Last Sunday, countless Philadelphia Phillies fans settled down in front of their TV sets to watch their team take on the San Francisco Giants in the National League Championship Series. They were disappointed. Not because their team lost—they won—but because they couldn’t watch it. The reason is a contractual spat between Fox Broadcasting and Cablevision over how much Cablevision must pay to put Fox’s programming on its cable TV system. With negotiations at an impasse, Fox stations in Philadelphia and New York (as well as some Fox cable channels) were …
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw (Radek) Sikorski was probably being polite when he described, in a conference call on Friday with U.S. policy experts, the U.S. government as “a friend of the Eastern Partnership” initiative, a Polish-Swedish venture within the EU, which covers Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the three countries of the Caucasus. The disparity between the U.S. and EU in terms of economic resources dedicated to Eastern Europe is overwhelming. While the EU spends billions on supporting this partnership, the United States spends a grand total of $311 million annually …
It turns out that many city public pension plans are just as underfunded as various state plans are. For instance, Chicago has only about $22 billion in pension assets to pay for $66 billion in pension promises to its city workers, while New York City has $93 billion available to pay $215 billion in city pension promises, and Boston has only $3.5 billion available to pay $11 billion in promises. That means that every household in Chicago has a liability of about $42,000 just to pay pensions to city workers, …
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has used a new Gallup poll showing that 77% of Americans believe “the cost of the government’s major entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, will create major economic problems for the U.S. in the next 25 years” to produce the following headline: Americans prefer tax increases to benefit cuts. Problem is, that just is not the choice respondents were given. Here are the actual top line questions produced by Gallup:
In The Green Room: RedState.com’s Erick Erickson on Tea Parties, Conservatives, and Government Waste
RedState.com Editor Erick Erickson was recently at The Heritage Foundation to give a talk about his new book, “Red State Uprising: How To Take Back America.” [Watch the full lecture.] Before the lecture, he sat down with Heritage’s Robert Bluey to discuss the book, the Tea Party movement, and how conservatives can retake the country. Erick specifically discussed what the Tea Party movement will mean for politics moving forward. “I think largely it’s about accountability. It really took conservatives until the Harriet Miers nomination in 2005 to really have vocal …
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback reads the headline from this past Sunday’s New York Times. Patricia Cohen goes on to report: “[I]n the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word ‘culture’ became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned. Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.” At first, this may seem like the left is finally ready to make a major concession to reality …
This week’s encouraging news—that the U.S. affirmed its security commitment to Japan under the 1960 bilateral defense treaty—sends exactly the right signal to China: that the U.S. will push back on Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the region. Most notably, Washington went far beyond long-standing ambiguous diplomatic statements to publicly state for the first time that the Senkakus (which the Chinese call the Diaoyutai islands) were specifically protected under the defense accord. China claims sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, but the Japanese have administered them since the United States ceded control …
In a provocative and divisive two day state visit to Lebanon last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad basked in the adulation of Lebanese Shiite crowds assembled by his Hezbollah allies. Ahmadinejad’s controversial trip was designed to: bolster his status as a world leader at a time when he increasingly is under attack at home; give him a platform for shaking his fist at Israel; and boost his Hezbollah clients. Iran has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Hezbollah’s coffers and supplied it with over 40,000 rockets and missiles in …
Speaking to younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party about Germany’s 16 million foreign worker population, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this past Saturday: We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone’, but this isn’t reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other… has failed, utterly failed. This analysis, while spot on, is unfortunately years late. Three years ago The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst for European Affairs …
Colin Clark misses the mark in his latest piece for DOD Buzz. Even the title, “GOP To Tea Party: Don’t Cut Defense,” is wrong. The opening sentence is no better. Indeed, it makes two mistakes. “With one wary eye on the Tea Party movement and its potentially isolationist policies,” Clark writes, “representatives of GOP think tanks sent a simple message today: don’t cut Pentagon weapons systems in the belief that the American homeland can be protected without a military that can fight and project power around the globe.” Clark was …
