The Washington Post is reporting that Pakistani experts believe Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban was probably killed in a drone strike–and that his death would be a “fatal blow” to the Taliban, coming so soon after the death of his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, also in a drone attack. To which I caution: [...]
Mark Thompson has a Time.com piece today about the coming high-noon showdown in the Senate over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, when both Secretary Bob Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen are expected to endorse a move towards allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. About half way through the story, you come upon [...]
What’s in the water in Connecticut these days? As Michael Scherer points out below, it looks like Chris Dodd is going to sacrifice sanity–that is, the notion that banks should stop being derivative gambling casinos and return to being, well, banks–at the altar of witless bipartisanship. (There is smart bipartisanship, but this isn’t it.) According [...]
In a post below, I linked to a funny tweet by the movie critic Roger Ebert. Subsequently, I found myself reading over his excellent blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, which is hosted by the Chicago Sun Times, where I came upon a post called, “Making Out Is Its Own Reward,” which recounts, among other things, a [...]
At a news briefing today, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius talked about funding for her agency contained within President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget. She talked about more money for community health centers, information technology, and drug and cancer research, among other priorities. But toward the end of the news conference, the AP’s Ricardo [...]
Greg Sargent picks this up: The GOP Senate leadership has privately settled on a strategy to derail health reform if Dems try to pass the Senate bill with a fix through reconciliation, aides say: Unleash an endless stream of amendments designed to stall for time and to force Dems to take untenable votes. The aide [...]
1. On the economic warfare front, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson says that Russia tried to mount an attack on the United States in 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, by trying to convince China to dump its investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac just as the war with Georgia began. From Bloomberg: The Russians [...]
Before September 11, Fouad Ajami was a well-regarded Middle East scholar. Since September 11, he’s had the distinction of coming from the region–he’s Lebanese–and being relentlessly wrong about it, especially the war in Iraq. More recently, since the arrival of Barack Obama, Ajami has expanded his area of inexpertise to include American domestic politics. And [...]
