Free Republic

Please tell me if anyone has heard of this "junior classic" “Last spring, my 2nd-grade daughter came home with an extra assignment—a worksheet she hadn’t completed in class for a story called The Selkie Girl,” Jennifer Holladay writes in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of Rethinking Schools.” She brought the book home, too, and it was one I’d never seen before, a Junior Great Books anthology (Series 3, Book 1), published by the nonprofit Great Books Foundation.” “As we settled in, I asked my daughter to tell me about The Selkie Girl. Her rendition gave me pause, so I asked her...

In last night’s vice presidential debate, Vice President Biden said (as best we can decipher) that AEI research supports the assertion that Governor Romney’s tax plan would hike taxes on the middle class. First, we would note that AEI does not take institutional positions on any policy matters and that the views we have expressed are only our own. More importantly, Vice President Biden’s assertion is completely incorrect. In fact, we have demonstrated that Governor Romney’s plan can accomplish his stated goal of providing 20% statutory rate reductions for ordinary income while maintaining distributional and revenue neutrality. In plain English,...

Conservative foreign policy hawks, outraged at the media’s circle-the-wagons reaction to the attacks on two embassies, are speaking out in defense of Mitt Romney. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells Right Turn:”The perception of American weakness that provided the foundation for these attacks is largely because of Obama administration mistakes and lack of resolve. A repetition of 1979 in Tehran is not far fetched, especially given the weakness of Obama’s statement this morning.” He dismisses the media storyline as pure boosterism: “The press criticism of Romney’s statement is so clearly at the administration’s behest that they...

Today, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a prominent conservative think tank, hosted a secret, four-and-a-half hour meeting of pols, wonks, and activists, including several self-identified ’progressives,’ to develop a PR/legislative strategy to promote and enact a carbon tax. This was the fifth such meeting to advance the ”Price Carbon Campaign/Lame Duck Initiative: A Carbon Pollution Tax in Fiscal and Tax Reform.” An annoted copy of the meeting agenda appears at the bottom of this post.

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

The 2012 election year has just begun, and already controversies have swirled around a number of President Obama’s actions. Constitutional issues are at the forefront as the president seeks to improve his chances of reelection by delivering on his promises. But is the president violating the Constitution as he tries to implement his program of transformation? Constitutional attorney David Rivkin believes he is. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington D.C. will be facilitating a discussion on one of the recent controversies, President Obama’s “recess appointments.” On January 4, 2012, President Obama made the following appointments: Richard Cordray as Director...

This time on Banter, Apoorva and Stu sit down with AEI Resident Scholar Andrew Biggs to chat about Paul Ryan’s new budget plan, entitlement reform, and a special piece of fan mail for Andrew.

On this special edition of Banter, Stu and Apoorva are joined by AEI Vice President of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, Danielle Pletka (on Twitter @dpletka). They discuss the ongoing situation in Libya and President Obama’s speech about the operation.

Conservative Republicans are rightfully giddy about the results of the midterm elections. The enormous Republican wave washed away hundreds of Democrats at all levels of government, giving Republicans their highest number of seats in the House of Representatives since 1946, and their largest number of state legislators since 1928. More important, the currents that caused the wave clearly work to Republicans' benefit: Voters were expressing widespread opposition to the liberal direction in which President Obama and the Democratic Congress have taken the country. This has led many conservatives to argue that, on November 2, 2010, America returned to its normal...

http://interactive.foxnews.com/livestream/live.html?chanId=6

It's called "Left, Right and Center," which claims to be a "civilized yet provocative antidote to the screaming talking heads that dominate political debate." But there's not a whole lot of truth in advertising for KCRW Santa Monica's radio program, which is also podcasted on the Internet. The show normally features Robert Scheer, editor of the left-wing investigative Web site Truthdig.com and a former Los Angeles Times columnist, representing the left. Matt Miller, a former Clintonista and senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress represents the so-called center. And former Washington Times editorial page editor and visiting senior...

America faces a new culture war. This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise... --snip-- To win, the 70 percent majority must come together around core principles: that the purpose of free enterprise is human flourishing, not materialism; that we stand for equality of opportunity, not equality of income; that we seek to stimulate...

Transfer Tax? Bethany Stotts, May 21, 2010 Alleging waste and a “transfer tax” in higher education, Peter P. Smith argues in the most recent Education Outlook that America should establish a “National, ‘Student-Facing’ Course Database and Transfer Information System” for postsecondary transfer students, and “Automate” the “Processing and Evaluation of Transfer Credits” in order to decrease the number of students who get sidetracked from graduating. In addition to these two reforms, Smith also suggests that higher education should “Create agreements among Colleges that Streamline the Transfer Process,” “Improve the Management and Quality of Postsecondary Data for the Administration of Credit...

Greenfield Schools Bethany Stotts, April 14, 2010 In a recent American Enterprising Institute (AEI) Education Outlook, Senior Fellow Frederick Hess suggests that the K-12 system should adopt “Greenfield” schooling practices in order to enhance educational entrepreneurship. “‘Greenfield’ is a term investors, engineers, and builders use to refer to an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build,” he writes in the April publication. “It is not a term one hears often in K–12 education. This is no surprise.” Hess argues that educational entrepreneurs today are often siphoned into resource-intensive “whole school” models. “Some reformers are fascinated by...

Passover is an unfortunate time to be asking what has gone wrong between America and Israel. Is today's strenuous disagreement over Israel's West Bank housing policy the real problem, or is this controversy merely a symptom of deeper, more profound differences?Partly because of the extraordinary secrecy surrounding Prime Minister Netanyahu's recent White House meeting with President Obama, much remains hidden from public view. Nonetheless, after 14 months in office, Obama has made clear he sees the U.S.-Israeli relationship very differently than any of his predecessors.Consider, for example, Obama's September 2009 U.N. General Assembly speech, profoundly anti-Israeli, and to a...

March 27, 2010 Republican Elite In Disarray After David Frum Is Sacked By Think-Tank America’s conservatives were in open disarray yesterday after the abrupt sacking of a leading Republican for daring to blame his party for “the most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s”. David Frum, who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” when he was a speechwriter for President Bush, was fired by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) after posting a column on his website that called healthcare reform a disaster for Republicans and blamed it squarely on their own refusal to compromise with the Obama Administration. The prominent...

With Mike Allen’s account of his exchange with David Frum, we apparently have David’s version of his departure from AEI: Donor pressure forced AEI president Arthur Brooks to fire him. “But the elite isn’t leading anymore,” David is quoted as saying. “It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.” I have known and liked David and Danielle Frum for...

The Right’s response to David Frum’s perceived heresies has inflicted serious intellectual and political damage on the conservative movement. I’m a full-spectrum conservative of conviction. But even if I leaned to the left, I still would find it laudatory that, in recent decades, political conservatives in America have been the most steadfast defenders of freedom of speech and the most vigorous champions of free and open intellectual inquiry. Indeed, no graduate of an American college or university in the past quarter century cannot help but notice that the biggest threat to free speech today comes not from the political Right,...

The paid services of former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum are apparently no longer required at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Frum made headlines earlier in the week with his criticism of Republican leaders who he said had brought their party its

The working assumption is that they canned him for his “Waterloo” piece about ObamaCare and the GOP. Did they? Hmmm: Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. “I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Institute,” he wrote, “and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship.” AEI did not comment immediately. In a brief interview, Frum said “there was no suggestion by AEI” that his sharp criticism of the GOP’s health-care strategy was the reason for...