This is the silly season among my dear colleagues in the press. We’re at the ugliest stage of the health care sausage-making–and so there are all sorts of dire predictions going around. Of course, the wingnuts are the worst. You can see blog posts with sentences like this almost every fifteen minutes: Suddenly, six months into [...]
Hillary Clinton today promised that the U.S. would protect the Middle East–implicitly, with a nuclear umbrella–if Iran ever acquires a bomb. This set off some jitters in Israel, where the Defense Minister Dan Meridor thought that Clinton was implying that the U.S. was ready to accept an Iranian bomb. Clinton then said her statement represented [...]
When President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor made her rounds on Capitol Hill, one of her harshest critics was South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham who said after that first meeting that he was “deeply troubled” by her nomination. Something must have happened on the way to the hearings last week because on [...]
It’s not quite the other shoe everyone was waiting to drop, but Alaska Governor (for the next four days) Sarah Palin is facing some ethics questions about the Alaska Fund Trust, a fund she started to raise money to pay for legal fees to defend against ethics complaints. An independent report commissioned by the state’s [...]
In a rare moment of Congressional courage and sanity, the Senate has refused to fund the continuation of the F-22 fighter jet program. The Pentagon didn’t want the planes, whose best use would have been dogfights against the mighty Al-Qaeda air force. The President threatened a veto. But there were plenty of jobs at stake, [...]
A look at why cash-strapped Governors are resisting one of Washington’s biggest ideas for expanding coverage. UPDATE: The NGA has sent this letter to Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley. Also, here’s their latest assessment of the economic situation in the states: Grim and getting grimmer.
When I visited Iran in 2001, several people told me I had to meet Bijan Khajepour–an Iranian expatriate who had returned to his homeland after Mohammed Khatami’s victory in the 1997 presidential election, in the hope that Iran wasabout to rejoin the world. In fact, Bijan was not only a great source of information about [...]
Bob Woodward is body armor in official Washington. He’s protection against the verdict of history, since his insider books are usually the first attempt to explain the inner workings of any given Administration. You want to be on his good side; just ask Colin Powell. So when former General Jim Jones invited Woodward along on a [...]
