Last month the Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates required senior defense officials throughout the department to sign non-disclosure on defense budget deliberations. Today Congressman Randy Forbes (VA-04) along with other House Armed Services Subcommittee Ranking Members sent a letter to Secretary Gates calling this policy a “gag order” that prevents transparency in the defense budget process. From the letter: I understand that you recently asked senior officials in the Department to sign a Non-disclosure Agreements as it relates to the President’s FY20 Budget proposal. While I …
ABC News, May 5, 2009: The White House is keeping a tight grip on photos from last week’s botched Air Force One promotional photo op over Lower Manhattan. At a press briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dodged reporters’ questions about last week’s photo-op, which cost over $328,000 in taxpayer dollars and frightened a broad swath of lower Manhattan, site of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers. Chicago Tribune, April 24, 2009: The Obama administration agreed late Thursday to release dozens of photographs depicting alleged …
Literally: “Anti-Mafia magistrates in Sicily have opened a sweeping investigation into the wind power sector where local officials, entrepreneurs and crime gangs are suspected of collusion in the construction of lucrative wind farms before their eventual sale to multinational companies. Italian and EU subsidies for the building of wind farms and the world’s highest guaranteed rates, ($240 per kwh), for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime. Prosecutors suspect the hand of the Mafia in fixing permits and building wind …
On March 23, President Obama nominated Harold Koh, former Dean of the Yale Law School, to be Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State. As Heritage U.S. Senate Relations Director Brian Darling writes in Human Events, “one of the many concerns [conservatives have] with Koh is his belief that international organizations should be empowered to regulate the Second Amendment right to own a firearm.” Conservatives are concerned with the shift away from reliance on the Constitution as the final legal authority in the U.S. toward transnational jurisprudence favored by …
Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley, the Chairman and Ranking Member respectively of the powerful Senate Committee on Finance have just delivered an indictment of the current health care system, including, strangely enough, the traditional Medicare program that top liberal health policy analysts and many in Congress want to use as the model of a new public health plan. The Baucus/Grassley policy options on Transforming the Health Care Delivery System: Proposals to Improve Patient Care and Reduce Health Care Costs shows: Senator Baucus agrees with conservative policy analysts. Including those …
The Obama Administration appears about to walk away from $7.5 billion in taxpayer money used to prop up Chrysler. This little information nugget was buried in Chrysler’s filing before the bankruptcy judge last week and confirmed by Administration sources. So much for responsible government and transparency! The Bush Administration pumped $4 billion into Chrysler to keep it alive long enough to go into bankruptcy well-prepared. Obama has waived the $4 billion and a $300 million fee. In exchange, taxpayers are receiving an 8 percent stake in a company likely worth …
DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING – Sen. Sessions returns from vote–more questions for Napolitano. Swings back to comprehensive immigration reform. No surprise–he has a different take than Sen. Leahy. Napolitano emphasizes stress on courts from processing illegal immigrants. Too many cases. But doesn’t this mean Bush enforcement efforts were working? Great hearing, but I am definitely concerned about Congress’s agenda on immigration….
Results from President Barack Obama’s recent overtures to the Cuban regime are coming in: Raul Castro has extended the warm hand of friendship to the peripatetic North Korean Foreign Minister Cuba’s United Nation’s representatives continue to defend their sovereign right to censorship Fidel still fulminates against the same commercial and trade values Washington promises will change life on the island In short, Cuba lurches forward with mummified grace, controlled by grumpy old men, devoured by memories of the heroic, anti-American past, and blinkered by decades of rigid belief in the …
DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING – Committee has moved into Questions and Answers. Leahy is questioning Napolitano. Started off with Real ID. She says working with Congress and Governors to “craft a new solution.” Sessions talking workplace raids. Napolitano emphasizes that DHS is continuing all enforcement actions. Swine flu rears it head–closing the border and more schools does not make sense. Napolitano has it right on swine flu. Conversation turns to comprehensive immigration reform…
This past April saw signs that Russian-NATO relations, frozen in the wake of the Russian-Georgian August 2008 conflict, might start looking up. A diplomatic meeting in the Russia-NATO format even took place in Brussels. But parallel to this event the Russian news media unleashed an unprecedented campaign protesting the NATO Cooperative Bow 09/Cooperative Lance 09 exercise that the Alliance is to hold in Georgia. Moscow is carefully sidestepping the fact that the exercise is nothing but a staff game, with no combat forces attending. The Kremlin is deliberately ignoring the …
