Only in Obama’s Orwellian world can secret negotiations to kill missile defense not mean the White House plans to kill missile defense. These secret negotiations were exposed by Bill Gertz in a June 16 article in The Washington Times. Genuine missile defense cooperation between the U.S. and Russia would be a very good thing. In fact, the U.S. was well down this path in 1992 with the Ross-Mamedov Talks, named for two chief negotiators, in response to Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s proposal for a Global Protection System against missile attack. …
The United States’ administration’s deference to the Kremlin in resolving Kyrgyzstan’s current ethnic cleansing ignores reality. Russia is seeking to dilute and diminish US influence in Eurasia despite much ballyhooed “reset” between the Kremlin and President Obama’s White House. Whatever the Administration wants to believe, Russia continues views geopolitics of Eurasia as a perennial “Great Game”. Ethnic strife is, unfortunately, a part of this game. Anti-Uzbek ethnic riots broke out in southern Kyrgyzstan last Thursday, and the official death toll has risen to well over a hundred, with the International …
The Senate voted 45-52 yesterday to oppose the $140 billion so-called “extenders bill” (HR 4213). The Hill is reporting that Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) is going to offer a slimmed down version for consideration as early as today. Two key health provisions of the bill are expected to be a continued bailout of state Medicaid programs and a temporary Medicare ‘Doc Fix’. The Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), initiated in 1997, links the increase in Medicare reimbursement rates to growth in GDP. Since medical costs historically increase at a rate more …
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the first of two committee hearings this Tuesday on the New START Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation. Attended by Acting Chair Ted Kauffman (D-DE), Ranking Member Dick Lugar (R-IN), and briefly by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) the three senators pressed the Honorable Rose Gottemoeller and the Honorable Edward L Warner, III, two key negotiators for the START Treaty, on a number of key issues. In a blog post earlier this week, Steven Groves listed four questions that should be addressed …
On October 13, 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the CEOs of the nation’s largest banks into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department just a stone’s throw away from the White House. Each CEO was then handed a one-page document that said their company would agree to sell hundreds of billions worth of equity to the federal government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). “We plan to announce the program tomorrow – and that your nine firms will be the initial participants.” In case anyone missed the …
Last week we wrote about an item that appeared in USA Today wanting to know your opinion about the meaning and significance of Independence Day: Americans celebrate the values that unite us on the Fourth of July, but today the country seems sharply divided. As the country copes with unemployment, immigration and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, what do you think the nation needs to remember this Independence Day? What are the messages you would like to share with other Americans? Write to letters@usatoday.com by June 21. …
Last week, George Mason University economics professor Daniel Klein wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed summarizing an study he did for Econ Journal Watch: “Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country—liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.” Some of the questions Klein et al asked included: “1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) …
It’s long been established that part of controlling rising health care spending in the United States will mean enacting meaningful medical malpractice, or “tort”, reform. Though tort reform is not a silver bullet to creating savings, it is one of many changes vital to containing patients’ medical costs. Unfortunately, in passing the mammoth Obamacare, Congress and the president failed to take tort reform seriously, leaving out any serious provisions to encourage states to reform their medical malpractice laws. Instead, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act threw an illusory bone …
Following the passage of the latest round of mild sanctions on Iran, the Obama administration is now seeking to weaken the sanctions passing through Congress. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep Howard Berman (D-CA) last Friday seeking to increase the administration’s “flexibility” by granting waivers to EU nations. While the US must work with the EU to ensure that it passes its own set of sanctions on Iran, Washington can no longer afford to make exemptions or “cut outs” on an issue of …
The Merriam-Webster dictionary notes that the word “campaign” dates back to the mid-17th century and has two meanings. The first is “a connected series of military operations forming a distinct phase of a war;” the second is “a connecting series of operations designed to bring about a particular result.” In the case of the latter, it has defined the political realm. Politics abounds with military metaphors: “standard-bearers” who speak in “bullets” and plan their operations in “war rooms,” while “veteran strategists” identify “battleground states” and rely on “partisans.” Earlier this …
