[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXZPqdnhe1Q[/youtube] White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod spoke with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace on yesterday morning, and clarified what had previously been an incoherent policy on missile defense and global threats to America and our allies: Well, I think that, uh, uh, missile defen-, the the missile, the the President has said, that he is, uh, that he is willing to embrace, wants to embrace missile defense if it’s necess-, necessary, uh, uh, if it’s cost effective, and if it works, and he has never, uh, taken that off …
The Nation’s Chris Hayes writes: Two years in Washington have started to make me feel jaded. I’ve come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I’m nowhere near cynical enough. Such is the case with the tale of the paper industry and the alternative-fuel tax credit. Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this …
Rule of law? Who needs it! That seemed to be the message of the Obama Administration as it seeks to maneuver around restrictions imposed by Congress on bailout recipients. As the Washington Post describes, the Administration is laundering money to bailout recipients by “set[ing] up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.” The end result of this scheming is that measures like caps on executive pay and …
Ed Whelan has a strong column in yesterday’s Washington Post on the Attorney General’s attempt to suppress an Office of Legal Counsel opinion concluding that the pending D.C. “voting rights” bill is unconstitutional. (We share that view.) This is not, as the Post had put it previously, a case of different parts of DOJ having different opinions, but an end-run around the Department’s usual clearance process: Now, it’s legitimate, if exceedingly rare, for an attorney general to contest OLC’s advice…. But there’s a right way to overrule OLC, and then …
Today Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will host a regional public meeting in Atlantic City to gather information and public comment on whether the Outer Continental Shelf should be freed for energy development. Heritage analyst Ben Lieberman explains the process: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmEVJCPF3os&feature=channel_page[/youtube] So if you can’t make it to Jersey today, be sure to make your voice heard by visiting freeourenergy.com and leaving your comment for the Minerals Management Service. You can also watch the hearing live at 11:30 AM here.
A wonderful story from Britain illustrates all the problems with the over-active, snooping state. First, the facts. The Broadland District Council in Norfolk hired a plane equipped with a thermal imaging system to fly over local towns at night to spot the ‘hottest’ buildings. Initially, the plane was only going to look at businesses, but clever officials soon realized they could look at houses as well. The justification for this heat-seeking eye in the sky was that it would allow officials to pay the hottest building a visit to “point …
Major 2010 defense budget cuts expected to be announced by Secretary Gates today are part of a broader theme laid out in last year’s National Defense Strategy and his Foreign Affairs article seeking more “balance” in the military’s equipment portfolio away from high-end systems to fight conventional wars and more toward counterinsurgency capabilities. In the Post-Cold War world, however, the United States has chosen through numerous defense strategies to embrace a global vision of the world consistent with broad interpretations of its national interests and international priorities. In short, America …
Unraveling the meaning of the G-20 summit will be the work of months, if not years. Many of the announced measures are vague, and the ones that are less vague are not encouraging. The promise to continue “expansionary policies for as long as needed” is an open-ended invitation to tax, borrow, and spend, while the pledge to “support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms” is foolhardy. The responsibility of firms is to obey the law and make profits for their shareholders, not to be subject …
This past Friday the Iowa Supreme Court rewrote the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. Justifying their rejection of the argument that “the optimal environment for children is to be raised within a marriage of both a father and a mother,” Justice Mark Cady wrote: “The research … suggests that the traditional notion that children need a mother and a father to be raised into healthy adjusted adults is based more on stereotype than anything else.” First of all, the court is just wrong on the facts. Children whose …
