There were no camera permitted for Barack Obama’s meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu last night. There were no reporters, no questions. All there was was this Statement: “The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed a number of issues in the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship. The President reaffirmed our strong commitment to Israel’s security, and discussed security cooperation [...]
It isn’t often that you get to give a Harvard professor a homework assignment, but that’s what Swampland commenters did yesterday. This came after I posted this Kaiser Health News column by Robert Blendon, the Harvard School of Public Health professor who is one of the leading experts on the intersection of health policy and [...]
TIME’s Bobby Ghosh files this post: The website of the radical imam who may have advised Maj. Nidal Hasan has been shut down. Anwar Al-Awlaki’s site no longer has anti-West, pro-Al-Qaeda messages. In its place is a generic message: “What you need, when you need it,” and an offer to sell the domain name anwar-alawlaki.com. [...]
Spencer Ackerman has been doing some terrific reporting on the military over at the Washington Independent. Here’s his latest, about two special ops Admirals–friends of General McChrystal–deeply involved in the Afghan strategy review. McChrystal has gradually put a personal, special ops stamp on his staff in Kabul–which, given the nature of the war in Afghanistan, [...]
Maybe he’s not bluffing this time. The eminently reliable Ethan Bronner seems to think Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, may well make good on his threat to quit. If he’s gone, the Palestinians are going to scuffle to find a new leader. Odds are, in such a fraught circumstance, they choose a tough guy, a hard-liner–to [...]
Few people have studied the effects of public opinion on health policy as extensively as Robert Blendon at the Harvard School of Public Health. In this post at Kaiser Health News, Blendon tells us that public support for health reform leaves little margin at the moment: When Medicare was enacted in 1965, 62 percent of [...]
There is a gem of a blog post over at the White House website. Norm Eisen, the lawyer charged by President Obama to oversee and enforce ethics rules, has posted a blow-by-blow of his recent meeting with a group of lobbyists (and others) who are upset about the new White House policy that bars them [...]
I asked a lot of members over the weekend: why pass the bill now? After the August protests there had been much speculation that the House would wait for the Senate to act. Some members said that Speaker Pelosi didn’t want them going home for another recess to face more Tea Party madness (the House, [...]
There are several possible responses to the appalling news that Iran seems to have brought espionage charges against three American hikers who wandered across the Kurdish border. Taken together with Iran’s apparent decision not to agree to the nuclear treaty it had agreed to, this is yet another signal of the Iranian regime going off [...]
