If a casual observer were to watch President Barack Obama’s speech today to House Republicans, they might walk away thinking that the minority party hasn’t offered up any ideas to fix the problems that plague America. But if that casual observer stuck around for the questions and answers, they would have seen an entirely different picture – a conservative party standing up to the President and making it clear that they do, indeed, have ideas but that their message has fallen on the President’s (and liberals’) deaf ears. The problem …
On Thursday, the Senate passed a bill to increase the debt limit. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) amended version of the bill passed by the House will raise the ceiling on the federal debt by $1.9 trillion. This is a huge increase from the House version, which allowed an increase of only $925 billion. Raising the debt ceiling by such a staggering amount is convenient for Congressional Leadership because they will not have to vote on another unpopular debt limit increase until after the 2010 elections. This strategy may …
President Obama called on the federal government, the nation’s largest energy consumer, to its increase energy efficiency and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2020. According to the White House if the targets are met they “would reduce federal energy consumption by the equivalent of 646 trillion BTUs, equal to 205 million barrels of oil, and taking 17 million cars off the road for one year, according to a statement from the White House press office. That would save $8 billion to $11 billion in energy costs …
Leaders in the House and Senate have a new secret plan to pass President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care plan using strong arm tactics and no transparency. I wrote back in September that Congress had a plan to ram through ObamaCare by the end of the year, but the American people stopped that plan. Public outrage was amplified by Rush Limbaugh and others in the media who took up the cause to educate Americans about Congress’ plan to railroad the unpopular bill through Congress with little debate and no opportunity …
Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Walter Russell Mead writes at Foreign Policy: Neither a cold-blooded realist nor a bleeding-heart idealist, Barack Obama has a split personality when it comes to foreign policy. So do most U.S. presidents, of course, and the ideas that inspire this one have a long history at the core of the American political tradition. In the past, such ideas have served the country well. But the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart — and, …
In his State of the Union Address, President Obama made several commitments to fiscal responsibility in the years to come. What do they really mean though? President Obama’s proposed three-year discretionary spending freeze, excludes defense, homeland security, veterans’ and international affairs, is somewhat promising. The savings won’t be large — these programs comprise only one-eighth of the budget ($420 billion), and a freeze might save perhaps $20 billion (0.5 percent of the federal budget). Furthermore, these programs can still feast on their 19 percent hike over the past two years, …
The Department of Energy finally announced the formation of its blue-ribbon commission on nuclear waste. The commission, co-chaired by former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft has been charged with reviewing the nation’s nuclear waste policies and providing recommendations for moving forward. If carried out properly, the commission could provide an historic opportunity, helping the U.S. set a new approach for managing its nuclear waste. Despite the broad support that nuclear energy currently enjoys, until the nation comes up with an economically rational and sustainable …
President Barack Obama launched his Cuban policy with some carrots for Fidel Castro’s regime. In April, he moved to lift many of the restrictions which hamper Cuban Americans from visiting and communicating with their families, and to cut through obstacles preventing private telecommunications and satellite radio and television companies from providing services to Cuba. Only eight months after President Obama offered to lift the restrictions on private communications companies, the Cuban government arrested a 60-year-old social worker and contractor, Alan P. Gross, from the Washington-based firm Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), …
The United States is a maritime nation. The military is the nation’s guarantor of freedom of the seas and protector of global sea lines of communication. The military ensures the safe transit of international commerce along trade routes that allows our local grocery store and Wal-Marts shelves to remain stocked everyday. Protection of the sea lines allows all of us to use the internet at will and on demand, as well. As Heritage highlights in “The State of the U.S. Military,” this week , the U.S. Navy’s fleet today contains …
Both British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have criticized the European Union’s police training mission in Afghanistan this past week, and it is not hard to see why. With just over 200 staff (many of whom are bureaucrats and not trainers), the NATO Parliamentary Assembly has described the EU Police Mission as too small, underfunded, slow to deploy, inflexible, and largely restricted to the safety of the capital. It is more than two years since the European Union undertook to train Afghanistan’s police force and the …
