Last year, Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) told reporters that there is “a far Left-wing fringe group that wants to disclose all our vulnerabilities. I don’t know what their motives are but I think they are very dangerous to our security.”
More hating on Wikileaks? No, Senator Bond was actually talking about the Federation of American Scientists, after we disclosed the inadvertent publication on the Government Printing Office website of a draft declaration on U.S. nuclear facilities.
Needless to say, we did not recognize ourselves in any part of Senator Bond’s confused comment. But he reminds us that much of what passes for political discourse is little more than pigeonholing of others into friends and enemies, heroes and villains. It is hard to learn much that way.
Somehow it comes as no surprise to discover that Senator Bond is the last Senator to have been “slugged” on the Senate floor, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Tuesday. It is maybe a little surprising that the person whom he drove to violence was none other than the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In his farewell remarks to the Senate, Sen. Bond briefly discussed the “little scuffle I had with Pat Moynihan. I never talked about it. We never said anything publicly until now. Later on, as we became fast friends, he used to tease me about setting up boxing matches so we could raise money for charity. But when I looked at his height and his reach, I didn’t take him up on that.”
With summer 2025 in the rearview mirror, we’re taking a look back to see how federal actions impacted heat preparedness and response on the ground, what’s still changing, and what the road ahead looks like for heat resilience.
Satellite imagery of RAF Lakenheath reveals new construction of a security perimeter around ten protective aircraft shelters in the designated nuclear area, the latest measure in a series of upgrades as the base prepares for the ability to store U.S. nuclear weapons.
It will take consistent leadership and action to navigate the complex dangers in the region and to avoid what many analysts considered to be an increasingly possible outcome, a nuclear conflict in East Asia.
Getting into a shutdown is the easy part, getting out is much harder. Both sides will be looking to pin responsibility on each other, and the court of public opinion will have a major role to play as to who has the most leverage for getting us out.