This Friday, the tax payer funded Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) is hosting a briefing for Members of Congress and their staff on their new study: Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century. The CMF study consisted of 21 townhall meetings where Members of Congress and CMF provided a moderator: “spoke via voice over IP, and constituents asked questions and made comments by typing them. Only off-topic, redundant, unintelligible, or offensive questions were screened, and only questions asked by people who had not yet asked a question were …
President Obama gave a nice, thematic speech Wednesday night. But that was the speech he should have given in April or May at the latest. It is now September and four congressional committees have already completed their work. The President said there is agreement on “about 80 percent of what needs to be done …”. That is probably not true because about 80 percent of what is in the current legislation is not needed in order to achieve the three basic goals outlined in the speech. The speech is a …
Fact checking President Barack Obama’s health care speech from last night, the Associated Press reports: “The president’s speech to Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.” That is an understatement. We counted no less than 10 spurious claims made by the President, including: 1. OBAMA: “There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.” THE FACTS: On August 8th, President Obama said: “Reform is obviously essential for the 46 million Americans who don’t have …
In a first of its kind, a report from The Heritage Foundation provides a fresh look at the billions of dollars in homeland security grants handed out to state and local governments. The report details the federal, state, and local spending from 2000 to 2007 in 26 states, the District of Columbia, and 85 cities and counties that make up Urban Areas Security Initiative jurisdictions. Among the key findings:–States and localities spend a lot more every year then the federal government. The billions of federal dollars distributed have had a …
