Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is known in DC as an avid Twitter-holic. So it came as no surprise when we saw this revealing tweet from Senator McCaskill: Stuck in tram from Capitol to Hart. Broken. Not moving. Lieberman and Alexander in next car. And Voiniitch. Wonder how long we’ll be here? As Red State points out, the tram that runs from the Capitol to the Hart Senate Office Building covers the distance roughly the length of a football field. So if stuck halfway, this would require the distinguished Senators to …
The Wall Street Journal reports: A massive natural-gas discovery here in northern Louisiana heralds a big shift in the nation’s energy landscape. After an era of declining production, the U.S. is now swimming in natural gas. Even conservative estimates suggest the Louisiana discovery — known as the Haynesville Shale, for the dense rock formation that contains the gas — could hold some 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s the equivalent of 33 billion barrels of oil, or 18 years’ worth of current U.S. oil production. Some industry executives …
Conservative supermarket tycoon Ricardo Martinelli resoundingly won Panama’s presidential election Sunday with more than 60% of the vote. Already Martinelli is pushing for a free trade deal with the United States. Heritage fellow Ray Walser puts the victory in context: The Martinelli victory breaks the Latin Left’s 2009 electoral winning streak of Venezuela, El Salvador, and Ecuador. The average voter in Panama is betting on a dynamic and productive relationship with the U.S. and has demonstrated confidence in continued strong ties between the two nations. It is incumbent on the …
Addressing Congress on the State of the Union, President Ronald Reagan told the American people in 1982: Our citizens feel they’ve lost control of even the most basic decisions made about the essential services of government, such as schools, welfare, roads, and even garbage collection. And they’re right. A maze of interlocking jurisdictions and levels of government confronts average citizens in trying to solve even the simplest of problems. They don’t know where to turn for answers, who to hold accountable, who to praise, who to blame, who to vote …
Global warming skeptics are quick to point out the exorbitant costs of global warming legislation because they are, well, exorbitant. The $1.9 trillion of tax revenue generated over eight years from a cap-and-trade bill would still be larger than the $1.5 trillion from NASA, the New Deal, and Hurricane Katrina. It amounts to a nearly $2,000 tax every year for every American household. Projected job losses that would have resulted from the Lieberman-Warner cap and trade would have surpassed 900,000 in some years. But if it saves the planet, isn’t …
National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez, better known as K-Lo on The Corner, told a group of nearly 200 young conservatives that the greatest impact they can have on national politics is back home — spreading the message of freedom to their friends and neighbors both online and off. Lopez addressed an under-40 crowd of conservatives today as part of Heritage’s biannual President’s Club meeting at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington. The gathering brought together more than 1,100 Heritage members, including a record showing among young people. The event …
As this video makes clear, the dulcet tones of President Obama’s education policy may have been music to the ears of liberals and some conservatives alike, but the D.C. voucher issue has proven that the President’s grand declaration about how Education Secretary Arne Duncan should make decisions is merely vapid rhetoric. Heritage has covered this issue well. Read a history of the successful program by Heritage Scholar Dan Lips here, a fact sheet here, and several blog posts here. We recently wrote on the Foundry: The Department of Education knows [the D.C. …
President Obama’s new corporate tax proposals cover two issues: tax evasion and tax punishment. He may have it half right. The tax evasion part is relatively easy. When U.S. taxpayers maintain foreign accounts with foreign financial institutions, Obama wants the financial institution to tell the Treasury about the accounts in the same way domestic institutions keep Treasury informed. This is quite an unacceptable intrusion into personal privacy, but it is just one of the inescapable pitfalls of having an income tax system. The one bit of good news is that …
Commenting on the White House’s Chicago-style negotiations with Chrysler’s creditors, The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle writes: [W]hen did it become the government’s job to intervene in the bankruptcy process to move junior creditors who belong to favored political constituencies to the front of the line? … these people lent money under a given set of rules, and now the government wants to intervene in our extremely well-functioning (and generous) bankruptcy regime solely in order to save a favored Democratic interest group. Later live-blogging the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, McArdle reports: But …
Under the header “It’s All On Obama Now” Los Angeles Times columnist Peter Nichols writes: Every president inherits a tangle of problems from his predecessor. War and recession, natural disaster and foreign crises. And for some undefined interval, new presidents argue that they should not be accountable for the troubles that arose on another’s watch. But inevitably, responsibility shifts. And for Obama, that time came last week, bringing both greater opportunities and greater risks. On the economy, Obama won approval Wednesday of a $3.5-trillion budget plan that aims to help …
