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Now that census data show -- for the first time in American history -- the number of white babies born exceeded by the number of babies born to non-white minorities the question is: What does this mean for the future of American society?

Today is Armed Forces Day. We remain the proud and the free because these Patriots -- American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coastguardsmen -- have stood bravely in harm's way and remain on post today. For this, we, the American people, offer our heartfelt thanks and prayers for you and your families.

My wife hates it when I say I hate something or someone, but she usually gives me a pass when I substitute the word "despise." I suppose it doesn't sound so personal. Also, hatred is said to infect the hater. I don't really feel that way. I think openly hating evildoers is a wonderful release. That way you don't keep the honest emotion bottled up, where the pressure can build up like a can of soda that's been shaken until it finally explodes.

When NATO leaders meet this weekend in Chicago, they are expected to announce an Interim Missile Defense Capability in Europe.

This announcement might read well in the summit’s declaration, but a lot more will need to be done before the members of the alliance will be protected from the ever-increasing missile threat.

According to NATO’s strategic concept, “The greatest responsibility of the Alliance is to protect and defend our territory and our populations against attack, as set out in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.” This core tenant is what has made NATO the most successful military alliance in history. As global threats change, NATO must adapt too. As ballistic missile technologies proliferate, ballistic missile defense (BMD) is not a luxury for NATO but a necessity.

NATO has made some progress, but it still has a long way to go. It has expanded its Active Layered Theater Ballistic Missile Defense program, a command-and-control backbone of the alliance’s theater missile defense system and future layered missile defense system.

At the Chicago summit, the U.S. and its allies plan to declare that NATO has achieved an interim capability in ballistic missile defense. The first steps in implementing the Phased Adaptive Approach, President Obama’s missile defense plan for Europe, will be part of this capability.

In the past year, Turkey agreed to host the X-band radar on its territory, and the radar is already operational. Romania and Poland agreed to host land-based interceptor sites in the future, and Spain will host U.S. BMD-capable ships.

Missile defense is an area where NATO’s Smart Defense initiative could actually produce benefits for the alliance as a whole. France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain have their own short-range missile defense systems. The Netherlands, Germany, and France are also exploring options to contribute sensor capabilities and early warning. With relatively modest investment and adaptation, these platforms could eventually form part of NATO missile defense capability.

NATO should continue to advance its missile defense program. This could include jointly developing missile defense systems, establishing interoperable command-and-control systems, resolving political and military issues associated with command-and-control, and preparing operational plans in case the alliance is attacked. NATO will need to further define key missile defense capability requirements and the assets required to achieve them.

In addition, NATO will need to explore options to field a variety of land-, air-, sea-, and space-based systems capable of intercepting ballistic missiles in all three stages of flight: boost, midcourse, and terminal.

While the announcement of NATO’s Interim Missile Defense Capability in Europe is welcome, this is only the first step in a longer process. NATO leaders need to stay committed to missile defense for the long haul. The security of the alliance depends on it.

At the NATO Summit in Chicago this weekend, leaders will gather to discuss a number of issues facing the alliance. Top of the agenda will be Afghanistan, improving NATO’s military capabilities, and extending NATO’s partnerships with regional and global partners. However, nothing agreed at the summit will matter if America’s European allies do not start spending what is required on defense.

Defense spending inside NATO is increasingly declining. As Libya and other NATO campaigns have demonstrated time and again, Europe relies too much on the U.S. to pick up the slack during alliance operations. This is mainly the result of reduced defense investments by NATO members since the end of the Cold War and the lack of political will to use military capability when and where it is needed.

Since 2008, the 16 European members of NATO have reduced their military spending. Reductions in many NATO countries have exceeded 10 percent. In 2011, just three of the 28 NATO members—the United States, Britain, and Greece—spent the required 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. As expected, France fell below the 2 percent mark in 2011. Even Spain, with the world’s 12th largest economy, spent only 0.9 percent of GDP on defense in 2011.

To put this problem into perspective, New York City spends more on policing ($4.46 billion in fiscal year 2011) than 13 NATO members each spend on their defense.

However, on a positive note, Estonia claims it might reach the 2 percent requirement this year.

At the summit, NATO is expected to unveil a number of “Smart Defense” initiatives to help solve this problem. Smart Defense aims to encourage allies to cooperate in developing, acquiring, and maintaining military capabilities in a more economically efficient manner in an age of defense cuts.

While the aims of Smart Defense are noble, there is a concern that the initiative is likely to amount to little beyond a list of aspirations if Europeans invest no new money in defense. The language describing Smart Defense may read well in a summit declaration, but until real money is invested and delivers real capabilities to the modern-day battlefield, it will be meaningless to the men and women on the front lines. To work, Smart Defense requires real military capability and real money. No clever nomenclature can evade this problem.

Many leaders in Europe say that the first duty of government is the defense of the realm, but few leaders actually implement this view in practice. Spending is about setting national priorities, and Europeans have become complacent about their own defense and overly dependent on the U.S. security umbrella. Sadly, with President Obama’s defense cuts, the U.S. is not leading by example.

In case anyone was unconvinced about Iran’s hostility toward everything associated with Western values, recent provocations leave no doubt.

After blocking the Olympics website, refusing to admit a Davis Cup tennis player, and slandering the Olympic logo for being “racist,” Iran’s latest flaunt is its threat to sue Google. Why? Because Google maps has no label for the Persian Gulf.

According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast:

Toying with modern technologies in political issues is among the new measures by the enemies against Iran, (and) in this regard, Google has been treated as a plaything. Omitting the name Persian Gulf is (like) playing with the feelings and realities of the Iranian nation.

This from Iran is not surprising. It sees Western values as inimical to its own. Consider Dipu Lal, a tennis player from Bangladesh who has been denied access to Iran for reasons unstated. Yet many believe the real reason is that Lal’s brother is a U.S. citizen.

Or take the outrage at the Olympic 2012 logo (which can be seen here), which Iran alleges spells the word Zion, a term referring to the city of Jerusalem. This comes from the same country whose president has called for the destruction of Israel and has denied the holocaust.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to slip and slide on its nuclear programs, pressing forward despite five U.N. Security Council resolutions to the contrary. Its anti-Western stance, longstanding support for terrorism, and genocidal threats against Israel are precisely why it should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.

Former Governor Tim Pawlenty (R–MN), national co-chair of the Romney for President campaign, appeared on CNBC yesterday and chastised President Obama for failing to lead on stopping Taxmageddon before the November election.

Pawlenty is right: Washington should stop Taxmageddon now. Heritage has been saying just that for weeks.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R–OH) understands that Taxmageddon must be stopped soon.

In a speech this week before the Peter G. Peterson 2012 Fiscal Summit, Speaker made clear the House will vote to stop Taxmageddon before the November election:

We shouldn’t wait until New Year’s Eve to give American job creators the confidence that they aren’t going to get hit with a tax hike on New Year’s Day. Any sudden tax hike would hurt our economy, so this fall—before the election—the House of Representatives will vote to stop the largest tax increase in American history. This will give Congress time to work on broad-based tax reform that lowers rates for individuals and businesses while closing deductions, credits, and special carveouts.

The Speaker is right to have the House vote to stop Taxmageddon before the election. In fact, he shouldn’t wait until the fall. Stopping Taxmageddon should be Congress’s summer job.

There is no reason to wait and all the reasons in the world to stop Taxmageddon now. As Mohammad El-Erian, CEO of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, told Washington last week, the uncertainty caused by Taxmageddon lingering ominously in the not-too-distant future is hurting economic growth today.

The Speaker is also right that tax reform should follow preventing Taxmageddon. The country badly needs tax reform, but completely re-ordering the tax code isn’t going to happen before the end of the year. The right thing to do is stop Taxmageddon, which runs contrary to the purpose of tax reform, and then undertake tax reform next year.

The list of influential people going on the record in favor of stopping Taxmageddon is growing longer by the day. That’s why the conventional wisdom that Congress would deal with Taxmageddon after the election is dead wrong.

Consumer-directed health plans have become increasing popular because of their ability to save consumers money. Breaking research published by Health Affairs shows that if consumer-directed health plans increased as a share of employer-sponsored plans from 12.4 percent to 50 percent, it could save $57.1 billion annually in national health expenditures. The report states, “Savings of this magnitude would account for 7 percent of all health care spending for the population with employer-sponsored insurance and 4 percent for the nonelderly population as a whole.”

The study uses two types of consumer-directed plans to comprise the increased market share: half health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) and half health savings accounts (HSAs). The study shows that if the ever-popular HSAs were to take up the entire 50 percent of market share, savings could reach $73.6 billion, or 9.1 percent of employee health care spending. This is because employees save more money in the high-deductible HSAs than in HRAs. HSAs are funded by both the employer and employee, while HRAs are funded solely by the employer. Thus, any money not spent in a HSA rolls over for the employee to keep, while in an HRA, it is just money the employer did not have to spend.

HSAs prove that having more control over health care decisions goes a long way toward creating savings.

Instead of building on this successful cost-saving model, Obamacare all but obliterates it. Many provisions of the law affect HSAs. For example, the medical loss ratio (MLR), which requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent (85 percent for group plans) of premiums on medical claims or quality improvement, weakens HSAs. Obamacare’s MLR does not take contributions to HSAs into account when determining if a plan meets the 80 percent threshold. One research report concluded, “For high-deductible and HSA plans to be viable, both from a consumer and carrier perspective under [Obamacare], an adjustment to the MLR formula for the impact of HSAs may be necessary.”

Also, Obamacare’s “unreasonable rate increase” provision undercuts HSAs. As Heritage has explained before, “[H]igh-deductible plans require larger annual rate increases, because medical inflation has a greater impact on claim levels with higher-deductible plans. The larger rate increase might disqualify [high-deductible health plans] in general if the increase qualifies as an ‘unreasonable rate increase.’”

Obamacare is government-directed health policy that poses a threat to successful consumer-directed health care.

Character is a key issue in selecting leaders of our republic, but politicians are loathe to frame the issue correctly. Meanwhile, Obama edits White House bios of other presidents to include himself, he proposes another "stimulus," a big oil find is neglected by the press and major facts are revealed in the Zimmerman/Martin case that just might be game changing. All that and more.

After Vice President Joe Biden backed President Barack Obama into a corner on same sex marriage there has been a flurry of activity surrounding the issue, but not much - if any - coming out of House or Senate Republicans.

WASHINGTON -- Forty-three years ago this week, the fabled 101st Airborne Division launched Operation Apache Snow -- a major ground offensive against North Vietnamese army invaders in the treacherous A Shau Valley. Though fighting raged over hundreds of square miles of triple-canopied jungle, the focus soon became a single terrain feature, a mountain, with peaks as high as 3,000 feet, the Vietnamese named Dong Ap Bia, or "Mountain of the Crouching Beast." The Americans who fought there called it Hamburger Hill.

Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao is guilty -- of being true to his Catholic faith. The gay-marriage mob is guilty -- of the very ugly bigotry it claims to abhor. And left-wing media outlets are guilty -- of stoking false narratives that shamelessly demonize religion in the name of compassion.

Howard Stern has not been missed since he took his smutty shtick off the airwaves and onto the unregulated Sirius satellite radio. His super fans -- the brainiacs still playing their VHS tapes of a Stern show called "Butt Bongo Fiesta" -- have made the satellite radio chiefs happy, but Stern has almost vanished as an icon of pop culture. He even scaled back his radio schedule to three days a week, semi-retiring.

People have asked what Obama could possibly have been thinking to announce the final step in his "evolution" in favor of same-sex marriage right after another state resoundingly rejected the notion and despite the fact that most Americans oppose it.

House Speaker John Boehner is playing a heroic role right now. In his efforts to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring, Boehner is aggressively taking on President Obama's leadership ineptitude on the economy.

This is the season of generational twaddle. At graduation ceremonies across the country, politicians, authors, actors and businessmen take to the stage to tell young people they are fantastic simply because they are young. This year, the ritual is more pathetic than usual because there's a presidential election in the offing. And because the current occupant of the White House won in 2008 in no small part due to his success with the "youth vote," he is desperate for them to repeat their blunder.

Like many Americans, genealogy has been a keen interest of mine. I've had a good sense of where my family came from -- Spain on my father's side and the British Isles on my mother's. But what I knew was only part of the story. And this Sunday, May 20th, what I subsequently learned will be aired on the PBS series "Finding Your Roots."

WASHINGTON -- There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That's essentially the case President Obama made when he first announced his change of views.

"If we resort for a criterion to the different principles on which different forms of government are established, we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior."

—James Madison, Federalist No. 39

The president dropped by Barnard College (my alma mater) this week to deliver the commencement address. It wasn't long planned. No, the college had lined-up a woman speaker -- Jill Abramson, editor of The New York Times. But in March, as part of the "war on women" gambit, the White House decided it needed a friendly female audience before whom the president could strut his feminist stuff. Barnard, bastion of women's rights, dumped the Times gal for him in a New York minute.