Spinning the ever-more-embarrassing gap between their economic stimulus job promises and economic reality, Vice President Joe Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopolous this Sunday: The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy. The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there. But if the Obama White House so terribly “misread the economy,” then why was VP Biden touring the country just last month claiming that Obama’s stimulus “has already created 150,000 jobs around the country”? That 150,000 …
There’s a point at which you’ve got to ask yourself, what are we doing here? What’s the point?” That’s Elaine Kamarck, a former Clinton administration official and advisor to at that time Vice President Gore, and she’s talking about the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. In order to garner enough votes to pass the House of Representatives, policymakers made promises that have groups like Greenpeace questioning the environmental effectiveness of the bill. One of the most contentious provisions in the bill is the use of offsets to reduce carbon dioxide …
The New York Times reported last week: President Obama on Sunday praised the energy bill passed by the House late last week as an “extraordinary first step,” but he spoke out against a provision that would impose trade penalties on countries that do not accept limits on global warming pollution. “At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade,” Mr. Obama said, “I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.” It’s …
After taking office earlier this year, President Obama issued an executive order to close the detention facilities by the end of the year, without a plan for the relocation of over 200 detainees currently housed at the base. One option that I do not support is bringing the detainees here to the States for trial and placing them in our federal prisons. Many of the detainees pose a serious threat to our national security. The Pentagon just released a report stating that one in seven of the detainees that have been released …
The Washington Post’s Liza Mundy had a cute take on the recent divorce of reality TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin: Poor Jon and Kate. Their marriage is over, their show on hiatus, their domestic ordeal entering a new phase of acrimony. Possibly nothing could have saved this marriage, but one thing would have made it less fragile: a mandate for health insurance to cover in vitro fertilization. If the Gosselins, whose efforts to raise eight kids have been chronicled over five seasons on cable television, had enjoyed, and availed …
According to Sergei Kovalev, World War II started “because of Poland’s refusal to meet Germany’s requests.” Kovalev writes: “The German demands were very modest. You could hardly call them unfounded.” Hitler, in Kovalev’s view, didn’t really want Lebensraum, but merely transport links across the Polish corridor to East Prussia and to the free city of Gdansk. The views of a crank? Actually, Kovalev is a colonel and a researcher in the Russian Ministry of Defense. Earlier this month, the ministry posted Kovalev’s lengthy essay laying out his views in a …
On June 15th, the Congressional Budget Office issued a crushing blow to President Barack Obama’s health care plan, placing a $1 trillion price tag on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee’s draft legislation. And what did Americans get for their $1 trillion in new debt? A measly16 million net decrease in the number of people uninsured. Liberals in Washington decried the CBO’s findings, complaining that they had scored an incomplete version of the bill. So this past Friday, the CBO released a fuller scoring of HELP’s legislation, …
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The Heritage Foundation is proud to announce that the FCC is the recipient of the First Annual Wanton Abuse of State-funded Technological Elucidation (WASTE) Award. Yes, the name is clunky, but so is their website. If you don’t believe it, see for yourself. The website’s search function leaves much to be desired. Also, as Cynthia Brumfield of IP Democracy has noted, everything on the website is published as a separate file (Word documents, PDF, etc.) to be downloaded by the user. The agency that is responsible for the nation-wide broadband …
On December 23, 1783, General George Washington resigned his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Army to Congress, which met then in the State House in Annapolis. Both Washington and Congress recognized the importance of the occasion, and the ceremony was carefully organized by a Protocol Committee headed by Thomas Jefferson. The scene was described by James Tilton, delegate from Delaware: Tuesday morning, Congress met and took their seats in order, all covered. At twelve o’clock the General was introduced by the secretary, and seated opposite to the president, until the throng, …
