CEI Daily Update

1. POLITICS

President Bush delivers his final State of the Union address to members of Congress.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews on what’s ahead for the rest of the 110th Congress:

“During the last Congress, the Republican majority massively expanded the federal government—and voters reacted negatively. Now that the Democrats have been in power, we see that their record so far has not much better. Hopefully, both parties can come together over the next several months to reform some of the worst excesses of the bloated federal government.”

2. LEGAL

Medical marijuana users in California lose a bid to be protected from being fired for their drug use.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on a previous access-to-medicine case cited by the court:

“[In a previous post] I defended the rights of the terminally ill plaintiffs, and noted that some critics of their challenge did not seem to understand that the Abigail Alliance did not claim an entitlement to such drugs at third-parties’ expense; they merely wanted the government to butt out and stop blocking their attempts to obtain drugs that they felt might save or extend their lives. They weren’t asking for a handout, but for the right to be left alone by meddling government bureaucrats.”

3. BUSINESS

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick faces charges of personal and financial misconduct.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on Kilpatrick’s real failure of leadership:

“But I’m not sure if anyone–right or left–has confronted the real problem: Detroit, under Kilpatrick and all his predecessors, has cared too much about big business and not enough about setting up a city that people want to live in….None [of his pro-business policies] do much good for the population in a city that has virtually no sizable supermarkets, not a single movie theater in its downtown area, and very few restaurants outside of a few-block Greek Town section. Aside from a few Home Depot stores, the city has no big box retail either. The result, not surprisingly, is that it’s a place where almost nobody actually wants to live. Until Detroit provides a friendly economy for these consumer services, it’s never going to make an economic comeback…even if it dumps its sleazy mayor.”

Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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