In the closing days of the Congressional health care debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told the National Association of Counties: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Today marks the end of just the first week of life under Obamacare and Speaker Pelosi has been proven right: we are just now finding out what is in it. This past Friday, AT&T, the biggest U.S. telephone company, announced that it would take a $1 billion charge against earnings thanks to tax …
Union bosses howled about one Obamacare tax hike: the levy on “Cadillac” health plans (expensive plans rich in benefits). The problem with this tax, as they see it, is that it hits the very plans often enjoyed by their rank-and-file. Ever eager to please the unions, Democratic leaders added a “fix” to the reconciliation bill the president will sign into law today (Tuesday). It delays the unpopular tax to 2018. The pols are touting it as a scaled back version of the tax. But even the “fix” is broken. While …
A signature achievement of Obamacare, we were told, was that it would provide immediate protection for children with pre-existing conditions. In the brave new world of Obamacare, no ailing child could be denied coverage. Turns out, that just ain’t so. According to the Associated Press, “Under the new law, insurance companies still would be able to refuse new coverage to children because of a pre-existing medical problem, said Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the main congressional panels that wrote the bill Obama signed …
From the New York Times Green, Inc Blog: The banking giant HSBC removed two companies involved in carbon trading from its Climate Change Index on Monday because they had lost too much value. Analysts from HSBC said the cause was mainly that governments had failed to come up with a timetable for a global climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December. “Carbon trading was the major loser from Copenhagen,” HSBC analysts said in their March 2010 Quarterly Index Review. ‘Cap and trade needs hard targets and …
On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck another blow towards restoring every American’s First Amendment right to engage in political speech. In SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, the court applied the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United to throw out another pernicious portion of the federal campaign finance law also known as McCain-Feingold. SpeechNow is an unincorporated association of individuals that wanted to run independent ads in the 2008 election that supported candidates for federal office that shared their views on the First Amendment …
The administration has just announced its round one Race to the Top winners, and only two states – drum roll please – Tennessee and Delaware, made the cut. The stated purpose of $4.35 billion RttT program is to increase teacher quality, improve failing schools, enhance the quality of state assessments, and build data systems to measure student growth. The identification of just two first-round winners falls short of the number most analysts predicted. While it is unclear as of yet exactly why those two states made the cut, the New …
The White House Fact Sheet on the New START Treaty agreed to between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev claims: No Constraints on Missile Defense and Conventional Strike: The Treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of current or planned U.S. missile defense programs or current or planned United States long-range conventional strike capabilities. But the Kremlin seems to be under the opposite impression. Vladimir Radyuhin reports:
Ed Haislmaier, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, takes on the 2,700 pages of Obamacare — and the notion that all that legislation is needed to fix the problem of pre-existing conditions. As Haislmaier explains, Congress could solve the pre-existing conditions problem quite simply and in only two pages. How? Watch this video to find out.
While most Americans were enjoying a weekend away from work, President Obama kept busy Saturday afternoon, appointing one of Big Labor’s lawyers to a post at the National Labor Relations Board. The recess appointment of Craig Becker was expected—despite the Senate’s bipartisan rejection of him in February. The White House knew media coverage would be minimal on the weekend, but Becker can’t escape the scrutiny. (Heritage’s Ryan O’Donnell wrote about the controversial pick last week.) Prior to his appointment, Becker served as associate general counsel to the Service Employees International …
It has taken over a year for the Obama Administration to understand what seemed clear when the President extended his hand to Iran: engagement will not work. How Washington responds to this reality as it presses for new sanctions will have a huge impact on the future of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The Heritage Foundation’s James Phillips makes the case for the “strongest possible sanctions” to deter Iran from continuing its nuclear weapons program.
