Senior Israeli Lawmaker Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran

A longtime Israeli lawmaker and former defense minister took to the airwaves and social media on Wednesday to suggest his country should do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

“It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means,” Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party said during a Channel 12 interview. “And we will have to use all the means that are available to us.”

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Declaring Our Independence From War

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

It’s Independence Day in America, so it seems like a good day to declare our independence from the insanity of war.

Sadly, since the presidency of George W. Bush if not before, it’s become routine for U.S. commanders-in-chief to boast of having the world’s finest military in all of history. Obama did it routinely, and Biden recently said the same during his disastrous debate with Trump. Few Americans stop to think about the implications of boasting about having the world’s greatest military – is such a boast truly consistent with democracy, liberty, and freedom?

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Our Nearly $1 Trillion Military Budget Won’t Make Us Safer

If you looked at the U.S. military budget without knowing otherwise, you’d probably guess we were in World War III.

Our military spending is now the highest it’s been at any point since World War II — and Congress keeps adding more. The House of Representatives just passed legislation that will take military spending to $895 billion, while the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill that would total $923 billion.

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Draft Bills Dead in California But Still Alive in Congress

A proposal to automatically register applicants for California driver’s licenses with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft was pulled by its author, Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera), just before a scheduled hearing today in the state Assembly Transportation Committee. This was the last scheduled meeting of that committee before the deadline for consideration of bills in this year’s legislative session, so the bill is effectively dead for the year.

Like similar laws in other states, California SB-1081 faced opposition from a coalition of peace, civil liberties, and immigrant rights organizations, on both policy and fiscal grounds. Pulling the bill before the hearing today was a face-saving way for Sen. Archuleta to avoid a vote by the committee not to advance his bill to the Assembly floor.

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