The past few years have witnessed the rise and fall of several left-leaning political fads, each touted as a response to the rise of the Tea Party Movement: the Coffee Party, One Nation, and Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’ s Rally to Restore Sanity. A month after the Wall Street occupation began, the protesters say they are just getting started. But a month is more than enough time to see that Occupy Wall Street is no Tea Party. For one thing, Wall Street occupiers call themselves the 99 percent. They …
While New Hampshire maneuvers to maintain first-in-the-nation primary status, a new Gallup poll reveals many Americans don’t care who New Hampshirites want to be President. In fact, they don’t care who any state wants to be President. A majority of those polled—62 percent—would prefer to amend the Constitution so that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide becomes President, while 35 percent of Americans would keep the Electoral College. With the spirit of the times supposedly against the Electoral College, why preserve the Founders’ constitutional design? The Electoral College …
Recent news reports have highlighted Chinese construction of a system of underground tunnels and raised serious questions about what they might imply regarding China’s nuclear capabilities. One story highlighted that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) may have some 3,000 miles of tunnels, sufficient to move systems underground across the breadth of the country. Much of this was apparently dug by the Second Artillery Force, which is responsible for China’s nuclear forces, so the assumption is that many of these tunnels are related to China’s nuclear deterrent. The most commonly …
The Al-Nahda (“Renaissance”) Party, a long-banned Islamist movement that was legalized after the ouster of Tunisia’s autocratic President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January, is emerging as the big winner in Sunday’s elections. Although the final results have not yet been announced, Al-Nahda has reportedly won 27 out of the 62 seats, over 40 percent of the seats filled so far, in the 217-member constituent assembly. The landmark election—the first genuinely free election to be held in Tunisia since it gained independence in 1956—will determine the members of the assembly …
President Obama may believe that America’s “reset” policy with Russia is the correct move to cover important foreign policy bases, but the policy is deeply flawed. It puts the United States at a disadvantage we can’t afford and forces us to lay aside fundamental American principles of human liberty. The “reset” concessions are simply not worth the exchange of empty promises from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is merely a talking head for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. As Heritage’s Ariel Cohen & Kim Holmes wrote recently in a memo on …
Protesters set up camp in New York City more than a month ago and have spread to other cities around the country, prompting many Americans to ask: What exactly do they want? The decentralized nature of the protests makes official demands difficult to come by, but the movement has released a number of positions that are fairly representative of the left-wing, anti-capitalist tenor of the protests. We decided to examine one such list of demands, and to give readers a sense of the conservative approach on the varied goals of …
Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) came to Washington in January ready to have a vigorous public debate over America’s debt crisis. He’s less optimistic about the outcome today — a result of the super-secret Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. “I thought it was a very, very bad idea to create a non-transparent, backdoor committee to put together something that is the responsibility of 535 members of Congress,” Huelskamp said yesterday at Heritage. “I expect nothing good to come out of it.” Huelskamp voted against the final debt-limit bill that created …
The liberal perspective on the “Occupy” movement is really something spectacular. Before the movement had really even announced a position or set of “demands,” progressives were pushing each other out of the way to embrace it. When they did finally come up with a set of ideals, which mostly involve eliminating their personally accrued debt, President Obama practically made it his new national agenda, branded “We Can’t Wait.” Now you have Hollywood “celebrities” like mega-millionaires Russell Simmons, Katy Perry and Russell Brand hopping by for a photo-op with the anti-capitalist …
Silly Brits. After all these years, they still don’t understand natural rights. During a moot debate last week at Franklin Hall in Philadelphia, British lawyers argued that the 1776 American Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, but actually treasonable. “There is no legal principle then or now to allow a group of citizens to establish their own laws because they want to,” the British barristers maintained. Well, of course seceding from Great Britain and renouncing allegiance to King George III was both illegal and treasonable by British legal standards. …
Is individualism adequate to sustain liberty and rein in government? This issue surfaced during the Republican primary debate last week in Las Vegas. “This country has always put people in groups” and treated them accordingly, said Representative Ron Paul (R–TX). America needs to move away from this kind of “group mentality,” he says, toward a more individualistic perspective: “We need to see everybody as an individual. And to me, seeing everybody as an individual means their liberties are protected as individuals.” While not disagreeing with the fact that government should …
