The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee meets Thursday to consider the most substantive postal reform plan under consideration in Congress. The debate in Washington triggered a spending spree from postal unions opposed to the reforms, including a national TV ad campaign launched last month. Now the Oversight Committee is striking back with its own video that explains the crisis and why the Postal Service needs to be fixed before taxpayers are left paying the bill. Mail volume has dropped by 46 billion pieces since its peak in 2006. As …
Google is growing up. That was the message company representatives shared at Heritage this week on the Silicon Valley behemoth’s 13th birthday. (Click here to watch video of the event.) Google is making the case for the free market — and taking its message to conservatives. The Heritage Foundation hosted representatives from Google at Tuesday’s Bloggers Briefing. The meeting came just a few days after a Senate hearing in which Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was grilled by lawmakers over the company’s search engine ranking practices. The search engine giant recently added …
The White House has discovered a new tactic for pushing legislation that most Americans don’t want through Congress: implying the legislation in question is either all for the troops or could hurt the troops if not passed. Wrapping the crassest political messaging in the flag is the lowest of low-ball politics. Pretending to honor the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform with congressional actions that have nothing to do with “providing for the common defense” is even worse. Perhaps the most egregious example of playing politics …
If the Senate doesn’t ratify New START, proponents of the arms-control agreement fear, then … well, the world will come to end. The latest warning came from Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that advocates a nuclear weapons-free world. “A delayed ratification with a close vote would be a blow to U.S. leadership around the world,” he told the Associated Press, “People would doubt the president’s ability to negotiate other agreements.” More pressure to just “sign the treaty so we can purge the world of nuclear weapons” …
The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on Tuesday on the implementation of the New START Treaty. Two weeks ago, Sen. John Kerry (D–MA) wrote in an op-ed that given all the testimony there was a clear record in favor of treaty ratification. However, had Sen. Kerry waited for the statements of The Honorable James Miller, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and General Kevin P. Chilton, Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, he may have been a little more hesitant to make such a proclamation. Dr. Miller and …
Eleven members of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a letter to the chairman and ranking member of the Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in anticipation of the hearings on the New START Treaty. The senators are calling for a broader spectrum of witnesses, beyond the administration officials that the Obama Administration has put forward so far, in order to fully address the wide array of questions that arise from the treaty. The potential witnesses requested in the letter include: Admiral Richard Mies (retired) – …
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke at Heritage today about President Obama’s decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. McCain said he was supportive of the move, but criticized Obama for setting a timetable for withdrawal.
Last week’s consideration of amendments to Obamacare focused on Medicare, which is used as one of the main sources of funding for the expansion of Medicaid and the establishment of a new health care entitlement under Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) bill. The McCain Amendment. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) offered an amendment to recommit and require the Senate Finance Committee to revise Sen. Reid’s health care bill to exclude all spending cuts to Medicare. Senate Democrats include nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts to pay for the legislation. Sen. McCain …
Congress has increased its focus on the war in Afghanistan as the Obama Administration fine tunes its new counterinsurgency strategy. Yesterday, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he supported “a properly resourced, classically pursued counterinsurgency effort.” Mullen acknowledged that “a properly-resourced counterinsurgency probably needs more forces – and without question more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance.”
