There is an obvious omission from all the previews of the President’s upcoming speech on jobs: Obamacare. Obamacare is perhaps the most damaging of the Administration’s policies that are impeding the country’s recovery. At a time when there should be a focus on cutting spending, reducing regulation, and lowering taxes, Obamacare does the complete opposite. It spends more, imposes costly new mandates and regulations, and raises taxes on individuals and businesses. This is no way to get the economy up and running again. More Spending. While proponents argue that Obamacare …
As Americans prepare to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorists attacks, The Heritage Foundation has been busy reminding Congress and the public of the importance of staying the course in the War on Terror. In the past 10 years, at least 40 terrorist plots have been foiled due, in large part, to our enhanced counter-terrorism efforts. But despite this progress, efforts are underway to undermine some of this progress by rejecting the very policies that have kept us safe. In a new report, James Carafano lays out …
Terrorists struck again in India—this time in the nation’s capital at the High Court, where at least 11 were killed and more than 80 were injured. Today’s attack comes less than two months after serial bombings in Mumbai claimed 25 lives. While suspicions for the Mumbai attacks fell on a shadowy homegrown terrorist group called the Indian Mujahideen, today’s bombing was claimed by a well-known, Pakistan-based terrorist group that has also been active in Bangladesh. The Harakat-ul-Jihadi-Islami (HuJI)—a group that focused on attacking targets in Indian Kashmir in the 1990s …
Fairfax County, VA, has used taxpayer funds to subsidize “affordable housing” in luxurious housing developments where homes retail for more than $800,000, an investigation by Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy has found. The affordable housing units are reportedly worth about half a million dollars each – more than six times the average value of the 3,600 affordable housing properties managed by the county. There are housing developments in Fairfax County where subsidized homes have sold for about 16% of the cost of the “normal” home in that development. …
Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie released a report on Wednesday that lends weight to arguments for greater energy exploration and production in the United States. The economic effects of such a policy, the report asserts, would be uniformly positive. The report summarizes its findings thusly: Wood Mackenzie’s analysis found that U.S. policies which encourage the development of new and existing resources could, by 2030, increase domestic oil and natural gas production by over 10 million boed [barrels of oil equivalent per day], support an additional 1.4 million jobs, and raise …
The U.S. Minuteman III intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) force faces an uncertain future, writes Mark Schneider in his recent post on DefenseNews.com. A set of Minuteman failures in the recent years is as concerning as the exponential loss of design and engineering expertise within the Air Force itself. As Schneider warns, no one involved in the original Minuteman design is active in the program, and no one in the Air Force project office has experience in managing the development of a new ICBM. This could cause substantial problems if a …
Obamacare changes the health care system in several ways that harm physicians. It also fails to address the pivotal issues facing physicians today—for example, low government reimbursement rates that fail to cover the cost of care, or the need for state-by-state medical malpractice reform. It should have come as a surprise, then, that during the health care reform debate, the American Medical Association (AMA) emerged as one of the new law’s supporters. But rather than symbolizing physicians’ support for the left’s health care overhaul, the AMA’s stance on Obamacare just …
Last week, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group (NSPG)—a follow on to the original 9/11 Commission—reported that, 10 years after 9/11, nine of the 41 recommendations made by the commission remain unfulfilled. With scores like that, this report card certainly isn’t going to make it on anyone’s fridge. The NSPG’s findings point to several key recommendations of the commission that have not been met. For one, some seven years after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created, congressional oversight remains abysmal. DHS remains subject to oversight by …
Last week, oil giant ExxonMobil announced an agreement with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft, to explore for oil in the Arctic continental shelf in the Kara Sea. America’s largest oil company is taking the place of BP (British Petroleum), whose dealings with Rosneft earlier this year collapsed. The controversial Rosneft and Exxon will be searching the Russian Arctic waters for black gold. Development of new oil fields has become possible due to the Arctic polar ice caps’ retreat and technological progress that make geological work in the High North a …
I was still on active duty in the U.S. Army and stationed at the National Defense University, where I was editor of the journal Joint Force Quarterly. Before that I had been stationed at the Pentagon, so a lot of family and friends called, worried that I might have been there when the plane hit the building. Actually, on that day I was at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, looking for photos to illustrate an article for the journal. When the plane hit the Pentagon, the archives closed. …
