What would you do if an enemy tested a weapon that could kill millions of your fellow citizens? According to Heritage Foundation vice president Kim Holmes, the logical response would be to build up a missile defense system capable of knocking a ballistic missile out of the sky. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration’s recent announcement to cut missile defense isn’t exactly logical. In fact it is downright puzzling. Holmes discusses this confusion in his recent op-ed in the Washington Times. While North Korea tested a long-range missile, the Pentagon announced a …
We knew it was coming, but rather than being cliché and waiting until Earth Day next week, the Environmental Protection Agency has issued an endangerment finding, saying that global warming and climate change pose a serious threat to public health and safety and thus almost anything that emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the first official action taken by the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide. Arbitrary restrictions and regulations in the name of curbing global warming do nothing …
In his Jimmy Carter-esque “New Foundation” speech Tuesday, President Barack Obama linked health care reform and deficit reduction claiming: “If we want to get serious about fiscal discipline … we will also have to get serious about entitlement reform. Make no mistake: health care reform is entitlement reform.” Problem is, Obama’s health care reform plan includes a Medicare-for-all like public plan that will “compete” with private plans. The idea that the path to reduced health care spending must go through expanding Medicare is laughable. former Political Science professor at the …
Yesterday, during his visit to Mexico, senior administration officials confirmed that President Obama will push the U.S. Senate to ratify the “Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials.” The Clinton administration signed the treaty, better known by its Spanish acronym CIFTA, after the Organization of American States adopted it in 1997. The Senate has not ratified it, but as the administration acknowledges, the U.S. has abided by the spirit of the treaty. The treaty, while not as fundamentally flawed as …
Leading Russian officials are loudly protesting the forthcoming NATO staff exercise in Georgia. The exercises do not involve any armed troops and are essentially a crisis management drill. Yet, as the Bard said, “the lady doth protest too much.” Since March 25, the Russian Federation has significantly increased its military presence in the occupied Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow built up its forces, Georgia officials say, particularly in the areas adjacent to the troop separation lines in Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region. In parallel with this buildup, there …
This past summer we took the Center for American Progress to task for putting their name on a “study” purporting to show how how many “green collar jobs” $100 billion in government spending on “green investments” would create. At the time, we argued that all of CAP’s green job creation numbers were worthless since they ignored all the jobs that would be destroyed by the taxing and regulation needed to subsidize those green jobs. Now a new study out of Spain, the very country President Barack Obama cites as an …
Great op-ed by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jay Greene on big labor’s war against education reform in the WSJ yesterday. We don’t have much too add, but we did go ahead and provide links to the studies he cites: On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools …
“Let me be clear: The United States government has no interest in running GM,” President Obama said just three weeks ago. He continued: “We have no intention of running GM.” But what about Chrysler? In a letter to employees released late last night, Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli stated that, under the evolving terms of the company’s deal with the government, “a board of directors for Chrysler will be appointed by the U.S. government and Fiat.” This board, he explained, will appoint its chairman and “select a CEO” and other executive …
In its rush to diplomatically engage Iran, the Obama Administration has found itself in the embarrassing position of appearing to be softer than France, which until recently had been a leading advocate of Europe’s “critical engagement” with Iran — a policy which offered Iran lucrative trade deals, but precious little criticism. The Administration reportedly is considering the unilateral abandonment of a crucial condition embedded in the 2007 diplomatic initiative made by the P5 + 1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) which required Iran to …
Today’s Washington Post reports an often heard but highly inaccurate statement: 90% of guns employed in the drug cartel killing spree come from the U.S. It is a factoid prominently stuck in the minds of leaders and the media, some of whom use this misrepresentation in support of reimposing extensive federal gun restrictions. The Post reports that Mexican law enforcement seized 35,000 weapons between December 2006 and the present. Of that total, the Post reports that 13,149 weapons were then reported to the U.S. by our southern neighbor. That leaves …
