Arianna Huffington in The Huffington Post

On Free Trade: CAFTA gives sweetheart provisions to drug companies

On Homeland Security: Guns vs. butter: make it part of the national debate

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Noam Chomsky? Bernie Sanders? Nope, it was that unrepentant lefty, five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, just a few months after taking office--a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was 2.7%.

Yet today--while America's economy sputters & the middle class struggles to make ends meet--the "guns vs. butter" argument isn't even part of the national debate. Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as "ICBM nukes, Predator drones, and missile defense shields vs. jobs, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing holes in our social safety net."

On Homeland Security: Reduce military spending or America will decline

Pres. Obama proposed freezing all discretionary government spending for 3 years--but exempted military spending, even though the defense budget has increased by 50% since 2000.

We are not talking about lessening America's national security. We are talking about eliminating or cutting back outdated and redundant military defense programs.

Increased military spending has been a hallmark of nations in decline since the fall of the Roman Empire--including the Soviets matching nuclear warheads and North Korea joining the nuclear club while its people starve. If we don't come to our senses and get our deeply misguided priorities back in order, America could easily join that ignominious list.

On Social Security: Calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme is radical & extreme

And that is certainly the conventional wisdom. After all, the man does have more than his share of extreme positions. To wit (or is it nitwit?):

We know he believes, depending on which day it is, that Social Security is "set up like an illegal Ponzi scheme," and a "monstrous lie."

We know he believes that the use of conventional monetary policy tools by the Fed is "almost treasonous," and that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would be treated "pretty ugly down in Texas."

We know all that. So surely someone with a history of radical statements like these could never get elected president. Americans would simply never put someone like that in the White House, right?