The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

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 President Bush’s prudent actions and the military response which he led should continue as our answer to these attacks.

Congress overwhelmingly reaffirmed their commitment to military commissions in 2006, which have historically been the way that we respond to acts of war. To abandon our two centuries of tradition and to substitute some new civilian procedure as a response to such attacks endangers the security of our country and our national interest.

It was a tragic mistake to decide to abandon the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, which was designed physically and legally to handle these types of cases. It is a further tragic mistake to now bring the detained war combatants into the United States and to employ civilian criminal procedures which were never intended for this type of situation.

The U.S. Constitution protects American citizens and visitors from the moment they are suspected of criminal wrongdoing through a potential trial. These same protections are not, have never, and should not be granted to enemy combatants in war, since it is clear that regardless of the outcome of the trial, these detainees will likely remain in the custody of the United States.”

The latest proposal to pay for a government takeover of the health care system is to increase the Medicare tax for those that earn more than $250,000 a year. This latest proposed tax hike shows Congress is desperate to find more revenue to pay for its excessively expensive health care plan.

The current Medicare tax is 2.9 percent. Workers and employers pay 1.45 percent each. It is unclear at this point whether both workers and employers would pay a higher rate, or just workers. Unlike the Social Security tax, the Medicare tax is not capped, so every dollar of wages earned by workers is subject to the tax.

Taxpayers pay the Medicare tax during their working years and receive coverage for hospitalization during their retirement. It already takes in less revenue than necessary to pay for the hospitalization coverage of current retirees. Raising the tax and using the revenue to fund a new entitlement does nothing to fix this shortcoming.
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Today Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki publicly rejected the U.N.-backed proposal to send about 70 percent of Iran’s known supplies of enriched uranium out of the country. Mottaki suggested that instead Iran would exchange its low-enriched uranium for an equivalent amount of slightly higher enriched uranium, but only on its own territory. This clearly would be unacceptable since it would put Iran closer, rather than slightly farther away from, acquiring sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, if the uranium were to be further enriched.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner recognized this reality and said that he was disappointed that “There is a clear and negative response from the Iranians.” But there has been no public reaction from the Obama Administration yet. Although the talks have focused on a side issue of what to do about Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium, even if a temporary solution was found to address this issue, Tehran adamantly rejects any halt in its uranium enrichment efforts and continues to stonewall IAEA efforts to find out more about its suspect nuclear activities. Continue reading…

The Washington Post reports:

Women in their 40s should stop routinely having annual mammograms and older women should cut back to one scheduled exam every other year, an influential federal task force has concluded, challenging the use of one of the most common medical tests.
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“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does saves lives,” said Diana B. Petitti, vice chairman of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which released the recommendations Monday in a paper being published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening. There are important and serious negatives or harms that need to be considered carefully.”

It’s one thing to have a task force issue a recommendation that people and groups can adopt or not adopt (and there are strongly held views on both sides of the screening-at-40 issue), but quite another if some task force can just change what is or is not available in most plans – which is exactly what would happen if President Barack Obama’s Super MedPAC proposal became law. Heritage Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy Studies Stuart Butler explained this summer: Continue reading…

In an era when legislation routinely exceeds 1,000 pages, the bill introduced by Sen. John Thune yesterday — at seven lines — doesn’t look like much. But looks can be deceptive. If adopted, those seven lines would guarantee the end of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a critical first step toward putting federal finances, and the economy, back on the right track.

Under current law, TARP, which provided up to $700 billion to support troubled financial institutions, is scheduled to expire on December 31 of this year, but can be extended until October of next year if Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner call for an extension. Geithner hasn’t made any final decision yet, but all indications are that he will so request. The Thune bill, S. 2787, would take away this authority, ensuring that the program will end this year. Continue reading…

The AFL-CIO, in concert with some Congressional leaders, has proposed yet another tax hike to fund Washington’s ongoing explosion of spending. This latest collaboration between Big Labor and Big Government would be a 0.25 percent tax on all stock trades. Given the budding deficit pressures another tax hike proposal is hardly surprising, but, curiously enough, this new tax would target the pensions of the AFL-CIO’s own members.

Congressional leaders have decided to divide their attention for the rest of the year between a hostile (to patients) takeover of the health care system and feigning concern over rising unemployment. Their new focus on reversing job losses is a tacit admission that the stimulus plan passed in February has failed and that high unemployment rates are likely to persist well into 2011 and beyond.

But any potential job creation bills will likely cost billions of dollars. And Congressional leaders recognize the public is tired of over-spending and growing deficits. To pacify these concerns they plan to pay for their latest dubious effort to spur job creation with the new financial transactions tax.
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European leaders will meet for dinner tomorrow for a special summit to decide who will become the first permanent EU president and the new EU foreign minister. With the ink barely dry on the illegitimate Lisbon Treaty, EU elites are rushing with indecent haste to anoint the next leaders of Europe. And in typical EU fashion, negotiations over who will become the formal ‘faces of Europe’ will be conducted behind closed doors with zero public input.

Although there is a small chance that the 27 European heads of state and government won’t be able to reach agreement, the free-flowing wine and smoke-filled backrooms of Brussels will likely provide ample opportunity for a dodgy political deal to be struck between the left and right to divvy up the posts. And if any one nation becomes too obstructionist – such as Poland who has annoyed EU officials by calling for candidates to be interviewed – the appointments can be made by majority vote. The EU hasn’t let democracy get in the way of creating these unelected posts, so why bother with it now? Continue reading…

The New York Times reports today:

In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.

But last month Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.

“The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card,” Justin Francis, the managing director of Responsible Travel, one of the world’s largest green travel companies to embrace environmental sustainability, said in an interview. “It’s seductive to the consumer who says, ‘It’s $4 and I’m carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.’ ”

Unfortunately Washington DC is lagging far behind the private sector when it comes to acknowledging just how fraudulent carbon offsets are. The Waxman-Markey cap and trade Continue reading…

Dr. Jeffrey Flier writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I’d give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama’s agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial. Continue reading…

Yesterday at 3:00 p.m. ET, the Treasury Department updated its calculation of the U.S. National Debt to: $12,031,299,186,290.07. That $12 trillion record high comes just eight months after it hit $11 trillion and is only expected to rise faster considering the federal deficit for 2009 was over $1.4 trillion. And what is the leftist majority of Congress going to do tomorrow about these skyrocketing deficits? They are going to pile on the spending faster.

The issue at hand is the congressionally created formula for annually updating the payments doctors receive for treating Medicare patients. The centrally planned price fixing formula was designed to control health care costs by tying doctor payments to the overall growth rate of the economy. Problem is the realities of supply and demand in the health care sector have pushed doctor’s fees higher than the formula allows for. So instead of going back and fixing the formula (or heaven forbid introducing some market based reforms into Medicare), every year Congress passes short-term fixes rescinding the scheduled rate cuts. Continue reading…

How would private insurers fare when a government-run public option was playing against them? The non-partisan Center for Medicine in the Public Interest demonstrates that it wouldn’t be pretty. Watch:

Late for a party? Miss a meeting? Forget to pay your rent? Blame climate change; everyone else is doing it. From an increase in severe acne to all societal collapses since the beginning of time, just about everything gone wrong in the world today can be attributed to climate change. Here’s a list of 100 storylines blaming climate change as the problem. Continue reading…

It’s official: U.S. taxpayers did not get a good deal when they bailed out AIG last year. That was the conclusion of a report released yesterday by Neil Barofsky, the federal government’s special inspector general for TARP. The conclusion is no surprise: no one holds up the $170 billion bailout of the insurance giant as an example of government at its best. But, the Inspector General’s report puts new teeth on the charge, and pins much of the blame on Timothy Geithner, then president of the New York Fed.

The report’s key charge against Geithner is essentially that he was a bad negotiator. Here’s what happened: AIG had sold massive amounts of so-called “credit default swaps,” pledging to compensate purchasers in the event of losses due to defaults on debts by other instruments. As part of the effort to shore up AIG last fall, the New York Fed bought out many of the purchasers of these contracts. The general idea was to prevent massive losses that would destablize the entire economy.
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The government’s Web site that is supposed to tell taxpayers how their stimulus dollars are being spent, and which spends $84 million per year to do so, shows that $6.4 billion of the stimulus has been spent in 440 congressional districts that don’t exist, according to a report by the Franklin Center, as reported by Watchdog.org.

The site, Recovery.gov, reports, for instance, that North Dakota’s 99th Congressional District has received $2 million in stimulus funding. But North Dakota has only one congressional district. The nation’s capital now contains 35 congressional districts, according to Recovery.gov.

For those keeping score at home, there are really only 435 congressional districts, so adding 440 new ones effectively doubles the size of the House of Representatives. By the way, Recovery.gov also reports that the $6.4 billion spent in those districts has created 30,000 jobs, which works out to almost $225,000 per job created. Various news reports, however, show that many of the estimates of “jobs created or saved” are bogus, so that number, too is in doubt. (See the Washington Examiner’s map and chart tracking jobs created claims.) Continue reading…

The health care reform debate in the Senate may start this week – at least procedurally. Today or tomorrow, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is expected to move to proceed to either the House passed Pelosicare bill or another tax bill (either an AIG Bonus tax bill or the Uniform Services Tax Bill) in order to start the procedure for a full Senate debate on Obamacare. Although the procedural process will start this week, the full debate on Reid’s bill will not commence until after the Senate’s Thanksgiving Day recess.

Today or tomorrow, it is expected that Reid release both the text of his legislation and a score from the Congressional Budget Office finally to other Senators and the American public. Dan Perrin of the HSA Coalition has written about the Reid bill as a hidden “Vapor Bill” and calls it “all hat, no cattle.” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said over the weekend on Fox News Sunday that “we know it’s been in Harry Reid’s office for six weeks and the other 99 senators have not seen it.” The bottom line is that Senators will be voting to proceed to a bill on Friday that they have yet to see and will have little time to read before the first critical vote. Sadly, the secretive procedure used to roll out this legislation has severely restricted the rights of Americans to participate in this process.

As we reported last week, 2009 will mark the first time ever in American history that the majority of union members work for federal, state, or local governments. The percentage shift has been staggering. In 1973 only 17.3% of union members worked for government. Today that number is 51.2%.

When unions depended on steel plants, coal mines, and automobile factories for their livelihood there was at least a chance that they would support some pro-growth public policies. But now that unions are dependent on the government, and not the private sector, for their membership dues pro-growth policies are not a priority at all. Hence the Big Labor/enviro alliance behind carbon cap and trade tax programs.

Worse, unions now have every incentive to grow government at the expense of taxpayers and private sector jobs. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Steven Malanga explains: Continue reading…

A young, African American male would have had a better chance of survival descending from a landing barge in Italy during WWII than he does getting off a Greyhound bus in a major U.S. city today. This according to Bob Woodson, president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which has created Violence Free Zones that are having dramatic effect turning around some of the most dangerous cities across the country. These Violence Free Zones (VFZ) have changed the lives of children, many of whom were involved with gang activity, sold drugs, and pushed their education to the back-burner prior to encountering VFZ

Yesterday, in a summit on youth violence held in Washington, D.C., Woodson and his team of youth mentors explained what makes their approach so effective, and what differentiates them from other programs. The Center for Neighborhood Enterprise partners with community-based organizations - groups that are already well-established in a community and know the local players - and then provides those organizations with the information they need to stamp out the violence plaguing their neighborhoods. Woodson notes: Continue reading…

Today, the Senate may vote to limit debate on the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, a significant federal court which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and whose opinions are more often than not the final word in cases. By limiting debate, Senators will barely have time to scratch the surface of Hamilton’s record of radicalism before considering whether to confirm him for this important, lifetime position.

Judge Hamilton, currently a federal trial court judge in Indiana, has a long career of liberal political and judicial activism, though the media has touted him as a “moderate.” His political background involves fundraising for ACORN and serving as vice president for litigation and a board member for Indiana’s ACLU branch. His rulings as a district judge reveal an inability to part with the extreme political leanings that are characteristic of these two organizations.

For example, the very court to which Hamilton is nominated overturned a series of his rulings that blocked enforcement of an Indiana law requiring informed consent for abortions. The language in the 7th Circuit’s majority’s opinion laments Hamilton’s blithe disregard for the rule of law: “No court anywhere in the country (other than one district judge in Indiana) has held any similar law invalid in the years since Casey.” That “one district judge in Indiana” refers to Hamilton himself. Continue reading…

Forget everything bad you’ve ever heard about President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus. Combing through the data on the $18 million Recovery.gov website, you’ll find tons of Obama stimulus success stories from across the country. In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.

The it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-our-tax-dollars-at-stake punch line here is that none of the above Congressional Districts actually exist. Yet those jobs “created or saved” claims still sit on the Obama administration’s official “transparency and accountability” website Recovery.gov. As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso points out, it would have been nearly costless for the Recovery.gov site designers to limit the input fields so that non-existent Congressional Districts never made it into the public domain, but for whatever reason the Obama administration chose otherwise. Defending the fake data on his website, Recovery.gov Communications Director Ed Pound told ABC News: “We report what the recipients submit to us. Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on job numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.” Continue reading…

Last year, with Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm standing by his side, President-elect Barack Obama proclaimed the importance of rapidly passing a stimulus package, described his intense focus on job creation, and noted that a new president can have an “enormous impact” on the economy.

This week, The Detroit Free Press reported that Obama’s stimulus package has “created or retained virtually no jobs” in Michigan, despite $1.2 billion in federal spending and the administration’s report that it created or retained 22,500 jobs in the Great Lakes State.

One wonders whether Michigan’s governor would still stand by Obama’s side and how she would rate the success of the president’s “enormous impact,” given that her state is currently suffering from a 15.3 percent unemployment rate.

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