Minority Whips Express Disapproval Over President's Address

By Meagan Wiseley, University Of New Mexico - Talk Radio News Service.

In a press conference on Thursday, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and House Minority Whip. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) expressed overall disappointment with President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night.

“Bottom line...I thought the speech was partisan, uninformative, disingenuous and not likely to encourage those who have honest disagreements with him to be able to work towards some kind of common solution," said Kyl.

Said Cantor, “There [is] no question that the bar was set very high for this president and his speech last night. His performance did not match those expectations and in fact I don’t think that he did reach that bar.”

Both Kyl and Cantor argued that the nation's health care system can be reformed with small specific bills, as opposed to one comprehensive bill. “Start with what works, guarantee those aspects can be preserved, then we can work to fix the problems,” said Cantor.

Republicans Propose Putting GM Into The Hands Of Public

By Annie Berman -- Talk Radio News Service

Republican Senators Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), and Robert Bennett (Utah) held a press conference today to introduce the “Auto Stock for Every Taxpayer Act”. The legislation will require the Treasury Department to distribute stock in the newly restructured companies to individual taxpayers within one year of the GM bankruptcy proceedings.

“This is the best way to get the auto companies out of the hands of Washington bureaucrats and politicians, and into the hands of the American people and the marketplace where it belongs,” Alexander said in his opening statements.

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) added two amendments to Alexander’s bill. The first amendment will give the Secretary of the Treasury the same fiduciary responsibilities that any director of a company would have. The second, being that no additional money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) would be distributed to bankrupt companies.

TARP is a program that was enacted in 2008, originally, to address the credit crisis. Recently, funds from this program have been used to help banks like Bank of America.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said, “I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the Alexander-Bennett amendment because they joined two excellent ideas together in something that I think is critical.”

Alhough Kyl didn’t add any additional terms to the bill, he spoke for the American people, saying, “They are fed up with the government taking over those businesses and running those businesses.”

Kyl explained that if the government were to hold the 60% of stock that it needs to own the company, it would result in a loss. He claimed that there would be an opposite result if the taxpaying public were to own the stock instead.

When asked about tomorrow’s announcement of the Unemployment Rate, Sen. Bennett said, “I can’t forecast what we are going to see tomorrow... One of the things we have learned, is that artificial attempts to maintain employment that go against market forces prolong recessions and sometimes turn them into depressions.”

Sen. Kyl (R-AZ): Democrats have ignored missile defense

The American Foreign Policy Council hosted their second annual conference on missile defense.

The biggest themes from both Jim Woolsey, CIA director under Clinton and Sen. Jon Kyl were that we are moving away from a cold war way of thinking and a focus on negotiating with Russia and focusing on new threats from Iran, China, and North Korea.

Woolsey focused on the ideology that controls Iran and that it should be taken as seriously as Hitler. He advocated even stronger sanctions against Iran for example, cutting off their refined petroleum product such as diesel. He said that the United States should increase their outreach to citizen's in Iran who are displeased with the Amadinejad regime via broadcasting mediums like VOA. He said that caveats the National Intelligence Estimate in December had been ignored and those indicated that Iran continues to March toward developing nuclear weapons. Woolsey said if Iran continues to advance in it's nuclear development the only thing worse than the use of force would be to let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

Kyl went a bit more into Russian and Chinese threats and how a missile that travels through space to reach it's target is a "space weapon." He defended the recent shoot down of the broken US satellite as a good sign for US missile defense. Kyle was much more political saying that the Democrats have been failing in appropriate funding for missile defense. Sen. Kyl said that only John McCain would return solid funding to missile defense. He criticized a "mindset on Capitol Hill that we should be spending as much on the Peace Corps as missile defense." He called for studies on space based missile defense and full funding for missile defense. He said he feared that a new administration with the same person said we should eliminate money from the missile defense program.