side Economics?

The Economist explains how “The Party of No” is most unified around the theme of being anti-Keynesianism.  Keynesianism teaches that government can grow the economy by spending tax dollars to stimulate consumption (i.e. demand).

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other Republicans supporting his “Path to Prosperity” budget argue that cutting taxes gives individuals more money to save and invest in production (i.e. supply), the increase of which creates more jobs.

Not all GOP-ers are sold on Ryan’s revived supply-side theory.  Instead, they prefer to focus on spending cuts as a matter of principle.  Come election season, it isn’t likely that voters will support merely cuts.  They’ll want a vision of what the extra money in their pockets can do.

If recent history is any guide, I suspect Paul Ryan will emerge as the main spokesman for the positive vision of limited government.

April 15th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
This Week’s Liberty Update
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Center For Individual Freedom - Liberty Update

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Senik:  Obama’s Deficit Reduction Plan: More Spending, More Taxes, Less National Defense
Lee:  Dear Liberals: Income Isn’t “Distributed,” It’s Earned
Ellis:  Biofuel: Sowing Hunger Wherever It Grows
Release:  CFIF Strongly Endorses Rep. Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” 2012 Budget Resolution
Release:  Award-Winning Columnist Quin Hillyer Joins Center for Individual Freedom

Freedom Minute Video:  The Gulf Coast … One Year Later
Podcast:  ObamaCare and Women
Jester’s Courtroom:  Tip Jar Lawsuit

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

April 15th, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Award-Winning Columnist Quin Hillyer Joins Center for Individual Freedom
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The Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) is pleased to announce that award-winning columnist Quin Hillyer has joined CFIF as a Senior Fellow. Mr. Hillyer comes to CFIF from The Washington Times, where he has spent the past two years as Senior Editorial Writer. 

For CFIF, Hillyer will continue his role as an “investigative columnist” on public policy issues, with special focus on matters legal, regulatory and budgetary.  He will work from both Mobile, Alabama – extending CFIF’s reach to a number of different sites across the country – and at CFIF’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.  Hillyer also will remain a Senior Editor at The American Spectator.

“CFIF is thrilled to have Quin join our team,” said CFIF President Jeffrey Mazzella. “He brings an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge which will prove invaluable as CFIF continues expansion of public policy advocacy and coverage.” 

Read the full press release here.

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April 15th, 2011 at 11:38 am
Video: The Gulf Coast … One Year Later
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One year after the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the need for the federal government to stop dragging its feet in allowing truly injured parties on the Gulf Coast to be made whole.  Furthermore, Giachino implores the Obama Administration to stop standing in the way of developing our much-needed oil resources in the Gulf.