As President Barack Obama embarks on a high profile campaign to bolster public opinion of his health care plan, there is one man who is already convinced that Obamacare is the right move for America – Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader and first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party. According to an Associated Press report, Castro hailed Obamacare as “a miracle” and “an important battle and a success of (Obama’s) government.” Castro went on to favorably compare President Obama’s health care plan to the one Cuba enacted a half …
A Seattle area mother is distraught because a school-based clinic at her daughter’s high school arranged for the girl to have an abortion, even providing a taxicab to the clinic, without notice to her parents. A spokesman for the King County Health Department summarized the situation simply when he commented, “At any age in the state of Washington, an individual can consent to a termination of pregnancy.” Washington is one of a handful of states that do not have a parental notice or consent law, according to Americans United for …
The recently released 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading results for grades 4 and 8 suggest that the sweeping education reforms implemented in Florida since 1998 have led to gains in achievement. One of the concerns raised by NAEP evaluators at a press conference to announce the test’s results was the varying exclusion rates among states of learning disabled students from NAEP participation. Dr. Steven Paine, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board and the president-elect of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) commented on …
The Senate’s health care bill became law earlier this week, but that does not mean the fight against a government overhaul of our nation’s health system is over. This week, the Senate will consider amendments to the reconciliation bill passed by the House alongside the Senate health bill, H.R. 3590. This process will provide a chance to ameliorate the numerous shortcomings of the passed legislation, and will provide Americans with a glimpse at the true intentions of their elected officials as they are forced to take a stance on difficult …
Now that that the massive healthcare bill has been signed into law, President Obama can no longer make excuses for neglecting foreign affairs. Just last week, he postponed an upcoming trip to Indonesia and Australia for one final push to pass Obamacare—a trip he had already pushed off a year ago for the same reason. Australians are among many foreign publics complaining that Obama is taking their support of the U.S. “for granted” and wonder if they are still on Obama’s foreign policy radar. For the recent Iranian new year, …
The U.S. Senate is currently debating H.R. 4872, which amends the Obamacare bill passed by the House Sunday evening and signed into law by the President on Tuesday. This second piece of legislation is advertised as necessary to “fix” problems with the basic Obamacare legislation — such as by deleting the notorious “Cornhusker Kickback” and by altering the timing and scope of the new penalty tax on “high-cost” health insurance plans. However, other parts of H.R. 4872 actually make the original bill worse — for example, the provision that would …
Speaking yesterday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Fourth Annual Capital Markets Summit, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal S. Wolin made the case for Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-CT), including this: This should not be a partisan or ideological debate. As David John of the Heritage Foundation has said, “Taxpayers should never again be forced repeatedly to bail out financial services firms like AIG because a company poses a risk to the entire financial system and regulators lack the necessary tools to close the company safely.” We are happy to …
As the Obama administration makes it clear they want to pursue a carbon capping policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the French government announced that it would abandon plans to impose a similar carbon tax on domestic energy and transportation fuels. The reason for the French government’s change of tune is obvious. Sarkozy’s party knows that the carbon tax, which would have raised gasoline prices by 17 cents per gallon and domestic gas bills by 7 percent, would have significantly harmed the intra-continental and international competitiveness of French businesses and …
Yesterday, The New York Times ran an editorial titled “Fixing Missile Defense.” Given the editors’ clear track record of opposing missile defense, they must mean “fix” it in the sense of neutering it. Ostensibly, the editors are pointing to recent public complaints by the Director of the Missile Defense Agency about poor quality-control practices by several unidentified defense contractors. Predictably, the editorial calls for punishing the contractors. What is important here, however, is that the criticism does not stop there. The editorial also warns against adopting a missile defense testing …
The latest outbreak of creeping global protectionism is in Brazil, which announced March 8 that it intends to levy nearly USD$600 million in increased import duties on more than 100 products made in the U.S. in retaliation for the United States’ failure to comply with a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against its subsidies for cotton producers and exporters. According to “World Trade\INTERACTIVE,” the Brazilian government also plans to impose the first-ever WTO-legal cross-retaliation measures on U.S. intellectual property rights holders that could lead to more than USD$200 million in …
