A smart Democratic operative fretting about the midterm elections made an interesting point to me today: How valuable might Hillary Clinton have been to the Obama White House as a campaign surrogate this year if she were still in the Senate and not at Foggy Bottom? My friend argues that Clinton could have saved Arlen [...]
Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” begins with a famous maxim I suspect every reporter has mulled at some point. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she writes. It’s a provocative thesis, but I [...]
There are a few very simple truths about how health insurance works, which some commentators and politicians can’t seem to grasp. The result is a constant drumbeat of disingenuous statements that misrepresent how health reform will work and why the Affordable Care Act was written as it is. The latest failure to grasp comes from [...]
The wolf wars continue to rage in the Rockies. Ever since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed gray wolves from the endangered species list in May 2009, animal-rights activists and hunting supporters (amongst others) have been howling at each other. We covered the controversy from the “hunter harassment” angle back in April, but a [...]
The New York Times has a vital piece today about the negotiations apparently taking place between Hamid Karzai and the Pakistanis. If it is true that the Pakistanis can deliver the Haqqani Taliban faction–which the American military considers the most vicious of the three main Taliban groups–then we may be at a turning point in [...]
I’ve been glued to the mind-numbing spectacle of financial reform conference committee unfolding on C-SPAN 3: Crusty old men testily kvetching about GSE reform for the the 4000th time in two weeks. But they went on break for a bit, so I had a chance to get in some real TV. Here’s Bristol Palin’s acting [...]
A short piece from me in this week’s dead tree edition about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s GOP opponent.
As expected, the trial of former Gov. Big Hair is proving a nuisance for the administration of Barack Obama, which has plenty of other things to worry about far more pressing than what political favors were and were not traded, discussed or rejected years ago in the shadowy underworld known as Chicago politics. Issue #1 [...]
President Barack Obama meets with his national security team on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Situation Room of the White House, June 23, 2010. Seated at the table are, from left, General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Vice [...]
