As a father, I question myself: what am I -- and what are we - -going to do over the next two decades to ensure that our children, when their time has come to lead, have a better world in front of them, just as we have had?

At a time when the budget is stretched to the breaking point because of poor decisions like the sequester, choices need to be made. If the choice is between taking care of our troops and veterans or protecting Europe from a ghost, it should be an easy choice to make.

Fifty years ago this week, June 11, 1963, is historically unique in having four major events that shaped the tumultuous decade of the '60s happen on a single date.

What happened to the party of Lincoln? To the party that abolished slavery and championed a woman's right to vote? To the party of Reagan who ended the Cold War and revitalized a moribund economy?

We need enemies. Homeland Security is psychological. Thus the guilt or innocence of the Gitmo prisoners and all our other detainees is irrelevant.

You can hardly point out that the Emperor has no clothes if you're not even allowed to look in his direction. And that's precisely the point of the government's war on whistleblowers. The message couldn't be more clear or more authoritarian: Avert your eyes, citizens!

Given the recent behavior of the United States when dealing with Libya, Syria, Mali, Iran, and North Korea, what we may be witnessing is a new way of applying Roosevelt's adage more along more humble lines of practice than seen certainly since becoming the world's only superpower.

Before you take your next steps to deal with the Korean situation reflect on Cold War history of American reaction to our perception of a powerful threat.

Republicans have always been better than Democrats at creating straw men. I'm not referring to those floppy figures we see in cornfields from time to time, but rather, those scarecrows that don't scare any crow with half a brain.

Targeted killing by drone has proven to be tactically effective but, as evidenced in Vietnam, overwhelming success at the tactical level does not necessarily translate into success at the strategic level.

If you chose to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," you never had a doubt that you could also turn off, tune out, drop back in, and get a job -- a good job -- any time you wanted. It's not a feeling the young would recognize now.

It couldn't be a sadder thing to admit, given what happened in those years, but -- given what's happened in these years -- who can doubt that the America of the 1950s and 1960s was, in some ways, simply a better place than the one we live in now?