Eleven members of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a letter to the chairman and ranking member of the Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in anticipation of the hearings on the New START Treaty. The senators are calling for a broader spectrum of witnesses, beyond the administration officials that the Obama Administration has put forward so far, in order to fully address the wide array of questions that arise from the treaty. The potential witnesses requested in the letter include: Admiral Richard Mies (retired) – …
The June jobs report is not a happy one as we head into the holiday weekend. Private-sector hiring is still weak, at less than 100,000 new jobs. Even worse, wages fell, and hours of work are flat in the last quarter. While hiring in temporary services is still increasing, it is at a lower level than the past nine months. The labor-market recovery is no longer strengthening but is instead holding in place since spring. While the unemployment rate dipped to 9.5 percent, this is because there was a large …
State legislators and governors will face many challenges implementing the provisions of Obamacare. In a new Heritage Foundation study, Ed Haislmaier and I analyze the components of Obamacare that detrimentally affect states and make recommendations for how states should respond to the new law. Of the many impacts on states that we analyze, there are three key ones: 1) The Massive Medicaid Expansion Over half of the newly insured will gain coverage through an expansion of state Medicaid programs. Medicaid expansion presents numerous problems for the states: additional financial obligations …
The latest study by the McKinsey Global Institute reveals some astonishing facts concerning contributions of U.S. global companies to the American economy. According to the report: With their share less than ONE percent of the total number of U.S. companies, U.S. international companies employ almost 20 percent of the U.S. private sector labor force. That small portion of U.S. global companies has accounted for nearly half of total U.S. merchandise exports since 1990 and contributes over 70 percent of our private sector’s R&D spending. These benefits from going global should …
An old saying applicable to dysfunctional organizations is that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The President and Congress have taken this approach to a whole new level. In seeking to strengthen small businesses to spur badly needed job creation, the left hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The Congress is being ushered out of Washington for its July 4 recess by a dismal jobs report from the Department of Labor. Despite every kind of budget-busting stimulus bill Congress can devise, beginning …
Conservatives began talking about rescinding the stimulus after President Obama signed it into law. Liberals are starting to listen. House Democrats approved an amendment to the Afghanistan and Iraq war supplemental yesterday, 239 to 182, that cuts more than $1.6 billion originally allocated for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (complete list below). Among the notable rescissions: $487 million from the government’s nutrition program for low-income women and children, known as WIC. A statement from Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) says the rescissions come from programs that “no longer require the …
On June 17, Vice President Joe Biden crashed the daily White House press briefing to kick off the Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week-long campaign to promote the belief that “the Recovery Act is working.” VP Biden claimed: “We knew that the hole dug by the recession that was created by the policies of the last administration resulted in a loss, a real loss of somewhere between $2 trillion and $3 trillion in the economy. We never thought that $787 billion was going to fill those holes — that hole.” …
A U.S. district court judge will decide within 30 days whether to dismiss Virginia’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare. From the perspective of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the stakes could not be higher. The fate of federalism, he believes, hangs in the balance. “This case really goes to the foundations of this country,” Cuccinelli said last night in an exclusive interview. “It is truly a case about the outer limits of federal power under the Constitution. It’s really not a case about health care. It’s a case about …
By the summer of 1776, Americans were already engaged in open conflict against the British Empire. The Colonies’ efforts to remedy their political grievances by appealing to King and Parliament had failed. It became clear that in order to protect its liberties, America would have to take “command of its own fortunes”, as George Washington would later put it. On June 7, 1776 Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, stood to present a resolution to the Second Continental Congress gathered at Philadelphia: Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and …
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki today insisted that sanctions would have little effect on Iran while his bombastic boss, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whined about the sanctions. Mottaki wrote letters to the foreign ministers of the fifteen members of the U.N. Security Council that criticized “the hasty adoption, at the insistence of America and its allies, of an unjust and illegal resolution against the great nation of Iran” and asserted that Iran is now “more determined” than ever to push forward on its nuclear program. Mottaki, an active pen pal, also …
