Like any group in its infancy, the Tea Party goes through phases. Gone, or at least temporarily shelved, are the noisy rallies, the tricorn hats, the abundant signage that marked its birth in 2009. “We are not a protest …
Mark Benjamin has an unsettling story on Time.com today that investigates whether federal authorities, under the auspices of a Patriot Act provision, are scooping up personal data like the location of citizens’ cellular phones. Read it here.
At a Senate confirmation hearing for his new gig atop the CIA, David Petraeus was asked Thursday if he supported President Obama’s drawdown timetable for Afghanistan. Mark Benjamin parses the thicket of words and argues that Petraeus’ windiness says everything you need to know about the decorated general’s opinion.
The Club for Growth is a conservative advocacy group that favors lower taxes (and a flat tax), less spending, privatizing Social Security, deregulation, free trade, and so on. But its practical mission is weeding out moderates from the Republican Party. It seems to relish targeting the GOP’s grizzled veterans in favor of younger, more …
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.
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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 question is when: will they come home
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JERSEY CITY, N.J., AND EXETER, N.H. — On his first day as a presidential candidate, Jon Huntsman wandered toward the back of his charter jet to meet the press. Reporters crammed into the aisles, hoisting their cameras and …
Jon Huntsman likes to call himself the “margin-of-error candidate.” It is not an accidental phrase. In the seven weeks since the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China returned from Beijing with visions of filling …
In his 12 terms in Congress, Ron Paul has waged many lonely crusades. Before he was a Tea Party standard bearer and a master of the online money bomb, the man known as “Dr. No” was a libertarian icon who regularly bucked his …
Don’t hold your breath, our colleague Mark Benjamin writes at TIME’s Battleland blog. The House appears poised to vote on an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would cut off funding to the war non-hostile armed conflict in North Africa. While the measure could find support among the bipartisan cadre of members irked by the …
HELENA, MT—On a rainy morning in March, Derek Skees sat in a Helena hotel explaining his beef with the federal government. It was as big as all Montana.
Skees, a building contractor from the Flathead Valley, surfed the Tea …
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce called in response to my post yesterday on the ongoing debt-limit negotiations. In the piece, I linked to a quote from Chamber chief Tom Donohue, who during an event in Atlanta on Monday appeared to warn the House Republicans vowing to vote against a debt-ceiling hike: “We’ll get rid of you.”
Chamber …
Jon Huntsman will announce that he is running for President next Tuesday in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park, a source familiar with his decision confirms.
The move is no surprise. In recent weeks, Huntsman has dropped a series of hints indicating that he was nearly certain to run and was merely performing “due diligence,” as an aide …
