Last night, one of the coveted seats in the First Lady’s Box was occupied by Clay Armstrong, a recent graduate of Ballou High School, part of the D.C. public school system. The Washington Post reports: Armstrong does not shy away from describing his life at Ballou as difficult, stressful and disadvantaged. ‘It was tough, but I handled it pretty well,’ he says. ‘There were fights every day and people have gotten stabbed. People have gotten shot. There’s constantly people being knuckleheads and trying to be the class clown.’ Fortunately, as …
In publicizing the President’s State of the Union address, Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett announced that one of the achievements of which the administration was most proud in its first year in office was its action to repair “badly frayed global alliances” and “to restore America’s leadership in the world.” That leadership was not much in evidence in the President’s speech, which is only fitting, because it has been lacking in reality as well. The President name-checked the obvious foreign crises. Haiti, predictably, took pride of place, and here, at least, …
While jobs and the economy are at the forefront of all Americans’ minds, Congress has the ability to create jobs, raise federal revenues, and boost the economy at the end of their fingertips —without any expense to the taxpayer. This could all be achieved simply by permanently repealing the death tax. At a lecture at the Family Research Council, Dick Patten, the President of the American Family Business Institute, presented a compelling case for repealing the death tax. The death tax is a costly burden for small family-owned businesses. According …
It appears that President Obama will exempt education from his so-called spending freeze. Despite the fact that Obama already doubled the Department of Education’s budget through the Omnibus and Stimulus bills last year, he plans to continue the spending binge. The Washington Post reported yesterday: Administration officials said they could not provide a direct comparison to current elementary and secondary education spending levels, but they said federal education spending would rise overall by 6.2 percent. That would apparently be the largest percentage increase since 2003, not counting the huge infusion …
POLITCO reported yesterday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to freeze defense spending too. “Everybody has to make a sacrifice,” the San Francisco Democrat said in an interview conducted as part of POLITICO’s “Inside Obama’s Washington” video series. “If you’re asking everybody else in the country who has an interaction with the federal government – and that means our states and cities and all the rest, too – to cut back, then I think we have to subject every federal dollar to the very harshest scrutiny.” If the speaker were really …
The news is out: the U.S. is falling behind on economic freedom. In the 2010 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom, the United States, for the first time, dropped out of the ranks of the free, and into those of the ‘mostly free,’ ranking eighth in the world and behind Canada in North America. The U.S. retreat was broad-based: it fell backward in seven of the ten areas measured. And while much of the U.S.’s decline stemmed from its response, under both President George W. Bush and President Obama, …
Yesterday, an Army General penned an op-ed about why the Army needs a new combat vehicle. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that many soldiers serving in the U.S. Army today are riding around in vehicles built in the 1980s based on technology from the 1970s. While the rest of us are used to a fast-paced, information-accessible real-time culture of i-Phones, Blue Ray, portable video games, tablets to read books, and GPS in our cars, Army soldiers are stuck in the era of Atari. “The State of the U.S. …
The more things change, the more things stay the same. A little over a year ago, President Barack Obama came to office expecting to pass a “big bang” of policy changes all in the first year: health care, cap-and-trade, and banking regulation. With the big-bang strategy officially a failure, President Obama’s State of the Union address last night desperately tried to keep all of these legislative efforts alive while also acknowledging that the country has firmly rejected his policy agenda. The result was an incoherent mess of promised tax cuts …
I knew the state of the American people was all right even before President Obama walked into the well of the House of Representatives to give what turned out to be an at time hectoring, at other times gloomy, State of the Union speech. You see, I was very fortunate to get a seat at the speech tonight. A rather good seat. And Providence struck again when John sat next to me a good 45 minutes before the event. John is a veteran who made it to the U.S. Capitol from …
