Iran’s embattled regime Saturday announced that it is ready to resume talks about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities, which have triggered four rounds of U.N. sanctions. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that “We think late October or early November will be an appropriate date for the talks by the representatives of Iran and 5+1 countries,” (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany). The U.N.-sponsored talks had stalled last October after Tehran rejected an offer to exchange some of its low enriched uranium stocks for more highly enriched …
The Progressive Movement is desperate. The 2008 election was supposed to be the dawn of a new liberal era. An enlightened bureaucratic elite in Washington was supposed to enact a broad and transformative agenda that would save the economy, return the nation to prosperity, and legitimize big government for a generation. But only the enactment of the agenda occurred, without any of the promised benefits. President Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus and trillion-dollar health care entitlement are now law. The leftist bureaucrats have been empowered … but their policies have failed. Health …
At an event in Florida last week, former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives Marco Rubio told a crowd: This race is not your traditional race. It is a referendum on our identity. This race forces us to answer a very simple question: Do we want our country to continue to be exceptional, or are we prepared for it to become just like everybody else? The debate on American exceptionalism has garnered widespread attention this season. It has been a Tea Party rallying cry and an object of liberals’ …
Liu Xiaobo, a primary author of the Charter 08 document calling for better human rights and democracy in China, has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the G-20 Summit this November in South Korea, President Obama, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, will meet with President Hu Jintao, the leader of China and the country where Liu Xiaobo is in jail. It’s a perfect opportunity for President Obama to put America’s actions where its mouth is. Members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and some their colleagues in …
If you ever wondered about some of the people behind the marijuana legalization movement, you need not look any further than Ed Rosenthal and Richard Cowan to see how disingenuous arguments are used to advance a broader agenda. Rosenthal (former editor of High Times Magazine) and Cowan (former Director of NORML — the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) realized a long time ago that in order to achieve full legalization of marijuana throughout the United States, they would have to invent a “scam” (their words) to get …
The Institute for Science and International Security, founded by former United Nations IAEA nuclear inspector David Albright, released a report today warning that North Korea has “moved beyond laboratory-scale work” and now has the “capability to build” a highly enriched uranium-producing centrifuge plant. The report says North Korea’s centrifuge capabilities makes them “both a horizontal and a vertical proliferation threat.” The Washington Post further reports that the study “comes as a senior South Korean official warned that North Korea’s nuclear program is ‘evolving even now at a very fast pace,’” …
Shallow-water rig workers and those in industries unrelated to oil drilling are losing their jobs and being denied access to relief funds because of what Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) calls a “de facto shallow-water drilling ban.” Nearly $1 billion is going to Gulf Coast industries that are suffering in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, but many workers losing their jobs due to the drilling ban, imposed by the Obama administrations’ Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, are not eligible. BP’s $20 billion relief fund for those affected by the Gulf …
What was normally a peaceful, quiet way of life for residents of Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, suddenly became loud and unbearable when utilities operating three new wind turbines flipped the switch to “on.” A recent New York Times article reports that some Vinalhaven residents are learning “the hard way” that wind power has its costs. While residents welcomed the arrival of the turbines in late 2009, it is apparent that they did so with certain expectations. Those expectations came from what schoolteacher Sally Wylie call an …
If you change the cast of a soap opera and the script is the same, the next episode is not much different than the last. Likewise, there is an Obama Doctrine, it’s the rulebook that President Obama is running foreign policy by, and the departure of General Jim Jones as National Security Adviser won’t matter much in changing how the White House’s plays are called. The most noteworthy part of Obama’s remarks to the press regarding the matter concerned the list of his Administration’s “accomplishments.” What is noteworthy is that …
When an environmental law or regulation passes in California, it usually comes as a surprise to no one. After all, it’s California. So when the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved regulations to reduce diesel emissions—despite opposition from the trucking industry—most thought of it as “California being California.” Now California may significantly reduce the regulations, because scientists drastically exaggerated the diesel emission levels from off-road machinery. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
