Last night on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) made the case for preventing President Barack Obama’s impending job killing tax tsunami. When Matthews tried to play gotcha by asking Rep. Ryan “Where will you cut?” to pay for the tax cuts, Rep. Ryan was ready. First, he cited the budget he produced last year which cut $4.8 trillion in spending (you can read Heritage’s coverage here). Next, Rep. Ryan cited the $1.3 trillion in discretionary spending cuts he enumerated just two months ago. Finally, Rep. Ryan touted …
Growing Chinese investment around the world is a major international economic development. In the U.S., the story is how limited Chinese investment is beyond government bonds. Limitations on Chinese investment in the U.S. are not imposed by the PRC. Other than bonds, the PRC invests primarily in natural resources, and the U.S. has such resources. The U.S. is the largest natural gas producer, may top the world in coal reserves, and even has high-cost oil reserves China has shown interest in elsewhere. The U.S. also has various metal ore deposits …
At the height of the debate over Obamacare, when the White House’s leftist allies were in full panic mode, The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein accused Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” Lieberman’s crime? He opposed including an expansion of Medicare in the health regulation bill. Now that the President’s signature foreign policy achievement, the New START nuclear agreement with Russia, is on the ropes, the left is again back to their hyperbolic ways. Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione told …
E.J. Dionne Jr. does not want to talk about the facts of the New Black Panther Party case. In his column today he dismisses the issue “right-wing propaganda” while blithely repeating blatant falsehoods. The American Spectator‘s Quin Hillyer called Dionne out this morning: He writes: “This is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting.” WRONG. Does Dionne ever actually do his own research and read documents? Two different people, both of them highly credible witnesses, including civil rights legend Bartle Bull, swore under …
Do the nation’s trial lawyers deserve a taxpayer bailout? That’s what they’re after: a special-interest tax break of $1.6 billion. In fact, after Congress refused to consider giving them that break, they are now trying to get it from the Treasury Department. In order to bestow that gift, though, the Treasury Department would have to reverse the view it took back in the Clinton Administration (which, incidentally, was not known for its hostility to the trial lawyers) and change its 1997 ruling without any intervening change in the underlying facts …
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not known for overly cautious mortgage financing. To the contrary, their open wallets helped fuel the credit crisis of 2008, and drove the two into federal receivership. To date, taxpayers have paid some $145 billion to keep them afloat, with no end in sight. Thus, its rather surprising to see the two in court for being too stingy. But that’s exactly where they are, having been sued earlier this month by California for refusing to finance properties in the federal government’s “Property Assessed Clean …
Managing the city of Bell, California, is apparently twice as challenging as being President of the United States. The Los Angeles Times reported on July 15, that Bell’s soon-to-be-former Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 a year. Bell is not exactly a wealthy metropolis. It is a small, predominantly Hispanic city of 38,000 southeast of Los Angeles. It has a per-capita income of only half the national average—making it the poorest city in Los Angeles County. Yet its city manager makes nearly twice what President Obama does governing the …
The publication of over 91,000 classified U.S. military documents on Afghanistan by WikiLeaks has, as White House national security adviser Jim Jones said, “put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk.” The documents include raw intelligence reports whose disclosure could not only endanger lives, but risk revealing the methods and means of gathering information vital to success in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, an Australian who has made no secret of his opposition to the war, is unapologetic about the disclosure. He obviously believes it will help the …
“The Common Core Curriculum: National Education Standards Even Conservatives Can Love.” This is what Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute write about the Obama Administration’s push to implement national standards in classrooms across the nation. In reality, there is nothing conservative about national standards, which will further tie schools to the demands of Washington bureaucrats but do little to improve student achievement. National standards create a one-size-fits-all, centralized approach to education. And while proponents will say that these standards are “voluntary,” the significant amount of federal funding …
The Lockerbie scandal has just become even murkier. According to a Sunday Times report yesterday “the US government secretly advised Scottish ministers that it would be ‘far preferable’ to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya.” The newspaper obtained a leaked document which reveals that Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, had written to Alex Salmond, Scottish First Minister, ahead of the release of the Lockerbie bomber. The correspondence indicates that the Obama administration’s opposition to the “compassionate” release of the Lockerbie bomber may …
