Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had already rescinded 1994’s Combat Exclusion Rule. This new measure only opens the door for women to enter elite combat units.

What’s the good of a “warrior culture” of strong and stalwart defenders of the country if they’re not fighting for the American values of “fairness and equality?”

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, a Republican, faced a difficult confirmation in the Senate, as many of his fellow Republicans differed with him on fundamental matters of foreign policy.

He means mano a mano: Hand to hand.

Mano y mano means “hand and hand.”

The President is known to be an avid reader.

But it feels like Ayers is throwing a little shade at former President George W. Bush, who was perceived as uniquely incurious for someone in his office. Christopher Hitchens:

He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

But Bush was a reader! Sometimes he loved reading so much that he just couldn’t pull himself away from a great read, regardless of what was happening.

During the Richard Nixon administration, Ayers was a member of the revolutionary Weather Underground, whose string of bombings targeting symbols of imperialism and racism forced the members underground.

For those interested in finding out more about the Weather Underground, this is the definitive book on the subject

The Hague is the seat of international law. The United Nations' International Court of Justice (sometimes called the “World Court”) determines matters of war criminality.

Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the Presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was reelected in 1964.

Johnson’s expansion (and Nixon’s continuation) of the Vietnam War angered many, and Bill Ayers and others in Students for a Democratic Society formed a revolutionary cadre to attack symbols of American imperialist power. They aligned with the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups to form a network of anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist opposition.