In April 2009, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor delivered a speech to the Puerto Rican chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she made it clear that the Court’s citation of foreign and international law was proper, and indeed laudable. Sotomayor has not yet cited international law in any of her own written opinions, so in light of her speech to the ACLU of Puerto Rico, Senators must press her regarding her view on the subject. Heritage fellow Steve Groves identifies some lines of questioning including: In your speech …
Cutting through the White House spin coming out of Moscow, Congressional Strategic Posture Commission member and Missouri State University professor Keith Payne writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: Beyond the bad negotiating principle of giving up something for nothing, there will be serious downsides if the U.S. actually reduces its strategic launchers as much as Moscow wishes. The bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission — headed by former secretaries of defense William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger — concluded that the U.S. could make reductions “if this were done while …
Three weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary score of the Kennedy-Dodd health reform bill. CBO estimated that Title I of the draft legislation alone would have added $1 trillion to the federal deficit while only extending coverage to 16 million of the uninsured. The score sent the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee back to the drawing board. Although Democrats on the HELP committee pledged to be bipartisan and transparent as they reworked the bill, those promises were broken late last week. While the …
Now that Al Franken has been seated in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is now telling reporters he sees no need for the left to compromise on their demands for a government-run “public option” health care plan. Proponents of the public plan, like Schumer, believe government-run health care is needed “to keep the insurance companies honest,” because they believe private insurance companies have higher administrative costs than a government-run health care system would. The explanations for why liberals believe this are as numerous as they are erroneous: government is …
Tomorrow, July 7th, new Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, appointed by President Obama, will speak in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Auditorium. As momentum builds behind new nuclear power in the United States, questions remain about whether the nation is truly at the threshold of a nuclear renaissance. Of critical importance is how the nuclear industry is regulated and how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) might change under the leadership of its new Chairman, Gregory Jaczko. What priorities will Chairman Jaczko place at the top of his agenda? Is the …
Congratulations, Missourians. For saving electricity, you could have an additional fee show up on your energy bill: Some Missouri residents and businesses soon could see a new charge on their electric bills — a fee for using less energy. Though it might seem illogical, the new energy efficiency charge has support from utilities, most lawmakers, the governor, environmentalists and even the state’s official utility consumer advocate. The charge covers the cost of utilities’ efforts to promote energy efficiency and cut power use.
Former Missile Defense Agency director, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, and Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, distinguished fellow Eric Edelman, write in today’s Washington Post: The apparent reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his frequently expressed commitment to pursue nuclear and ballistic missile capability, underscore the importance of proposed U.S. radar sites and missile defense interceptors in Eastern Europe. Critics of the plan frequently recycle the arguments repeatedly invoked by Russian diplomatic and defense officials during rounds of U.S.-Russian diplomacy throughout 2007-08, including two meetings between …
Heritage Russian and Eurasian studies research fellow Ariel Cohen blogs at The Corner: Earlier today, Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev met for their first full-fledged summit in Moscow. They announced a strategic arms-control agreement that would cut the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals down to the level 1,500-1,600 warheads apiece, reduce the number of missiles held by each country, and establish verification mechanisms. It feels like the 1970s all over again.
The guy who’s made those excellent videos on the stimulus and government spending has made a new one on health care. He’s also got a website now: politicalmath.wordpress.com. Watch: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqD-nMpsYAY[/youtube]
In his blog, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman launches an unsubstantiated attack on The Heritage Foundation for our June 25 report showing that Medicare administrative costs are higher than those private health plans, not lower, as Krugman has frequently claimed. We find it somewhat encouraging that his only “refutation” to our basic point consists of (a) an ad-hominem-like attack, and (b) an old quote that is doesn’t refute the point of our report — and is incorrect anyway. The point of our paper is that expressing health administrative costs …
