After I wrote a short piece for last week’s magazine that, among other things, chastised the Obama Administration for not doing more to discuss the pros and cons of its heavy reliance on drone strikes against suspected terrorists, an Administration official groused that I hadn’t credited public comments on the subject by various …
Obama Administration
Amid Endless Solyndra Smoke, Some New Signs Of Fire
Another week, another disconcerting e-mail dump to push the Solyndra scandal deeper into the history books as an example of why industrial policy in the United States tends to go badly. According to newly released emails, the former Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison told officials at the Department of Energy that he wanted to announce a round …
In the ArenaUncategorized
…Or Maybe It’s Just to Save Lives
The folks over at Commentary have become so twisted in their hatred for the Obama Administration–and in their perverse sense of what helps or hurts Israel–that their only possible reaction to the Administration’s announcement that it would help fund an anti-missile system to protect Israeli towns from attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah is …
In the ArenaUncategorized
OutFoxed?
Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.
But I don’t understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on …
In the ArenaUncategorized
Health Care Wisdom
Not often do you see David Brooks and Paul Krugman in substantive agreement on anything, but they are today–on the need to contain health care costs and the gravity of the President’s effort to confront this problem head on. The immediate challenge is Medicare reform: the fee-for-service system, where doctors are paid by the …
In the ArenaUncategorized
Overmatched by Events?
This is the silly season among my dear colleagues in the press. We’re at the ugliest stage of the health care sausage-making–and so there are all sorts of dire predictions going around. Of course, the wingnuts are the worst. You can see blog posts with sentences like this almost every fifteen minutes:
Suddenly, six months into his
…
