Later today, the Obama administration will release the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) which will set the framework for decisions on U.S. nuclear policy for the next five to 10 years. Coupled with the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) to be signed in Prague this Thursday, these documents begin to implement the “road to zero” nuclear dream President Barack Obama outlined in Czech Republic last year. In their exclusive interview with President Obama about the NPR, David Sanger and Peter Baker report in The New York Times: Discussing his …
Rajendra Pachauri , chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), responded to the errors exposed in the IPCC report saying that “Scientists are demonised because of one error in 3000 pages of evidence.” Truth be told, there were several errors uncovered in the report including questionable sources in the assessment of mountain ice reduction in the Andes, Alps and Africa as well as acknowledged overstating crop loss in Africa, Amazon rain forest depletion, sea level increases in the Netherlands. But Pachauri only acknowledges that the Himalayan glaciers will …
In 2008, the United States spent $607 billion on our military. Far more than any other country as British author David McCandless illustrates in the graphic to the right. But as McCandless goes on to show in the rest of this Datablog post, focusing on spending totals alone doe not provide an accurate context to judge U.S. military spending by. The U.S. is a wealthy country with a larger Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than Japan, Germany, and China combined. McCandless compensated for this fact and you can see the result …
The Washington Post asks: “What does it mean for a nation to be energy independent? Is it realistic and if so how should that be achieved?” Energy Independence is a mixed bag — both good and bad energy policy ideas are promoted under its banner. The bad outweighs the good, and in any event energy independence shouldn’t supplant free markets as the overarching principle for sound energy policy. Among the few good ideas spurred by the desire to achieve energy independence is expanding domestic energy production. As it is, the …
Treaties are just words. Deeds matter more. We were supposed to have learned that lesson from the fallout after World War I. That global conflict was billed as “the war to end all wars.” The Versailles Treaty was meant to seal the deal. But its words couldn’t stop the German military. The treaty aimed to prevent Germany from producing cutting-edge weaponry. The Kaiser’s U-boats, for example, had taken a dreadful toll during the war. So the treaty forbid all future “construction and purchase of all underwater vessels, even for commercial …
Despite all the talk about how Obamacare would lower health care costs, it’s already becoming clear that it just won’t be the case. The Indianapolis Star reports that companies can expect employee health insurance costs to rise even faster. “Driven by worries about the economy and possibly the effects of health-care reform, [health insurers] are raising rates this year for family coverage through employer-sponsored plans… from 8 percent to 21 percent, which is considerably higher than the 5 percent increase the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in 2009.”
Former East Los Angeles high school teacher, Jaime Escalante, whose exemplary teaching led to the inspiring film Stand and Deliver, passed away last week. As a math teacher at Garfield High School, Escalante was able to motivate inner-city students to achieve top scores on advanced placement calculus. His influence on the school’s math program and its students led to its becoming one of the top public high schools in the country for the number of advanced placement calculus students it produced. Only four other public high schools nationwide could boast …
Roberton Williams and Rosanne Altshuler’s Five Myths About Your Taxes in the Washington Post on Sunday was such a useful piece one hesitates to criticize, but one confusion is so unfortunate that a correction is necessary. In all, the authors got about 3 and a half right out of five, which at the start of baseball season is really pretty good. They were right when pointing out that most people (75 percent by their estimates) pay some federal tax, even the many of the poor and virtually all the rich. …
Just three days after President Barack Obama’s health plan was signed into law, AT&T announced that due to an obscure tax change in the bill, the nation’s largest telephone company would take a $1 billion hit to its bottom line this quarter. According to health benefits analysts this tax law modification would shave as much as $14 billion from U.S. corporate profits. While it would have been better had these tax losses been made more public before Congress voted, at least these tax charges are transparent and easily quantifiable enough …
Leftist love for the Marxist Cuban regime manifests regularly. Just this Monday in the New York Times Marc Lacey had an item titled “Dreaming of Cuban Profits in Post-Embargo World.” The article was a bit odd, most notably for the unreal caption of a photo of tourists driving a 1952 Cadillac along El Malecón, describing the scene as “a pleasure that few Americans have experienced in decades.” The caption had a double meaning, as not only have Americans not visited El Malecón since the Revolution, but Americans haven’t experienced the …
