In her March 30 speech at the opening ceremony of the National Model U.N., Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, pointed out that: Important as the United Nations is as a vehicle to promote global security, foster broad-based development, and advance collective interests, the UN is far from perfect. A serious gap still separates the vision of the UN’s founders from the institution of today. The Security Council still stumbles when interests and values diverge, as they do over such issues as Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma …
If you are a human rights activist or suffer under the yoke of an oppressive regime, do not expect the United States to be rushing to your assistance these days. As the U.S. government persists in pursuing engagement with less than savory regimes – such as those of Cuba and Iran – those who fight for liberty for their citizens are feeling the pinch. Groups supporting freedom for the citizens of Iran have felt the change in tone since President Obama took office. One example was the defunding of the …
Shortly after Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev signed the New START agreement this morning, the Kremlin released the following statement: The Treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States of America on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms signed in Prague on April 8, 2010, can operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defence capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively. Consequently, the exceptional circumstances referred to in Article 14 of the Treaty include increasing the capabilities of the United …
Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released preliminary U.S. birth data for 2008. A flurry of news stories followed. Two statistics dominated the headlines: the total number of births fell by 2 percent, after peaking in 2007, and teen birthrates declined as well, reversing a slight two-year uptick. But the mainstream media completely ignored the most genuinely concerning trend in childbearing. In 2008, more than 4 in 10 children, or about 1.7 million births, were born to unmarried mothers. For decades, unmarried childbearing has been trending unrelentingly …
The national health reform rammed through Congress is giving state officials headaches. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels outlines several problems states will have to deal with as a result of Obamacare. For example, Daniels now faces the prospect of terminating a popular insurance program for low-income Indiana residents. The “Healthy Indiana Plan” includes health savings accounts that have been widely popular with the program’s participants. Due to new health care law, however, Indiana will most likely have to dump the “Healthy Indiana” enrollees into Medicaid. …
The Secretary of Energy’s request that the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future not consider Yucca Mountain has been debatable from the beginning. After all, America’s electricity ratepayers have already invested over $10 billion into the repository. And besides that, federal statute clearly states that Yucca Mountain will be the nation’s repository. Whether or not that is the best policy, it is the law. Ignoring this investment and federal statute seemed like bad policy from the start. However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission changed what seemed to be bad policy …
State government finances are in a bad way, and for an examination of why that is the case, see the latest edition of “Rich States, Poor States,” released this week by the American Legislative Exchange Council. The basic story, as anyone following state fiscal issues will surely know, is that too many states went on spending binges in the early part of the decade when revenue was rolling in, but didn’t leave enough in reserve to handle the collapse in revenues caused by the 2008-2009 recession. The ALEC volume is, …
Just hours before President Barack Obama unveiled his Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Moscow that the Kremlin maintained the right to withdraw from the new START agreement if the United States pursued its missile defense program. Late last night, the White House responded to Lavrov’s statement, insisting: “The Russian statement does no more than give the United States fair notice that it may decide to pull out of the New START Treaty if Russia believes our missile defense system affects strategic …
In recent days, some blogging friends from the left have commented on the U.S. dropping from “free” to “mostly free” in the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, the Heritage Foundation’s data driven policy guide. The Huffington Post picks up on the long-term erosion of economic freedom in which both political parties have been complicit: Though the analysis of American freedom acknowledges a longer-term trend stretching back to the end of the Bush administration, [the Index] seems to put the lion’s share of blame on the policy initiatives of President Obama
