foreign policy

With Washington’s government facing a $3.2 billion budget deficit, we need to cut expenses now. One smart place to start is with a two- to three-year moratorium on buying new state fleet vehicles and to begin the transition from oil to electricity in transportation.

Virtually every major automaker will sell plug-in hybrid or all-electric vehicles starting in 2010-12. General Motors is advertising the plug-in Chevy Volt for 2010. Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes will have plug-in cars on the road within three years. Last month Warren Buffett bought a major stake in BYD, a Chinese company that will have an electric-powered five-passenger car for sale this month.

Instead of buying state vehicles that will be consuming gasoline for the next decade or two, the governor should order an immediate moratorium on buying new gasoline-powered cars for the state fleet and make firm plans for the purchase of the coming plug-in cars that use little or no gasoline.

This article, published by the Tacoma News Tribune, mentions the Cascadia Center, Bruce Agnew, and Steve Marshall of Discovery Institute: PHEVs are a particular enthusiasm of the Cascadia Center, whose leaders, Bruce Agnew and Steve Marshall, believe that PHEVs are the best short-term answer to our dependence on for eign oil and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The rest Read More ›

In a speech at Georgetown University on January 18th, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threw down the gauntlet at the State Department bureaucracy by expounding “transformational diplomacy” to shift the priority and direction of the department in the post-modern, post-Cold War era. Noting that the State Department has almost as many employees in Germany, with a population of 82 million, Read More ›

Original Article This week President Bush announced a global realignment of U.S. military forces to take place over the next several years. The proposed realignment will decrease U.S. presence in Germany and South Korea, bring some units home and shift others to bases in newly allied countries such as Poland, Romania and Uzbekistan. This global realignment is not only overdue, Read More ›