President Obama has used his executive power in many ways to expand the role of government. But there’s one area that stands out: Obama’s frequent and repeated use of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to issue emergency and disaster declarations. Heritage’s Matt Mayer reports that Obama “eviscerated the record books by issuing 243 declarations in 2011,” continuing an alarming pattern that begin under President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush. Mayer says FEMA has become a “political pork-barrel spending agency.” The trend is illustrated in this week’s chart, which …
When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D–CA) staff released a chart in May that attempted to illustrate how much past Presidents increased the national debt, it collided with a meticulous critique from Politifact that in turn led to a revised chart. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler weighed in as the original chart resurfaced recently, reporting on its methodological faults and misleading presentation. Even the revised version makes President Obama’s debt accrual appear minor compared to that of past Presidents. The facts show, however, that the Obama Administration is well on …
Earlier this week at Heritage, a Bush-era deputy assistant attorney general shared the stage with a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s not exactly the type of combination you might expect talking about terrorism 10 years after 9/11. But for John Yoo and Nadine Strossen, it was an opportunity to discuss the future of national security. Yoo is the co-editor of a new book with Dean Reuter that features essays from 22 contributors spanning the ideological spectrum. The compilation, “Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American …
President Obama’s defenders are taking to the airwaves to rebut the charge that his actions have caused the dire employment figure we see today. The rebuttals mirror those the President is making, and they sure don’t lack in audacity. Some of the president’s enablers, for example, continue to claim that the unemployment rate is the fault of George W. Bush (even though it has been steadily rising two and a half years after Mr. Bush left office). Others say it is the structural result of deindustrialization. A third excuse making …
“When all else fails, blame Bush.” This seems to be the operating principle of the current Administration. Case in point: At a conference on innovation earlier this week, Cass Sunstein—the head of OMB’s regulatory review office—tried to deflect criticism that the Obama Administration was responsible for a “tsunami” of regulation sweeping over the American economy. His defense: Bush was worse: “The annual cost of regulations has not increased during the Obama administration,” Sunstein said. “In its last two years, executive agencies in the Bush administration proposed far higher regulatory costs …
Reporters covering a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” protest at the White House today were forced out of Lafayette Square by police. The scene, captured on video, is remarkable given the historical importance of the park as a protest spot across the street from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. President Obama, who boasts of the most transparent administration in history, is facing increasingly angry rhetoric on the issue. But the more important matter facing the administration today involves freedom of the press. Why would Secret Service officers, charged with protecting the White House, …
Earlier this week, The Foundry carried a post by Jim Roberts, a Heritage Senior Research Fellow in Freedom and Growth, which wisely recommended that President Obama appoint former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to lead U.S. recovery efforts in the earthquake-stricken nation of Haiti. This type of high-level bipartisan leadership is critical in raising U.S. support and resources for the effort, as was demonstrated by Clinton and former President George H.W. Bush during the Tsunami relief effort in 2004. Some liberal voices including Daily Kos, Rachel Maddow and …
When President George Bush made the case for the surge in Iraq in January 2007, he made it clear to the Iraqi people and our allies abroad that he would not bow to domestic political pressures by setting a date for troop withdrawal. President Barack Obama has chosen a different path, explicitly naming a July 2011 retreat date in the sentence immediately following his troop increase announcement. So how does Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spin this pre-retreat to our allies: It should be clear to everyone that — unlike …
Edwin Meese III, the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation as well as the United States Attorney General between 1985 and 1988 released the following statement today on the proposed trials of terrorists in New York City, including confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “It is clear that foreign terrorists and terrorist groups have committed acts of war against the United States, and that our national security requires that we respond accordingly. This means that …
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O2ke-AuJkQ[/youtube] The supposed assassination of a U.S. president is no laughing matter. All Americans of all political persuasions hold sacred the safety of our elected leaders. When baby boomers remember where they were on November 22, 1963, they don’t associate that remorse with a particular Kennedy policy, they merely know the despair and emptiness they felt. This is why it is so ghastly when a figurehead of any political movement advocates for the assassination of a U.S. President and even more revealing when the media excuses it. Liberal icon Gore Vidal, …
