Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. Jim Rogers: Don’t see how U.S. can ever pay off debts – Deepanshu Bagchee Did a new Taliban weapon kill a chopper full of Navy SEALs? – David Axe S&P cuts Fannie and Freddie credit rating – Philip Klein AIG sues Bank of America over mortgage bonds – Louise Story and Gretchen Morgensen The growth agenda and its enemies – Iain Murray Gunwalker: Drug Enforcement Administration admits involvement – Bob Owens …
The auto bailout, EPA regulations, Obamacare, and now No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The Obama Administration is doing yet another end-run around Congress, this time granting states conditional waivers from the onerous provisions of NCLB in exchange for adopting a yet-to-be-specified set of executive branch education policy priorities. Today, the Department of Education announced that it will be issuing waivers to insulate states from incurring sanctions under NCLB: With the new school year fast approaching and still no bill to reform the federal education law known as No Child Left …
How much danger does the federal government’s unprincipled, out-of-control body of criminal law pose to, say, the average American small-business person? Well, suppose you were a small-business owner, and for twelve years both U.S. Customs and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been inspecting the shipments of seafood you were importing to sell to U.S. restaurant distributors. Suppose that for the entirety of those twelve years you had always packaged your shipments using plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes. Suppose that there is no U.S. law requiring you …
In case you missed it, here is audio of Heritage Libertad Radio from August 7. Topics included the new jobs numbers, the economy, and a discussion with Heritage expert James Gattuso on the increasing number of government regulations. We also answered a number of member questions on air, including: When will we know who is on the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) created by Obamacare to review Medicare? How long will the terms of IPAB members be? To whom will IPAB answer? Are the Bush tax cuts responsible for the majority …
The Obama Administration has in recent months made efforts to improve relations with Cuba contingent upon the release of Alan P. Gross. A subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Gross was arrested in December 2009 for making the Internet available to members of Cuba’s minuscule Jewish community. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in March 2011. Two weeks ago, Cuba’s highest tribunal listened to an appeal of his conviction and a plea for release. In Cuba, free circulation of ideas is forbidden. The State defines …
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a subpoena to the National Labor Relations Board on Sunday requesting documents that he said the board had failed to provide of its own accord. The documents involve the NLRB’s controversial suit against Boeing, which seeks to block the airline giant from opening a production facility in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, instead of Washington State. The NLRB claims the move constitutes retaliation against the International Association of Machinists union. Boeing insists that it is …
According to a new poll by the education research journal Education Next, 65 percent of the American public wants education spending to increase. That figure, the poll’s architect Paul Peterson notes, is the kind of polling data “that the president’s political advisors undoubtedly rely upon when they decide to appeal for more education spending.” But that figure drops significantly—by nearly half—when respondents realize that their taxes are at stake. When asked, “Do you think that taxes to fund public schools around the nation should increase, decrease or stay about the …
A spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin lashed out at a reporter on Friday, threatening to enlist party activists in a mass letter-writing campaign complaining about the reporter’s coverage of a recent Heritage Foundation interview with Gov. Scott Walker (R). The spokesperson also threatened to express “deep concerns about your credentialing” with the state’s Capitol press pool. Wisconsin Democratic Party communications director Graeme Zielinski aimed the threats at the Wisconsin Reporter’s Matt Kittle in a letter on Friday. During his interview with Scribe, Gov. Walker touted his state’s recent …
On Friday evening, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. As we and other conservatives warned, the spending reductions in the deal negotiated by President Obama to raise the debt ceiling were inadequate, and S&P reacted as we predicted but sooner. Neither Moody’s nor Fitch, two other rating agencies, have downgraded federal debt yet, but they are not providing much rosier outlooks. Decades of over-spending and over-borrowing by the federal government have damaged America’s creditworthiness. Congress after Congress, President after President, the federal government …
There is considerable misunderstanding about what the new debt ceiling law does to the area of defense. Many people are describing the required defense cuts in terms of dollar-figure reductions. A recent article appearing in The Cable, for example, referred to a $350 billion reduction for defense. These descriptions are abstract at best, because the law itself does not give a baseline dollar amount from which cuts would be made. Instead, it gives two scenarios for cuts to take place: spending caps or automatic cuts. Spending caps. The debt ceiling …
