President Bush today signed into law today the G.I. Bill, which will double college benefits for troops and veterans, despite his earlier threats to veto the measure. The bill was attached to the $850 billion war supplemental that allocates and additional $650 billion for the war in Iraq and $200 billion for Afghanistan. Among those [...]
If it made sense for Barack Obama to stage a splashy event with Hillary Clinton in a place called Unity, it might have been just as significant that his call on Monday to Bill Clinton was from a town in Missouri named Independence. For all the intrigue that had surrounded this moment, the actual conversation [...]
I’ve been doing a lot of writing about the candidates’ wives and have been struck by how, for both Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain, we know much more about things such as their hobbies and childhoods than we do about the way they think about the world or how they feel about politics. Beyond, you [...]
. . . using his own campaign website. Interesting, right? Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right It’s a side-effect of the powerful you-centered campaign. His supporters can use Obama’s own campaign infrastructure to organize against him his position. All the mybarackobama widgets are there to be exploited. For [...]
At his Pennsylvania press conference today, McCain said that the Wesley Clark comment yesterday was “not an isolated incident.” “If that is the kind of campaign that Obama and his supporters and surrogates want to wage, I understand that,” McCain said, before adding that he would rather talk about issues like gas prices and the [...]
The McCain campaign would love to keep talking about Wesley Clark’s weekend comment–that McCain “getting shot down” during Vietnam is no credential for commander in chief. Indeed, even as Obama speaks on patriotism in Missouri, McCain is holding a presser in Pennsylvania to discuss the Clark comment. But Obama just took a big step to [...]
I can’t figure out if the seemingly endless stories about how some people believe dangerous crap about Obama are an accurate reflection of a disturbing and growing trend or if it’s a result of journalists’ bizarre wishful thinking, driven by preconceived notions about fly-over country and not a genuinely threatening undercurrent in American culture. I’m [...]
Face the Nation had the best action of Sunday’s talk shows, with neither Wes Clark not Joe Lieberman distinguishing himself. Clark is just plain wrong when he says that “getting shot down” doesn’t qualify as foreign policy experience. I think McCain’s Vietnam war experience gives him important perspective on the horrors of war and should [...]
George Packer argues, correctly, that Barack Obama needs to recalibrate his position on Iraq to reflect the changing situation in Mesopotamia. One quibble: Packer says that a too-rapid withdrawal might lead to a revival of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)…an unlikely scenario, I think, given the Sunni population’s total rejection of AQI’s severe interpretation of [...]
