The front page of USA Today claims: “President Obama’s attempt to use the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to help propel comprehensive energy legislation has failed.” Don’t believe it for a second. On Monday the Obama administration reissued a ban on offshore oil drilling in the gulf after federal courts twice invalidated the first ban, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.” The new ban is, if anything, more restrictive than the first, thus guaranteeing even more job losses for the already devastated Gulf region. Meanwhile, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is …
NEW ORLEANS — In an ironic twist of fate, the chairmen appointed by President Obama to study the impact of the Gulf oil spill turned their attention to Obama’s own offshore drilling moratorium as a significant factor causing economic harm. Commission co-chairman Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida, bluntly declared Tuesday that there’s a “disconnect between Washington and the Gulf region about the sense of urgency needed.” The Republican co-chairman, former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly, said the moratorium should be shortened. After a federal court struck …
I was on vacation with my family in Yellowstone National Park when the New Black Panther voter intimidation case exploded into the headlines with the testimony of former Department of Justice career lawyer J. Christian Adams before the Civil Rights Commission. This story has been in the public domain for a year, but the reaction to Adams’s testimony was eerily similar to the many geysers I saw venting steam into the atmosphere in Yellowstone. Adams confirmed many of the details that I have reported for National Review over the past …
Sunday’s terror attacks in Kampala, Uganda are now known to be the work of Somalia’s Al-Shabab [the Youth], a self-declared ally of Osama bin Laden and operating arm of al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. Al-Shabab is increasingly being run by foreign fighters trained in Afghanistan. The group is also closely linked to Islamists in Yemen and to Yemini-American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, the spiritual adviser to the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Hasan. The venomous religious-ideological core of al-Shabab is readily apparent. As an Islamist organization, al-Shabab’s aims are to …
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently unearthed yet another undesirable side effect of Obamacare—one that will hit the taxman as well as business owners. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, “an independent organization within the IRS whose employees assist taxpayers,” reports that both the IRS and taxpayers will have trouble complying with the health care law’s extensive new tax reporting regulations. The regs will affect 40 million businesses, from international mega-corporations to Mom-and-Pop shops on Main Street. The Taxpayer Advocate Service says it “may propose administrative or legislative recommendations to modify the …
Officials at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana have sparked controversy over their decision not to extend the hiring of Adjunct Professor Kenneth Howell, a highly rated instructor who has taught electives at the university since 2001 on the history and tenets of Catholicism. Howell’s apparent “offense” is that he accurately rendered those teachings in an e-mail distributed to students in one of his classes. According to a local newspaper, the trouble began when a friend of an unidentified student sent the chairman of IU’s Religion Department a copy of an …
Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX) does not like having his credibility questioned. Defending his vote for Obamacare in what appears to be a restaurant in his home district, a video on YouTube shows Rodriguez claiming: If we had not done anything in the next eight years based on CBO, congressional budget office, numbers it would have cost us $4.1 trillion. When the veracity of this statement is questioned by a female constituent, Rodriguez is offended: “Ma’am don’t accuse me of not saying the truth.” Rodriguez then slams his papers on a …
In a week dominated by new START op-eds, Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) penned another piece supporting treaty ratification while rejecting the arguments of former Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) from earlier this week. This follows the article by Senator Kerry (D-MA) also in support of new START. For Sen. Kerry opposing the treaty is “political,” for Sen. Lugar the arguments of Romney were “hyperbolic. Getting down to the sheer facts of the matter, however, make it clear that opposing the treaty is simply in the best interest of United States security. …
The results are in: The Department of Education (DOE) is the least popular of all federal departments. Considering the stagnate state of U.S. students’ test scores despite ever increasing federal education spending, this should come as no surprise. What should be surprising—and troubling—however, is that some Members of Congress want to allocate even more taxpayer money to this “bureaucratic boondoggle,” as termed by President Ronald Reagan. Currently, Congress is considering pumping $10 billion more into the DOE, adding to the recent $80 billion already allocated via the stimulus package. After …
Beginning this week, and running through July 23, the United Nations will hold back-to-back meetings of the Preparatory Committee for the Arms Trade Treaty. The Preparatory Committee will discuss the content of the treaty, in advance of a meeting of the Conference in 2012 to finalize the treaty and open it for ratification. This treaty is purportedly intended to address the “absence of commonly agreed international standards for the transfer of conventional arms” which, it is argued, contributes to war, crime, and terrorism. On October 14, 2009, U.S. Secretary of …
