Each week, The Heritage Foundation highlights one of its nearly 300,000 Facebook Fans on its “Featured Fan” page. This week’s fan is Samantha Thompson of Oracle, Arizona! Read her story below, and be sure to become a fan of Heritage on Facebook! Thanks for being a fan, Samantha! Moments after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot at a Tucson, Arizona, supermarket, Samantha Thompson, who lives in nearby Oracle, was glued to her television set. As a lifelong Arizonan, she immediately knew a tragedy of staggering proportions was unfolding in her …
House Republicans are attempting to live up to their pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal government’s current fiscal year 2011 budget. One of the funding categories being placed on the chopping block are the employment and training services run by the Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (ETA) which provides a host of Workforce Investment Act (WIA) job-training programs and other employment services. Compared to President Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget request, the plan is to cut $2.8 billion from programs that, according to a January 2011 …
Ever since President Obama announced in his State of the Union speech that he will travel in March to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador “to forge new alliances across the Americas,” dozens of White House and State Department officials have been meeting with people in those three countries to plan details of the state visits. It is surely no accident that the Obama visit will fall during the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s announcement of his Alliance for Progress, “which was aimed at accelerating economic and social development …
Ambassador Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, gave the first of a series of scheduled speeches last week in Portland, Oregon. The focus of the speeches is “Why America Needs the UN” and was inspired, apparently, by congressional efforts to include U.S. payments to the U.N. among efforts to cut the U.S. budget deficit. Her speech was dominated by unstinting praise for the U.N. and arguments intended to instill that viewpoint in her audience. Describing it as hagiographic would be going too far, perhaps, but not by …
House Republicans are attempting to live up to their pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal government’s current fiscal year 2011 budget. One of the proposed programs placed on the chopping block is the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Assistance to Firefighter Grant (AFG) program—a federal program that subsidizes the purchase of firefighting equipment and vehicles and fitness equipment by state and local governments. Compared to President Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget request, the plan is to cut $310 million from the highly ineffective program that has inappropriately awarded …
House Republicans are attempting to live up to their pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal government’s current fiscal year 2011 budget. One of the proposed programs placed on the chopping block is Head Start – a “Great Society” pre-school program intended to provide a boost to disadvantaged children before they enter elementary school. The plan is to make a significant cut to a highly ineffective program that is plagued by fraud. Using Head Start’s budget of $7.235 billion in fiscal year 2010 as the baseline, the plan is …
The Department of the Treasury today updated its figures on foreign holders of Treasury bonds. The update appears to show that Chinese holdings of Treasuries fell slightly last year. This is nonsense. The PRC accumulated $471 billion in surplus foreign exchange in 2010. Under Beijing’s own balance-of-payment rules, that money cannot be spent at home. This is not a matter of debate—it physically cannot be spent at home under current conditions. So where is it? It is apparently not in new purchases of U.S. agency debt issued by Fannie Mae …
The New York Times continues to lower the threshold of responsibility in matters marital, and yesterday’s editorial calling on the Obama Administration to abandon the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is the latest—and perhaps oddest—example. It is odd first and foremost because the Obama Justice Department’s defense of DOMA maintains a pattern that a distinguished scholar has termed “almost like collusive litigation”—that is, where presumed adversaries are actually seeking the same result. The Obama Administration is indeed all but abandoning DOMA—but not in the forthright manner that would result in …
Harvard University’s Niall Ferguson recently criticized the Obama Administration for lacking foresight and planning over the events in Egypt. The point of his criticisms of the Administration—and, by extension, the European Union—was illustrated over a year ago in a Heritage Foundation “war game.” In late 2009, Heritage invited security experts and Washington-based policymakers to “game” a fictional scenario of its own whereby Tunisia was hit with a major earthquake. Significant political and civil unrest followed, accompanied by large numbers of refugees flowing from Tunisia to Italy and Malta. The exercise …
Now—when the House considers the bill to fund government for the rest of the year and seeks to reduce spending by $100 billion—is the best of all times to defund Obamacare. But although it’s a golden opportunity, so far defunding Obamacare is not on the agenda. Republican freshmen have the chance to fix that if they stand firm again as they did last week. House Republicans say they are crafting a bill to save taxpayers $100 billion. Their revised proposal would rescind funding for 123 different federal programs and would …
