UPDATE: This graph is now over two years old. For up to date information see this post: The Truth about Obama’s Budget Deficits, in Pictures President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama’s budget deficits …
The character of the cartel war as seen in Pima County can be brutal. One “bandit” tactic is to organize small teams that camp out for days in the desert living on peanut butter and gallons of water. They set-up scouts on the hill tops to look out for law enforcement, as well as competitors. When a train of backpackers laden with dope are traversing the foot hills, an ambush team is quickly dispatched with sniper rifles. The packers are given a choice—give up their loads or their lives. Sometimes, …
“We are the United States of America, we are not Sweden.” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, March 23, 2009. “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.” Swedish enterprise minister Maud Olofsson, March 22, 2009. “Today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council (NEC) Director Larry Summers convened official designees to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry to discuss recently submitted restructuring plans from Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corporation.” The White House, February 20, 2009.
The media and pundits alike have skewered the Clinton State Department for giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a prop “reset button” when Secretary Clinton met with him in Geneva earlier in the month. Obviously it is a bad idea to reset relations with Russia only weeks into a new presidential term, especially given the number of outstanding sensitive issues that the United States should maintain some level of leadership on, rather than ceding all ground to Russia. But this episode also demonstrated a clear lack of leadership at the …
Do you eat, sleep or pray? If so, then the Obama Administration wants to monitor, regulate and tax you. According to federal records only published yesterday, this past Friday the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a proposed rule to the White House that finds carbon dioxide to be a danger to public health pursuant to the Clean Air Act. One might wonder how a substance so natural that it is passing through your lungs and out your nose right now could be declared a threat to “the public’s health and welfare,” …
Courtesy of Lord Christopher Monckton: I warn this honorable House that any proposal to inflict billions of dollars of new taxation on all citizens by charging selectively-disfavored industries for arbitrarily-rationed permits to emit a harmless and beneficial trace gas that is necessary to all life on Earth and has little effect on its surface temperature will fall cruelly and disproportionately upon the poor, will threaten their very lives, will gravely diminish the liberty that is the glory of your great nation, will render difficult if not unlawful the pursuit of …
According to an official communiqué issued by the Venezuelan government, Senator [sic] William Delahunt, a “friend of Venezuela,” according to Foreign Minister Nicholas Maduro, found time this week to slip away from Congress and spend two and half hours in closed-door conversations in Caracas with Venezuela’s controversial President Hugo Chávez, the fiercely anti-American architect of “Socialism of the 21st century.” Congressman [not Senator] Delahunt (D-MA) stands among the more vocal defenders of President Chávez in the House of Representatives.
Via Greg Mankiw, Bentley University professor Scott Sumner writes on efficient-markets hypothesis (EMH): So the anti-EMH argument for regulation must be based on the following: bankers are irrational and make lots of foolish loans. Regulators are rational and can see that these loans are too risky, and can protect bankers from hurting themselves. At a theoretical level this doesn’t even pass the laugh test. But what happened in practice? What position did the “regulators” take in this crisis? First we need to define “regulators,” who are much more than just …
Heritage senior fellow James Carafano recently traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border and filed a series of reports which will be featured here throughout the week. What goes on across the border matters to the Pima County Sheriff Department. Any of the smuggling cartel war that spills over the border falls into its lap. The Tucson Border Sector, which Pima County sits smack dab in the middle of, is currently the busiest smuggling corridor in the country. As border enforcement has been stepped up in California and Texas, land border smuggling …
After over a year of the Bush-Obama Bailout Parade, there were some encouraging statements coming from the Senate last week. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK): Should we be mad at the executives who are involved in this and who ran a once-great company into the ground? Yes. But that’s not where the blame game ends. That’s not where the buck stops. I know that I will upset some of my colleagues when I remind them, and the American people, that much of the blame should be directed right here, to the …
