Repeating the Mistakes From the Iraq War in Afghanistan Yesterday, early in the morning, the House Armed Services Committee finished its work on the Defense Authorization bill for 2010. The bill unfortunately falls short is several areas, including a slashing of our missile defense program and a failure to dedicate the resources necessary to prevail in Afghanistan. I recently took a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. This was my first trip back to Iraq since having served with the United States Marine Corps in al Anbar province from August 2005 …
According to Time, the Center for American Progress (CAP) is “the most influential independent organization in Obama’s nascent Washington.” The brainchild of former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, President Obama “effectively contracted out the management of his own government’s formation to Podesta.” So take notice when CAP senior editor Matthew Yglesias writes in The American Prospect: The flaw in [Obama's] budget is that the taxes it proposes are too low. Obama would stabilize revenue at about 18.8 percent of gross domestic product, somewhat lower than it was …
On Wednesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center – a group led by former senators Howard Baker, Tom Daschle and Bob Dole – released a report describing yet another health care reform proposal that would attempt a compromise between Democrats and Republicans. The proposal is billed as “the culmination of an inclusive year-and-a-half effort that included strategic outreach to key health care stakeholders, a series of state-based public policy forums, and months of personal deliberations by the Leaders.” The proposal [PDF only] is a mixture of repackaged proposals of the past combined …
Tens of thousands of Iranians are demonstrating for the sixth day in protest over the disputed outcome of last week’s presidential elections. Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi requested that the demonstrators dress in black as a sign of mourning over at least seven protesters who have been killed by the regime’s security forces. While the regime continues to evict foreign reporters and impose restrictions on news coverage, it has sought to defuse the potentially explosive situation by announcing that the Guardian Council will meet with presidential candidates to hear their …
The immediate reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Osborne case has been both ill-informed and negative. And liberals are already spinning it as the Roberts Court’s latest affront to justice. This is no surprise. It’s easy for political hacks to attack decisions when the public doesn’t understand the facts of the case. Understand the facts in Osborne, however, and it becomes clear that the decision was plain common sense. The Court held that individuals who have been convicted of crimes have no constitutional right to access evidence held …
During yesterday’s White House press conference, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked: “The President actually told the AMA that ‘there are some countries where a single-payer system works pretty well.’ Do you know what countries he was referring to or what he was talking about?” Gibbs responded: “I don’t know exactly the countries. I think you could — I think if you talk to people in the countries that have those systems, they’d think their health care is pretty good.” Watch: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRGYgEMwSvQ[/youtube]
Heritage fellow James Sherk reports: Organized labor argues that Congress should effectively take away workers’ right to vote in secret ballot elections because employers allegedly intimidate workers in the run-up to elections by firing and threatening to fire pro-union workers. However, a recently released study commissioned by two union-funded organizations, American Rights at Work and the Economic Policy Institute, shows that employers rarely break the law during organizing campaigns.
This Monday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) delivered a major dose of reality to Capitol Hill, affixing a $1 trillion price tag to the Kennedy-Dodd health care plan. Supporters of the Kennedy-Dodd approach then complained that the CBO only scored an incomplete version of the bill and Dodd-Kennedy staffers “were scrambling to give the CBO something closer to the final legislation.” By their own admission, their legislation is incomplete; you would think that would give Dodd-Kennedy supporters pause before pushing the bill through committee. Nope. Yesterday they began their first markup …
Today, USEC, Duke Energy and the international nuclear company AREVA announced plans for a new 1,650-megawatt nuclear reactor to be built in Piketon, Ohio, creating even more jobs for southern Ohio. The announcement comes almost a year after USEC announced it would build a new uranium enrichment plant in Piketon. Nuclear plants are fueled with low-enriched uranium and the U.S. currently has very limited uranium enrichment capabilities. While America’s limited domestic enrichment is currently provided by USEC’s plant in Paducah, Kentucky, the company is building a new $3.5 billion plant …
To the President and Congress of the United States From Edwin Feulner, Ph.D. President, The Heritage Foundation Health care reform has been a central goal of The Heritage Foundation since our creation more than three decades ago, so we welcomed President Barack Obama’s call for a common effort to find the right solution to this public policy challenge. We believe that putting families, not the government, in control of the system is the key to success. We want to strengthen our health system based on that principle. The trouble has …
