Al Gore takes some shots at President Obama in a new Rolling Stone essay, grumbling that he has “thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change.” Wait: Isn’t that Al Gore’s job? The president’s job is the action, not the case-making. And while I don’t [...]
In November of 1986, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the Politburo about his country’s futile war in Afghanistan. The conflict had already dragged on for six years, Gorbachev told his comrades, but no end was in sight. “In general, we haven’t found the key to resolving this problem,” the communist leader explained, according to Gregory [...]
On our sister blog Battleland, TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson has a bracing take on the drawdown strategy for Afghanistan that President Obama articulated Wednesday night. As Mark writes: Obama’s decision simply locks into place a U.S. drawdown that may doom all that has been achieved in Afghanistan over the past decade. Military success is [...]
President Obama arranged for the television networks to break from local programing Wednesday so he could announce his decision to withdraw 30,000 troops from Afghanistan by next summer, and transition out of combat there by 2014. But the Americans who tuned in got to watch a different speech altogether.
While Mitch McConnell is betting that the economy will bring down President Obama, Democrats are betting that Republicans aren’t immune to the bad jobs numbers either. Senate Democratic leaders held a press conference this morning calling on Republicans to include a short-term stimulus package as part of the deficit reduction deal. “Look at polls in [...]
You know things are bad when even the optimists sound unsure about the future. The Federal Open Market Committee came out with more negative predictions for inflation, economic growth and unemployment today, but still said that by the end of 2013 everything should be much better than it is now. However, at his second-ever press [...]
–U.S. Senator Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee, criticizing the body for taking up “filler” bills and doing “almost nothing” this year.
Last month, for this story in the dead-tree edition, I asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell if defeating President Obama is still his No. 1 priority. “Yeah, sure. I think every Republican in the country would like to elect a Republican president,” McConnell told me. “But that’s next year. The question this year is: what are [...]
Which arm of government is most deplored by today’s Republican Party? It might be the allegedly jobs-killing Environmental Protection Agency. Or perhaps it’s the Health and Human Services Department, now tyrannically implementing Obamacare. But moving closer to the top of this list every day is an unlikely suspect: The Federal Reserve.
As esteemed Swampland alum Mark Thompson explains, the devil is in the details: The outlines seem clear: Obama will declare some kind of success tonight and call for the 30,000 troops he sent into Afghanistan as a “surge” force over the last 18 months to come home by the end of next year. The key [...]
