Assassination in Pakistan
December 27, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward
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Heritage expert Lisa Curtis reacts to the October assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto. |
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Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday during a pre-election rally. Bhutto, an opponent of Islamic extremism, recently returned from exile and was critical of President Pervez Musharraf’s government.
Lisa Curtis, Heritage’s Pakistan expert, says Bhutto symbolized everything that’s anathema to Islamic extremists—democracy, modernity and change.
The media turned to Heritage’s experts for prompt analysis of this tragedy. In just a few hours on Thursday morning, Curtis and national security expert James Carafano appeared on national programs like the Dennis Prager Show, Bloomberg radio and Bloomberg television, plus local radio programs in New Orleans, Dallas and Seattle.
“Only those who firmly renounce violence and participate in the current political process [should] have a say in running the country,” Curtis said in a recent lecture before the House Armed Services Committee.
“The U.S. should encourage the current transition to civilian-led democratic rule, yet not try to micromanage it from Washington,” she explained.
“The Pakistani people, by and large, do not support extremist policies and would likely vote into power one of the secular democratic parties, so long as they have a range of political choices and perceive the elections as transparent and free.
A Christmas present for big labor
The federal government has for the past several years been cracking down on corrupt union officials. The program has revealed a whole host of crimes by union officials against the workers they claim to represent.
“In the past month alone,” Heritage’s Rob Bluey reports, “a former financial secretary for the United Mine Workers in Wheeling, W.Va., was sentenced to a year in prison for embezzling more than $70,000 in union funds, an office secretary for the Plasterers in Denver pleaded guilty to embezzling $28,480 in union money, and the former president of National Treasury Employees Union in Detroit pleaded guilty to one count of bank robbery.”
But liberals Congress managed to force through a big cut to the enforcement agency’s budget. And at the urging of their big-labor allies, they had even tried to block the collection of reports that would “disclose possible conflicts between personal interests and the officer’s or employee’s duty to the union and its members.”
The unions, Bluey concludes, “are doing what they can to shut down the one agency in the federal government that looks out for union workers.”
Heritage’s unfortunately accurate prediction
In 2003, Heritage Foundation experts were working furiously to expose the dangers hidden in the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement plan. Heritage’s Derek Hunter, for example, warned about “the problem of senior dumping —which will occur when former employers drop current retirees into the proposed new government entitlement.”
And exactly this has come to pass. Under a new federal rule, “retiree health benefits can be ‘altered, reduced or eliminated’ when a retiree becomes eligible for Medicare,” according to the New York Times.
The government, to the consternation of groups like the AARP, used exactly the reasoning Heritage warned about: “Lawyers for the [Equal Opportunity Employment Commission] said the new Medicare drug benefit, now nearing the end of its second year, had strengthened the case for the regulation because it guaranteed that retirees 65 and older would have access to drug coverage.”
This raises two interesting questions. Why are many of the same groups that lobbied hard for a Medicare prescription drug benefit now complaining when employers take advantage of it and discard private coverage? Perhaps because they realize that government-run health programs like Medicare compare unfavorably with private-sector care. And second, why should taxpayers have to pay to cover retirees who already have insurance? There’s no good answer.
In other news
- The Heritage Foundation continues to shape the conservative movement, and the Left is taking notice. Liberal columnist Paul Krugman named Heritage as one of “the interlocking set of institutions...that make up the modern American right.”
- The Lakota tribe, with land in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, has reportedly severed its treaties with the United States government.
- Japan’s navy has conducted a successful missile defense test, according to news reports.
- Because Congress was slow to pass a workable fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax, the IRS will delay tax refunds by several weeks.
- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is angering his countrymen for failing to meet his populist campaign promises.
Coming up at Heritage
To attend these or any other events at Heritage please RSVP at Heritage’s website. Or you can view these events live online. All times are Eastern.
- On Tuesday, Jan. 8 at noon, a panel of experts will discuss how much progress has been made in Iraq and how sustainable these security achievements are as the level of U.S. troops gradually drops to previous levels.
- On Wednesday, Jan. 9 at noon, author Jonah Goldberg discusses his new book, Liberal Fascism:The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
