Author Archive:

There’s good Elon and there’s bad Elon. …read more

There’s good Elon and there’s bad Elon. …read more

A coalition of leftist causes calling itself Disrupt J20 plans a series of organizing sessions, classes, protests, and other activities aimed at disrupting Donald Trump’s inauguration as president Jan. 20.

“We’re planning a series of massive direct actions that will shut down the inauguration ceremonies and any related celebrations.”—Disrupt J20 website

In appeals to “all people of good conscience,” Disrupt J20 seeks to bring thousands of fellow activists to Washington to join forces at American University beginning Saturday, six days before Inauguration Day.

“We’re planning a series of massive direct actions that will shut down the inauguration ceremonies and any related celebrations–the inaugural parade, the inaugural balls, you name it,” Disrupt J20 declares on its website, adding:

We’re also planning to paralyze the city itself, using blockades and marches to stop traffic and even public transit. And hey, because we like fun, we’re even going to throw some parties.

Organizers plan early-morning “blockade actions” Jan. 20 built around such banners as “racial justice,” “trade justice,” “climate justice,” “economic justice,” “communities under attack,” “labor direct action,” and “anti-war and Palestine.”

This all must be cool because …read more

Kentucky’s Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, has now officially signed right-to-work legislation–along with other jobs legislation–into law.

Yet the impact of Kentucky’s right-to-work legislation could move beyond the state’s borders.

Right-to-work laws prohibit employers from entering into agreements that make union membership and the payment of union dues a condition of employment.

Additionally, Bevin signed the Paycheck Protection Act, which calls on workers to “opt in” if they want union dues withheld from their paychecks instead of requiring workers to “opt out” if they don’t want their union dues withheld. The other big ticket item eliminates the “prevailing wage” employers must now pay on work funded with public money. This involves construction work on schools and government buildings.

These laws could have a significant impact on the national debate over worker freedom. Kentucky is poised to become the 27th right-to-work state.

A Republican Wave

“Promises made, Promises kept.”

That’s how Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Ky., describes the successful push for right-to-work legislation that went down during Saturday’s special session of his state’s General Assembly.

Nemes was elected in November along with a Republican wave that delivered the Kentucky House of Representatives to his party for the first time since 1921.

“I’m calling it promises made, promises kept because …read more

PRINCETON, N.J.—What began as a retreat from battle-hardened, bayonet-wielding British soldiers 240 years ago, Gen. George Washington reorganized into a counterattack after arriving with well-armed reinforcements in a place known as Maxwell’s Field.

This battleground in Princeton, New Jersey, is where the U.S. War of Independence reached a critical turning point.

“Parade with us, my brave fellows!” Washington is said to have called out to his troops, “and we will have them directly.”

A tall and imposing figure even by today’s standards, Washington was “an easy mark for any British soldier” while mounted on his white horse, historian David Hackett Fischer recounts in his book “Washington’s Crossing.”

But the British didn’t hit Washington. He rallied two broken brigades back into offensive positions, where they concentrated musket fire on British soldiers and forced them to clear the field.

The end result was a major victory for the Continental Army on Jan. 3, 1777, that would reignite the American Revolution. Historical records show that Washington’s maneuvers on Maxwell’s Field turned the tide of the battle at a …read more

Just before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, seven state-level attorneys general huddled with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The political activist, Peter Frumhoff, called for them and other elected officials to move decisively against major corporations and institutions for “denying” climate change.

The seeds of that call to action in March were planted four years earlier at a gathering of environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics across the country in San Diego.

The Daily Signal found this and other revealing bits of information among material produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against Virginia’s George Mason University, home to six academics who urged the Obama administration to prosecute individuals and organizations for not agreeing that man has caused climate change.

The detail is important because Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, demanded that 17 state attorneys general who call themselves “AGs United for Clean Energy” provide documents on interactions among their offices — and with various environmental organizations.

Such details obtained through the lawsuit “reveal the incestuous relationship between climate change activists and partisan …read more

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy had “selfish political and ideological motives” when he made secret overtures to the Soviet Union’s spy agency during the Cold War to thwart then-President Ronald Reagan’s re-election, a Reagan biographer said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

When they came to light years later, Kennedy’s secret contacts with the Russians through their KGB spy agency in the early 1980s didn’t cause nearly the tizzy that Russia’s alleged interference with this year’s election has for President-elect Donald Trump among liberal activists and reporters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump has said he hopes to “get along,” is a former foreign intelligence officer and lieutenant colonel in the KGB.

In the 1980s, Kennedy was “terribly misguided” and “a fool” for seeing Reagan as a greater threat than either the leader of the Soviet Union or the head of its intelligence agency, political science professor and writer Paul Kengor told The Daily Signal.

The presidential hopeful’s secret correspondence with the Soviet spy service was first reported Feb. 2, 1992, by the London Times in an article headlined, “Teddy, the KGB and the Top Secret File.”

As this reporter wrote in 2010, the story focused on a 1983 document from the spy …read more

A conservative advocacy group has a special name for liberal bloggers who have rushed in to defend the business practices of Elon Musk, the multibillionaire co-founder of taxpayer-funded renewable energy and space technology companies. It calls them “stoogers.”

Despite “mounting evidence of cronyism by his crumbling empire, Elon Musk has tapped stooge-like left-wing bloggers to come to his defense,” according to a press release from Citizens for the Republic, a grassroots conservative group based in Alexandria, Virginia.

“Musk should not be permitted to bail out his own companies with taxpayer money,” @dianasbpa says.

The group bitingly defines a “stooger” as “a liberal person … living in their basement spewing left-wing prevarications and slander via blogs, which few read.”

For months now, Citizens for the Republic has been sharply critical of Musk and the government subsidies that flow into his companies. In recent days, however, liberal bloggers and left-leaning news outlets have published articles raising questions about the political action committee’s motivations, objectives, and funding sources.

Diana Banister, a partner in Shirley & Banister Public Affairs and executive director of Citizens for the Republic, told The Daily Signal in an interview that she suspects the blogs “received their marching orders from Musk” in the aftermath …read more

Taxpayer advocacy groups around the globe are calling on the World Health Organization to open this week’s anti-tobacco convention in New Delhi, India, to the news media.

Since the proceedings could not take place without taxpayer funding, journalists should not be prohibited from covering public policy deliberations that could have significant ramifications for taxpayers, the advocates argue in a letter to WHO’s director-general and delegates of the World Health Assembly.

Instead, the World Health Organization should “operate in a more fiscally responsible, more transparent manner and strive to become a leader in promoting press freedom,” the coalition of taxpayer advocacy groups say in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily Signal.

WHO was founded in 1945 as an arm of the United Nations to help alleviate sickness and promote health across the globe.

The fact that the U.N. hosts World Press Freedom Day while banning journalists from the events of an affiliated organization is “hypocritical and despicable,” one American reporter told The Daily Signal.

In 2003, WHO used its authority under the U.N. to create a treaty called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to “protect present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences …read more

Not every justice on the Supreme Court connects the “magical words” of the Declaration of Independence with the government structure set up in the Constitution to protect natural rights as expressed by Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, the only one to do so with any consistency in recent years is Justice Clarence Thomas, a friend and former White House lawyer said in an interview with The Daily Signal on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Thomas’s swearing-in.

“What we now have after Thomas has served for 25 years on the court is not just an amazing and inspiring life story, but a remarkable record of jurisprudence,” recalled Mark Paoletta, who was on the White House legal team when President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the high court.

Other judges have produced “originalist” decisions, Paoletta said, but Thomas stands out as the one most willing to challenge prior court decisions that in his view conflict with constitutional rights, some of them lost to history and calling out for restoration:

Thomas is the one justice who is most willing to look back to the Declaration of Independence as the lodestar of our constitutional structure and how this leads into the concept of federalism, the separation …read more