The junior Senator from Arizona, Jon Kyl, is taking an hour to attack the New Start treaty as the battle between him and Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana gets underway today. In his opening, Kyl made 10 substantive points. Some track what he has been saying, but others call into question whether he has [...]
Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana has taken the Senate floor to deliver a 45-minute speech urging his colleagues to pass the New Start treaty. Close followers of Congress know that he rarely takes the floor for anything, leaving it largely to his more theatrical colleagues. In this case he is defending a treaty he [...]
I wrote this brief tribute to Richard Holbrooke in the current issue of the magazine. Obviously, there’s a lot more to say about the man–and others are saying it eloquently, particularly Michael Elliott on Time.com yesterday and Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic. Both reflect my feelings, although my experience with Richard was somewhat different [...]
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and Arizona Sen. John Kyl have turned resistance to a new START treaty with Russia into a religious calling. “You can’t jam a major arms control treaty right before Christmas,” DeMint tells Politico. “What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did [...]
Mark Zuckerberg Runners up: The Tea Party, Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai, The Chilean Miners
My first reaction to Richard Holbrooke’s “You’ve got to stop this war” comment to his Pakistani surgeon was that Dick obviously was joking, trying to ease the mood–which would have been very much like him. I was, thus, surprised when people seemed to be taking the comment seriously today–I mean, why would he implore his [...]
The initial Washington Post report that Richard Holbrooke’s final words to a Pakistani surgeon were, “You’ve got to stop this war,” felt like a stark message to the wider world: That only serious and honest Pakistani cooperation–specifically by means of flushing Taliban and al Qaeda fighters out of their sanctuaries along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, something [...]
