Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. First Amendment Wins in Arizona Campaign Finance Case – Hans von Spakovsky On nukes, Obama ‘leads’ & the world laughs – Peter Brookes Bureaucratic Insanity: Wasting money while undermining public health – Dr. Fuller Torrey FCC Pledges to Scrub Fairness Doctrine by August – John Eggerton Dodd-Frank Rekindles Old Debate: State vs. Federal Law – Louise Story ObamaCare Puts Big Dent in Hiring – John Rossomando Cornyn links China debt to …
The U.S. government intentionally sells assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Those cartels use those weapons to kill, among others, a U.S. law enforcement officer. The White House deflects questions on the subject. The director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), who watched the gun sales on video in his office, stonewalls Congress. So does the Justice Department. The whistleblower that exposed it all is fired. Paperback novel or real-life Obama Administration scandal? Time’s up. Just last week, Vince Cefalu, a special agent in the ATF …
Late last week, at least 80 illegal immigrants were abducted from a train by armed gunmen in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. According to accounts, the train operators “didn’t stop where they usually do.… Instead, they continued on to a remote area where the trains that come from Coatzacoalcos pass by.” There the gunmen were waiting and “went straight—like they already knew—to (the cars in which the) women and children were riding.” Sadly, this violence is nothing new. According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, more than 400 kidnappings …
It has been over two decades since Albania escaped the iron grip of communism, yet it is still struggling to sustain democracy. Since 2009, the same year it joined NATO, its elections have been marred by violence, with the Socialist Party using intimidation and mob rule to try to gain or maintain power. Sadly, Washington does not appear to be paying attention. Albania is a small country of about 3 million mainly Muslim people bordering Kosovo, Macedonia, and Greece in the Balkan Peninsula. It is one of the poorest countries …
On June 28, 2010, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board—a three-judge panel charged with conducting licensing hearings for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)—rejected the Department of Energy’s motion to withdraw the license application to move forward with opening Yucca Mountain, the geologic repository meant to store our nation’s used nuclear fuel. Before the board’s decision can become final, however, the NRC must vote on whether or not to accept it. The problem is that NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko refuses to allow the commission to consider the ASLB’s conclusions. This is …
Last week the government of Russia banned a center-right democratic opposition party from participating in elections. At the same time, the Kremlin propped up a small party led by a friendly oligarch. Despite his democratic rhetoric, President Dmitry Medvedev did nothing to uphold minimal democratic norms. As Heritage’s Ariel Cohen noted recently, the Obama Administration “bet on the wrong horse” when it engaged Medvedev as the lead contact for its “reset” of relations with Russia. Unfortunately, he did not deliver on democracy or other issues important to the U.S. A bipartisan …
Yesterday, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) took to the Senate floor to fight against secrecy in budget talks and out of control spending. Transparency may be dead in debt limit talks, but if heroes like Senator Johnson pledge to use the two most important words in the Senate dictionary–“I Object”–to shut down the Senate, they can force transparency for the American people. Senator Johnson threatened to object to all unanimous consent agreements until debt limit negotiations and the budget are done out in the open. He also cited the fact that …
For all of candidate Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric promising to respect Congress’s authority to draft the nation’s laws, President Obama has demonstrated a persistent pattern of circumventing the legislative branch via administrative fiat whenever his agenda stalls. And though one of the Obama campaign’s legal advisers cautioned against a President who would “take the law into his own hands and shred it when it’s convenient,” Obama has done just that time and time again. The Obama Administration generally employs one of two strategies to legislate without—and often in spite of—congressional …
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is making his second trip to the White House this week. Today he’ll be joined by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Patty Murray (D-WA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for an afternoon meeting with President Obama on the debt limit among other issues. The Democrats are plotting their next move in a game of chess with Republicans. Today at Heritage we’ll also host a member of the upper chamber. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) speaks at 9 a.m. ET about the security implications of U.S. debt at …
America’s chemical industry is one of the biggest consumers of natural gas. But it is stridently opposed to government interference and taxpayer-funded subsidies for the production, use and purchase of natural gas vehicles. American Chemical Council chief executive Cal Dooley, a former Democratic congressman from California, spoke at today’s Bloggers Briefing about the organization’s criticism of the NAT GAS Act. (Watch a recording of Dooley’s remarks.) “What is being proposed under the Pickens Plan and the NAT GAS Act is to create a $5 billion taxpayer subsidy that would support …
