When President Barack Obama introduced Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) as his nominee for Commerce Secretary, Obama said of Gregg: “He shares my deep-seated commitment to guaranteeing that our children inherit a future they can afford.” After yesterday’s Senate Budget Committee hearing, we now know why Gregg eventually decided he could not in good faith join the Administration. Referring to the president’s fiscal 2010 budget proposal, Gregg told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: “This budget, as it’s presently constructed, pass[es] on to our children a nation which they will not be able …
Yesterday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called the United States a “deadbeat” donor to the world body. The White House called these words “unfortunate” and at least rightfully acknowledged the “the contribution that the American taxpayer makes.” However, these words are much more than “unfortunate.” Let’s start with our donor status. The United States puts up 22% of the operating budget of the United Nations. Compared to other well populated nations with large economies, this is an outstanding number. China barely tops 2%, Brazil is just over 1% and Russia and …
Yesterday, the Obama Administration sought to quiet mounting anxiety about Mexican drug violence and border spillover when it named the nation’s next Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske, police chief in Seattle on March 11. The position, the Vice President noted, will no longer be considered a cabinet-level office. The Vice President Biden used the opportunity to offer the most extensive White House comments thus far on the Mexico situation. The challenges facing the Chief are going to be daunting. Nowhere is that more true than in the southwest border today. All …
Today The Washington Post reported that President Obama’s budget proposal to “tax the rich” to pay for health care, including reduced deductions for charitable donations, is “facing deep skepticism on Capitol Hill”. According to the Post, as an alternative, top lawmakers are pondering a change to the federal tax treatment of health insurance—a relic of the WWII era—as an alternative way to financing health reform. If there is one item where there is a powerful consensus among serious health policy analysts, conservative and liberal alike, it is the need to …
Former Attorney General Ed Meese hosted a panel to give President Barack Obama advice when on choosing his nominations for the the Supreme and Appellate courts. On the panel were Walter Dellinger, Stuart Taylor, and Jonathan Adler. Dellinger had a bevy of advice. First, he advised Obama to select someone who is humble. He said that opinions would be far more persuasive if they were honest, weighing both sides equally and walking us through the decision making process that lead them to whatever decision they made. He also said that …
This is what happens when Congress passes bills that nobody has time to read. As it turns out, on the last page of the recently passed “Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009” was language that clarified the end date for E-Verify. There has been much confusion regarding whether the Department of Homeland Security could continue operating E-Verify to September 30, 2009 or would have had to shut it down yesterday. While DHS felt that they could extend E-Verify until September the different end dates for the program in the FY 2009 appropriations …
George Will writes today: The administration insists that it really does have a single priority: Everything depends on fixing the economy. But it also says that everything depends on everything: Economic revival requires enactment of the entire liberal wish list of recent decades. The implausibility of this opportunistic hypothesis is deepened by Obama’s rhetoric, which says “catastrophe” impends unless everything is done simultaneously. But his budget, in effect, says the danger will soon be gone and the new risk will be whiplash from the economy’s sudden acceleration. Although only a …
Only the New York Times op-ed page could offer two ridiculous and obviously contradictory statements in two succeeding sentences and believe it was making sense. In “Defensible Missile Defense,” Professor Ted Postol declares that US missile defense “performance is unproven, it requires unending additional resources and it faces problems that cannot be solved with existing science. Russia, for its part, has long perceived missile defense as a threat to its security — a concern the administration chose to ignore, worsening tensions with Moscow.” If missile defenses are scientifically impossible how …
Proponents of the $787 stimulus bill had only one complaint when President Obama signed the bill into law. It wasn’t big enough. While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi acknowledged yesterday that the stimulus plan needs time to work she also said, “You have to keep the door open” for the possibility of a second stimulus. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, went one step further saying, “”We are going to need more taxpayer money up front. I think another stimulus package is a reasonable probability given where things …
Former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao weighs in on the two major provisions of the “Employee Free Choice Act” at the Wall Street Journal: One of these counterproductive, special-interest initiatives is “card check,” which would deprive workers of the ability to vote privately in workplace unionization elections — a vital worker protection that dates back to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. There is a push in Congress to enact card check despite the fact that the vast majority of workers — including rank-and-file union members — want to keep the private …
