Reacting to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s announcement yesterday that U.S.-led international forces would shift from their lead role in combat operations to a primary role of training Afghan forces, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney resorted to distorting the announcement before a Las Vegas crowd. Calling President Obama “misguided and so naive,” Romney said:

Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy. His secretary of defense said that on a day certain, in the middle of 2013, we’re going to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan… So the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it. Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with and tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops?

But Panetta did not announce any troop withdrawals. He said that in in mid-2013 the U.S. and its allies will shift in roles from one of primarily combat to one of primarily training and advising local allies — a move many experts have said is a necessary step toward ending the war. And this plan isn’t necessarily all that new. U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen laid it out last month. In fact, Panetta even added, amid the same announcement that Romney misstated, that U.S. troops would remain at the ready to fight if needed. “It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be combat-ready; we will be, because we always have to be in order to defend ourselves,” Panetta said.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a habit of trying to prove his fiscally conservative bona fides by making mountains out of mole hills. A few months ago, he literally made a federal case out of a non-existent $16 muffin “scandal.”

Now Coburn is holding hostage $20 million in funding for the September 11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero, trying to force Democrats to make deep cuts to other programs by pushing an emotional hot button:

Sen. Tom Coburn is blocking legislation that would provide $20 million a year in federal funding for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at ground zero, demanding that co-sponsors of the bill come up with cuts to pay for the spending, his office confirmed to POLITICO.

“Our debt is our greatest national security threat, and Dr. Coburn makes no apologies for forcing Congress to make choices and avoid unnecessary borrowing,” said John Hart, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Republican. “If providing federal funding for this effort is a critical national priority, the sponsors should pay for this effort by reducing spending on lower-priority programs.

“It is also important to question why we need a $20 million earmark for a 9/11 memorial when private and patriotic Americans across the country are generously supporting this noble cause,” Hart added.

If Coburn believes the memorial is such a “noble” and “patriotic” undertaking, the more obvious question is why doesn’t he believe the government should support it with more than just words. By using the loaded term “earmark” to describe the project, his spokesman effectively lumped it together with wasteful boondoggles like the infamous bridge to nowhere.

This disparaging characterization of the 9/11 memorial (with phrases like “unnecessary borrowing”) makes it clear that Coburn does not consider it a “critical national priority,” as sponsors of the bill do.

Moreover, it’s deeply ironic that Coburn’s office cites his concern for “national security” to defend his opposition to commemorating the lives lost in the worst act of terrorism on American soil.

Political Correction points out that Coburn’s grandstanding is “substantively meaningless.” $20 million represents less than 0.001 percent of the federal budget, so contributing to the memorial would have virtually no effect on national debt. Last year Coburn also blocked a bill to provide health care and other benefits to 9/11 first responders who were sickened by dust from the attacks.

A group of Senators led by Arizona Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl today unveiled a bill to try to prevent nearly $500 billion in cuts to military spending, which were mandated after the congressional debt commission’s super committee failed to agree on where to trim $1.2 trillion from the federal budget.

Their plan calls for delaying the implementation of the mandatory spending cuts one year (in to 2014) in order to figure out how to offset the reductions. The Republicans don’t plan on raising taxes however. Instead, they want to cut federal jobs and freeze federal workers’ pay, Reuters reports:

The new proposal by McCain, Kyl and four other Senate Republicans would spare the military and selected domestic programs of cuts set to go into effect in January 2013. The $127 billion in budget savings would be achieved, instead, by scaling back the federal workforce and freezing its pay.

The move is designed to buy time for lawmakers to decide on more orderly reductions than the across-the-board cuts put in place after a special congressional committee failed to develop a deficit reduction plan last year, a Republican aide said.

“Let’s not let a domestic issue such as tax increases interfere…with our nation’s security,” McCain said at the bill’s unveiling on Capitol Hill today. In fact, the military can more than afford the extra $500 billion in cuts. Not only has the U.S. defense budget doubled in the last 10 years, the U.S. spends more than the next 14 countries combined. Indeed, as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said, “it’s difficult, but it is not super hard” to make the reductions.

Democrats, however, balked at the plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called the bill “unfair.” Referring to the fact that McCain and many of his GOP colleagues had indeed voted for the plan that ended up resulting in the sequester cuts, Reid added, “I believe that an agreement is an agreement. I believe that a handshake is a handshake. Here we have more than a handshake – we have a law that is in place in our country. They should keep their word. That’s what the American people expect them to do, and that’s what I expect them to do.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reminded Congress earlier this week that U.S. intelligence estimates indicate that Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, U.N. nuclear inspectors report that their recent talks in Tehran made for a “good trip” and scheduled a second round of talks for later this month, and a flurry of recent articles from experts have cast doubt on the effectiveness of a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

While some of the more hawkish rhetoric and efforts to drive forward on unilateral sanctions continue to come out of Congress, the new United Technologies/National Journal “Congressional Connection Poll,” found that public support for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is extremely low.

Forty-seven percent of respondents favored economic sanctions against Iran, only 13 percent said the U.S. should “go farther and take covert action against Iran such as sabotage and assassination of scientists working on their nuclear program,” and 17 percent would support “tak[ing] military action against Iran, including bombing weapons facilities inside the country.”

The combination of E.U. sanctions banning oil purchases from Iran and tighter U.S. sanctions led 60 percent of National Journal’s “National Security Insiders,” in a separate poll, to conclude that the new sanctions regime will stave off the need for military action.