1. Freedom’s Slate

2. Eric Cantor & The Pro-Life Statists Take Sides In North Carolina

3. Individual Mandate A Tax Or A Penalty

4. Natural Gas Economics: A Look Under the Hood

1. Freedom’s Slate

On this Independence Day, it is time to focus on improving the crop of Republican congressmen by examining some of the remaining Republican primaries.

Want the GOP to stand up to Barack Obama?

Tired of the GOP cutting deals?

Want to make sure the GOP doesn’t back out of full and complete repeal of Obamacare if they sweep in November?

Then you absolutely must support these candidates still in Republican primaries.

If you care about freedom, here is Freedom’s Slate.

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2. Eric Cantor & The Pro-Life Statists Take Sides In North Carolina

North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District provides the quintessential battleground between go-along to get-along Republicans and small government conservatives.

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3. Individual Mandate A Tax Or A Penalty

For conservatives, the debate over whether the individual mandate in ObamaCare is called a tax or a penalty has become a litmus test for the Romney campaign’s conservative credentials. It should not.

Eric Fehrnstrom, Spokesman for Mitt Romney, said on MSNBC earlier this week that Romney “believes that what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty, and he disagrees with the court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.” There is nothing inherently non-conservative about this statement. Believing that the individual mandate is not a tax is consistent with Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito’s opinion that the individual mandate is not a proper exercise of the federal government’s taxing power.

Today, Mitt Romney walked back Fehrnstrom’s statement with his own declaration that the individual mandate in ObamaCare is a tax. Conservatives should not be so hung up on the declaration of the individual mandate being called a tax or a penalty. The goal is complete and total repeal of ObamaCare.

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4. Natural Gas Economics: A Look Under the Hood

Christmas comes in June for energy geeks and graph junkies. Every year, the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy releases its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), a compendium of 30-tear forecasts and analyses of energy sources and uses. The 212 page .pdf file contains tables, bar charts and area graphs galore, enough to provide blog fodder at least until Christmas (the December one).

This week’s installment is a look at production decline curves from selected shale gas plays. The extreme rates of decline experienced in these wells has interesting and far-reaching policy implications, although this angle is rarely described in the mainstream press. For the energy operator, the performance of his wells in aggregate determine the success or failure of his enterprise. For the nation, shale well performance has become a key factor in energy policy and planning.

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