Consider today the dueling columns of Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. Krauthammer, the ideologue, makes a debater’s boutique argument: Obama is just continuing Bush’s anti-terror policies with a little window-dressing. This elides the actual truth of the matter, which Brooks approaches: Bush’s policies evolved–toward legality, away from arrant brutality–in the years after Cheney’s quiet, unconstitutional [...]
I meant to post on this a few days ago, but the arrest of a key leader of the Sunni Awakening Councils in Diyala province is not a good sign. Diyala, which is located just northeast of Baghdad has been one of the toughest provinces to calm over the past two years, in part because [...]
From London, our colleague Catherine Mayer reports that the British (or at least the British press–not always the same thing) are in a tizzy over word that Obama plans to name one of his top fundraisers, Lou Susman, to be his ambassador to the Court of St. James. Catherine sends this report:
Energy and Commerce hires a speedreader. Also, it would appear that they are putting vodka in their water glasses again. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.c-spanarchives.org/flash/cspanPlayer.swf" fvars=" pid=286502-102 ; clipStart=3522.42 ; clipStop=3684.91 ; autoplay=0 " width="365" height="340" /] (H/T: C-SPAN video library)
It has taken nearly all of House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman’s energies and patience the last five months to finally get to the point this week where he thinks he has enough support from conservative Dems on his own committee to pass sweeping climate change legislation. Enter Colin Peterson, the chairman of [...]
Yesterday I wrote that all three other accounts of the September 2002 CIA briefings on EITs (Goss, Shelby, Graham) seemed to support Speaker Pelosi’s statement that they were not informed that the practices had already been used. I stand corrected. Apparently Senator Richard Shelby’s office put out a clarification to his original statement: To his [...]
It went down. Oh yeah, it did. Big time. The president spoke for a long time in a big room. And then the former vice president spoke for a long time in a smaller room across town. We’ll be talking about it for hours, or at least until something else happens. The two men, Grandpa [...]
Here’s a story I wrote for TIME.com on the Republican proposal unveiled yesterday.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, speaking to reporters this morning at a breakfast sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, sounded extraordinarily optimistic about the prospects for bipartisan support of the health care reform bill that his committee will begin writing in mid-June. “Very high. Very, very high,” he said, saying he puts the odds [...]
I think the Obama and Cheney speeches this morning pretty much speak for themselves. From the very first–the notion that those who oppose his policies saw 9/11 as a “one-off”–Cheney proceeded to mischaracterize, oversimplify and distort the views of those who saw his policies as extreme and unconstitutional, to say nothing of the views of [...]
