Attorney General Alberto Gonzales replies to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy’s invitation to “correct and supplement” his testimony–Senatespeak for giving him one last chance to avoid a perjury charge–with a two-page letter in which he writes he is “deeply concerned with suggestions that my testimony was misleading, and am determined to address any such [...]

Remember all that gauzy talk about bringing democracy to the Middle East? Remember how President Bush was going to abandon the policy, pursued by previous U.S. administrations for decades, of propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East with military aid because doing so served our paramount interest in regional stability? There may never be [...]

To answer Karen’s question below, I thought Obama’s counter-terrorism speech today was just right…and not just because he sent the correct signal to Pakistan. There were a half dozen other ideas in the speech about terrorism prevention and public diplomacy that were smart and creative, including the idea of creating joint military-diplomatic teams to do [...]

Media Matters totally put their stop watches and Tivos to good use this week, documenting exactly how much time each network spent discussing Hillary’s yaboobs. The most breast obsessed? MSNBC: I wish there was something to compare it to, like, say, coverage of the ethics legislation or, you know, the war. Or, of course, any [...]

Forget last week’s silly back and forth over whether it is naive or not to meet with foreign badguys. Barack Obama makes news today with a speech on terrorism that included the far more substantive declaration that he would take military action against al-Qaeda in Pakistan without the consent of the Musharraf government. A key [...]

This just in from the Tillman hearings: Kucinich [irritated]: did the WH have a press strategy on the Iraq war? Rumsfeld: If there was, it obviously wasn’t very good. And, you know what, he’s right! There was a press strategy, and it wasn’t very good! It most consisted of Rumsfeld standing at podium being folksy [...]

While I think a tax credit system, of the sort Giuliani proposed yesterday, is probably the best way to get to universal health insurance, his plan is defective on three counts: –it doesn’t mandate that insurance companies cover everyone at the same rate, regardless of pre-existing conditions (community rating). –it doesn’t mandate that everyone participates [...]

Sorry for the late posting, but here’s what I skimmed over this morning: · “The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him [...]