The Heritage Foundation will host a Panel Discussion and Dinner featuring Karl Rove.  The panel discussion will feature Heritage experts including Honorary Chair Jim Talent.  The dinner will feature a keynote address by Karl Rove.

http://www.myheritage.org/events/

Please join Sen. Talent and Heritage expert William Beach at Mike Duffy’s in Kirkwood this evening for a discussion on the federal budget and the deficit.

More details here: http://on.fb.me/elT3HG

America’s leaders — of both parties — bounce from one impulse to another instead of formulating a coherent foreign policy.

Read the full piece by Jim Talent in National Review.

Last night, the President identified challenges facing our country, but his remedies missed the mark.  He rightly pointed out that the “mountain of debt” was a threat to our competitiveness, but his solution of a freeze on non-security discretionary spending is hardly the answer.  A freeze now will actually lock in the 25 percent expansion in these programs since 2007.  To balance the budget, it is necessary to cut non-defense spending and also vigorously pursue a bi-partisan solution to the growth of entitlement spending.  The President’s failure to call for that is part and parcel of the refusal to recognize reality that has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy.

On top of that, the President called for increased “investment” in a number of programs, showing both that he is not taking the spending issue seriously and also that he does not understand the importance of the private sector in driving economic growth.  In 1995, President Clinton forthrightly recognized that big government was the problem.  Last night — despite some rhetorical genuflections — President Obama showed he still thinks big government is the solution.  It looks like the country is in for two more years of deficits and slow growth.

On defense, the President complimented the men and women who are fighting for us.  But cheering from the sidelines will not increase the size of a Navy that is smaller than at any time since 1916, or recapitalize the aging inventory of the Air Force, or help the Army replace the two generations of modernization that have been lost by shortsightedness in Washington.  Our country needs leadership, not words, from the Commander in Chief.

For months we’ve known that we are are in uncharted territory politically. That’s because never before has an Administration pursued policies which so consistently flouted basic, common sense. It isn’t just that times are bad. It’s that this government has consumed the credit reserve of the United States without getting anything for it, used the uninsured as an excuse to interfere with peoples’ health care, frightened and alienated the private sector to no purpose, and acted internationally as if it was ashamed of America.

Barack Obama entered office on a wave of good will, and the people have given him every opportunity to honestly address their concerns. His failure either to defend or change his policies, in the face of growing public disapproval, has made voters even more determined to insist on a change of course.