America's era of strong leadership is over

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 28, 2012 — Obviously the Mayas got it wrong. The world did not end on December 21. But one thing is for sure, the era of strong leadership in Washington is over.

Gone are the days when a president and a Speaker of the House can reach a bipartisan deal to reform Social Security and taxes, like President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill did in the 1980s. Gone are the days when an American president can propose a grand idea like putting a man on the moon, and work with Congress to make it a reality.

America, your political system is broken. Your elected officials lack the political will to solve the country’s great challenges, and your Congress is dysfunctional. The 18 percent of Americans who still approve of the job Congress is doing must be lying to pollsters.

Responsible governance and visionary ideas have taken a backseat to finger-pointing, and partisan-bickering. Quick fixes and stop-gap measures have become the new normal. A short-term investment here, a temporary tax-cut extension there. Long-term solutions are no longer a national priority.

There are serious challenges facing the United States. Unemployment is high. The American Dream is slipping away from many Americans. Middle-class families continue to see their wages go down year after year. More than 46 million Americans are living in poverty. America’s infrastructure is crumbling. The tax-code is bloated and inefficient. There is no energy policy. No plan to reform education. No plan to make entitlement programs more solvent for future generations.

America is set to hit its $16.4 federal debt limit on December 31, according to the Treasury Department. $16 trillion is nothing to sneeze at. $16 trillion is over 400 million times the country’s median household income.

If you spend a dollar every second, you would not reach a trillion dollars for over 30, 000 years. If you spent a million dollars every day since the birth of Jesus Christ, you would not be at a trillion yet. And that is just a trillion. America has $16 trillion on the credit card, yet there is no serious plan to rein in the debt.

Medicare is the big elephant in the room, and no one is talking about it. Without Medicare reform, America’s long-term debt will continue to rise.

In the last 10 years, the amount the federal government spends on healthcare for the elderly has risen from two percent of the economy to four percent. By 2050, it will rise to eight percent according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are devouring 40 percent of federal spending. If nothing is done, in ten years, it will rise to 54 percent. The trajectory is clear. Entitlement spending will bankrupt America. Where is the sense of urgency to solve it?

Gradually raising the retirment age from 65 to 67 is not unreasonable. Delivering benefits to only those who fall below a certain income level (means-testing) is not unreasonable. Doing nothing at all is irresponsible.

There is a leadership vacuum in Washington, and no one is filling it. Not the president, not Congressional leaders. The American people are waiting, and the world is watching.

Can our national leaders still govern responsibly? That remains to be seen.

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The mass torture of drone strikes

WASHINGTON, D.C. December 13, 2012 — Leon Trotsky once said: “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Unfortunately, that is true for the innocent men, women and children in the Middle East who have witnessed their loved ones blown into pieces by drone strikes.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be winding down but the drone war lives on, with no end in sight. Drone strikes are one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy arsenals for fighting the War on Terror.

Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, writes that in Pakistan alone, President Obama has authorized over 283 drone strikes, six times more than President George W. Bush in his eight years in office.

Forget waterboarding, a drone strike is mass torture.

Sure, bad guys get killed in the process. But so do innocent women and children. In Pakistan for example, BBC’s Jane Corbin reports the story of a young girl named Nabeela Ur Rehman. She was tending to her cow in the family compound when she witnessed the slaughtering of her grandmother by a drone, right in front of her eyes. The trauma she must have experienced, and the fear that she continues to live with is unfathomable.

Investigators from Stanford and NYU Law Schools released a study (“Living under Drones”) about the effect of drones on the civilian population in Pakistan. Some of those effects include severe anxiety and psychological disorder.

Have drone strikes killed top Al-Qaeda targets? Are they more efficient than ground troops? Yes and yes.

The American approach to fighting the War on Terror has slowly shifted from a counter-insurgency strategy into a counter-terrorism approach. Counterinsurgency--like in Iraq and Afghanistan--requires protecting the population, winning them over, training the country’s army, and gathering human intelligence. The amount of money and military personnel it takes to successfully deploy such a strategy is unsustainable in the long run. Not to mention the inevitability of mass casualties.

As a result, we see more targeted counter-terrorism operations through drone strikes.

Read full article: 
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/elections-fastbreak/2012/dec/12/mass-torture-drone-strikes/

President Obama may push America over the fiscal cliff

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 30, 2012 — President Obama should take some time off to see the movie “Lincoln.”

Abraham Lincoln understood the art of legislating. He knew how to deal, how to cajole, how to play his hand and not overreach, and how to do it in a way that would enable some of his political opponents to save face.  He understood that he sometimes needed to get the hard liners in his own party – like Thaddeus Stevens – to tone down their rhetoric so as not to offend the swing voters in the Democratic Party that were needed to pass the 13th amendment.

President Obama can learn from that approach.

The president’s plan to avert the “fiscal cliff” calls for $1.6 trillion in tax increases, $50 billion in stimulus spending, and $400 billion in Medicare savings. The New York Times deemed the plan “loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts.”

It was immediately rejected by Republicans. “I’m disappointed in where we are, and disappointed in what’s happened over the last couple weeks. Going over the fiscal cliff is serious business. And I’m here seriously trying to resolve it. And I would hope the White House would get serious as well,” House Speaker John Boehner said.

The plan was a nonstarter for Republicans, and The White House probably knew it. So why do it? He did to prove a point. He did it to score points with Democrats, and show Republicans that he has the leverage to get whatever he wants. After all, he won re-election convincingly, and campaigned on raising taxes on high-income earners.

Read full article: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/elections-fastbreak/2012/nov/30/president-obama-may-push-america-over-fiscal-cliff/

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