Today, the Labor Department released its monthly jobs report showing that the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs in March and unemployment fell to 8.8 percent. Despite these encouraging numbers, Americans still consistently tell pollsters that jobs and the economy are the most important problems facing the country. And yesterday, Gallup released a poll showing that the number one way Americans would like to see more United States jobs created is to stop sending new jobs overseas. That is a fabulous idea, and the simplest way to accomplish it would be …
According to the liberal version of events, the ongoing fight in Wisconsin between Gov. Scott Walker (R) and government unions centered on the unions’ “right” to collective bargain for wages and benefits. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, there simply is no “right” to collective bargaining. And just what are the “benefits” that government unions use their collective bargaining privileges to take from taxpayers? Today, The Washington Post reports on Montgomery County, Maryland’s very similar budget troubles: At a time when public employees unions are fighting for …
Monday, the State Department announced that the United States and the European Union have begun “negotiations on an agreement to protect personal information exchanged in the context of fighting crime and terrorism.” This is very welcome news. As Heritage analyst Sally McNamara wrote earlier this month: The EU–U.S. counterterrorism relationship has been marked as much by confrontation as it has by cooperation. Brussels has long opposed key U.S. counter-terror programs such as renditions, and under new powers granted by the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament has challenged two vital data-transfer …
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) just doesn’t have a strong grasp of the facts when it comes to Social Security and the debt. Yesterday, at a campaign rally calling on Congress to “Back Off” Social Security Reid again repeated his line that: “Social Security has not contributed one penny to the debt or the deficit.” As FactCheck.org has certified, this is just plain false. The reality is that Social Security added $37 billion to the debt last year and will add another $45 billion to the debt today. Reid and the …
For at least the past five years, anti-incarceration activists, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Amnesty International (AI), have been waging a disinformation campaign designed to free juvenile killers from prison. The latest battleground is Colorado where the Grand Junction Sentinel reports: “Three state lawmakers are hoping to overturn the life sentences of 48 juveniles who were tried as adults and convicted of murder. The bill, which is to be heard in a House committee this week, would allow those juveniles, who are now …
It took them a week and a half, but The Washington Post editorial board has finally noted the absurdity of President Barack Obama’s support for oil drilling … in other countries. From today’s paper: When was the last time an American president stood before an audience in a foreign country and announced that he looked forward to importing more of its oil? Answer: Just over a week ago, when President Obama joined political and business leaders in Brasilia in hailing the fact that their newly discovered offshore petroleum reserves might …
As a third temporary spending bill expires next week, the attention of Capitol Hill will once again be focused on producing a permanent spending bill to keep the federal government open and operating. The threat of a government shutdown would not exist had the Democratically controlled 111th Congress passed a budget for this fiscal year. In fact, not only did they fail to pass a budget, but for the for the first time in the history of the budget-making process, last year’s Congress failed to even vote on a budget. And now, …
“I think that health care, over time, is going to become more popular,” then-White House senior advisor David Axelrod promised David Gregory about Obamacare last September. That same month, the Health Information Campaign, founded by high-profile leftist activists including former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, spent $2 million on a national television ad campaign touting Obamcare’s first insurance mandates. Now, six months after Axelrod’s promise, and a full year after the bill was signed into law, the results are in: Obamacare is …
The Obama Administration has already presided over the steepest rise in gas prices since the Carter Administration. And like President Jimmy Carter, PresidentBarack Obama has restricted traditional domestic energy development at every turn. According to the Energy Information Administration, President Obama’s Gulf drilling moratorium will cause domestic offshore oil production to fall 13% this year . Absent the Obama moratorium, the EIA had predicted a 6% increase in offshore production from 2010 levels. That means President Obama’s Gulf moratorium alone will cost American consumers 220,000 barrels of domestic oil production …
On March 2, President Barack Obama anointed Vice President Joe Biden as his lead negotiator on coming to an agreement with congressional conservatives on this year’s federal budget. Biden then spent half a day on Capitol Hill talking with Republicans before jetting off to Europe. The next week, Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV) attacked the President on the Senate floor: “Why are we doing all this when the most powerful person in these negotiations—our president—has failed to lead this debate or offer a serious proposal for spending and cuts that he …
