President Obama’s Foreign-Policy Report Card, Part II

Two notable events in the news this week showcase the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. First, the Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was captured by Pakistani authorities at a madrassa near Karachi. Here the Administration’s efforts to cultivate a better relationship with Pakistan bore fruit. Second, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Saudi Arabia, ratcheting up pressure on Iran. She declared that Iran is fast becoming a military dictatorship under the boots of that country’s Revolutionary Guards. If nothing is done to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, warned Clinton, then the entire Middle East may find itself in a nuclear arms race. Here ...

The National Debt: Getting in Touch with Reality

How bad is the national debt really?

David Walker, the non-partisan former Comptroller of the United States declared that if we were each handed our own personal share of the national debt, we’d each owe five to six times what we earn in income each year.

As bad as that sounds, it gets much worse. When unfunded entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are added to the equation, each and every citizen owes 25 to 30 times what he or she makes each year.

Let Walker’s numbers sink in for a moment.

A family making $50,000 per year owes between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000.

Only a nuclear Armageddon could harm the United States more ...

Addressing National Debt by Reforming Social Security

FDR Signing Social Security Act August 14, 1935

Government deficits and debt have reached alarming levels today, and the unfunded liabilities of tomorrow are even more staggering. The key to attaining fiscal sobriety is entitlement reform, and Social Security is as good a place to start as any.

Established in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, Social Security was FDR’s strong response to the difficulties experienced by the elderly, ...

Taxing Wall Street with Righteous Wrath: Please, Can We Be More Aware and Less Angry?

Two Thursdays ago, President Obama announced a new policy: imposing a “Fiscal Crisis Responsibility Fee” on Wall Street.  The title is both shifty and judgmental, with the judgments based more on emotion than on fact.  The fee is actually a tax. And it’s being levied on only a subset of those responsible for our recession: the ones it’s so easy to hate.

Obama says that his “Responsibility Fee” is designed in part to help the Treasury recoup its losses on its “Troubled Asset Relieve Program” (TARP), the dramatic effort started by Bush 43 and continued by Obama to unfreeze credit during our recession. The program began with loans, not gifts, to the ...

Climate Change Needs Real Science and Real Debate

The recent release of over 3,000 emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UK), has climate change experts silent and circling the wagons, fearing the impact such information could have on both their grants and professional reputations. The email exchanges portray what looks like an attempt by some of the world’s leading “experts” in climate change to silence criticism, to muzzle debate, to manipulate data and generally to politicize the science of climate change. On the other hand, the news has given voice to the so-called climate change agnostics and “deniers”, albeit not widely in “the mainstream media.” They proclaim that science on ...

The Doomsday Clock

Does anyone remember the “Doomsday Clock?”  Created in 1947 by the directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, the clock’s hands were always poised menacingly minutes before midnight, when life on earth would end in a nuclear holocaust.  The clock’s hands ticked as close as two minutes before midnight in 1953, and three minutes in 1984, moments perceived to be perilous during the Cold War.

Since the end of the Cold War, climate change and other man-made threats to the planet have diluted the focus on nuclear weapons.  Protestors waving anti-nuclear placards no longer fill the streets, and movies and books far less frequently fan popular fears ...

President Obama Should Lead to the Center

“To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades the driving idea behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable for those without it. The Public Option is only a means to that end – and we should remain open to other ideas.”

- President Barack Obama, before Wednesday night’s Joint Session of Congress

To this we say, “Amen.”

For about one hundred years, and most notably under Harry Truman and Bill Clinton, Democrats have fought for universal health care. Along the way they won big victories, like the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Still, the Holy Grail was to guarantee affordable health insurance for every American, as ...

Embracing my Distraction

My father was a Nixon man in 1967, when I was three years old. I liked to run around the house yelling “I’m for Humphrey, I’m for Humphrey!” just to get a rise out of him. He took it well for a man of his conservative political passions. My dad was a school building custodian who worked the second shift in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Boston during the years immediately following the city’s unhappy experience with forced busing. He was mugged twice and beaten up, but never hated anyone. OK, I am wrong. He did hate liberals, but he taught me not ...