Some of the day’s best reads:
For the past year, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been the Obama administration’s equivalent of the Maytag repairman—a capable official with nothing to do. That is about to change.
As part of a broader push for job creation, the president yesterday unveiled an ambitious strategy for doubling U.S. exports over the next five years. Key elements include $2 billion more in export financing, an easing of export technology controls and a new Cabinet office to promote sales of U.S. products abroad. Obama also picked W. James McNerney, CEO of Boeing—one of America’s export champions—to chair the President’s Export Council.
President Obama gave away his $1.4million Nobel Peace Prize award yesterday, and where national security is concerned, he literally put his money where his mouth is.
The largest donation – $250,000 – was given to Fisher House, an organization that builds “comfort homes” on the grounds of major US military installations that allow service members’ families “to be close to a loved one at the most stressful times—during the hospitalization for an unexpected illness, disease, or injury.” It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that President Obama would choose a charity like Fisher House, given the First Lady’s focus on the cause since the beginning of her husband’s presidency. And with America’s military facing unprecedented strains, every drop in the bucket helps.
Today’s big whoop in the manic conservative drive to kill health care reform is a Washington Post op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen urging Democrats to abandon reform and work with Republicans on “bipartisan” proposals like “purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage,” and so on and so forth.
Join the Progressive Policy Institute and Americans for Campaign Reform for a special presentation featuring Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — Wednesday, March 17 from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Space is extremely limited. RSVP required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and not guaranteed. RSVP to attend the event
Some of the day’s best reads:
If you supported the Obama administration on this one, it couldn’t have turned out any better.
Back in September, the White House decided to swap missile defense programs. Out was a ground-based system in Eastern Europe that depended on a stationary missile battery and radar station in Poland and the Czech Republic, respectively. It was geared towards a long-range ballistic missile threat, and was over cost, over schedule, and under-performing to boot.
Conservatives howled that the White House was “abandoning its Eastern European allies” to a salivating Russia. Or was it a salivating Iran? Either way, conservatives were all worked up in a tizzy that, despite our mutual-defense pact with Poland and the Czech Republic, surely we were doing irreparable damage to the NATO alliance.
When we last checked in on the Texas textbook wars, the craziest advocate on the state School Board for rewriting American history was a dentist named Don McLeroy, who had become so embarassing that he faced a Republican primary challenge from a more conventional conservative. The good news is that McLeroy lost, albeit very narrowly. The bad news is that he remains on the Board for ten more months, and as James McKinley explains in the New York Times today, McLemore and the conservative bloc he leads on the Board is going for the gold in imposing its revisionist views on the school children of the Lone Star State (and many other states, given Texas’ outsized clout in the textbook market).
The following is an excerpt from Elbert Ventura’s review of Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue in the newest issue of Democracy journal:
Flipping through The New York Times on the morning of February 16, 1966, a reader would have come across a startling photo: a stern-faced soldier, standing against a pitch-black backdrop, crowned by the bold declaration “I quit!” The soldier was Donald Duncan, a decorated Green Beret who had just returned from Vietnam. The small print announced Duncan’s opposition to the war after an 18-month tour. “I couldn’t kid myself any longer that my country was acting rationally, or even morally,” he said. But the photo wasn’t telling his story. It was selling it–it appeared in a full-page ad promoting the newest scoop fromRamparts magazine.
Today’s strange quasi-political news is that Tiger Woods has turned to former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer to help manage public relations for his comeback to the professional golf tour. Fleischer last made national news by becoming the spokesman for college football’s Bowl Championship Series, and earlier represented Mark Maguire and (as they were getting rid of quarterback Brett Favre) the Green Bay Packers, powerfully unpopular clients all.
So I wasn’t the only one who thought the FCC dropped the ball in its dealing with the carriage fee kerfuffle over the weekend—some of the nation’s largest cable and broadcast companies have sent a letter to the FCC to that effect.
Some of the day’s best reads:
Join the Progressive Policy Institute and Americans for Campaign Reform for a special presentation featuring Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) DATE: Wednesday, March 17 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. LOCATION: U.S. Capitol Complex Dirksen Senate Office Building - SD-106 Washington, D.C. RSVP to attend the event Space is extremely limited. RSVP required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and not guaranteed. Opening Remarks: Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) Featured Panelist: Dan Weeks - President, Americans for Campaign Reform John Samples - Director, Cato's Center for Representative Government Mark McKinnon - Vice Chairman, Public Strategies Andrew Baumann - Senior Associate, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Moderated by: Will Marshall - President, Progressive ...
Download the report. This is the first installment in a three-part series investigating the state of China’s military. The other articles in this series will look at China’s missile capabilities and naval modernization. This week, China’s National People’s Congress will convene its annual meeting in Beijing. Among the developments that are expected from the gathering is one we should all pay close attention to: the announcement of China’s 2010 defense budget. Beijing has given the military double-digit budget increases for well over a decade, and some Chinese security analysts are calling for a larger-than-usual boost this year in a bid ...
As the United States struggles to rouse itself from its economic slumber, the country is beginning to keenly feel the need to lay down a foundation for a new and vibrant economy. A concerted effort to modernize our infrastructure must top any checklist for recovery. The backbone of our economic system has suffered from years of neglect – budgetary, conceptual, institutional. With his recent request for $4 billion to create a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, it’s encouraging that President Obama seems to understand how essential an infrastructure revival is to our prosperity. But such a fund is not nearly ...
Download the full report. In the next few weeks, the administration will be announcing which states will be awarded funds from $8 billion dedicated for high-speed rail (HSR) development in the stimulus package. Right now, 259 applications from the states valued at $57 billion are chasing the recovery plan money. The administration’s decision to devote considerable resources to developing HSR underscores its commitment to bring bullet trains to the U.S. But unless it makes the right decisions about where to put the money and what policies to follow, the new enthusiasm for HSR could be just the latest false start in ...
Download the full report. The past decade has seen the U.S. government expand its activities around the globe in response to complex and stateless threats. In the face of these challenges, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, and members of Congress have all called for increasing the resources and capabilities of the State Department to roll back what Gates has termed the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. But efforts at reform are hindered by an institutional structure rooted in a 19th-century view of the world. The days of traditional diplomacy conducted behind closed ...
Download the full report. In Washington, "cybersecurity" is a term that's come to have a thousand meanings, and none at all. Any crime, prank, intelligence operation, or foreign-government attack involving a computer has become a “cyber threat.” Russian teenagers defacing Georgia's websites, hackers eyeing the power grid, overseas powers embedding government microchips with malicious code – they all share equal billing as cyber foes. The vague definition muddies the debate about what the real dangers are, where they lie, and how to respond to them. No wonder it took the White House so long to find someone to serve as a ...
Download the full policy memo. It’s been said that money is the mother’s milk of American politics. Congressional incumbents spend about a third of their time chasing after it in never-ending campaigns for reelection. Interest groups contribute it in ever-increasing sums to politicians as an investment in government policy, or at least as a cost of doing business. Political consultants and the broadcast media collect it by the hundreds of millions every two years, thanks to the epic, televised spectacle we call the modern campaign. Difficult though it may be to imagine American politics unconstrained by big money in elections, that ...
Download the full report. Tens of millions of Americans need more nutritious, more affordable food. Tens of millions need better jobs. Just as the Obama administration and Congress have supported a “green jobs” initiative to simultaneously fight unemployment and protect the environment, they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative. Given that large numbers of food jobs could be created rapidly and with relatively limited capital investments, their creation should become a consideration in any jobs bill that Congress and the president enact. Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to ...
