The Obama administration’s decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline (which would bring oil down from Canada’s province of Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast) is emblematic of the pervasive, systematic hostility the administration has shown to all forms of fossil-fuel production and consumption. 

The first order of business for a Republican president next year should be corporate-tax reform. But even if Republicans win big in the fall, undoing America's largest policy error will be an almost impossible political lift, unless enough people in both parties come to grips with the counterintuitive economics of corporate-tax reform.

The president was quick to embrace the Keystone delay to 2013, as it will spare him the need to either approve the pipeline, infuriating environmentalists, or kill it, infuriating everyone else. Whether one views such a move as cowardly or as pragmatic, it’s indisputably foolish.

Canada held an election last Monday and the result was anything but boring. The headline story is that the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has headed minority governments since 2006, won an absolute majority of seats, 167 of 308, in the House of Commons. The Conservatives' triumph offers a couple of lessons that may be relevant to U.S. Republicans.

Stephen Harper's victory in the Canadian election is an astounding achievement.

If John McCain could run on Stephen Harper's record, he wouldbe cruising to an easy third term for the GOP.

The Conservative Party's Senate reforms have gone nowhere, but the Canadian Senate's members should compete for a popular mandate in order to govern.

We know how the Liberals will campaign against Stephen Harper. The real question is: How will Harper fight back?