Trump has not said how he plans to spend the $54 billion military increase, leading some analysts to call it “a budget in search of a strategy.” How would costly weapons help in Yemen, facing famine because U.S.-armed Saudi Arabia is blockading its port?

Mr. Trump welcomes a nuclear arms race and says he wants to be “top of the pack.” In conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he rejected Putin’s proposal to extend the START Treaty capping U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at 1,500 nuclear weapons. Those already represent levels of destructiveness that would devastate both nations and endanger life on Earth. Russia might put its forces on launch-on-warning, increasing the risk of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

Trump’s proposal is as dangerous as it is cruel. Congress should reject it.

Our democracy depends on citizens who can identify valid information, analyze multiple viewpoints, and act upon their understandings ethically. Our beautiful democracy, while imperfect, does demand that we make available to all an education at public expense. The truth is, we all benefit from an educated citizenry, and we all suffer when some are not capable of contributing productively to our communities. As such, public education remains a cornerstone of our democracy and must be supported accordingly.

A commitment to educating all children is a tall order. Public schools continue to be a place where children of any social class, any religion, any national origin, any race, any sexual orientation, any gender identity, and any ability potentially come together to interact and learn with one another. Public schools continue to be a place where our democracy has its best chance for survival. While many in our country want to lay the blame for all social ills at the schoolhouse door, they neglect to see the realities of its vast undertaking and the importance of its role in the unique American experiment.

Public education is the heart and soul of who we are. Where inadequate funding from the state legislature leaves off, our local communities must step in. Six years ago our community passed a referendum to increase our property taxes to support the Monroe County Community School Corporation. In the coming election we must decide whether or not to re-affirm that support for teachers, programs, and resources for our local schools. The way we vote on school referendums reflects our recognition of the need for an educated citizenry to maintain our American democracy, and our understanding that our public schools remain the best place for that vision to be pursued. For WFIU’s Speak Your Mind, this is Angela Lexmond.

I spent nearly fifty years in public affairs, and am a former adjunct professor at I-U’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

I’m now past my Biblical “sell-by” date, but I have never seen such a mean-spirited presidential election. Soon–but not soon enough–about half of us will claim “We won,” and about half will say, “Don’t blame me.” However, almost ALL of us live in a different America than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. We can’t hop a private jet and leave our communities’ problems behind whenever we like. WE are what makes our country what it is, not the President. He or she will not stop crime in our neighborhoods or teach our children right from wrong. We can make this country whatever we want if we UNITE as a people with sound morals, values, and ethics. We are the ones that shape our communities, not whoever is President.

Picking a Commander-in-Chief is very important, but this election has been incredibly divisive. However, we can unite and hold doors for strangers, let people in front of us in traffic, be patient with others, and smile at strangers. We can refuse to let children live in a world where love is invisible and being rude and vulgar is acceptable. Showing each other more love and respect will swing the pendulum back from the hate in this campaign, no matter the result of this. If each of us does this, WE will be the winners of this election. I’m at least going to try.”

For Speak Your Mind, I’m John Clark.

Russia appears to have been involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. The deeper issues, however, go beyond partisan politics.

At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, assured the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not absorb former Warsaw Pact states. The most recent NATO summit was held in Warsaw. We plan to deploy advanced weapons in Poland.

While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the United States was involved in an intense political crisis in Ukraine, which had been a republic of the now extinct Soviet Union. Ukraine’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovich, an unsavory leader by any standards, was close to Moscow. Washington supported a revolution by Yanukovich’s political opponents, Western-oriented free market advocates. They prevailed. Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern population revolted, and Russia then seized Crimea and interfered in eastern Ukraine. Five thousand Ukrainian forces — anti and pro Russian — have been killed, along with 2,000 civilians.

Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, was caught on tape designating one Ukrainian leader as “the guy”; he became Prime Minister.

To be sure, both the U.S. and Russia have interfered in many countries, but when it comes to former Warsaw Pact states and especially to former Soviet republics, the moral issues of democracy — or hypocrisy — are overshadowed by extreme risk.

As the West incorporates former Soviet republics into NATO, as it has the Baltic states, it becomes obliged to defend them with nuclear weapons. In turn, Russia is moving toward nuclear launch on warning, with greatly increased danger of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. The next President will need to manage tensions with Moscow to avoid a new arms race.

For Speak Your Mind, this is David Keppel.

In 2008 Gary Clack of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote, “Shirley Chisholm broke ground before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” (and, I would add, Bernie).

Born in 1924, Shirley Chisholm was an African-American politician, educator and author.

In 1965 she ran for the New York State Assembly with the slogan ‘Unbought and Unbossed.” She served there from 1965 to 1968.

In 1969 she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first African-American woman elected to Congress. She served until 1983.

On January 25th, 1972, she announced her presidential bid, calling for a bloodless revolution in the forthcoming Democrat National Convention. She became the first African-American major-party candidate to run for President of the United States, and also the first woman to run for the Democrat Party presidential nomination.

She said, “In my political career, and my run for the Presidency, I faced more discrimination as a woman than for being black.”

She lost to George McGovern, but she had broken new ground.

During her years in the New York State Assembly, she worked to improve the lives of inner city people. In Congress she worked to create programs to feed at-risk families including the “Women, Infants and Children” program. She was a tireless advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment. She opposed the draft, supported increased spending for education, healthcare, and other social services, but for a reduction in military spending. She was opposed to the Vietnam War and to the expansion of weapon development.

After leaving Congress in 1983 she taught and lectured in many colleges. She visited local minority groups and urged them to become a strong force at a local level. In 1984 and 1988 she campaigned for Jesse Jackson.

She retired to Florida in 1993.

When I watched the documentary film, Shirley Chisholm for President and saw her, an African-American woman, stand up for her beliefs against immeasurable odds, I felt admiration and respect for her courage and integrity. She inspired me and gave me hope in a way that modern political leaders do not. She may have died in 2005 but her example still lives on.

She told her students, If you don’t accept people who are different, it means nothing that you’ve studied Calculus.

While I don’t disagree that guns in the hands of some mentally ill persons is a danger—I got to thinking about two questions: 1) Who is mentally ill? and 2) Who DECIDES who is mentally ill?

These might seem like questions with obvious answers, but they are not. For instance: “Who is mentally ill?” Some might answer “Psychotics” or “Schizophrenics.” But why stop there? The Diagnostic Manual also classifies other conditions as a mental illness—such as some serious forms of depression, anxieties, severe personality disorders and others. When we add up all these individuals we have a lot of people who should not buy guns if what the mayor and many others say is right.

Besides that, however, is the fact that most schizophrenic or seriously depressed persons never kill anyone.

The second question — “Who decides who is mentally ill?”– is also a tough one. Most Americans never see a mental health professional, and sometimes even people under care commit violent acts. If most people are not under professional care who should determine who can buy a gun? Should we leave it up to the intuition of the clerk at the gun shop?

The fact is that responses such as “we need to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill” is a glib, meaningless response and is a dodge to divert our attention from the issues of guns and race.

The question about access to guns is now, once again, being talked about, but so far, little is being done on that front.

August 6 and 9 mark the 71st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 130,000 men, women, and children, horribly wounding others. Speaking in Hiroshima in May, President Obama called for “a moral revolution” to rid the world of nuclear weapons, saying “technological progress without an equivalent program in human institutions can doom us.”

Yet President Obama’s own administration has failed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to move toward nuclear disarmament.

Instead the U.S. is embarking on a trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization program. Senate Republicans forced Obama into this program, otherwise refusing to ratify the START II treaty with Russia.

Arms control advocates are trying to stop the most dangerous of the new nuclear weapons, which will be more usable and thus more likely to be employed. The Long-Range Standoff Weapon, a cruise missile, increases the risk of accidental nuclear war, as an adversary could mistake one of our conventional missiles for a nuclear attack.

Let us support the president’s call for a “persistent effort” for a nuclear-free world. It is a stand for safety and sanity.

Together with Indiana University, Crane is undoubtedly the best source of skilled jobs in the region. At a time when good jobs have a way of disappearing, it is no surprise that Indiana officials, editorial writers, and citizens appreciate Crane.

The more we need Crane, the more committed we become to staying on good terms with the Pentagon – supporting everything on the military’s wish list to win its generosity to us. Senator Donnelly recently sent me a generic letter assuring me he’s doing everything he can to ensure the Pentagon receives adequate funding. The U.S. spends more on the military than the next eight nations combined.

As Chair of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Senator Donnelly may be the most important of all Senators in evaluating a new generation of nuclear weapons. Former Defense Secretary William Perry, Senator Diane Feinstein, and others strongly oppose a new air-launched nuclear cruise missile as seductively usable, possibly tempting a President across the fateful nuclear threshold.

If Crane leads Hoosiers to look away from the risks of new nuclear weapons, that will be a very high price to pay, not only for us but also for the world.

Both the news report and documentary focus on so called “Screen Teens” and assert that overuse of hand held devices is the problem. It is NOT the problem. The “problem” since time immemorial, regardless of the technology, is the issue of a power struggle between parents and kids.

What caught my eye was when the doctor-film maker turned the camera on herself and her daughter. The mother is concerned that the daughter spends too much time on her hand held device. The mother asks daughter: “What should the rules be?” The daughter, thinking that the mother has asked a true question, responds: “I think the rule should be there is no rule.”

With that response the mother clearly shows her irritation and tension breaks out between mother and daughter as it does every day in their home.

One reason for that is that the mother’s “question” is not a true question. It is a demand couched as a question.

The doctor says, “I was really having a hard time as a mom.” I’ll bet she was! She added “I felt out of control.” I would agree with her there, but I think she meant “I felt out of control” because she couldn’t get compliance from her daughter.

When questions are not true questions but demands couched as questions, tensions rise between parents and kids, screaming starts, and if I were a kid I would want to escape the daily tension by using my hand held device!

So many of our problems as parents comes from misdiagnosis of the problem. Is the problem really the child’s behavior or parental anxiety about the child’s behavior? If we misdiagnose the problem we will respond in exactly the wrong way and make things worse instead of better.

The article says that President Obama’s lieutenants argue that smaller and more reliable nuclear weapons will make their use less likely, reasoning that doesn’t make sense to me. I believe that developing such flexible weapons will make their use more likely, as the weapons will fill niches not covered previously. General James Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, agrees that “what going smaller does is to make the weapon more thinkable.”

And Andrew Weber, a former assistant secretary of defense, said that “It’s unaffordable and unneeded.”

Of course, Russia and China are very much opposed to the new developments, and their opposition adds to nuclear tension and increases the possibility of a new arms race.

In 2009, in his first year in office, Mr. Obama pledged that he would take steps toward a nuclear-free world and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons.” The Nobel committee cited his pledge in awarding him the Peace Prize.

Mr. Obama is reversing his earlier position by increasing the role of nuclear weapons in his military arsenal. His new position is just plain wrong. We must oppose these misguided and dangerous weapons.

Source

William Broad and David Sanger, “Race for Latest Class of Nuclear Arms Threatens to Revive Cold War,” The New York Times, Jan 11, 2016.