Skip ahead to page content

federal_budget_and_spending.jpg

Meeting demonstrates Heritage impact

November 14, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward

   
 

Featured video

Watch the video!

Excerpts from Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner’s remarks on Leadership for America to the fall President’s Club meeting.

More videos »

  
     

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas highlighted the fall President’s Club meeting, held Monday and Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

Speaking to hundreds of Heritage members, the justice stressed the importance of traditional values like hard work and perseverance—two themes repeated throughout his bestselling new autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son.

Too few Americans, he argued, appreciate the principles that have defined the country. For instance, he noted that there are those more familiar with the operation of their cell phone than with the principles laid out in the Constitution.

» Read more about the meeting, including Laura Ingraham’s remarks on Power to the People, John Fund’s discussion of conservatives’ electoral prospects, and more.

The next President’s Club meeting will be held in Washington on May 5 and 6, 2008. Find out more information about the President’s Club today.

Hearing from Heritage experts

Members had an opportunity to interact directly with Heritage experts during the President’s Club meeting.

On Monday, Heritage experts volunteered their time to take part in intimate “Ask an Expert” sessions with President’s Club members. Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, addressed the U.S.-U.K. alliance, while media expert Khristine Brookes explained how conservatives can combat the spin and distortions from the mainstream media.

And during Tuesday’s sessions, Heritage experts briefed members on their ongoing policy work.

» Read about the Heritage briefings on defending America, preserving the nation’s prosperity and strengthening family and religion.

Honoring those who served

This Veterans Day, we at The Heritage Foundation honor the service and sacrifices of the men and women in uniform who have done so much to preserve our nation’s freedoms.

Heritage policy experts work tirelessly to advance military that gives America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines the tools they need to do their jobs. And they also strive, as Heritage expert Jen Marshall told Heritage members today, to advance policies to ensure theirs is “an America worth defending.”

The latest from Heritage

  • A coalition led by big labor helped defeat a landmark school-choice ballot initiative in Utah, Heritage education expert Dan Lips writes in The Salt Lake Tribune. The defeat of the state-wide school choice plan—which was signed by Gov. John Huntsman earlier this year but blocked pending a referendum—marks a “victory for the National Education Association—and other special-interest groups that oppose allowing parents to decide where their children attend school.”
  • Heritage national security expert James Carafano last week traveled to the terrorist detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was there as an observer to the proceedings against Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was taken into custody on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Carafano blogged about his Guantanamo Bay experiences on RedState.org and summed up his experiences in an article for National Review Online.
  • Liberals have proposed tax increases to pay for the war in Iraq and other defense spending. “The problem isn’t that we’re not taxed enough to defend ourselves,” Heritage experts J.D. Foster and James Carafano argue in The Washington Times. “It’s that Congress spends too much of our tax money on non-defense programs.”
  • The government is about to release figures on “food insecurity,” which are likely to stir up a media frenzy about hunger in America. But Heritage’s Robert Rector has looked at previous years’ data and found that the figures are wildly misinterpreted: “The government’s own data show that, even though they may have brief episodes of reduced food intake, most adults in food insecure households actually consume too much, not too little, food.” And government food aid programs, he continues, could exacerbate the failure to spread food consumption more evenly across time.

In other news

  • Continuing his welcome new commitment to fiscal restraint, President Bush has vetoed a liberal-backed health and education spending bill. The bill, packed with wasteful special interest earmarks, would have spent more than the President requested.
  • A bipartisan coalition of big spenders voted last week to override President Bush’s veto of an irresponsible pork-bloated water resources spending bill.
  • The United Nations will once again consider whether the global body should assume control of the Internet. Heritage experts have warned against such a development, which “would give meddlesome governments the opportunity to censor and regulate the medium until its usefulness as a vehicle for freedom of expression and international competition is crippled.”
  • MyHeritage.org is two years old! The website first launched on November 14, 2005.
  • Liberals in Congress passed a bill to bar workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians; some liberals even voted against it on the grounds that it didn’t go far enough and establish still more federally-protected groups. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill, citing its vague language and expansive scope; opponents of the bill appear to have sufficient votes to sustain the veto.
  • New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has abandoned his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. But the city of San Francisco has announced its intention to issue municipal identification cards, including illegal immigrants.

Coming up at Heritage

To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. Colin Gowan contributed to this report.