Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to go before Congress today and defend the $614 billion proposed budget for the military in the coming fiscal year. Not because that’s a staggering amount, especially with spending caps all over the government. Because it’s too small for [...]

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has not ceased its holy war on birth control access, shunting aside the obvious contradiction of an organization beset with sexual abuse scandals telling other people what they should and should not do when it comes to sex. Cardinal-in-training Timothy Dolan plans to support legislation like Roy Blunt’s bill [...]

Car bomb attacks on workers at two Israeli embassies in India and Georgia could help provide a pretext for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel immediately blamed Iran and Hezbollah for the attacks, which occurred overnight. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But if the Israeli accusations are verified they would represent [...]

Because there’s no actual term sheet for the foreclosure fraud deal it’s virtually impossible to assess it, and every group who released a press statement calling it “a drop in the bucket” or a “down payment” or a “first step” should withdraw before the facts are known. But we should be talking about how the [...]

The White House has told Congressional Republicans they only have one avenue to avoid the defense trigger that would cut the military budget by around $600 billion over the next ten years: they would have to increase revenue by a similar amount. In light of Congressional Republicans’ abandonment of a key part of the debt [...]

Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of [...]

At least so far, the attempts from inside the military to warn against an early withdrawal in Afghanistan are not working. In fact, the US appeared to move in the other direction today, aligning themselves more with France than with the military moles. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that NATO would shift from a combat [...]

It’s a sad commentary on our media that the President had to answer questions yesterday about drones for the first time, and the questions didn’t come at a White House press briefing or major print interview, but in a virtual YouTube town hall with members of the public. FDL’s Kevin Gosztola covered this at The [...]

The Pentagon today announced its “lighter” budget, which should more accurately be referred to as its reorganization of the military. It’s hard to call this a smaller budget when you look at this fact sheet. The only reason the budget gets “smaller” is the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The base budget [...]

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, said today that Israel was “very far off” from any attack on Iran. More important, Israeli intelligence indicates that they have not yet determined that Iran has decided even to build a nuclear weapon. These are things you don’t hear much in the US press, so let’s run the [...]

Prior to all the rising tensions around Iran, the US and Israel had scheduled a large set of joint military exercises in the spring. Maybe this wasn’t necessarily a provocative act, but with everything happening around Iran, it gained a new resonance. So today, when the two sides postponed the exercises, some saw it as [...]