Obama, in his national security speech this morning, dispensed with one of the stupidest fear-mongering arguments made in the Gitmo debate that Joe has rightly deemed “political nonsense”: Let me begin by disposing of one argument as plainly as I can: we are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, [...]
1. Nancy Gibbs and I are out with a new cover story on Michelle Obama. (Subscribe to the magazine, already. $1.99 for 6 weeks.) Our full 50-minute interview with Michelle can be read here. There is also another great Callie Shell photo essay here. 2. David Axelrod thinks all this Cheney noise only underscores the [...]
First L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, ran an article giving Obama’s first 100 days a tentative thumbs-up. Then, as conservative Catholics in the U.S. were wringing their hands about the horror of Barack Obama’s scheduled appearance at Notre Dame, the newspaper–and the Vatican in general–was conspicuously silent. Then, when the paper did report on [...]
Over at TPM, Brian Beutler is reporting that part of the problem has been the Obama Administration’s failure to get its act together on this issue. I think there’s something to that. Yesterday, Jane Harman made a similar point in an interview with me, saying that Obama should have addressed all the various asymmetrical warfare [...]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a tough week — much of it her own making. But in looking at the substance of the accusations, it increasingly looks like she was right. Porter Goss was careful to parse his words in the conditional future tense when talking about what, exactly, he and Pelosi were briefed on in [...]
The usual neoconservative malingerers have been hammering me about a quote I gave to Politico, regarding Charles Krauthammer’s limitations as a columnist. Obviously, I didn’t mean to imply second-class status for disabled people. On the contrary, the distance and perspective that comes with physical deficits often leads to enhanced insight and abilities. The greatest President [...]
Eileen Smith of Texas Monthly’s In the Pink blog tells us that things are getting pretty hot in the 2010 GOP primary race for Governor, where incumbent Rick Perry is trying to convince voters that Kay Bailey Hutchison (whose 2008 American Conservative Union voting record topped 89%) is just too darn liberal for the state [...]
I am supposed to advise you that there is electricity in the Washington swamp air, a ringing tension, a sharp static, a fibrous charge that will explode at any moment. I should compare this moment to Manila, circa 1975, when Muhammed Ali was cavorting about with a rubber gorilla, taunting Joe Frazier into furious focus [...]
So after we’ve been reading all these stories about record sales of firearms and ammo, and how gun owners are stocking up because they think Barack Obama is going to take away their weapons, the NYT tells us: WASHINGTON — Advocates of gun rights are poised to win a Congressional victory that eluded them under [...]
