Free Republic

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

Since December 2007 when the Great Recession started, Texas civilian employment has increased by 12% and by more than 1.32 million jobs, from just over 11 million jobs in December 2007 to 12.32 million in September of this year (see blue line in chart). In contrast, civilian employment in the other 49 states without Texas is still 0.73% and almost one million jobs below the December 2007 level (see red line in chart) – 134.27 million non-Texas jobs in September vs. 135.26 million in December 2007. It’s also important to note that while job growth in Texas slowed considerably in...

“What do you call Democrats with kids?” goes a joke of fairly recent vintage. “Republicans,” is the punch line. Former CNN reporter Campbell Brown may not have reached that point yet but she has become skeptical of some time-worn shibboleths of public school teachers’s unions. “I talked to one prinicipal who has been trying to get rid of an incompetent teacher for seven years,” Brown said in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on October 2, 2014. In her experiences with the New York City public schools, Brown discovered that three key obstacles to reform can be found in...

Here’s a recap and update of the nearly three-year quest for truth and justice at the Department of Justice: 1. In a speech on August 3, 2009 in Long Beach, CA at a conference sponsored by The University of Minnesota’s Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, Attorney General Eric Holder made the following claim: “Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45. These statistics are shocking and completely unacceptable.” 2. In a subsequent speech on October 19, 2009 at a Domestic Violence Awareness Month Event in Washington, D.C., Holder...

Think Republicans have been making fools of themselves? Blame Michael Needham. Link only to a very interesting article. Consider the source.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray suggested on Friday that former Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard included evidence that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites, had been railroaded and forced to resign by people without integrity or “balls.” Quote: Jason Richwine, guilty of crimethink, "resigns." The bashing from the right has been as mindless as from the left. Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.DeMuth was the president of AEI from 1986 to 2008. The Bell...

Proponents of President Obama’s universal prekindergarten proposal make a strong case for the potential benefits of such a plan. Studies of about 100 low-income kids enrolled in two pricey and intensive preschool projects in the 1960s and 1970s found the children, while not experiencing any permanen IQ improvement, developed life skills that meant they were more likely as adults to hold a job, own a home, and stay out of jail than counterparts in a control group. More recently studies of broader, statewide pre-K programs, particularly in Oklahoma provide some further evidence of effectiveness, though the results are certainly not...

Please tell me if anyone has heard of this "junior classic" “Last spring, my 2nd-grade daughter came home with an extra assignment—a worksheet she hadn’t completed in class for a story called The Selkie Girl,” Jennifer Holladay writes in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of Rethinking Schools.” She brought the book home, too, and it was one I’d never seen before, a Junior Great Books anthology (Series 3, Book 1), published by the nonprofit Great Books Foundation.” “As we settled in, I asked my daughter to tell me about The Selkie Girl. Her rendition gave me pause, so I asked her...

In last night’s vice presidential debate, Vice President Biden said (as best we can decipher) that AEI research supports the assertion that Governor Romney’s tax plan would hike taxes on the middle class. First, we would note that AEI does not take institutional positions on any policy matters and that the views we have expressed are only our own. More importantly, Vice President Biden’s assertion is completely incorrect. In fact, we have demonstrated that Governor Romney’s plan can accomplish his stated goal of providing 20% statutory rate reductions for ordinary income while maintaining distributional and revenue neutrality. In plain English,...

Conservative foreign policy hawks, outraged at the media’s circle-the-wagons reaction to the attacks on two embassies, are speaking out in defense of Mitt Romney. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells Right Turn:”The perception of American weakness that provided the foundation for these attacks is largely because of Obama administration mistakes and lack of resolve. A repetition of 1979 in Tehran is not far fetched, especially given the weakness of Obama’s statement this morning.” He dismisses the media storyline as pure boosterism: “The press criticism of Romney’s statement is so clearly at the administration’s behest that they...

Today, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a prominent conservative think tank, hosted a secret, four-and-a-half hour meeting of pols, wonks, and activists, including several self-identified ’progressives,’ to develop a PR/legislative strategy to promote and enact a carbon tax. This was the fifth such meeting to advance the ”Price Carbon Campaign/Lame Duck Initiative: A Carbon Pollution Tax in Fiscal and Tax Reform.” An annoted copy of the meeting agenda appears at the bottom of this post.

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

The 2012 election year has just begun, and already controversies have swirled around a number of President Obama’s actions. Constitutional issues are at the forefront as the president seeks to improve his chances of reelection by delivering on his promises. But is the president violating the Constitution as he tries to implement his program of transformation? Constitutional attorney David Rivkin believes he is. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington D.C. will be facilitating a discussion on one of the recent controversies, President Obama’s “recess appointments.” On January 4, 2012, President Obama made the following appointments: Richard Cordray as Director...

This time on Banter, Apoorva and Stu sit down with AEI Resident Scholar Andrew Biggs to chat about Paul Ryan’s new budget plan, entitlement reform, and a special piece of fan mail for Andrew.

On this special edition of Banter, Stu and Apoorva are joined by AEI Vice President of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, Danielle Pletka (on Twitter @dpletka). They discuss the ongoing situation in Libya and President Obama’s speech about the operation.

Conservative Republicans are rightfully giddy about the results of the midterm elections. The enormous Republican wave washed away hundreds of Democrats at all levels of government, giving Republicans their highest number of seats in the House of Representatives since 1946, and their largest number of state legislators since 1928. More important, the currents that caused the wave clearly work to Republicans' benefit: Voters were expressing widespread opposition to the liberal direction in which President Obama and the Democratic Congress have taken the country. This has led many conservatives to argue that, on November 2, 2010, America returned to its normal...

http://interactive.foxnews.com/livestream/live.html?chanId=6

It's called "Left, Right and Center," which claims to be a "civilized yet provocative antidote to the screaming talking heads that dominate political debate." But there's not a whole lot of truth in advertising for KCRW Santa Monica's radio program, which is also podcasted on the Internet. The show normally features Robert Scheer, editor of the left-wing investigative Web site Truthdig.com and a former Los Angeles Times columnist, representing the left. Matt Miller, a former Clintonista and senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress represents the so-called center. And former Washington Times editorial page editor and visiting senior...

America faces a new culture war. This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise... --snip-- To win, the 70 percent majority must come together around core principles: that the purpose of free enterprise is human flourishing, not materialism; that we stand for equality of opportunity, not equality of income; that we seek to stimulate...

Transfer Tax? Bethany Stotts, May 21, 2010 Alleging waste and a “transfer tax” in higher education, Peter P. Smith argues in the most recent Education Outlook that America should establish a “National, ‘Student-Facing’ Course Database and Transfer Information System” for postsecondary transfer students, and “Automate” the “Processing and Evaluation of Transfer Credits” in order to decrease the number of students who get sidetracked from graduating. In addition to these two reforms, Smith also suggests that higher education should “Create agreements among Colleges that Streamline the Transfer Process,” “Improve the Management and Quality of Postsecondary Data for the Administration of Credit...