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DC Editorial
Say no to Kaine’s con on taxes
- Following in the ill-advised footprints of his predecessor Mark Warner, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine wants state legislators to join him in making residents pay higher taxes. If Kaine succeeds, he and the legislators once again will be enabled to avoid making the tough choices required by responsible budgeting.
The glory of Israel at 60
- A s the state of Israel turns 60 years old today, it deserves to be celebrated both as one of the most remarkable national survival stories in world history and as a stalwart and admirably democratic ally of the United States. Besieged from all sides from its very inception — five of its neighbors launched military attacks against it at its formation by the United Nations in 1948 — Israel has not just survived. Israel has thrived, thanks to the fortitude and hard work of its citizens, as well as their wholehearted embrace of Western political and economic values.
U.S. needs more oil drilling, not higher energy taxes
- In a high-profile speech on the environment Monday, John McCain still foolishly defended the congressional ban on energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As wrongheaded as McCain is on ANWR, however, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are even more misguided. Both favor a new windfall profits tax on oil companies that would do horrendous damage to America’s energy present and future.
Shine more light on union finances
- A milestone will be reached Tuesday when Elaine Chao becomes the longest-serving secretary of labor since Francis Perkins was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historians will someday look back on the Chao era as a time when transparency and accountability in union finances finally began to be taken seriously by the Labor Department.
Get the gold watch for the ‘Golden Hammer’
- Earlier this week, Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi informed city leaders that the District of Columbia has a $130 million deficit for the coming year. That means District residents and businesses will likely again be asked to pay more taxes.
Oink! Oink! Oink! Congress goes hog wild with farm bill
- There will be unmelted snowballs in Hades before this Congress agrees to cut out the pork in the farm bill headed for a vote within the next week, so President Bush should get his veto pen ready. At an estimated cost of at least $285 billion over 10 years, this will be the most expensive and regressive farm bill ever. Given how Congress uses budget gimmicks these days to hide the real costs of many of the bills it approves, that $285 billion figure is almost certainly too low. If there was a truth-in-spending law with real teeth in it, this Congress would have been hauled to the pokey long ago.
‘New’ Dulles Rail is same old bad deal
- Don’t be fooled by the Federal Transit Administration’s recent U-turn on the Dulles Rail project. It doesn’t change the flawed fundamentals of this $5 billion-plus mega-pork project, designed to benefit wealthy Tysons Corner landowners and their political allies at the expense of taxpayers and commuters. Dulles Rail will not reduce traffic in Northern Virginia, as the project’s own environmental studies attest. It will actually increase congestion in and around Tysons, thanks to higher densities approved by the Fairfax Board of Supervisors in connection with the project. It’s no exaggeration to say Tysons Corner will suffer perpetual gridlock once the Dulles Rail and its parallel developments are completed. Every tax dollar spent on Dulles Rail is a tax dollar that should have been used to reduce congestion on the Washington region’s roads.
False ‘reform’ for False Claims Act
- W ill Republicans in Congress never learn that backing legislation to expand litigation opportunities for the class action plaintiffs ‘bar simply pours money into the Democrats’ campaign coffers? The question arises yet again because of the bill recently moved forward by the Senate Judiciary Committee to amend the False Claims Act. The proposal would encourage even more frivolous lawsuits by profiteering class action plaintiffs’ lawyers, while hurting the small and medium-size businesses and contractors that are the job-creating backbone of the economy. The bill’s main sponsor is Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. A second powerful GOP patron is Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Knowing a great opportunity to weaken Republicans when they see it, liberal Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island are co-sponsors.
Who owns John Conyers?
- If, as campaign finance reformers have long claimed, the answer to queries like that posted by the headline above is to be found in the list of the House Judiciary Committee chairman’s most generous campaign donors, then the answer is lawyers and law firms, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
More transparency for District schools, not less
- After D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty was elected with a mandate to reform the city's chronically failing public education system, the District of Columbia City Council gave him extraordinary powers to get the job done, including authorization of an unprecedented takeover of the city's school system last June.
Please, Congress, stop ‘fixing’ student loans
- Believing itself infallibly wise, Big Government would rather cover its tracks than admit a blunder. So it was no surprise that Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California, respectively chairmen of the Senate and House committees on education and labor, blithely forced through Congress this week a stopgap solution to the impending student loan crisis without acknowledging that they created the problem in the first place.
Time for McCain to stand in the schoolhouse door
- Years ago, George Wallace stood in an Alabama schoolhouse door to keep black children from getting in for an education. Today, John McCain should stand in front of an inner-city schoolhouse door demanding that the children be let out for an education. Wallace became an enduring symbol of the terrible system of segregation that kept people down for too long. McCain can become a new symbol of people being liberated from another terrible system that has also kept them down for too long.
It takes more than PR to reduce violent crime
- When Cathy Lanier replaced Charles Ramsey as the District’s police chief in January 2006, people were being mugged on the National Mall and gunned down in the streets, making Washington feel more like a Wild West town than the capital of the United States. Ramsey was fired after a surge in violence on his watch left 14 people dead in 13 days. Last weekend, four people were killed in just five hours.