Each week, The Heritage Foundation features one of its more than 250,000 Facebook Fans on its “Featured Fan” page. This week’s fan is Karin Agness, founder of the Network of enlightened Women and an attorney in Washington, D.C. Read her story, below, and be sure to become a fan on Facebook! As a junior at the University of Virginia, Karin Agness was walking home from class when she stopped at the campus Womens Center. After taking a brief tour, she asked a representative about helping her found a club for …
Currently 3.4 million Americans seniors covered by Medicare find themselves in a giant “doughnut hole,” but despite the tasty terminology, there’s nothing sweet about it. The doughnut hole refers to a gap in prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D. As David Hilzenrath explains, “…beneficiaries enter the coverage gap when their prescription tab hits $2,830, including both their share and the amounts paid by insurance. Once in the gap, they are responsible for 100 percent of the cost and must spend $3,610 of their money before qualifying for catastrophic coverage, …
Before concluding that today’s New York Times article on Taliban outreach to Karzai means that an Afghan settlement is on the horizon, consider today’s other news from Afghanistan, which includes a suicide attack that killed the Deputy Governor of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. The point is the Taliban may be reaching out to the Karzai government less to negotiate a compromise and more toward establishing a perception of their inevitable return to power in the country. A recent Wall Street Journal article reports that key leaders of Afghanistan’s ethnic minority communities …
NBC News is on Day Two of its week-long series Education Nation. You cannot turn on any of the NBC family of networks (MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, A&E, Telemundo, etc.) without seeing Education Secretary Arne Duncan, or some Obama administration surrogate, flacking for the President’s education agenda. There are plenty of issues the journalists at NBC could be asking about but aren’t: the silent push toward national standards, the assault on for-profit learning, the waste in education spending. But most galling is NBC’s continued refusal to ask about the Obama administration’s …
Bruno Lete’s analysis of European reactions to the New START treaty is breathtaking; not for its insights, but rather for its intrinsically false assumptions. Assumption #1: New START can and should lead to another agreement on the denuclearization of Europe. It is impossible—not to mention foolhardy—to ask U.S. senators to support New START in order to get to a second treaty of greater importance of Europe—namely the removal of c. 200 U.S. tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Europe. The U.S. Constitution empowers the Senate to offer its advice on and …
The inability of Congress to stop the Obama tax hikes is already having a real, negative impact on the U.S. economy. Businesses are delaying hiring and investment decisions because they do not know what their tax liability will be next year. Even tax experts have noticed the incredible amount of confusion that now exists as Congress flees D.C. without preventing the tax hikes. Tax Notes Today reports in “Uncertainty in Tax Code Is Extraordinary, Former Tax Official Note” (gated copy) that former Joint Tax Committee chief of staff Lindy Paull …
It’s 2010, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the American school system. Technological advances that we all take for granted in our homes, offices, and cars have yet to fully make their way into our children’s classrooms. But online education can open doors of opportunity to children around the nation. In a recent Baltimore Sun piece, author Dan Lips, a senior fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a former education analyst here at Heritage, writes: In school, most children are being taught in the same classrooms …
For more than 200 hundred years, America’s first principles—liberty and equality, natural rights the consent of the governed, private property, religious freedom, the rule of law and constitutionalism—have defined us as a nation and united us as a people. America’s founding principles are not just ideas fit for the 18th century. Just watch our new film, We Still Hold These Truths, featuring citizens who think about the founding principles in their daily lives. Through these one-on-one interviews with parents, entrepreneurs, young professionals, and a very wise Texan, we understand how …
Scott Rasmussen, President of Rasmussen Reports, a widely respected polling company. For years, Rasmussen polling has helped legislators, business leaders, and the general public gain a sense of the country’s opinions on any number of important issues. Recently, Scott teamed up with pollster Doug Schoen on a new book, entitled, “Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Transforming our Two-Party System” which delves in to what the tea party movement is, what it believes, and the impact it will have on our nation. Before a book event …
With the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts fast approaching, the debate over whether to extend the cuts, and for whom, has taken on a new face. Proponents of allowing for tax increases on the highest income brackets, or in some cases, on all Americans, argue that this is a necessary step to reducing projected federal deficits. But, as Edward Lazear, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, explains in The Wall Street Journal, this creates a false choice between huge deficits or tax increases. He …
