There is one, and only one, notable development in the Chinese tires case. The rest is old news, non-news, or nonsense. Why does anyone care about this case? It’s certainly not because of the amount of trade affected. Replacement tires constitute a drop in the bucket of US-China trade. It’s not because it will dent US unemployment. Three years of tariffs on tires from one country will do almost nothing for production in the US. It’s not because of the potential Chinese reaction. The level of grassroots interest in this …
Last month we reported that news outlets in Poland were saying that the Obama administration had made the decision to abandon our anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Today Czech Premier Jan Fischer confirmed those reports telling reporters that President Obama phoned him overnight to say that “his government is pulling out of plans to build a missile defense radar on Czech territory.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration is justifying its decision on their determination that Iran’s long-range missile program hasn’t progressed as rapidly …
Congress has increased its focus on the war in Afghanistan as the Obama Administration fine tunes its new counterinsurgency strategy. Yesterday, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he supported “a properly resourced, classically pursued counterinsurgency effort.” Mullen acknowledged that “a properly-resourced counterinsurgency probably needs more forces – and without question more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance.”
Monday, September 14, in New York City, federal and city counterterrorism agents raided homes of those suspected to be involved in terrorist plots against the United States. As part of a joint terrorism task force activity, this is a big win for law enforcement, and it shows just how far information sharing has come in terms of linking together federal, state and local resources. There are those that try to say the U.S. isn’t any safer since 9/11. Or that the threat has gone away. Neither are true. As my …
The tens of thousands of Americans who traveled to Washington over the weekend to protest profligate government spending didn’t just exercise their constitutional right to peacefully assemble and ask that wrongs be set right. Taxpayers and voters also demonstrated a healthy understanding that the Constitution is on their side. “We want our freedom back,” Gary Brown, 53, of Greer, S.C., told The Washington Times. “The Constitution is the law of the land. We don’t need lawyers to interpret it. Get out of our lives.” Terri Hall, 45, of Starke, Fla., …
NATO chief, Anders Rasmussen, said yesterday that NATO should have closer ties with Russia and that Moscow has “legitimate security concerns.” Which country does not have security concerns? But what does Rasmussen mean by “legitimate?” Does he mean when Russia announces, as it did yesterday, that it would seize any Georgian ship it finds in the territorial waters of Abkhazia, the Moscow-backed rebel region of Georgia? Or maybe he means when Russia occupied South Ossetia, essentially annexing parts of Georgian territory illegally? No one except for such radicals as Venezuela, …
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has been engaged in a good-faith effort to build potentially broad bipartisan support for health care reform. If carried out on a far wider scale with members of both parties, in both houses, and with the good-faith involvement of the President, such a process could lead to the kind of bipartisan health reforms Americans would believe in. To do that, the President needs to hit the “reset” button and bring together a wide set of members with a fresh roadmap – and the …
Thanks to the relentless work of Christopher Horner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, U.S. Department of Treasury admitted cap and trade would be a tax that could generate revenue between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. Horner obtained the information from the Treasury by using the Freedom of Information Act. Horner says, These are candid, internal discussions of what they are telling each other and what they won’t tell you. The words cap and trade were chosen for a reason, and that is to avoid a vote on tax. …
Even as National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers says the stimulus is working he also warned that he expects unemployment to remain unacceptably high for years to come. Unfortunately, Summers is half right: unemployment will probably stay high, but because of – not in spite of – the stimulus bill. The Obama administration claimed that the government spending in the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill would “create or save” millions of jobs. And in one limited sense it will. The enormous increases in government spending will directly employ many workers. …
When Director of the USC for Center Public Diplomacy, Philip Seib told Professor Nicholas Cull that the anthology, Toward a New Public Diplomacy (released September 14, 2009) was going to be written, Cull was pessimistic regarding the book’s potential impact on the Obama administration’s public diplomacy initiative. On September 14, 2009, during a panel discussion at Washington, DC’s Newseum, Cull revealed his expectation that the Obama administration would already have its foreign policy strategy crafted ten months into the presidency was realistic. As it happens, he was wrong. It is …
