Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just this past week announced the details of the Obama Administration’s Department of Defense budget. For once, it isn’t the size of the budget that has made a lot of waves, but instead the details of the budget. Gates and Obama want to radically restructure the military. [...]

Dick Cheney is on a whirlwind tour trying to justify the Bush Administration’s record on the War on Terror, especially their decision to torture detainees. Mostly he is trumpeting intelligence gleaned from a supposedly high-level al Qaeda operative who was held and tortured at Guantanamo. Meanwhile his critics are countering his claims, noting [...]

Given the date, I thought it would be a good day to go over the differences between the two presidential candidates when it comes to The War on Terror. (If you were hoping that I’d discuss whether or not Senator Obama believes that Governor Palin is a barnyard animal, I’m sorry to disappoint.) [...]

I am constantly flabbergasted by how “common knowledge”, even and especially among experts in a particular field, can so often be so wrong. And I don’t even mean “wrong if you really know what you’re talking about”; I mean “illogical at face value”. I’ll start with a couple examples from football (it is [...]

Right now, the United States is an active participant in two civil wars: Iraq and Afghanistan.

The GOP is trying to turn this election, in part, into a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the War on Terror. In particular, conservative pundits (cheered by both the White House and the McCain campaign) have attacked Obama for praising the response to the first World Trade Center attacks, bringing back the charge [...]

One of the big issues in this primary season is how the War on Terror should be fought. On the one hand, you have the Democratic candidates, plus Senator McCain and Representative Paul, who believe that the War on Terror is fundamentally a public relations war that the United States can only win by [...]

I’ve bee hearing these kinds of reports for years, but they just keep coming: the Department of Homeland Security backed down off of regulations about the storage and use of industrial chemicals.  We’re told that, for our own safety, we need to have our phones tapped, have guards see us almost nude at airport x-ray [...]

In his New York Times blog Dick Cavett describes how he was once targeted by the Nixon Administration. In particular, he testified as a character witness for John Lennon during his deportation hearings. Within the next three years, every single member of his staff was audited by the IRS. The newly released [...]

I encourage you to take a look at this series of articles being published in Foreign Affairs. In a nut shell, the journal asked each of the “top” presidential candidates to write an essay outlining their foreign policy goals and strategies if they are elected president. So far, four candidates have responded: Obama, [...]