Last weekend President Hugo Chavez announced with great fanfare that Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), had signed an agreement with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) to develop part of the Orinoco heavy crude area for which they had given Venezuela a $20 billion loan. As usual with Venezuela and China, there is far less here than meets the eye. After clearing away all of Chavez’s bombast, the true picture emerges: China Development Bank is said to have agreed to come up with the money, but a …
Ted Ginn Sr., father of NFL wide receiver Ted Ginn Jr., has coached some of the best college and professional talent in the NFL and NCAA. But he is doing something even more impressive off the field in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Ginn presented a plan to establish the Ginn Academy to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District in 2006. The district accepted his blueprint, and Ginn opened a school for at-risk male students whom he felt could benefit from his unique style of leadership. The Ginn Academy, a privately …
The popular appeal of nuclear weapon free world rhetoric has not been lost on Tehran. This is an insight the Iranian regime shares with Obama administration, which has made nuclear arms reduction arguably its top foreign policy objective. Not to be outdone by the Nuclear Summit here in Washington, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held its own public relations extravaganza last weekend, a conference in Tehran under the banner “Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for None.” The goal of the summit was allegedly to promote global disarmament and …
In the mad dash to meet their strictly political deadline for passing Obamacare, lawmakers wound up victimizing many people. Including themselves. Members of Congress and Congressional staff currently enjoy a wide variety of excellent health insurance options, courtesy of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). One of the more commonplace campaign promises of federal lawmakers is that they will fight to give ordinary Americans the same kind of choice and competition among the wide variety of private health plans that they have. Obamacare doesn’t begin to deliver on that …
If you did not know that you were supposed to affix a federally mandated sticker to your otherwise lawful UPS package, should you be arrested face down on the pavement by FBI agents training automatic weapons at you? Our hunch is that most reasonable Americans would respond with an emphatic ‘No!’ Today we are launching a series of posts based on case studies adapted from our new book, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. The book includes stories of average Americans …
For Earth Day’s 40th anniversary, President Obama and the White House released a video praising Americans for our environmental awareness, and urging us to get personally involved with improving our local environments. The president’s message of individual responsibility is commendable but his message that we’ll spend and regulate our way to a clean energy economy is troubling. “It’s clear change won’t come from Washington alone,” the president said in his message. The reality is that most productive change comes from outside Washington. The government is good at obstructing that progress …
President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor James Jones has sought to counter an April 17th Wall Street Journal editorial criticizing the New START arms control agreement with Russia for limiting U.S. missile defense options with an April 20th letter to the editor. General Jones acknowledges that there is a specific restriction in Article V of New START, but chose to ignore the editorial’s point that language in New START’s preamble also constitutes a limitation on missile defense. The language in the preamble, which the United States has agreed to as …
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates yesterday sought to “correct” what he called “mischaracterizations” about the three-page memo that he had written on U.S. Iran policy last January after it became clear that Iran had rejected the Obama Administration’s efforts to resolve the nuclear issue through diplomacy. While The New York Times previously had reported that some administration officials considered the memo to be a “wake-up call” about the weaknesses of the administration’s Iran policy, Gates denied that was his intent, explaining that the memo “presented a number of questions and …
Speaking to Politico, John Kerry told them it was up to Harry Reid to pass Cap-and-Trade In the end, it will be Sen. Reid’s responsibility, as majority leader, to put the pieces together as he did on health care and to decide how the Senate is going to proceed. In other words, the Senate plans to force sweeping, expensive, job-destroying changes to America’s energy policy in much the same way they forced ObamaCare upon unwilling Americans. Next week, Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) plan …
A recent poll by Rasmussen shows that 58 percent of Americans lack confidence that they will receive their promised Social Security benefits in their entirety. The poll showed just 13 percent feel very confident they will receive their benefits. As usual, the sense of the American people is spot-on. As the population ages, the cost to the federal government of running the Social Security program, which Americans workers pay into their whole lives, will skyrocket. This trend is made crystal clear in Heritage’s recently published 2010 Budget Chart Book. Social …
