Bradley Roberts, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy, recently testified before a House of Representative Armed Services subcommittee, touting Obama’s plan for missile defense in Europe. His testimony is more noteworthy for the facts he conveniently left out. CLAIM: Hearkening back to Obama’s campaign promise to give Americans “proven and cost-effective ” missile defense, Roberts boasted “….the Obama administration was putting ‘proven’ sea-based and land-based missile shields into Europe as quickly as possible as part of a revised shield announced last September to any Iranian ballistic-missile …
Richard Florida, who is the author of “The Rise of Creative Class,” posed the following vital questions in his recent article “Free, Tolerant, and Happy” in The Atlantic: To what extent is economic freedom associated with tolerance and happiness? Are freer nations also more tolerant? Are their residents happier than those of other nations? To what extent is economic freedom also associated with other factors like affluence and material well?being, the level of human capital, and the transition to postindustrial economic structures? And what is the relationship between freedom and …
The decline of public education stands out as a subject ripe for the lens of a documentary filmmaker. In Waiting for Superman, to be released by Paramount this fall, the producers do just that, pointing a critical eye to the plight of public education in America. The film’s name comes from the idea of a child wishing to be rescued from a bad situation–in this case, from a school system that often leads to nowhere but failure. Other recent documentaries on this topic–such as The Heritage Foundation’s Let Me Rise, …
This past Friday, President Barack Obama again threatened to veto any financial reform bill that fails to tightly regulate financial derivative products which many blame for the 2008 economic crisis. Derivatives work like insurance to protect certain investments, and provide stability to the price of most goods and services. For example, farmers buy derivatives on the price of their crops, so if the price of their crop plummets, the price of the food at the grocery store won’t change that much. Airlines buy derivatives on oil, so if the price …
Groucho Marx famously quipped to the Friar’s Club of Hollywood that he didn’t “want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” On Monday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case where Groucho-like humility is nowhere in evidence. In CLS v. Martinez, what is at issue is the right of the Christian Legal Society (CLS) to establish and receive routine school recognition for a chapter that retains and applies a statement of faith to its officers and voting members. On the other …
Last Friday, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, University of California at Berkeley law school Associate Dean Goodwin Liu, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was not the first time Liu was before this Senate panel. In 2006 Liu testified against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito claiming Alito’s record was “not the mainstream.” Liu also spoke out against Chief Justice John Roberts nomination in 2005. But now that the Senate was examining his qualifications, Liu offered this spirited defense of his past legal writings: …
Earlier this year, after Congress passed an increase in the debt ceiling, was deliberating over a trillion plus health care package, and the President’s Budget promised new record deficits, the American people started to see a worrisome trend that pushed fiscal responsibility to the forefront of the public’s priorities. President Obama responded by creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan commission tasked with submitting a solution to the nation’s fiscal woes by the end of the year. Problem solved, right?
Internet freedom could well be the defining issue of the 21st century, the issue on which authoritarian regimes stand or fall. Authoritarian regimes are only too well aware that the greatest threat they face today is less from an outside military force than from populations empowered by information about their own country and by the ability to communicate and organize via new cell phone technologies. As reported Monday by The New York Times, China is arming itself in this communications battle, trying to get a handle on the host of …
President Obama came to Washington to restore trust in government. A new Pew Research Center survey indicates he’s failed. Just 22% of the poll’s respondents said they trust the federal government almost always or most of the time. That’s one of the all-time low points in the survey and represents a decline from when Obama took office. The last time Americans felt this discontent with Washington was 1994. The similarities are eerie: A newly elected Democrat was in the White House, the country was recovering from a recession, and President …
The drill, baby, drill crowd was quick to discover that the President’s offshore drilling announcement does very little to increase access to domestic supplies and in fact puts 13 billion barrels of oil and 49 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off limits, respectively. Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been much more supportive of offshore wind energy, but should he be? A new Institute for Energy Research video compares a natural gas platform to an offshore wind platform and in terms of surface area and cost, natural gas …
