Refuting Sen. Kerry’s distortions
November 2, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward
On Tuesday, I reported that a recent Heritage Foundation paper directly refutes Sen. John Kerry’s assertion that those who do not succeed academically will end up “stuck in Iraq.” The media have certainly noticed Tim Kane’s study on military demographics, and have used it to point out the Massachusetts liberal’s distortions about the troops.
Here’s just a sampling of how the media are covering Kane’s paper:
- Columnist Michael Barone on USNews.com: “The Heritage report refutes utterly the statement made by John Kerry yesterday at a rally for California Democratic gubernatorial nominee Phil Angelides.”
- The Charlotte Observer: “The bottom line, according to Dr. Kane: The men and women now joining our armed forces are mostly white, middle class and better educated than their peers. For every two recruits coming from the nation’s poorest neighborhoods, there are three from the richest neighborhoods. It is by no means a poor, dumb fighting force.”
- The Oregonian: “The sad fact is that many people think there’s truth in Kerry's unintended or intended insult of our troops. The truth is the opposite, according to a recent Heritage Foundation study.”
- Air Force Times: “[Media] reports, the study says, indicate that there is a disproportionate representation of minorities and lower-income people serving in the military, while others ‘accuse’ the Army of accepting unqualified enlistees. Not so, says Tim Kane, an analyst at The Heritage Foundation.”
Click here to see more newspapers that have cited this important Heritage paper.
Time for spending restraint
“[E]ven as tax rates were coming down,” Heritage President Ed Feulner writes in The Chicago Sun-Times¸ “federal spending kept going up. This is the real fiscal problem facing America, not the deficit (which merely measures the share of government financed by borrowing rather than taxes).”
Feulner points to a new government report that makes a strong case for fiscal restraint. “It predicts we will be able to make the tax cuts permanent, grow the economy and shrink the deficit—if we’re willing to hold the line on spending.”
It’s “critical” that we cut back on spending, he writes. “That helps balance the budget in the short run, and it reduces government interference in the economy in the long run.”
How bad is America’s overspending problem? Click here to find out more.
Can a key American ally defend herself?
“Taiwan’s defenses are collapsing while China’s are expanding at breathtaking speed,” report Michael Needham and John Tkacik of Heritage’s Asian Studies Center. They add that the United States government “is concerned by the general malaise among Taiwan’s political parties concerning the island’s defenses.”
These degraded defenses leave Taiwan in a bit of a bind in its discussions with the Communists on mainland China. Taipei will come to future negotiations from a position of weakness, Needham and Tkacik explain, and “their relationship with Beijing becomes one that places exclusive reliance on Beijing’s good will.”
“There is little sense in America’s continued support of Taiwan’s defenses if Taiwan has no intention of using them to deter attack by the Chinese,” they conclude. But there are steps that can be taken before we reach that point, including continued American cooperation on military equipment sales and a new Taiwanese commitment to pass a strong defense budget.
In other news
- The Pentagon has opened an investigation into yet another leak of classified materials to The New York Times, this time a report on Iraq violence.
- The Washington Post outlines the liberal domestic agenda: throw money at education and homeland security in the hopes that’ll make a difference, expand the IRS and collect more in taxes to pay for the new spending, and impose new price controls on wages and medicine, in the form of a higher minimum wage and “negotiated” Medicare prescription drug prices.
- A coalition of international labor unions has created the International Trade Union Confederation, a group charged with imposing their special-interest agenda on global commerce.
- Lawyers for captured terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are challenging the constitutionality of the freshly-passed Military Commissions Act, which authorized a secure method of trying al Qaeda suspects for war crimes.
- NASA has approved spending $900 million to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. Again.
- Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela has formally withdrawn its bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.
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.
- On Friday, November 3 at 11:00 am, James Shikwati of Kenya’s Inter Region Economic Network will explain Africa’s potential and the obstacles to change.
- On Friday, November 3 at noon, Peter Schramm of the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs will reflect on Hungary’s 1956 uprising against Soviet oppression.
- On Thursday, November 9 at noon, author Dave R. Palmer will discuss his new book on George Washington and Benedict Arnold.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.