Heritage President Ed Feulner writes today in the Washington Times: Nobody could have been happier to see August end than the liberals pushing government-run health care. The month, to put it mildly, was not kind to President Obama and his allies. Their worst nightmares were realized — Americans examined the bills being proposed and turned out in great numbers to voice their opposition. What we can expect in September is another matter. Desperate times call for desperate means — or so liberals will think. Those who oppose this hostile takeover …
Just as renewable energy can be a good thing if the market can provide it at an affordable rate, products designed for greater energy efficiency is a good thing. But not when the government gets in the way. Federal laws dictating how much energy home appliances are allowed to use have frequently harmed consumers, and the Waxman-Markey bill introduces a host of new ones. Improved energy efficiency is a worthwhile goal, but not when Washington tries to mandate it with arbitrary requirements. Consumers who think the resultant energy-efficient appliances will …
Earlier this week, The Heritage Foundation uncovered a disturbing posting on President Barack Obama’s perpetual campaign website, barackobama.com. Under the Organizing for America (OFA) banner, a user of the site had created an event urging fellow Obama supporters to use 9/11 as a day of action for Obamacare. The message urged Americans to call their U.S. Senators and “fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders.” It …
Byron York gets this scoop in the Washington Examiner today: …if the plan envisioned by President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats is enacted, the primary federal bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing national health care will be an old and familiar one: the Internal Revenue Service. Under the Democrats’ health care proposals, the already powerful — and already feared — IRS would wield even more power and extend its reach even farther into the lives of ordinary Americans, and the presidentially-appointed head of the new health care bureaucracy would have …
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, former-President Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has a piece titled “An Agenda for NATO: Toward a Global Security Web” that calls for a treaty between NATO and the Moscow-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as well as a Joint NATO-Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) council. CSTO is a military bloc and includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO consists of China, Russia and several Central Asian states, including Iran as a candidate member. Brzezinski’s proposal echoes then-Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov …
Government expenditures are not free. Economists know this and most others recognize it when they take the time to think about it. Unfortunately, it seems not everybody takes that time. In a story fit for satire in The Onion, a renewable energy research group, bankrolled by a $1.1 billion subsidy from the Department of Energy, concludes that huge government subsidies for renewable energy don’t reduce employment after all. However, their reasoning works only so long as the subsidies don’t come out of anybody’s pocket—a practical and theoretical impossibility. Two environmentalists …
In Washington this week, Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president of Honduras, is telling his side of the story of what led to his removal from the presidency on June 28. He blames the oligarchy and their clients for conspiring to topple him. He is pressing hard for more punitive sanctions and deeper U.S. intervention to force his return to presidential power. Zelaya and his backers want to make restoring him to office a test case for support for democracy by the Obama Administration in the Americas and around the world. …
Iran’s top nuclear negotiator released a vague statement Tuesday indicating that Iran will soon offer a diplomatic proposal concerning the standoff over its refusal to abide by its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Saeed Jalili, who also heads the country’s Supreme National Security Council, told reporters that: Iran has prepared to present its revised package of proposals . . . and is ready to hold talks with world powers . . . in order to ease common concerns in the international arena. This statement, made on the eve of …
It’s back-to-school for American families, and the Obama administration is marking the occasion with an unprecedented venture. In a move that steps far beyond the role of the federal government in education policy and shows a disregard for the guidance of parents in their children’s political formation, the Department of Education has released lesson plans for teachers in grades pre-K-12 to accompany an upcoming speech on education by President Obama on September 8th. The lesson plans – one plan for pre-K-6 students and another plan for students in grades 7-12 …
Today, the Department of Labor reported that 570,000 Americans filed initial claims for jobless benefits last week. This follows news from ADP Employer Services on Wednesday that private employers cut 298,000 jobs last month. As bad as these numbers sound (and they are bad) the real threat facing our nation’s economy is that, as Gallup’s Chief Economist Dennis Jacobe puts it: “job creation in August is just not taking place in the U.S. economy.” Why is job creation more important than job loss numbers? Heritage fellow James Sherk explains: The …
