At 2:43 PM local time today, North Korea fired artillery rockets at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong setting dozens of residential homes ablaze, wounding three civilians and fifteen soldiers, and killing two South Korean Marines. South Korea responded with artillery fire of their own but while they placed fighter planes on alert none took off. For hours North Korea offered no explanation for the attack on the island, which is two miles south of the Northern Limit Line and eight miles from shore, but by late in the evening …
Pat-downs and body scanners seem to be keeping some from getting in the Thanksgiving spirit this week. As if the security lines weren’t bad enough during the busiest time of the year to fly, travelers are now faced with the invasive screening measures. Seniors speculate how to get out of their wheelchairs to walk through scanners, and parents wonder if their toddlers will be selected for additional screening. The bottom line is that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is currently treating every traveler as a threat. Last week Homeland Security …
The U.S. defense budget is currently inadequate to meet the nation’s security needs. Yet, a panel led by retired U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, the former Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Alice Rivlin, budget director under President Clinton, has proposed to reduce the federal debt by making drastic cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. Defense spending, however, is not the cause of America’s fiscal woes. Rather, mandatory spending on entitlements and interest on our debt currently accounts for over 50 percent of the federal budget, while defense spending accounts …
Much is at stake for President Obama in the lame duck session. New START, an offensive arms control treaty with the Russian Federation, is capturing the stage as the most important foreign policy issue before the new Congress is sworn into the office in January. However, concerns with New START are real and transcend the accusations that Republicans seek to obstruct the vote in the lame duck for political reasons. Gary Samore, Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation, …
Three weeks ago, Democrats took what President Obama dubbed a “shellacking” at the polls: Republicans picked up 62 seats in the House, enough to gain a majority, and six in the Senate. The next day, the post-election analysis and finger-pointing began. Defeated Democrats blamed the President. Defeated Republicans blamed the media and the Washington establishment. The President (whose usual reaction is to blame Bush) blamed the American people’s anxiety over not feeling the change he had promised. All blame games aside, the real question remains unanswered: what did the 2010 …
The President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is not set to release its final recommendations on how best to tackle deficit spending and entitlement reform until December 1. However, several of its members have already gone public with proposals to reduce runaway spending and put Medicare and Medicaid, two of the fastest-growing entitlement programs, on the road to solvency. The commission co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, released a report that takes several positive steps in reforming Medicare, including opting to repeal the Sustainable Growth Formula. Alice Rivlin …
It’s time for speculation in Washington. And the question on everyone’s mind is what exactly Congress will do during the Lame Duck session? The DREAM Act has been talked about as one possibility. In September, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D–NV) attempted (and failed) to incorporate the DREAM Act into the Defense Authorization Bill. However, Reid has a big incentive to try to push forward with passage before the end of the year. He promised to bring the act up for a vote during his hotly contested Senate reelection campaign …
What do Senators Jon Kyl (R–AZ), Scott Brown (R–MA), and George Voinovich (R-OH) all have in common? One Senator is from a blue state, one from a red state, and the other is retiring from office all together. But last week each of them told the White House that, despite their belief in the need for a nuclear treaty with Russia, this lame duck is not the right time to vote on President Barack Obama’s New START. Faced with these setbacks, the Obama Administration has gone into campaign mode, throwing …
Pyongyang revealed a covert facility for enriching uranium to a visiting U.S. scientist last week. Dr. Siegfried Hecker, former head of the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, stated he was shown a vast plant containing “hundreds and hundreds” of centrifuges—North Korea claimed 2,000—controlled by an “ultra modern control room.” The discovery affirms a U.N. report released earlier this month that North Korea continues to “use a number of masking techniques in order to circumvent the Security Council measures” to curtail Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. Although the United States has long …
President Obama’s flying visit to Lisbon this weekend resulted in a mixed bag of results. On a practical level, NATO made big strides in fashioning the transatlantic alliance for the 21st century. On a personal level however, President Obama did not succeed in turning this weekend’s summits into ones that prioritized new START. By far and away, the most important of the three summits this weekend was the NATO heads-of-state summit. The alliance agreed its first Strategic Concept of the millennium, outlining NATO’s core purpose and tasks. The 2010 Strategic …
