Political Quotes

“in 1957, when America was caught off guard by the Soviet Union's launch of a satellite named Sputnik, Congress passed a massive education bill, the National Defense Education Act, which poured federal funds into the study of math, science and strategic languages like Russian. Thirty-two years later, the Soviet Union fell. Following the 9/11 attacks and the Commission's report, we need to rise to the challenge once again. We must intensify the study of strategic foreign languages, like Arabic, Pashto and Korean. According to the Department of Education, only 22 of the 1.8 million American students who graduated from college last year earned degrees in Arabic. This figure has remained about the same over the last decade. And as the 9/11 Commission reported, and the Washington Post and the New York Times reiterated on Tuesday, the lack of qualified personnel has left hundreds of thousands of pages of intercepted terrorist communication untranslated.…”