I hate to keep a Cold-War mentality about these sort of things (especially since I wasn’t really around during the Cold War) but I can’t see how getting rid of our nuclear stockpile is going to help us in the long-term.  I personally like LGF’s comment:

He’s going to achieve this amazing feat by making sure the US adheres to nonproliferation treaties. [excerpt from article]

Because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il will look at the US adhering to those treaties, and be embarrassed into getting rid of their weapons programs.

Or something like that.

No ‘rouge’ nation/state/terrorist group/club is going to stop attempting to acquire or produce nuclear weapons because the US is sticking to treaties that we should be sticking to right now.  That’s a rather ridiculous idea, to be frank.  I would think that if a terrorist group realized that the US was no longer going to have nuclear weapons they would be more inclined to attempt to get and use a nuke against the United States.  After all, if the US doesn’t have nukes anymore it makes it much tougher for us to inflict massive amounts of damage without taking over their country and attempting to regulate it in a Western democratic style.

Obama has a great quote in the article itself:

“All of this will demand the greatest resource that America has, and that’s our people,” Obama said. “In the Cold War, we didn’t defeat the Soviets just because of the strength of our arms. We also did it because at the dawn of the atomic age and at the onset of the space race, the smartest scientists and most innovative work force was here in America.”

That’s correct.  Starting with the beginning of the Manhatten Project and ending sometime in the middle to late 20th century, America had the best scientists and engineers.  Is that honestly the case anymore?  More and more people are shying away from careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and we’re rapidly losing to countries like China who send their best students to America to benefit from our great colleges.  I honestly wonder if we have the capability to make the same kind of technological advances that we made with what seemed like such ease during that period.

I’d also like to take a second to expand on my personal annoyances with Obama.  For one part, he seems to be against nuclear energy.  Then again, he’s also for nuclear energy.  Would he please pick a side?  It’s rather ridiculous.  If you’re going to be against it then just be against it.  I did get a bit of humor out of this article being that I go to Purdue, I’m in Nuclear Engineering and, oh yeah, Obama made this statement in West Lafayette.  For those who don’t know, West Lafayette is the home of Purdue as well as Indiana’s only nuclear reactor, PUR-1.  Well, at least he targeted his comments well.  I will spare everyone reading this my rant on why we don’t have more nuclear power plants–but I’m sure I’ll return to that topic eventually.

Anyhow, we’ll see if Obama actually follows through on this claim or if it’s just more pandering, this time to the more liberal sides of the party.  I can only hope that he’ll realize what a large mistake he’s making.

First of all, I wasn’t too happy when Obama announced what I call the “One-Step Forward, Two Steps Back” education plan earlier this year.  What the plan amounts to is cutting the funding on NASA’s development of their next spaceship which, by the way, is currently projected to come into service 5 years after the Space Shuttle is discontinued.  After five years Obama pledges (which means a lot) to restart the funding on the project which would put the project ten years past the decommissioning of the Space Shuttle.  I don’t understand the idea of cutting one of our most important scientific ventures for the ability to, among other things, give more pre-school access to children.  Do I think pre-school is important?  Yes.  Do I think we should be relying upon the goodwill of Russia to send our astronauts into space?  Hell no.

Now, of course, Obama has added onto the waste of the government by pledging more money to faith-based initiatives.  This is getting to be quite ridiculous.  If it involves faith, the government needs to leave it alone.  The really ridiculous part of this is that Obama wants to allow faith based groups to ’selectively’ hire and fire based on religion in their ‘non tax-payer supported’ sections.  This seems, to me, to be cruising for a problem.  The loopholes that groups could easily exploit to take advantage again boggle my mind.  If their publicly funded part had one person and their other section had the rest of their employees, they could very easily grab federal money to support both parts.  Why is the government wanting to limit this funding to religious groups?  Why not social groups?  Why not sports groups?  Why not groups based around sexual orientation?  It seems ridiculous that the religious groups get a huge wave of funding simply because they are religious.  Why do they get that free pass?

Obama differs from Bush in his public reasoning for the groups:

Obama also chose a different emphasis for why religious charities are an important answer to solving poverty and other social problems: because they better know the people who are hurting, instead of Bush’s argument that religion itself is a transforming power the government must not be afraid to harness.

(And, for the record, that’s an AP story, I hope they don’t send me a Cease and Desist Letter!)  While I don’t know if Obama is being completely truthful, I must admit that his reasoning falls in line with mine much more than Bush’s policy does.  That being said, it still sounds slightly bogus–why are religious groups that much more in tune with the poverty-stricken people than, say, a teacher group that wants to help kids in their free time?  I think that a random religious person may very possibly be less in tune with poverty than a teacher who teaches at an inner-city school (like the one I am currently employed at).

The other interesting thing is that Obama, in this speech, seemed to comment on a lot of things in addition to this, including:

• Talking about his support for expanded Electronic Eavesdropping by the Federal Government
• Talking about his plan for an Iraq pullout that has been expanded to 16 months now
• Expressing his distaste for the Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Louisiana law that allowed the state to execute criminals that rape children

Obama is certainly the Democrat candidate and it is never certain that he will follow through on his campaign promises, but this is rather scary for those who support Obama and were hoping for a candidate that was separate from the Republican tactics we have seen in the past 7 years.  He’s trying harder and harder lately to show how ‘hard’ he is on terrorism and how much he’s a centrist candidate and while that’s probably popular to the masses, it’s scary to me.