Free Republic

It’s not exactly “Man Bites Dog,” but “Congress Gets Defense Spending Right” is almost as surprising a headline. For too long now, we’ve been cutting corners when it comes to the military. Years of underfunding have given us a weakened force that, despite the hard work of our brave troops, is ill-equipped to handle the missions we keep throwing at it. Think the recent spate of ship collisions is a coincidence? Hardly. They’re a red flag -- a warning sign we ignore at our peril. That’s what happens when you shortchange our armed forces and fail to ensure that they...

“It is an outrage.” The source of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s anger? The fact that the United States has yet to approve a treaty known as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. Panetta was speaking after the election. His ire about LOST’s status suggests that the Obama administration may well make this a second-term priority. It’s come close to being ratified by the U.S. Senate before -- it dates back to 1982, in fact. But LOST has never been able to gain enough supporters in the Senate. That could change,...

South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint will replace Ed Feulner as president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. DeMint will leave his post as South Carolina's junior senator in early January to take control of the Washington think tank, which has an annual budget of about $80 million. Sen. DeMint's departure means that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, will name a successor, who will have to run in a special election in 2014. In that year, both Mr. DeMint's replacement and Sen. Lindsey Graham will be running for reelection in South Carolina.

President Obama this morning cited The Heritage Foundation’s research in an attempt to sell his health care package as a “middle of the road, centrist approach.” We take great exception to this misuse of our work and abuse of our name. This is but the latest act in a campaign to sell this big-government program as a moderate law that incorporates conservative ideas. Americans should not be fooled. Let’s be very clear: We oppose this new law because it is a radical new intrusion into the daily lives of all Americans and a massive takeover of one-sixth of the...

Unveiling his latest budget proposal, President Barack Obama announced: “The bottom line is this: We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences; as if waste doesn’t matter; as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money; as if we can ignore this challenge for another generation.” Unfortunately, few in Washington are listening -- including the president himself. His budget would boost spending to $3.8 trillion in the next fiscal year. It would generate a $1.5 trillion deficit for next year alone, on top of the trillions American taxpayers already...

Guest post from Edwin J. Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation The President of the United States tomorrow will inform the Congress on the State of our Union, as he is constitutionally mandated to do. The past 12 months have seen our country head down a dangerous course, and The Heritage Foundation can only hope that the President will use this time of reflection, coming on the heels of a stunning electoral loss, to change direction. You must recognize, Mr. President, that the State of the Union is not good. You need a new approach and fresh domestic and foreign...

You may want to think twice before taking your next deep breath. Every time you exhale, you’re supposedly endangering the planet -- by contributing to global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency says global warming poses a “serious threat to public health and safety.” That sets the stage for the EPA to regulate, through the Clean Air Act, almost anything that emits carbon dioxide. CO2, of course, is a naturally-occurring gas. It’s produced whenever a person breathes and, yes, whenever we use any sort of fossil fuel. Driving a car, mowing a lawn, boiling a cup of water, even flipping on...

“Too many cooks spoil the broth.” That’s common wisdom. So, will too many czars spoil the administration? President Barack Obama recently introduced Kenneth Feinberg as America’s “compensation czar.” He’ll oversee executive pay at firms that have taken federal bailout money. Feinberg “will have broad discretion to set the salaries and bonuses for their five most senior executives and their 20 most highly paid employees,” The New York Times reported. Timothy Geithner explained why the administration wants a compensation czar: “This financial crisis had many significant causes, but executive compensation practices were a contributing factor,” the Treasury secretary announced. “Incentives for...

Chris Wallace interviews. For some reason the video has about 5 seconds of blackspace right at the beginning.

Conservatism’s Obituary Premature by: Jesse Masai, December 04, 2008 The jury is in: the conservative cause may well have taken a beating at the polls last month, but it certainly is not and cannot be dead. “Conservatism is a body of ideas. The Grand Old Party is a political outfit. The GOP is not always conservative,” Heritage Foundation’s president Edwin Feulner said during a recent bloggers briefing at the think-tank. Feulner argued that the movement must get its principles right once again, generate new ideas and market them smartly. “We must not forget that ideas are important. Our friends at...

Every president, every senator, every member of Congress and every Supreme Court justice takes an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. The way some of them behave, though, you have to wonder if they’ve ever read it. The Constitution is clear and understandable. It gives Congress, the legislative branch, the responsibility of passing our laws. It gives the president, head of the executive branch, the responsibility of enforcing those laws. And it gives the courts, headed by the Supreme Court, the responsibility of interpreting them. Yet in recent years, leaders of all three branches have expressed confusing...

The fifth anniversary is traditionally the “wood” one. But this year, instead of getting another knick-knack, millions of Americans are celebrating a fifth anniversary with paper. Paper money, that is -- and more of it.         That’s because our country just marked the fifth year of the 2003 tax cuts.        Five years ago, Congress and the president agreed to accelerate the key provisions of the 2001 tax act that: Doubled the child tax credit to $1,000 per child. Fixed the “marriage penalty” -- that quirk of the tax code that forced couples filing jointly to pay more that singles filing...

This year a Democratic majority took power on Capitol Hill. But new leadership has done nothing to address an old problem: Lawmakers racing to pass bills they haven't actually read. Recall the Senate's ill-fated immigration reform bill last spring. Senators didn't bother to hold committee hearings on the measure. Had they done so, they'd have realized it would have granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation did read the bill, and calculated it would cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion. That bill died without a vote, because the more that senators learned about it, the less...

Ahmadinejad's simply stalling for time so Iran can finish building its nuclear weapons program. Frighteningly, they're quickly closing in on their goal, and the international community isn't doing much to interfere. In March the U.N. Security Council urged Iran to suspend its uranium-enrichment activities and fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the IAEA admitted on April 28 that Iran has ignored that warning. In fact, the Iranian government has repeatedly violated the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and has made clear that it intends to keep on doing so until it has the bomb. When faced with the...

In the long run, the battle to make America safer is part of a larger cause—the battle to make the free world safer and, indeed, to make the whole world freer. Victory will come only if representative government prevails, because freedom is the one force strong enough to stop tyranny and terror. In our modern day and age, America appears to have forgotten the guiding principles that have led her thus far. Getting America Right offers not a revolutionary, novel solution, but an answer that is as old as America herself—a conservative one...

Anyone who's ever filed a tax return or visited the Department of Motor Vehicles understands that government does two things well: spend our money and waste our time. Unfortunately, both traits were on display during the response to Hurricane Katrina. A House select committee headed by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., says the government displayed "fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis." The committee report lays out 90 flaws in the Katrina response and notes that all levels of government failed. Oh, plenty of money was going out. Last September, the federal government was spending about $1 billion per day -- and...

A Blueprint for Success By Ed Feulner CNSNews.com Commentary October 10, 2005 If there's one thing Washington, D.C., is famous for, it's words. Here, we boast the greatest speech-per-capita ratio in the country, if not the world. But occasionally, a speech stands out and stands the test of time. That's not necessarily because of the speaker's eloquence or verbosity. George Washington never publicly read aloud his Farewell Address, and Abraham Lincoln finished his 272-word Gettysburg Address so quickly the photographer didn't even have a chance to take his picture. No, great speeches provide listeners with a compass they can use...

In real life, money follows results. When an inventor creates a useful product, investors find him, market the product and sell it. There's no need for the federal government to get involved. In fact, federal involvement usually means an approach has failed. Farmers demand subsidies, for example, when they can no longer profitably sell their crops. And some manufacturers, faced with less expensive products from overseas, demand protective tariffs. This principle helps illuminate the ongoing debate over federal funding for embryonic stem cells to treat and cure disease. Researchers would harvest these cells from human embryos for medical treatment, destroying...

Some lawmakers may not realize it, but there's a fine line between raising legitimate objections and simply obstructing business. In the Senate, a minority of senators is using the filibuster as a tool to prevent a vote on judicial nominees they dislike. We'll learn soon if the Senate's rules really allow that. Some obstructionists now claim that they do, even though they strongly disputed that notion just a few years ago. It's worth wondering why they're flip-flopping. Perhaps it's because the abuse of those rules may be the only way to keep activist judges in control of the nation's most...

Imagine you're running a company. You've been providing prescription drug coverage to your retired employees for years. But now the government is willing to do so. Do you continue providing benefits, or save yourself money and responsibility by letting Uncle Sam provide those benefits? This question won't be merely hypothetical for long. Starting next January, the federal government will add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. All seniors, regardless of income or need, will be eligible. And with the government willing to pick up the tab, many companies currently offering retiree drug benefits will drop them or scale them back....