Hugh Hewitt

Hugh Hewitt: Captain Crunch is an enemy of the state

If you buy cereal for your children, or yourself, you should be aware that the Food and Drug Administration thinks you are falling down on the job. Last week, the FDA issued "Guidance" to the food manufacturers of America pronouncing the agency deeply troubled over efforts by various segments of the business to use "Front of Package" branding to delineate their products as useful -- say a "Smart Choice" -- for the consumer. "FDA's research has found that with FOP labeling, people are less likely to check the Nutrition Facts label on the information panel of foods (usually, the back or side of the package)," the agency wrote in its public announcement of its concern. "It is thus...

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Hugh Hewitt: New Jersey's choice and the MSM's

Either Chris Christie or Jon Corzine will win the election for New Jersey's governorship next month, which makes a vote for Chris Daggett one of the more unusual ones that will be cast in all of America in many years. New Jersey is on the ropes, sliding toward the category of California and Michigan. Unemployment in the Garden State is a shade under 10 percent. The budget deficit that looms over 2010 is about $8 billion, or roughly 25 percent of the entire state budget. Taxes are already sky-high, and corruption in and around state government isn't just a big story, it is a way of life. The hapless Democratic incumbent Corzine is an object of ridicule and contempt throughout the...

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Hugh Hewitt: Will 2010 voters recall cloture vote? Not if GOP can help it

Republicans sent a fellow named Lemieux out to make the case against Obamacare in Saturday's national radio address, which followed the president's weekly turn on the airwaves. Turns out he's a senator from Florida. That's right, the new guy was sent in from the taxi squad to take some snaps while the Sunshine State decides whether Charlie Crist or Marco Rubio is the new senator. Nothing against Lemieux, but that I misspelled his name twice without your noticing should convey the point. George LeMieux is the best the GOP can come up with as the Senate enters the endgame on the debate over the most radical domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression? The list of the people I...

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Hugh Hewitt: Begala to Obama: Listen to me, dummy

Chicago and the Olympics weren’t a great mix from the start. Sort of like holding an international gathering of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Guinness St. James’ Gate Brewery in Dublin, Ireland. The grifters and graft merchants of the Windy City couldn’t have helped themselves, and the results wouldn’t have been pretty. As a lover of the Olympics, I am disappointed, but perhaps we can nominate a less problematic locale for 2020 than Chicago and New York have proved to be in the last two rounds. The aftermath of the president’s pratfall has been interesting to watch. The first-round knockout was so embarrassing that even the Beltway’s cadre of...

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Hugh Hewitt: Begala to Obama: Listen to me, dummy

Chicago and the Olympics weren't a great mix from the start. Sort of like holding an international gathering of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Guinness St. James' Gate Brewery in Dublin, Ireland. The grifters and graft merchants of the Windy City couldn't have helped themselves, and the results wouldn't have been pretty. As a lover of the Olympics, I am disappointed, but perhaps we can nominate a less problematic locale for 2020 than Chicago and New York have proved to be in the last two rounds. The aftermath of the president's pratfall has been interesting to watch. The first-round knock-out was so embarrassing that even the Beltway's cadre of professional friends of the powerful were...

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Hugh Hewitt: To cover or not to cover: The legacy of Geoffrey Dawson

To: Jonathan Klein, president, CNN Subject: Coverage of Iran Congratulations on the approach of your fifth anniversary at the helm of CNN/US. What a great moment during which to exercise leadership over one of the most important media platforms in the world. It may be "the most busted name in news" in the eyes of many, but the reach of CNN's programming is still vast. It remains the default network for center-left elites who cannot abide the buffoonery that MSNBC has sunk to, and even those of us who watch Fox News with great regularity are still checking in on Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper and a few others. There's lots to criticize, of course, with the refrains from the...

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Hugh Hewitt: Obamacare is to Medicare what ACORN is to Children's Protective Services

That's the line that was best received by the 600-plus-person audience at a debate on Obamacare I participated in along with University of Colorado Law School professor Paul Campos on Thursday night in Denver. Campos, who writes for the Daily Beast and is a reliable lefty, earned enormous points with the mostly hostile-to-Obamacare crowd simply for showing up to defend the general outlines of the various "reform" proposals under consideration by the Congress. That's more than most Democratic members of Congress will do, and with reason. Obamacare can't be defended if the right questions are asked of its proponents -- questions almost never posed by the legacy media. Our debate's...

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Hugh Hewitt: While we debate health reform, the Iran crisis deepens

By Hugh Hewitt With thousands of Tea Party protesters swarming the National Mall on Saturday, the continuing debate over the president's throwdown on Wednesday night ("We will call you out!") and Joe Wilson's decorum-breaching callout of the president, it is no wonder that few Americans are paying attention to fast-moving events abroad. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jets off to meet with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, rejects stiff sanctions on Iran. Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatens to crush dissidents at Friday prayers in Tehran, and in the same address rejects curbs on Iran's nuclear program. And...

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Housing depression headed our way

California's unemployment rate reached 11.9% last week, and if the Golden State stays at that level it will be very difficult for President Obama to do anything but apologize to voters next November for spending trillions and trillions of dollars without making a significant dent in joblessness. Michigan can have a one-state depression and not greatly impact the nation's overall economic outlook, but not California. As the West Coast's recovery goes, so goes --or not-- the nation's. California's woes can be traced to the housing industry's collective heart-attack. When the bubble burst and home prices plummeted, the cost of land already banked by developers and of the materials...

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Hugh Hewitt: Desperate Democrats need new game plan

"Grandma Got Run Over By Obama-care" is a satire by Perry Nunley of Randy Brook's classic Christmas song involving reindeer and eggnog from 30 years ago. Inspired by the now famous viral video of an August 4 AARP "listening session" which was abruptly ended by the AARP's Nurse Ratched when the codgers wouldn't play ball, Nunley's take-off is just more evidence that the country is digesting the president's plan to radically rework American medicine and that the heartburn is real and growing. If the seniors' revolt spreads, the plan is doomed, no matter how many dollars Big Pharma throws the DNC's way. Democrats were eager for any good news after another rough...

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Hugh Hewitt: 10 August recess questions for your congressman

Members of the House are back in their districts, and senators will join them in their states after next week. If they are doing their jobs - a big if - they will be meeting with constituents over the next month, and this is your chance to impact the debate on the radical proposals to restructure American medicine. These proposals are now making their way towards a final debate and vote in the fall. Here are 10 questions for any meeting you might have or e-mail you might send. (And 10 answers any honest representative or senator would give you.) 1. Do you guarantee that I get to keep the plan I have and the doctor I have? ("I know you have heard the president say this...

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Hugh Hewitt: Obama's armada founders in high political seas

On May 28, 1588, Philip II of Spain launched a massive Armada, aimed at changing England forever. More than 130 ships loaded with supplies and 30,000 warriors left for a rendezvous with the army of Duke of Parma and his army of tens of thousands of more veterans who would barge under the Armada's protective screen across the English Channel. Philip II threw everything he had at Elizabeth --and as Arthur Herman's "To Rule the Waves" makes clear, the Spanish monarch had to. Sir Francs Drake had bled Philip's empire with a pair of bold strokes and the momentum (and the money needed to maintain the momentum) was bleeding away. So he risked it all, sending everything at England at once....

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Hugh Hewitt: Obama's Armada founders in high political seas

On May 28, 1588, Philip II of Spain launched a massive Armada, aimed at changing England forever. More than 130 ships loaded with supplies and 30,000 warriors left for a rendezvous with the army of Duke of Parma and his army of tens of thousands of more veterans who would barge under the Armada's protective screen across the English Channel. Philip II threw everything he had at Elizabeth --and as Arthur Herman's “To Rule the Waves” makes clear, the Spanish monarch had to. Sir Francs Drake had bled Philip's empire with a pair of bold strokes and the momentum (and the money needed to maintain the momentum) was bleeding away. So he risked it all, sending everything at...

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What will your employer choose for you?

My lecture was on health care reform, and I asked the control room technician to please run through the DVD cues with me prior to the audience assembling. As we screened the different exhibits, all of which had to do with the debate underway in Congress, Joseph volunteered that he was from Ontario, and that the wait for a standard physical was 4 to 6 months. As a young and healthy man, he didn't have any particular complaints about Canada's government-run, government-paid-for system, but he knew that you didn't want to be seriously ill up north. And you never wanted to be in a hurry. That's the reality of single-payer, and most Americans appear to know a Joseph or two and thus to know...

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Debating the "Government Option/Public Plan

Today is "health care debate" day on my radio show. Three experts will each spend an hour outlining and critiquing the radical proposals currently circulating in the Senate and the House. Dr. Robert Moffitt is the Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Moffitt has been tracking the Congressional tinkering with American medicine for a quarter century. Like everyone else who has ever been covered by the federal Employees Health Benefits Program -"FEHB" for short--and with the grasp of details that only a former senior official at the Office of Personnel Management which oversees FEHB can bring to the conversation, Moffitt knows and...

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Congress is killing U.S. softly with too many laws and too much red tape

For the past 20 years, I have advised landowners, home builders and energy companies on the intricacies of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Both are complex statutes supplemented by dense volumes of regulations and administered by confusing agencies that have state and local counterparts applying state and local versions of the similar laws and rules. The costs of these regulatory regimes are enormous but dimly if at all understood by the public. The highest-sounding rhetoric surrounds both laws, but, even as they accomplish important environmental goals, they also operate to batter tens of thousands of Americans every year. The Consumer Products Safety...

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See 'The Stoning of Soraya M' and send the Mullahs a message

"How can we support the demonstrators in Iran?" When Americans see tragedy at home or abroad, the immediate response of millions of them it to want to help. Thus the outpouring of private relief efforts after the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the surge of volunteers and donations into New Orleans after Katrina in August-September, 2005, and the outpouring of support for the rural poor of China after the devastating earthquake of May, 2008. There are other examples too numerous to mention, and every day sees groups of Americans doing good works around the globe. Now, as the theocratic fascists of Iran strike back at the protestors in Tehran and around the...

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For whom the bell really tolls

Teachers aren’t going to get rich spending years in the classroom, but those who teach in the public schools have traditionally had excellent benefits, including excellent health insurance. Few begrudge teachers their generally superb health benefits, and teachers’ unions have made the establishment and preservation of strong health benefit packages a key component of their negotiations with school districts. The objective has been high quality benefits at little or no cost to the teachers. Just last week a study in New Jersey revealed that only 12% of the Garden State’s teachers pay anything towards their health care. The enormous number of school districts...

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Doctors can write their own prescription

There are more than 800,000 doctors in the United States, up from a half million only 20 years ago. Each and every one of these professionals face a tidal wave of change whether or not Obamacare passes out of the Congress in the next 90 days. If the Obama/Pleosi/Reid plans does make it out of the House and Senate and it includes the so-called "government option" - a government-sponsored health insurance plan open to enrollment to every American - not only will the changes ahead for doctors be massive, they will also mean a significant drop in their ability to earn incomes anything like those they are making today. Right now the country faces an unfolding doctor shortage....

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Just say no to Government Motors and Obamacars

I won't buy a socialist car, which means I won't be buying a GM or Chrysler car for as long as the U.S. government owns huge blocks of the companies. Today's bankruptcy filing by GM will see the end of a once-great car company and the birth of a federal government-union partnership dressed up as a business. It won't work, even with the $50 billion federal tax dollars plowed into the new entity past and present, and not even with the UAW's "concessions." Governments can do very few things well and almost nothing efficiently. Yes, it can build amazing armies and the weapons and technologies to support them, but only at extraordinary cost and only with often dismaying...

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Terrorist networks can be run from within U.S. prison cells

In order to demonstrate the danger of bringing Gitmo terrorists to U.S. prisons, it is useful to go back to September 28, 2007, to a speech given by FBI Director Robert Mueller to the Council on Foreign Relations. Part of Director Mueller's point that day was to drive home the interconnectedness of the terror network, and just how little connectivity it takes to operate a worldwide web of terror. Director Miller used what he called "three threads" to illustrate the situation the United States faces every day: “In April 2005, two college students from Atlanta allegedly traveled to Washington, D.C., to record videos of potential targets, including the Capitol and the...

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Don't expect silence from people who know the truth

Yes, his critics acknowledge, he was number two in the government with access to all the inner workings of the cabinet and all the background to all the controversies. And yes, he has long experience in matters related to the conduct of war from even before then. But his spectacular misjudgment at a crucial juncture should not be forgotten or forgiven, and his frequent, sharp criticisms are beyond the acceptable role of an out-of-power, at-the-end-of-his-career pol. He should simply exit the national stage in the disgrace he has earned and leave the matters at hand to the new men who understand that the world is so much more complicated and nuanced than the old man could possibly...

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Here comes California's May 19 Rebellion

California voters head to the polls next week with predictions of doom echoing in their ears if they decline to endorse the massive tax hikes prescribed for them by big Democratic majorities in the statehouse, Arnold and a handful of now ruined-politically Republican legislators. "Shrill" doesn't begin to describe the campaign designed to stampede the Golden State electorate. The latest ad has a weary, soot-covered fire-fighter urging a yes vote on the tax hike. The message is clear: Vote no and your homes will burn down. Not even this sort of fear-mongering is moving the needle towards "yes" on the massive tax surge on next week's ballot as poll after poll...

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Flu pandemic today, health care rationing tomorrow

“Reconciliation” is Beltway-speak for the imposition of the rationing of medical services and goods on a largely unsuspecting American population by means of simple majorities in both houses of Congress. The reality of President Obama’s vision for medicine in America is a “single-payer” system, and the reality of “single-payer” is rationing. Because the government is the ultimate provider of medical services, it provides only what it can afford, and when its money runs out, your care ends. Almost anyone familiar with the push for what is euphemistically called “health care reform” knows that many experts on the left believe that...

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President Obama's choice

When Winston Churchill became British prime minister in 1940 (on the very day Hitler invaded France, Belgium and Holland) there were severe pressures on him to exclude from his Cabinet the "guilty men" of Munich. He wisely resisted the hue and cry and formed a successful coalition of all parties, including many who had been quite wrong about Munich, Hitler, and much else. In his memoirs Churchill explained: "'If the present," I said a few weeks later, 'tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future." My friend George Kimball sent me a reminder of this bit of Churchill greatness this week, along with this thought: "The essential wisdom of...

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Trillions for pork but nothing for the Raptors?

Has the world really changed that much since 1990? When the Air Force first announced its planned procurement of the F-22 Raptors, the intended acquisition was for 750 of the fighters. The Soviet Union was the enemy then, and soon thereafter the Soviet Union fell apart. In 1990 the Air Force adjusted its expected acquisition to a total of 648. The world continued to get safer –at least in the eyes of President Clinton-- and the 1994 projection dropped to 442 planes. Three years later the total was cut to 339. By 2003 the number was 277. Last week, with two active battlefields still requiring the complete air superiority Americans have come to assume is a condition of...

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Voting to kill and injure kids: A congressional CYA endangers children

Thousands of children 12 and younger ride motorcycles, ATVs and snowmobiles, which is why a lot of effort and time has gone into designing vehicles made for smaller folks. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal noted a study by the Motorcycle Industry Council that concluded "90% of the youth fatalities and injuries on motorcycles occur when kids ride adult vehicles." On Thursday of last week, the Senate of the United States voted 58 to 39 to reject an amendment to the budget bill designed to keep kids on bikes designed for them and thus off adult vehicles. The reason the amendment was offered by South Carolina's Jim DeMint is because the 2008 "Consumer Products Safety...

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Obama orders the Second Surge

A new president unveiled a new surge last week, and the announcement ought to have been greeted by sustained applause by everyone who cheered President George W. Bush’s surge policy in Iraq. President Barack Obama appears to have adopted his predecessor’s commitment to following the advice of his top generals –especially that of General David Petraeus—and the announcement of 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan on top of the 17,000 reinforcements already committed by the new administration is an important signal of American resolve in the war against Islamist jihadism. Max Boot hit exactly the right note when he opined at Commentary Magazine’s blog...

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A longer view, please

“Traditionally, the Chinese think in terms of millennia,” Richard Nixon wrote in his 1980 best-seller, The Real War, “the Russians in terms of centuries, the Europeans in terms of generations, and we Americans in terms of decades.” Impatience was strategic deficiency in the mind of the former president. “We must learn to take a longer view,” Nixon concluded. In the nearly three decades since Nixon urged national patience as a virtue, our haste to get things done has grown more, not less, frenzied. Political impatience has reached its highest level yet in the new presidency of Barack Obama. In his Saturday radio address, the president again demanded...

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