Free Republic

‘A Probabilistic Undertaking’ Sarah Carlsruh, November 16, 2009 “We are now losing in Afghanistan. It is not a slow win. It is not a stalemate,” proclaimed Frederick Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) November 4th lecture on the “Afghanistan Strategy: The Way Forward.” Top Commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, requested in an August 31st report to President Barack Obama that 40,000 additional troops be sent to Afghanistan. A September 21st Washington Post article quotes Gen. McChrystal saying that “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks...

In a full page article about the falling value of the Dollar in Financial Times the article notes that Sarah Palin posted a comment on her Facebook page on the issue. The opening paragraphs of the article contained her quote: The falling US dollar is giving ammunition to the critics of the Obama administration and fuelling broader concerns about the potential erosion of America’s reserve currency status. Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power. Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential Republican candidate, on Wednesday sought to link the dollar decline to rising US indebtedness and...

College By...Subscription? by: Bethany Stotts, October 05, 2009 Is subscription-based online education a successful strategy for remedial education? Burck Smith, co-founder of SMARTHINKING argues in a September publication that “call center” style online courses would prove more affordable for both students and colleges. “According to one recent report, the cost of offering these courses exceeds $2 billion a year, of which approximately $800 million is borne by students and families in tuition and fees,” writes Burck for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Educational Outlook. He was referring to the 2008 Strong American Schools Diploma to Nowhere report, which was...

Over his decades as a columnist, lecturer, TV host and debater, William F. Buckley Jr. lost his cool in public only once--when he threatened to sock Gore Vidal "in your goddamn face" on the third night of their joint appearances on ABC during the ill-fated 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Three nights on a television set with Vidal might drive anyone mad, yet Buckley also tangled with the roughest players on the left, from Jesse Jackson to William Kunstler, with unfailing composure. But suppose that instead of his formal addresses and his weekly "Firing Line" show on PBS, Buckley...

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Sarah Palin begins to build her network of advisors Politico's Ben Smith reports: Randy Scheunemann, has emerged as an advisor to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as she attempts to build a serious public profile and begins to build a network of aides and advisors typical of a national politician. Scheunemann confirmed this evening that he's with Palin in Hong Kong, where she is delivering a paid speech at a conference hosted by the brokerage house CLSA, which has in the past heard keynotes from Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Rich Lowry recounts how the McCain...

Government Friends With Benefits by: Mytheos Holt, August 12, 2009 Last Thursday, August 6, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted a presentation by resident scholar Andrew Biggs on his paper entitled “The Case for Simplying Social Security Benefits.” Prominently featured by Biggs were the problems with estimating Social Security benefits due to the byzantine calculations involved. In discussing his political priorities, the former Social Security Administration official cited equity and predictability as the two relevant factors. “First, we want to make benefits more predictable, and secondly, we want to improve the social insurance value of the program,” he said. To...

It has been twelve years since a Republican won a statewide race in New Jersey — a longer run of GOP losses than in any other state. But recent polls show that Democratic dominance may be coming to an end in the Garden State. New Jersey’s incumbent governor, Jon Corzine, is trailing Republican challenger Chris Christie by double digits in recent polls. These polls are boosting the spirits of beleaguered Jersey Republicans, but only to a certain degree: The Garden State GOP has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory before. State senator Tom Kean Jr. led Robert Menendez early...

WASHINGTON: In sponsoring the recently enacted Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act (CARS), Betty Sutton, a Copley Township Democrat, had her biggest moment as a U.S. House memeber. Better known as ''cash for clunkers,'' this federal program provides vouchers of up to $4,500 to U.S. residents toward the purchase of new, more fuel-efficient vehicles when trading in a vehicle that gets no more than 18 miles per gallon. The trade-in vehicles can be any age, and while many of them still work perfectly well, they must be scrapped. The federal dollars are in addition to a dealer-designated scrap value...

Climate Change: Channeling King Canute, G-8 leaders agree to wreck the world's economy, and ours, by pledging to prevent temperatures from rising more than 4 degrees by 2050. What if the Earth has other plans?Canute was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. He was The One of his time. He once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. As the story goes, he was exercising his ego when in fact he was giving his followers a dose of reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. We were...

Following are excerpts of for mer Vice President Dick Cheney's address at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington yesterday. NOW and for years to come, a lot rides on our president's understand ing of the security policies that preceded him. Whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of this country, those choices shouldn't be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history. Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious...

Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration's measures to defend the United States after the 9/11 terror attacks. Cheney said they "did not invent powers," but used the authority authorized by the Constitution. Cheney condemned the New York Times for exposing the top secret terrorist surveillance program. "It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn't serve the interests of our country," Cheney said.

Slamming Obama, New York Slimes.

Former VP Cheney Counters Pres Obama on terrorism policy Audio.

Text Also at link. Hat tip Stephen C. Rose

Thank you all very much, and Arthur, thank you for that introduction. It's good to be back at AEI, where we have many friends. Lynne is one of your longtime scholars, and I'm looking forward to spending more time here myself as a returning trustee. What happened was, they were looking for a new member of the board of trustees, and they asked me to head up the search committee. I first came to AEI after serving at the Pentagon, and departed only after a very interesting job offer came along. I had no expectation of returning to public life,...

There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise--the principle at the core of American culture. Despite President Barack Obama's early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the "tea parties" that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop...

It is by now a cliché to say that the most important political event of the twentieth century has been the collapse of the Communist regimes and of the socialist idea on which they ultimately rested. True, there are still quite a few intellectuals who try desperately to distinguish one from the other, who insist that there is still some life left in the socialist idea, conceived of as a kind of immortal political soul that survives the corruption and decay of its worldly incarnations. But political ideas do not have any such Platonic or otherworldly status. They live and...

Newspaper headlines during the peak of the housing-credit crisis called it "the end of capitalism" or the end of American capitalism. As often, they greatly overstated and misstated by projecting a serious, temporary decline as a permanent loss of wealth. Capitalist systems have weathered many more serious problems. Capitalism as a guiding system for economic activity has spread over the centuries to now encompass most of the world's economies. This spread occurred despite almost continuous hostility from many intellectuals and, in recent decades, military threat from avowedly Communist countries.Capitalist systems are neither rigid nor identical. They differ, change, and adapt....

Funds worth trillions of dollars start to plummet in value. Political pressure to be “socially responsible” distorts the market decisions of government-related enterprises, leading to risky investments. Investors who once considered their retirements safely protectedwake up to a sinking feeling of uncertainty and gloom.Sound like the great mortgage-fueled financial crisis of 2008? Sure. But it also describes a calamity likely to hit as soon as 2009. State, local, and private pension plans covering millions of government employees and union workers with “defined benefit” accounts are teetering on the brink of implosion, victims of both a sinking stock market and investment...

US President George W. Bush spoke to the American Enterprise Institute, a Conservative think tank, at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in D.C. today and he also participated in a Q&A session. transcript Mrs. Laura Bush led a video teleconference with the Afghan Women Entrepreneurs group, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington.

Bush Shares Bittersweet Memories By DAVID STOUT WASHINGTON — President Bush shared some bittersweet reflections on Thursday as he looked back fondly on his White House days, but regretted his inability to win passage of immigration legislation and to change the tone of debate in the capital. “Reflections by a guy who’s headed out of town,” Mr. Bush called his musings in a question-answer session at the American Enterprise Institute. “An old sage at 62 ... headed to retirement.” The president, who has described himself as uncomfortable with introspection, loosened up considerably before a friendly audience. Better to have tried...

Always eager to shove their agenda into a seemingly unrelated policy discussion, the green movement has joined the debate over bailing out the Big Three automakers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to tie federal assistance to a requirement that Detroit make more fuel-efficient, eco-friendly cars. “Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol,” demands New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Writing in The Washington Post, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs calls...

Nine years ago today, in a quotation that appeared in an article in the New York Times, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Peter Wallison predicted the current financial crisis. From the article (emphasis added): " In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s. " “From the perspective of many people, including me,...

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders. The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring. Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest...

The Flash video is available at the web page.

Neoconservatives whose influence had been waning in Washington have hitched their colours to rising star Sarah Palin in a bid to shape US foreign policy for another decade. Comments by the governor of Alaska in her first television interview, in which she said Nato may have to go to war with Russia and took a tough line on Iran's nuclear programme, were the result of two weeks of briefings by neoconservatives. Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007....

"The American Enterprise Institute hosts a panel of scholars to discuss the recent military conflict between Russia and Georgia." Here is the URL for the video. It is a long video (1hr 40min) but an interesting panel discussion to watch. I have not found a transcript of it yet.

Almost anything can happen in an election year, but among conservatives, almost everyone seems to agree that no matter who captures the White House in November, the movement that has ruled the Republican Party since the 1960s and mostly dominated American politics since 1980 has lost its way. Across the spectrum of the right, writers and thinkers have turned their relentless analysis inward, a kind of political EST seminar aimed at self-transformation.

Iran May Miscalculate in Taunting US, Panelists Say at AEI Josiah Ryan/ Staff Writer Washington. (CNSNews.com) - There is a danger that Iran may miscalculate the likelihood of a U.S. response as it taunts U.S forces in the Persian Gulf, experts on the Middle East said Monday at a conference held by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C. Noting that Iran threatened the U.S. Navy in international waters earlier this year, and that it continues to provide weapons and fighters to U.S. enemies in Iraq, Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service compared the U.S. to a great...

AEI scholar Michael Rubin's very sober analysis of Iran April 16, 2008 HH: Joined now by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the country’s leading authorities on the Islamic Republic of Iran. Michael Rubin, last week, Vice President Cheney was on the program, and I talked to him about 12th Imamism, and about Ahmadinejad. And the left has gone crazy, and they’ve been throwing bricks at him, because he said we should take very seriously what Ahmadinejad says, and we should be concerned about sort of a millennialist outlook. And I’ve been waiting to talk to you...

The Basra Business   By Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan The Weekly Standard | Thursday, April 03, 2008 MUCH OF THE DISCUSSION about recent Iraqi operations against illegal Shia militias has focused on issues about which we do not yet know enough to make sound judgments, overlooking important conclusions that are already clear. Coming days and weeks will provide greater insight into whether Maliki or Sadr gained or lost from this undertaking; how well or badly the Iraqi Security Forces performed; and what kind of deal (if any) the Iraqi Government accepted in return for Sadr's order to...

JOHN Howard says he has left Australia with a stronger, less ambiguous sense of national pride than before the Coalition won government in 1996. "I think we were having a pointless debate about our identity in the early 1990s," the former prime minister said after a speech to Harvard University students yesterday. "I think we've shed that. We have now got a very positive view of Australian history and Australian achievement. I think our sense of national pride is stronger now than it was in the 1990s and less ambiguous. And that's tremendously important." Mr Howard, who in Washington last...

The Patton of Counterinsurgency With a sequence of brilliant offensives, Raymond Odierno adapted the Petraeus doctrine into a successful operational art. by Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan 03/10/2008, Volume 013, Issue 25 Great commanders often come in pairs: Eisenhower and Patton, Grant and Sherman, Napoleon and Davout, Marlborough and Eugene, Caesar and Labienus. Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno can now be added to the list. It's natural to assume that successful pairs of commanders complement each other's personalities (the diplomatic Eisenhower and the hard-charging Patton, for example) or that the junior partner is merely executing the vision...

A study by two conservative researchers attempting to determine why conservatives are underrepresented on college and university faculties. The conclusion is while some portion of this imbalance can be traced to "bias" and "discrimination", a large part results from a decision by students with conservative values not to pursue a career with limited economic potential that also requires sacrifice of family commitments to achieve academic advancement. "Since conservatives place an especially high priority on financial security and raising a family, the academy needs to make efforts to adopt more family-friendly policies... "As graduate school is not financially lucrative and pre-tenure...

I find few religious scenes more inspiring than a synagogue on a morning when we read one of the more grisly bits of scripture. Samuel 15:3, for example: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." I glance down--and there are the rabbinical footnotes in the text, explaining that the passage does not mean what it seems to mean. The reason Israel is to kill all the Amalekites, even the animals (which the Israelites might easily have...

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. is ending 2007 with a whine rather than a whimper. It is tough to keep track of what's collapsing faster, home prices or the dollar, and the financial market crisis caused by it has many seers talking recession as we enter 2008. As always, that delicious negativity receives the lion's share of media attention. But, in many ways, this past year was a pretty good one, and no, I am not just a talking about Boston's sports fans. Thus, to ring in the New Year, I present the Top 10 pieces of happy economic...

President Bush intends to name a well-known conservative commentator and journalist to lead the State Department's struggling efforts to improve the U.S.'s image abroad, replacing long-time confidante Karen Hughes, who is leaving government by the end of the year, The Associated Press has learned. Bush plans to tap James K. Glassman, now chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America, to be the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, administration officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not yet been made. The officials said the...

“MR. PRESIDENT, I rise today to address the record number of filibusters in the Senate,...” So might begin the transcript in the Congressional Record if a senator were to discuss what may well be the most pivotal issue in American public policy these days — the filibuster and its only antidote: a cloture vote that ends debate. --snip-- “This is a sharp increase in the use of a filibuster as a routine mechanism,” said Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan research group. “The Senate is set up culturally not to act on anything quickly. That’s a...

Start: Monday, November 26, 2007 8:30 AM End: Monday, November 26, 2007 2:00 PM Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 Directions to AEI The United States is likely to make some important decisions on climate change policy in the near future. At this conference, distinguished experts offer new approaches for thinking through the climate change problem. 8:30 a.m. Registration and Continental Breakfast 8:45 Welcome: Robert Hahn, Joint Center 9:00 Panel I: Defining Appropriate Policies Presenters: Joseph Aldy, Resources for the Future Scott Barrett, Johns Hopkins University Discussants: Al McGartland, Environmental Protection Agency...

LONG: These are excerpts By Gary J. Schmitt, Reuel Marc Gerecht Posted: Thursday, November 1, 2007 EUROPEAN OUTLOOK,AEI Online, November 1, 2007 (snip) Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelance but organized Islamic extremists. The attacks in 1985 and 1986 were probably Iranian-inspired, carried out as payback for France's military and financial support of Saddam Hussein. The attacks in the 1990s, however, in part an outgrowth of the Algerian civil war, clearly revealed to French security officials that...

Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer. WE MUST bomb Iran. It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere. First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian...

Start: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 10:00 AM End: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:00 PM Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 Directions to AEI In The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, Lee Harris delivers a daring argument about the inherent conflict between Western civilization and Islamic fanaticism. Radical Islam, he argues, is not a social pathology or “failure to modernize,” but rather a robust, internally consistent social order. It is resistant to conventional Western methods of conflict resolution such as negotiation, economic sanctions, and conventional armed confrontation. Indeed, the...

Senators Levin and Reid have introduced an amendment that would order the immediate withdrawal of American forces in Iraq--a stampede, in fact, that would require the military to pull 169,000 soldiers and their equipment out of active combat within nine months. There is no way that such a withdrawal would look like anything other than a rout and a humiliation for American arms. Such a proposal can only be supported on the premise that our efforts in Iraq to date have failed utterly and that there is no hope of protecting vital American interests in Iraq through the current strategy....

The Iranian Time Bomb - The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction By Michael A. Ledeen The first salvo was the attack on the American Embassy in Tehran in the fall of 1979, leading to the seizure of American hostages, a crisis that lasted 444 days. The war continued with the assassination of American diplomats and military personnel in Europe and North Africa. The latest fronts in that war are in Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. Iran arms, funds, trains, and directs a variety of terror groups, numbering tens of thousands of terrorists, regardless of their religious or ethnic makeup. It...

Coming to America By Ayaan Hirsi Ali Posted: Thursday, July 26, 2007 SPEECHES AEI World Forum (Beaver Creek, Colorado) Publication Date: July 23, 2007 Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali The movie Coming to America tells the story of Prince Akim from a beautiful, peaceful, exotic monarchy called Zamunda in Africa. The king of Zamunda holds a fabulous ceremony for his crown prince Akim (wonderfully played by Eddie Murphy) attended by all the king's men and all the king's horses. After a display of rigid protocol, preceded by a generous sprinkling of petals followed by a wild but well-choreographed dance, Akim...

When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders. A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a calamitous failure in Iraq, almost single handedly convinced the White House to change its strategy. They banded together at AEI headquarters in downtown Washington early last December and hammered out the surge plan during a weekend session. It called for two major initiatives to defeat the insurgency: reinforcing the...

I frequently meet people who claim to have no idea of the difference between traditional conservatism and so-called "neo" conservatism. The other day I came upon an amusing song parody by a right- wing Vietnam vet named George Gould that goes a long way toward explaining the difference. It's titled "The Neocon National Anthem" and it is set to the tune of the Vietnam War-era hit "The Ballad of the Green Berets." ''Laptop warriors from the sky, "Fearless men who send others to die ''Men whose every word's a lie ''The brave men of the AEI." The AEI is the...

A demographic spectre is haunting authoritative and influential circles in both the United States and the international community. This spectre is the supposed imperative to "stabilise human population." The quest to "stabilise human population" (or to "stabilise world population," or sometimes just "stabilise population") was formally launched on the global stage in 1994 by the United Nations at its Cairo Conference on Population and Development, whose "Programme of Action" intoned that "intensified efforts" to this end were "crucial" given the "contribution that early stabilisation of the world population would make towards the achievement of sustainable development." That objective is today...

Another Education Myth Collapses by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 07, 2007 Along with supposedly beneficial small class sizes, another constant refrain of American education officials is that there is a teacher shortage in the United States. “The data give a little support to this but there is no shortage of social studies teachers,” Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania said recently at the American Enterprise Institute. Moreover, “Half the schools don’t have shortages,” Dr. Ingersoll claims. He is a professor of education and sociology at Penn. The “shortages” are frequently cited as the reason why only a third of...

It is time for some strong medicine for American conservatives and it does not get any stronger than this: if Republicans are going to have any chance of victory in 2008, they need to learn a thing or two from the French. That's right. The French. For Republicans in Washington, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy is significant not because he is a conservative but because he was a part of a deeply unpopular incumbent government. For those who are willing to learn, Mr. Sarkozy's win shows that it is possible to produce a decisive national decision in favour of more...