Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) today filed a cloture motion on Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be the next Defense Secretary, saying he was forced to file the motion — which effectively means that 60 votes will be required for an up or down vote on Hagel — because Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-OK) and other Republicans “aren’t willing to consider” the Nebraska Republican’s nomination.

“This is the first time in the history of our country that a presidential nominee for Secretary of Defense has been filibustered,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “What a shame.” Watch the clip:

The cloture vote is scheduled for Friday and It’s unlikely Senate Republicans will be able to derail Hagel’s confirmation. At this point, their obstruction and delay appears to be just that: obstruction and delay.

But it’s worth remembering who wants Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense — former top military and defense officials from both parties, 50 former U.S. ambassadors, veterans and military families, a bipartisan group of former national security advisers, and the country’s most prominent newspapers and journalists — and who doesn’t: James Inhofe, Ted Cruz, Bill Kristol, Rick Santorum, Elliott Abrams, and Jennifer Rubin. You do the math.

Less than twenty-four hours after President Obama announced an executive order aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure and called for congressional action on cybersecurity in his State of the Union Address, Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) reintroduced the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) to the House.

CISPA caused widespread outcries from privacy and civil liberties advocates when it was considered in 2012 due to provisions that would in effect allow intelligence agencies a backdoor into the personal information of most Americans by allowing companies to share information about activities on their network with very little oversight. The version of the bill introduced for the 113th Congress is unchanged from the amended version from the 112th session, which President Obama threatened to veto. Indeed, press materials from the House Intelligence Committee say “the bill that was introduced today is identical to the ‘Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act’ (H.R. 3523) that passed the House by a strong bipartisan vote of 248-168 in April 2012.”

Online privacy advocates began organizing a response based on rumors of its revival earlier in the month, with Fight for the Future launching the site Cispaisback.com and Gregory T. Nojeim, Director of the Project on Freedom, Security & Technology at the Center for Democracy & Technology telling ThinkProgress “CISPA is deeply flawed” and recommending Members “seriously consider” if they wanted to re-open the debate over the bill.

In his State of the Union address last night, President Barack Obama referred to the need to reduce the force structure of our strategic military systems by cutting the number of deployed nuclear weapons. Press reports over the last year have indicated that military and civilian leaders have settled on a plan to reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons by one-third, to between 1,000 and 1,100, down from 1,700. President Obama should push for such a reduction, which would follow the practice of his predecessors and improve our national security. As the Center for American Progress has argued for the last decade, this move makes sense both strategically and fiscally, and is long overdue.

When President George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, he moved to cut our stockpile of nuclear weapons—which at that time numbered about 6,000 to the lowest-possible number consistent with our national security. The president offered to make these cuts unilaterally, but Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted the reductions codified in a treaty that would limit deployed nuclear weapons to less than 1,500 warheads for each country. In 2002, under pressure from Russia, President Bush agreed to a legally binding accord the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT—which stated that both sides will limit their arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons each.

Subsequently, in 2010 President Obama negotiated a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, with Russia that calls for reducing each country’s number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 by 2018, but places no limits on the total number of warheads, which now number 5,000. This was an impressive and welcome achievement. But analyses by the Air War College, Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander of U.S. Strategic Command; and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) all argue that these numbers of deployed and reserve nuclear weapons and warheads are far more than the United States needs for the purpose of deterrence in the 21st century.

Analysts at the Air War College argue that the United States can achieve deterrence with a total nuclear force (deployed and reserve) of 300 weapons, while Gen. Cartwright believes a total of 800 (400 deployed and 400 in reserve) would be sufficient.

These reductions would result in substantial savings. The United States currently spends about $55 billion a year to maintain its triad of nuclear-capable bombers, land-based ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Moreover, if the United States wants to refurbish, repair, and modernize its existing nuclear arsenal in its current size, we will have to spend about $600 billion over the next decade. Adapting the Cartwright plan would save approximately $120 billion. Depending on the specifics of its implementation, even President Obama’s more moderate target could save tens of billions over the next decade. Additionally, reducing our nuclear footprint will reduce long-term maintenance costs and reduce the risks of theft or mishandling of nuclear material.

Given the pressure that all government expenditures will face over the next decade due to our fiscal problems, maintaining our current oversized nuclear arsenal is unnecessary, unaffordable, and unwise. The savings from reducing our nuclear arsenal can be used for either more pressing national security priorities or to pay down the national debt. This is why the Center for American Progress has advocated for reductions to our nuclear spending for nearly a decade and why we fully support President Obama’s planned reductions.

Lawrence Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

During last night’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama pledged that the United States would work towards ending extreme poverty around the world within the next two decades.

“[P]rogress in the most impoverished parts of our world enriches us all,” Obama said standing before the combined Federal government. “In many places, people live on little more than a dollar a day,” he continued, referring to the much cited World Bank definition of extreme poverty.

Obama then described exactly what ending such abject poverty would entail:

OBAMA: So the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades: by connecting more people to the global economy and empowering women; by giving our young and brightest minds new opportunities to serve and helping communities to feed, power, and educate themselves; by saving the world’s children from preventable deaths; and by realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation.

Obama’s declaration came amid a section of the speech talking up other, seemingly higher profile international issues — such as the use of targeted killing in the fight against Al Qaeda and warning North Korea against further provocations. The firmness of the statement, however, stood out as the first time that a President has directly set such a target during a State of the Union Address.

Obama’s commitment echoes the eight principles in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set forth by the United Nations in 2000. The MDGs have managed several successes since their implementation, including cutting global extreme poverty in half ahead of schedule. Other goals, including reducing the number of urban-dwellers living in slums and improving access to clean water, have been met early as well.

Many goals, however, will remain incomplete when the 2015 deadline set for many of the MDGs is reached. CAP Chair John Podesta was named to be a part of the High-Level Panel on Development, charged with charting a post-2015 course for development, by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last August. The panel has met several times already, discussing a wide range of issues, including those in the President’s call to action. Podesta has written a white paper detailing possible approaches to connect the poorest of the poor to the global economy and give the poor the tools they need, like access to education and health care, to contribute to the development of their countries. The Panel is due to present their findings to the Secretary-General by June.

President Obama signed a long rumored executive order aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure and a Presidential Directive on Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience before the State of the Union yesterday.

The executive order creates new information sharing programs under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide threat and attack information to U.S. businesses, opens up the voluntary Enhanced Cybersecurity Services program to other sectors participating in critical infrastructure beyond the defense industrial base, and calls for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to implement a cybersecurity framework to reduce the cyber risks to critical infrastructure.

Under the order, agencies and the private companies participating in the information sharing program are also required to incorporate privacy and civil liberties safeguards based upon the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPS) and other applicable standards. The Chief Privacy Officer and the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of DHS will also produce an annual report on the privacy and civil liberty impacts of the programs outlined in the order, and provide guidance on how to minimize or mitigate those risks.

Largely due to these provisions, online privacy advocates have applauded the order, in stark contrast to other cybersecurity proposals in recent years. While cybersecurity breaches have made big headlines in recent months, with the hacking of major newspapers and new revelations about the network insecurity some federal agencies, legislative efforts to address the issue languished in 2012 — although much to the dismay of privacy advocates, the most troubling of them, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), appears to be attempting a comeback.

Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) President Leslie Harris released a statement praising the order’s protections and emphasis on sharing the government’s cybersecurity expertise with private stakeholders:

“The executive order says that privacy must be built into the government’s cybersecurity plans and activities, not as an afterthought but rather as part of the design. By explicitly requiring adherence to fair information practice principles, the order adopts a comprehensive formulation of privacy. The annual privacy assessment, properly done, can create accountability to the public for government actions taken in the name of cybersecurity [...]

CDT has long argued that one of the best things government can do to bolster cybersecurity is to share the cyberthreat insights and expertise it has with private industry. Rather than having the government monitor private networks, it is better for security and privacy to have private entities protect their own systems and networks. Better sharing of what the government knows will enhance that effort.”

The Presidential Directive accompanying the order clarifies the role of many federal agencies in cybersecurity, with DHS leading the effort and other agencies working with sector-specific industries to promote cybersecurity best practices, and outlines three major imperatives for DHS to pursue to improve the resiliency of the federal government’s critical infrastructure against cyberattacks: Define current function relationships across across government, identify baseline data and systems requirements to enable information exchange, and implement an analysis and integration function with the capability to process and respond to cyber vulnerabilities.

This is the second Presidential Directive to address cybersecurity, following a secret directive signed by the President in mid-October that redefined some military cybersecurity actions previously considered offensive as defensive around the same time Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of a looming “cyber-Pearl Harbor.”