The Huffington Post: on Homeland Security

Arianna Huffington: 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."

Arianna Huffington: 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 We are talking about eliminating or cutting back outdated and redundant military defense programs.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.

Chris McDaniel: Why are Muslims never portrayed as villains by Hollywood?

McDANIEL: It's funny how the movies have portrayed themselves lately and how the video games have portrayed themselves lately. There's one person that cannot be a villain in Hollywood, ever. One group that cannot be villains. Who is that?

CO-HOST: The Muslims.

McDANIEL: Yeah, isn't that neat? They'll go out of their way to find some Russian white guy that's just nuts, and he's the terrorist, which I've never seen that. But the Muslims, they've just disappeared from Hollywood's radar.

Darrell Castle: Withdraw from NATO; it's unaffordable & no longer useful

A: When NATO was formed, it has 28 members, the US was one of those members. When it was formed, there was probably some use for it. We were very concerned that Soviet tanks would come rolling across the German frontier at any minute and it was something that was supposed to prevent that. We had just come out of World War II and we encountered a new enemy and that's really not the case anymore. The US kind of entered into a deal with those other 27 countries, and that is, you won't have to provide your own defense, we'll do that for you. In return, you can use your entire GDP to advance your economies and fund your welfare states. And the United States can't afford it anymore. It's becoming a little too belligerent. Promises were made between President Reagan and President Gorbachev that NATO would not advance to the edge of the Soviet Union or the old Soviet Union, if the wall would come down.

Dennis Kucinich: Strength through peace

Jeb Bush: Deal with bullies like Putin with strength, not nuance

"I'm not talking about being bellicose--but saying 'here are the consequences of your actions', that would deter the kind of bad outcome we don't want to see."

Bush said signaling what further sanctions Russia could face, and reassuring Poland & the Baltic states that the US would meet its NATO obligations to view an attack on one member state as an attack against the whole alliance, could halt Putin's aggression. "If he thinks we're resolute, that's the greatest possibility of restricting any kind of further aggressions." However, he said, it was essential to ensure that the US did not isolate Moscow to such an extent that it ended up in the arms of China.

Mike Gravel: I ended the draft; I stopped nuclear testing

A: I'm the fellow that ended the draft. I'm the one that stopped the nuclear testing in the north Pacific. I'm the one that brought about the Alaska pipeline. I'm the one that released the Pentagon Papers and had to go to the Supreme Court because Richard Nixon was trying to throw me in jail. That's what I did 30 years ago. That was leadership then. And I was excoriated by the media at that point. I was a loose cannon. Well, right today, I've had the good fortune to live this long, and people look back and say, "My God, were you a courageous leader." Well, that's the leadership you'll get when I become president of the United States. Now, can the American people stand that kind of leadership? That remains to be seen.

Richard Burr: OpEd: Quashed release of report about CIA torture

No sooner had he become committee chairman this year when he staged an unheard of stunt in trying to reclaim from the executive branch copies of a classified report--revealing new evidence of torture via "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA--in order to bury it.

Thus, Burr attempted to erase from the official record the detailed report on the heinous conduct of clandestine operatives as the agency moved suspected terrorists from one black site to another around the world, while brutally mistreating them. If the declassified summary of the full report had not been published in national newspapers, there would have been no trace of what the senator has endeavored to cover up.

Sarah Palin: Dozens of veterans per day commit suicide; VA should help

The former vice presidential candidate also said that veterans weren't receiving the care that they needed from the Veterans Affairs Department and alluded to the scandal over long waiting times for appointments at VA hospitals: "America hands over her sons and her daughters with the promise that they're going to be taken care of," Palin said. "We can't wait for D.C. to fix their bureaucratic blunders. This bureaucracy is killing our vets. They wait for months, they wait for years to get treatment at the VA, and they're losing hope."