The Heartland Institute

Taco Bell®, long a young person’s favorite place for inexpensive and tasty late-night snacks and likely an occasional target of late-night robberies, now finds itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit for alleged stealing--brought by a prisoner in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. One Gary Cole, whose fellow inmates include ...

The latest polling on Obamacare is the worst it has ever been, with majorities of Americans saying they expect their family will be worse off under it and majorities saying it would be better to go back to the pre-Obamacare health care system. A Fox News poll found only 26 percent of voters say their health care situation ...

The Arizona legislature passes a voucher expansion . Republicans undercut Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's voucher expansion , the Wall Street Journal decries. Texas passes a law effectively banning Common Core . Common Core resistance hits South Carolina . A Colorado school district is first in the nation to pay teachers according to ...

Also on the food front, you just knew this was going to happen back when Budweiser®, Schlitz®, and Pabst Blue Ribbon® brand beers became no longer good enough for the cognoscenti and everybody started getting into microbrews: more brands, more logos, and sooner or later the marketing people will start running out of ideas ...

A much-anticipated carbon tax debate in Washington D.C. last Thursday brought some much needed clarity to assertions that conservatives should or indeed do support a carbon tax. The timing of the debate couldn’t have been better, as Senate leaders announced on that same day the Senate will hold hearings on a carbon tax next ...

An energetic group of medical doctors, nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, climate scientists, and just plain folks desiring to get up close and personal with some of our nation's greatest scientists will be meeting at the Houston Marriott South on Saturday and Sunday July 13 and 14. The group, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness ...

Not everything worth doing should be done by the federal government. That may be the understatement of the millennium, but it’s the key to understanding why the current push for “common core” standards in education is a bad idea. Common Core is the latest wrinkle in a 20-year trend to raise standards and increase accountability ...

The California State Assembly overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would have banned oil and natural gas fracking in the state. By a vote of 37-24, the Democrat-dominated Assembly voted down AB 1323. Supporters of a fracking ban held back two similar bills after realizing the Assembly would likely reject those bills, also. Anti ...

Climate models used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate groups to predict future temperatures have failed miserably at predicting climate in recent years, new data show. Scientists overseeing temperature data collected by NASA satellite instruments compared real-world temperatures in the ...

School districts across the country are digging through the details to see how the Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare, will impact their budgets starting January 1, 2014. The law’s mandates are causing schools to fire employees, reduce employee hours, and otherwise slash education spending. “Since most of [school districts ...

Federal wildlife officials announced they will allow wind producers in California’s Tehachapi Mountains to kill endangered California condors without fear of prosecution. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the free pass will apply only when wind power companies inadvertently kill or harass the large and highly endangered birds ...

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has already promulgated a tsunami of 1,920 regulations, many of which will bring few health or environmental benefits but will impose high economic and unemployment costs, often to advance the administration’s decidedly anti-hydrocarbon agenda. The Heritage Foundation calculates EPA ...

The following statement was released today by Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast: "Earlier this week, the Information Center for Global Change Studies, an Information group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a Chinese edition of 'Climate Change Reconsidered,' translating and combining the contents of two volumes ...

A Kentucky state law that requires new moving companies to prove to government bureaucrats there is a “need” for their services before they can obtain a license has been blocked by a federal judge. On June 13, U.S. District Court Judge Danny Reeves ordered the state of Kentucky to halt enforcement of its so-called “competitor ...

Hospitals across the nation are threatening that unless state lawmakers implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s—Obamacare—Medicaid expansion, the law’s new taxes and spending cuts will lead to layoffs and closures. There’s a dual irony here. First, hospitals put themselves in this position when they lobbied for ...

Beginning in 2014, the effects of a new Health Insurance Tax under President Obama’s health care law could result in the loss of jobs and employer-provided health insurance for many employees in small businesses above the fifty employee threshold. HIT is a federal tax on health insurance firms based on the policies they sell ...

The number of Iowa workers on disability has increased only slightly during the past nine years, while the federal government’s monthly disability payments to state residents have more than doubled, according to the Social Security Administration. Claims in the Hawkeye State grew 8 percent from 2003 to 2011, reaching 592,000 ...

Wisconsin business owners will get tax cuts and simplified paperwork if a bill sponsored by state Rep. Dale Kooyenga, R-Brookfield, passes. The bill was expected to go to a vote in June. It would simplify the state’s tax code, allowing businesses to more easily fill out tax paperwork, and would reduce the number of income ...

California Gov. Jerry Brown is seeking to revise Proposition 65, formally titled The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, to reduce instances of lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits under the Act for the purpose of monetary gain. Multiple Reforms Proposed The goal of Prop. 65 was to protect drinking water sources ...

The fish responds as most any logical creature would. It seeks a cooler location. In short, “the flexible use of spawning habitats under divergent temperature conditions suggests that capelin have a high capacity to respond to and possibly tolerate predicted ocean-climate change”... Read More Storm-Track Activity: Modeled vs. Measured ...