Last week, extempers were given the treat of seeing President Barack Obama and former Vice-President Dick Cheney give speeches on national security. The Obama administration has continued to advocate that the Bush administration’s policies were negligent in winning international support and made hasty decisions concerning the treatment of detainees in the conflict. Not to take these allegations lying down, Cheney has fired back that Obama is trying to compromise with an enemy that will never compromise and is endangering America’s national security when he is releasing information about interrogation techniques and wanting to close Guantanamo Bay.
On top of this, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been under fire for accusing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of lying before Congress and for arguing that she was unaware that waterboarding techniques where being utilized on detainees. This has created yet another partisan, and some would say distracting, conflict on Capitol Hill that augurs ill for Obama’s promise of getting past the politics of division.
With NFL several weeks away, extempers need to brush up on their understanding of America’s national security debate. Even international extempers could face questions about how America’s image abroad is being impacted by the domestic debate we are seeing play out. Thus, this brief will provide a quick overview of the conflict between Republicans and Democrats on national security, the steps being implemented by President Obama to settle some of these national security issues and what the GOP is doing to attack Democratic opposition, and then provide some political impacts for the current national security debate.
permanent member of the world’s nuclear club?
Last week Social Security and Medicare trustees released a chilling report that documented the dire financial straits of the programs they oversee. According to the trustees, Social Security will start taking in less money than it sends out in 2016 and by 2037 the fund will go bust, four years earlier than anticipated. Also, Medicare’s hospital fund is already running a deficit and is now in danger of going bust by 2017.
Last Friday, Supreme Court justice David Souter announced his retirement, pending the confirmation of a successor. Souter has been a liberal vote on the court, progressively moving in that direction since arriving to the Court in 1990. He was a former New Hampshire Attorney General, New Hampshire Supreme Court justice, and First Circuit Court of Appeals justice before serving on the highest court in the United States.
The last several years have been fortunate for the world’s medical watchers. Fearing an avian flu pandemic across the globe several years ago, these experts have only had to watch the progression of the virus in isolated parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. Also, avian flu never became a human-to-human transmission problem, reducing the urgency required or the threat of avian flu becoming a global problem. However, the recent outbreak of swine flu, if it can be aptly called that since this strain of flu borrows from swine influenza, avian influenza (albeit not its most dangerous components), and human influenza components, which has infected nearly 1500 people globally at the time of this writing, can aroused fears that this is the next global flu pandemic. This is compounded by the fact that swine flu appears to be spreading from person to person, regardless of their contact with infected animals.
In a time of federal bailouts for corporations, aid to homeowners who are facing trouble paying their mortgages, and budget plans that call for trillion dollar deficits, a segment of the American population has had enough. Clinging to their signs and cries of showing Washington that power still rested with the people, 800 locations around the country were the site of “tea parties” last week, denouncing the policies of President Barack Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress.
by Logan Scisco