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Entries for 'Heritage Foundation'
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 |
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Myths and Facts about Obamacare
By Heritage Foundation @ 1:02 AM :: 7914 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Last week NBC News released a poll showing that while 36% of Americans believed President Barack Obama’s health care plan was a “good idea,” 42% of Americans believed it was a “bad idea.” NBC’s explanation for this inconvenient truth? “[M]isperceptions about the president’s plans for reform … that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue.” Specifically NBC found that 55% of Americans believed Obamacare “will give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants,” 54% believed it “will lead to a government takeover of the health care system,” 50% believed it “will use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions,” and 45% believed it “will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.”
The President has since copied NBC’s diagnosis, devoting his Saturday Weekly Address to debunking these “phony claims.” The problem for NBC News, and the White House, is that every one of these concerns has rock solid foundation in fact.
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Thursday, August 20, 2009 |
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Obamacare: “By Any Legislative Means Necessary”
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:16 PM :: 3196 Views
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The left in Congress is now considering abandoning moderates and independents to pass their narrow partisan ideal of health reform. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spokesman Jim Manley promised yesterday that Democrats will pass Obamacare “by any legislative means necessary.”
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009 |
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Six months of "stimulus": 2.8 million jobs lost
By Heritage Foundation @ 1:42 PM :: 6938 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Yesterday was the six month anniversary of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. Since the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” became law, the United States economy has shed nearly 2.8 million net jobs. When Obama signed the stimulus the nation’s unemployment rate stood at 7.6%. Today it is 9.4%. Nationwide, a total of fifteen states are now suffering from 10% unemployment. No wonder 57% of Americans recently told Gallup that the stimulus package is either having no impact on the economy or making it worse.
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Monday, August 10, 2009 |
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Obamacare: Dissent is not un-American
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:36 PM :: 5460 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Reviewing the month’s polling data, Gallup’s Frank Newport sums it up: “The bottom line is a sense that, while Americans apparently favor some type of healthcare reform in the long term, they are in no hurry to see healthcare reform legislation passed in the short-term on a rushed schedule. … A Pew Research poll released this week shows that those who are worried about new health care legislation are most likely to say it is because it involves too much spending and would increase the deficit.”
Wrapped in their liberal Washington cocoon, however, the leadership in Congress simply do not want to hear this message. Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) have chosen to pen an op-ed in today’s USA Today calling those who want Congress to hear their concerns about health care “simply un-American.”
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Friday, August 7, 2009 |
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Obama calls out union goons to townhall meetings: "Punch back twice as hard"
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:24 PM :: 11627 Views :: National News, Ethics
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"Presidential" leadership: In Tampa, Florida, protester Barry Osteen was pushed in the face by Democratic Club Treasurer Karen Miracle and union members allegedly assaulted another concerned citizen. Both of the events were organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Asked about the possibility of people concerned about Obama showing up at their event, in Tampa, SEIU spokeswoman Kim Diehl told the St. Petersburg Times: “We’re prepared. We have strategies to deal with it if it should come up.”
As this video plainly shows, one of those strategies is to lock out dissenters while letting in purple-shirted SEIU members. The desire to silence dissent on Obamacare goes all the to the top. At a Democratic rally in Virginia last night, the President told supporters: “I don’t want the folks who created the mess doing a lot of talking. I want them to just get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.”
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Wednesday, August 5, 2009 |
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Spreading “Disinformation” About Obamacare
By Heritage Foundation @ 3:25 PM :: 7464 Views :: National News, Ethics
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The White House wants people to believe they are losing the health care debate because “scary … videos are starting to percolate on the internet” that are spreading “disinformation” about Obama’s health care plan. The White House is even encouraging Obama supporters to help them identify people spreading this “disinformation.” The official White House blog now asks Americans: “If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”
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Monday, August 3, 2009 |
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The Obama Middle-Class Tax Hike is Coming
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:30 PM :: 6629 Views :: National News, Ethics
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President Obama is finding that keeping the promises made by candidate Obama is next to impossible. You just can’t borrow a trillion dollars for an economic stimulus, enact a new trillion dollar health care entitlement, and increase discretionary spending by 12% through 2019 (including doubling federal education spending) and then expect to pay for it all by taxing the most productive Americans. Eventually the moment would come when reality would catch up to candidate Obama’s promises. That moment is fast approaching. This weekend on the Sunday talk shows, both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers refused to rule out the possibility that President Obama will raise taxes on the middle-class....
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009 |
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Obama Deficit for 2009: $1.845 Trillion
By Heritage Foundation @ 4:02 PM :: 6956 Views :: National News, Ethics
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The federal government is estimated to run a 2009 budget deficit of $1.845 trillion. While it is true that President George W. Bush handed President Barack Obama a $1,186 billion deficit for the year, Obama has only added to that total to the tune of $659 billion. Worse, President Obama’s budget shows average deficits of $855 billion over the next decade which would double the publicly held national debt by 2019. And that does not even count Obama’s budget busting health care spending.
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Monday, July 27, 2009 |
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Obamacare "IMAC" to ration healthcare
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:23 PM :: 8649 Views :: National News, Ethics
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For the second time in less than two weeks, the independent and non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has dealt a crushing blow to President Barack Obama’s health care plans. First, on July 17th, CBO director Doug Elmendorf sent a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY), explaining that, in direct contradiction to President Obama’s promise that his health plan would not add “even one dime to our deficit over the next decade,” the House health plan would actually increase the budget deficit by $239 billion over ten years.
Reeling from this setback, the White House then put all of its cost-containing reform eggs in one basket: a massive transfer of power from Congress to the Executive branch in the form of an “Independent Medicare Advisory Council” (IMAC) that would be “the equivalent of a federal health board determining how health care was rationed for all seniors.”
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Friday, July 17, 2009 |
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Obamacare: House Dems question taxes and debt
By Heritage Foundation @ 1:20 PM :: 4971 Views :: National News, Ethics
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The independent verdict on Obamacare is in: Instead of saving the federal government from fiscal catastrophe, the health reform measures being drafted by congressional Democrats would worsen an already bleak budget outlook, increasing deficit projections and driving the nation more deeply into debt. This runaway spending, coupled with the Democrats plans to raise taxes, will kill our struggling economy and leave us with double digit unemployment for years to come.
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Friday, July 17, 2009 |
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Sotomayor refuses to defend liberal record
By Heritage Foundation @ 1:12 PM :: 4892 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Tough questioning by conservative senators afforded Sotomayor a rare opportunity to defend the principles of progressive/liberal jurisprudence. But Sotomayor declined to defend those principles at every turn. Instead, according to Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler, Sotomayor sounded “more like the sort of nominee we would have expected from a President McCain than a President Obama.”
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009 |
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The House’s $1.3 Trillion Health Care Train Wreck
By Heritage Foundation @ 9:39 AM :: 7768 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Yesterday House Democrats unveiled their much anticipated health care plan the same day that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary scoring of the bill putting a $1.3 trillion price tag on the effort. Weighing in at 1,018 pages, that comes to $1.264 billion per page. But even this analysis understates the true costs of the bill. The CBO only scores bills on a ten-year time frame, and House Democrats have designed their bill to obscure the catastrophic long-term fiscal path it places our country on.
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Friday, July 10, 2009 |
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The $1.5 Trillion Health Care Taxapalooza
By Heritage Foundation @ 2:01 PM :: 5128 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Just 15 days into office, President Obama signed a bill expanding Medicaid eligibility that was paid for with a 156% tax hike on tobacco. Since slightly more than half of today’s smokers (53%) earn less than $36,000 per year, Obama’s first effort at expanding government’s role in health care also became his first broken promise. But that first Medicaid expansion was minor league compared to the estimated $1.5 trillion health care plan Congress is considering now.
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Thursday, July 9, 2009 |
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EPA Admits Cap and Trade Will Fail
By Heritage Foundation @ 7:15 AM :: 7574 Views :: National News, Ethics
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The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee began their hearings on the 1,500 page Waxman-Markey cap and trade legislation Tuesday, and ranking member Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) won a startling admission from Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson. Inhofe produced an EPA chart generated last year during the Senate’s debate of the Lieberman-Warner cap and trade legislation. The chart showed that the carbon reductions under that bill would not materially effect global carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. Inhofe then asked Jackson if she agreed with the chart’s conclusions. Jackson replied: “I believe that essential parts of the chart are that the U.S. action alone will not impact CO2 levels.”
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Wednesday, July 8, 2009 |
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Democrats begin Trillion-dollar push for second "stimulus"
By Heritage Foundation @ 8:58 AM :: 5096 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Celebrating his first 100 days in office, President Barack Obama told the American people: “One hundred days ago, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in half a century, we passed the most sweeping economic recovery act in history…One hundred days later, we are already seeing results.”
And he’s right, we are. Unemployment has risen to 9.5%, stocks fell to their lowest level in 10 weeks on Tuesday, and consumer credit delinquencies have hit a record high.
Responding to the obvious failure of the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package, some liberals in the House and Senate are calling for a second (really the third when you count President Bush’s 2008 effort) stimulus. How big of a second stimulus? Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker told Politico: “To my mind it’s pretty obvious we need another stimulus package, probably a lot bigger than the last one.”
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Tuesday, July 7, 2009 |
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Job Killer: Obama’s new Health Care Tax
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:15 PM :: 6000 Views :: National News, Ethics
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This past Friday the CBO released a fuller scoring of HELP’s legislation, and indeed, the overall impact on our nation’s debt is lower: a mere $597 billion would be added to federal budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period.
How did HELP lower the bill’s budget busting total? Did they “bend the curve” on health care costs? Did they weed out administrative costs? Eliminate waste? Nope. The Washington Post reports:
Committee staffers reworked the bill — and added a new provision requiring most employers to contribute to the cost of health insurance — to arrive at the lower estimate. Under the new proposal, any business with more than 25 workers would be required to offer coverage or pay a $750 penalty per employee.
In other words, the HELP committee wants to pay for their health care plan in classic “tax-and-spend” liberal fashion: by instituting a crippling new tax on our nation’s businesses. And not just any new tax. A tax directed like a heat seeking missile at job creation: an employer mandate.
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Monday, June 22, 2009 |
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CBO busts Obama's socialized healthcare plan
By Heritage Foundation @ 7:55 AM :: 8302 Views :: National News, Ethics
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A NYT poll, which predominantly questioned Obama voters, showed only 43% of Americans would be willing to pay $500 a year more in taxes to pay for universal coverage. And the NYT did not ask how many Americans would be willing to give up their current health plan (77% of Americans are satisfied with their current plan) in exchange for a government-run option.
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Friday, June 19, 2009 |
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EPA targets Waikiki? Large hotels, hospitals to fall under EPA carbon rules
By Heritage Foundation @ 7:38 AM :: 13174 Views :: Maui County, Education K-12, Energy, Environment, National News, Ethics
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According to the US Chamber of Commerce, regulating carbon through the Clean Air Act would expose at least one million mid-sized commercial buildings to draconian environmental regulations. One-fifth of all food service businesses, one-third of all health care businesses, one-half of the entire lodging industry, and even 10% of all buildings used for worship would be under the EPA’s hammer.
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009 |
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$9.4 trillion question: What is the Bigger Threat? Global Warming or Global Warming Legislation
By Heritage Foundation @ 5:15 AM :: 6560 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Yesterday the White House release a report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, finding that “Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.” Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told The Hill, “The findings released today add urgency to the growing momentum in Congress for legislation that cuts global warming pollution.” Do they really? Is there any evidence in the report that global warming legislation will prevent any of the changes the report identifies? Is there any evidence in the report that the costs of global warming legislation will be offset by its benefits? No and no.
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Monday, June 15, 2009 |
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Sham Elections Expose Obama’s Iran Policy
By Heritage Foundation @ 6:04 AM :: 8735 Views :: National News, Ethics, World News, Family
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On the eve of Friday’s election in Iran, President Barack Obama told reporters: “We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran. Whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact there has been a robust debate hopefully will advance our ability to engage them in new ways.” But almost immediately after the polls closed, election authorities miraculously claimed to have counted millions of paper ballots and named the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner.
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Friday, June 12, 2009 |
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Obama Rhetoric vs Health Care Reality
By Heritage Foundation @ 9:35 AM :: 5717 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Campaigning for his health care plan yesterday, President Barack Obama told a Green Bay, Wisconsin audience: “Right now a number of my Republican friends have said, ‘We can’t support anything with a public option.’ It’s not clear that it’s based on any evidence as much as it is their thinking, their fear, that somehow once you have a public plan that government will take over the entire health care system.” In fact, the opposite is true. It is President Obama who is operating on rhetoric without any evidence to back up his claims.
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009 |
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The Obama PAYGO Farce
By Heritage Foundation @ 3:48 PM :: 6115 Views :: National News, Ethics
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The world's biggest borrow-and-spender swears off financial irresponsibility (again) ...
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009 |
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The Obama Jobs Gap
By Heritage Foundation @ 7:04 AM :: 8176 Views :: National News, Ethics, World News, Family
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Even Democrats are beginning to question the integrity of the Obama administration’s economic claims. Grilling Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) said:
You created a situation where you cannot be wrong. If the economy loses 2 million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would’ve lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You’ve given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct.
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Monday, June 8, 2009 |
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Stop the Health Care Bailout Before it Starts
By Heritage Foundation @ 7:24 AM :: 6049 Views :: National News, Ethics
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The last time Congress debated fundamental health care reform, America’s health insurance industry fought against more government control of your health care, most famously with the “Harry and Louise” ad depicting a typical middle class family in despair. This time around, however, the health insurance industry is supporting more government control of your health care. Why? Because key reformers are offering to use government coercion to force fifty million Americans to become new health insurance customers. What industry wouldn’t want the government to create 50 million new customers overnight?
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Friday, June 5, 2009 |
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Leadership Lacking in Cairo
By Heritage Foundation @ 6:48 AM :: 8447 Views :: National News, Ethics, World News, Family
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A ritual exercise in self-loathing that has become a hallmark of the Obama administration....
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Thursday, June 4, 2009 |
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Remembering Tiananmen
By Heritage Foundation @ 3:46 PM :: 8424 Views :: National News, Ethics, World News, Family
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In the spring of 1989, millions of Chinese peacefully seized control of their own capital and demanded democracy. After then-Premier Li Peng declared martial law on May 19th, the people of Beijing, not just students, responded by setting up bus and truck barricades to protect the demonstrators’ command post in Tiananmen Square. But on the morning of June 4th, 20 years ago today, China’s rulers sent in tanks and soldiers to regain control. The Chinese government claims only 241 people died that day, but the Chinese Red Cross puts the number at 2,600.
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Wednesday, June 3, 2009 |
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President Obama’s Top Ten Apologies
By Heritage Foundation @ 5:47 AM :: 9341 Views :: National News, Ethics, World News, Family
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Tomorrow at 6:10 AM EST, (12:10AM HST) President Barack Obama will deliver a keynote address at Cairo University. If past experience is any guide, he will continue apologizing for America’s “mistakes” and bend over backward trying to explain that the United States is not a threat to Islam. The President has already apologized for his country to nearly 3 billion people across Europe, the Muslim world and the Americas.
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Friday, May 29, 2009 |
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Federal Obligations now equal $546,668 per household
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:21 PM :: 3881 Views
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According to an analysis by USA Today, American taxpayers “are on the hook for an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year for retirement benefits, the national debt and other government promises.” Federal obligations now stand at a record $546,668 per household, quadruple what the average U.S. household owes for all mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt combined.
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Thursday, May 28, 2009 |
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The Largest Expansion of Government Ever
By Heritage Foundation @ 10:04 AM :: 5716 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Speaking to a celebrity studded fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Beverly Hills last night, President Barack Obama humbly proclaimed he “would put these first four months up against any prior administration since FDR.”....
Near the end of his Beverly Hills remarks to the Hollywood elite, Obama promised, “Los Angeles, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Unfortunately President Obama may be right again. His upcoming agenda includes a trillion dollar energy tax, the stealth nationalization of the health care industry, and an economy killing rewrite of our nation’s labor laws.
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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 |
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The Story of Lies: Greenpeace in Your Kid’s School
By Heritage Foundation @ 10:46 AM :: 6703 Views :: Energy, National News
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The Story of Stuff highlights the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America. Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it. For example: after implying that the radios for sale in Radio Shack are assembled by 15 year olds in Mexico, and by purchasing one, you contribute to the exploitation of the third world and the eventual end of the Earth....
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Thursday, April 30, 2009 |
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Obama's 100 days: The question that didn't get asked
By Heritage Foundation @ 11:29 AM :: 5091 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Yesterday before President Barack Obama’s 100 days news conference, the Commerce Department released data showing that the U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of 6.1% in the January-March quarter. This comes on top of a report from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released earlier this month showing that the U.S. has lost more than 1.2 million jobs since President Barack Obama was sworn into office. Yet despite all this bad economic news Obama claimed that his stimulus $787 billion deficit spending stimulus package “has already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.”
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009 |
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GM Nationalized: Washington Occupies Detroit
By Heritage Foundation @ 8:27 AM :: 5506 Views :: National News, Ethics
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Under the latest reorganization plan released by General Motors, Uncle Sam would take ownership of 50 percent of the challenged automaker in return for forgiveness of $10 billion of debt now owed to the Treasury. The deal would give Washington controlling ownership of a major industrial corporation for the first time since Conrail was sold in 1986.
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Thursday, March 19, 2009 |
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False Numbers: ACORN Gets Plum Census Assignment
By Heritage Foundation @ 1:14 PM :: 6266 Views :: National News, Ethics
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ACORN, which claims to be a non-partisan grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people, came under fire in 2007 when Washington State filed felony charges against several paid ACORN employees and supervisors for more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In March 2008, an ACORN worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for making 29 phony voter registration forms. The group's activities were frequently questioned in the 2008 presidential election.
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Thursday, March 5, 2009 |
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N Korean missile could reach Hawaii, Alaska
By Heritage Foundation @ 2:31 PM :: 10938 Views :: Energy, National News, Ethics, World News
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The range of North Korean ballistic missiles has increased five-fold since 1990. The two-stage Taepodong-2 missile, if successfully developed, could travel thousands of miles to strike Alaska, Hawaii and "parts of the continental United States," intelligence experts estimate. By testing and perfecting a third stage, the North Koreans could reach anywhere in North America with a nuclear warhead.
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009 |
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Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending
By Heritage Foundation @ 12:58 PM :: 4483 Views
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Since its enactment in the mid-1990s, welfare reform has proven to be a very successful policy that dramatically reduced welfare dependency and child poverty. The fact that the stimulus proponents seek to conceal the bill's massive permanent changes in welfare is a clear indication that they understand how unpopular these changes would be if the public became aware of them. Far from an exercise in "unprecedented transparency"--as President Obama claims--the stimulus bills are an example of unprecedented deception.
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