Reporting on the July 16 car bombing in Ciudad Juarez led one journalist to evoke images of the battle against Islamist terrorist in Iraq and Afghanistan. The attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaeda playbook, demonstrated once again that the cartels are a step ahead of both an already guarded public and federal police, who have recently taken over command from the military of the battle against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso, Texas. The proper analogy is not the Middle East or Afghanistan but …
UPDATE: The NAACP has released a full video of Sherrod’s speech. It shows that the incident Sherrod was describing happened in 1986 years before she was in the Obama administration. More importantly it shows that Sherrod has completely repudiated her view that the farmer was not one of her “own kind.” In fact it shows that she has since become life long friends with the farmer and that she is fervently committed to helping all Americans equally. We are thankful to the NAACP for releasing the full video and we …
The power struggle inside Iran is intensifying, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ultra-radical camp continues to clash with the traditional hardline camp that has dominated most of the previous Iranian presidencies. Ahmadinejad, backed by cronies from the increasingly influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has sought to marginalize members of the older generation with links to Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution. One of the latest disputes involves Ahmadinejad’s effort to seize control of one of the largest Iranian academic institutions as part of the regime’s cultural purge of the …
In the U.S. House of Representatives, new legislation to prepare for and prevent WMD attacks must go through not one, not two, not three, but EIGHT separate committees before it can be enacted—a process that insures it will never become law. In the Senate, when legislators tried to create a single committee with jurisdiction over homeland security the result was a feeding frenzy of parochial Senators who stripped so much from the committee that it wound up overseeing only one-third of the Department of Homeland Security. Oversight of the Department …
Alan Sayre is a New Orleans-based business writer who works for The Associated Press. Today he published an analysis of the perfect job killing storm the Obama administration is creating in Louisiana: In the blink of an eye, the economic focus in Louisiana has shifted from recession recovery to avoiding actual and potential job losses piling up at a staggering rate. And there’s very little that the state can do: The tally is due to the Obama administration decisions affecting petroleum, defense and space — all coming together in a …
There simply is no way to avoid thinking and, perhaps, even starting the analysis of economic policy except from a set of principles. Whether it be labor, investment, trade, or a host of other pieces of our national economic policy; analysts only will be able to understand policy change if they have a foundation of guiding principles. No one would see a physician who was untrained in the mechanics and chemistry of the human body. It would be somewhat disconcerting if physicians were surprised by the presence of body temperature …
President Obama has picked another “winner” among green technologies meant to portend an energy revolution. This time it is a Korean-owned battery factory in Michigan, part of a $2.4 billion government investment in electric car battery technology in spite of a global glut of battery supply. However, the question is not really whether the technology is a good or bad idea but rather why the federal government is making these investment choices in the first place. Perhaps it is because the government has a valuable role to play in spotting …
According to The Los Angeles Times many states have enacted laws similar to the Arizona law aimed at curbing activities related to illegal immigration. Though late at coming to that conclusion, the Times is right. As extensively cataloged in Controlling Illegal Immigration: State and Local Governments Must Do More, over the last six years most states have enacted legislation in the areas most affected by illegal immigration: driver’s licenses and identification, public benefits, higher education benefits, voting security, criminal sanctions, and employment. When pro-illegal immigrant groups have sued, the courts …
Since the beginning, we have been following the New Black Panther Party voting intimidation case that began on Election Day 2008. Throughout the case, when the mainstream media has paid any attention, it has been to disparage the key actors and to dismiss the case as having been blown out of proportion. In today’s Morning Bell, Heritage’s Mike Brownfield reviews what we now know about the case and the Obama Administrations interference. As he wrote: This isn’t a case of pure imagination. This is, in a nutshell, the true story …
Since 1948, Cold War legislation has been tying the hands of practitioners of U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting. The law in question is the Smith-Mundt Act, which was intended to allow the State Department to counter Soviet propaganda in foreign media, while at the same time forbidding it from aiming propaganda at Americans at home through print or airwaves. This made sense at the time, but the world and—and the world of communication technology—has changed greatly. Considering that changed international environment, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R–TX) and Adam Smith (D–WA), …
