Yesterday the White House rolled out the president and senior cabinet officials to update America on the long war in Afghanistan. It was with far less fanfare that Obama’s top counter terrorism advisor, John Brennan, gave a speech today at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about U.S. policy in a country sometimes called the …
It’s been just over a year since Barack Obama’s speech at West Point announcing that he would be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, raising the U.S. force there to 100,000 strong. And after months of bleak reports about the war’s progress–the rampant corruption; the weirdness of Hamid Karzai; the harder-than-expected conquest of …
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 …
“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
Spoken to a Pakistani surgeon who was sedating him before surgery.
Matt Yglesias wondered about our intense national focus on aviation security, and wondered what it would take for air travel to become less safe than famously unsafe highway travel. A reader of his crunched some numbers:
In the US, 583 billion passenger-miles were flown in 2008… So if all that travel was done by car instead
…
National Review has surveyed the field of likely 2012 Republican presidential contenders and found that not one supports ratifying President Obama’s New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia in what’s left of the lame-duck Congress. (Only one–libertarian New Mexico Gov. Gary “The Next Ron Paul” Johnson, a longshot at best …
Did someone put LSD in my coffee this morning?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4IjHz2yIo&w=460]
President Obama will probably get his budget deal with Republicans through the Congress, though not without considerable protestation from the Democratic left. But it’s worth remembering that the idea of Congressional liberals being outraged over a Democratic president’s fiscal footsie with the GOP is far from unprecedented. This …
In his press conference this afternoon, President Obama didn’t tell us much about his tax cut deal with Republicans that we didn’t already know. But in an impassioned, even testy defense of political compromise, he did reveal his clear frustration with liberal criticism that he’s a pushover and a sellout. And he ultimately positioned …
A few weeks ago the White House ponied up $4 billion in new spending to modernize the US nuclear complex at the insistence of Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl, who has been holding up Obama’s New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Moscow. Democrats understood Kyl to have promised that he would support the treaty in return for the …
The Wikileaks dump has put some high government officials in, shall we say, rather awkward positions. But the flood of raw diplomatic cables may actually suit the purposes of one prominent foreign policy figure: John Kerry. The cables are filled with references to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman’s active diplomacy around …
President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission has finally voted* on the plan produced by its co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson–and the result was something of a non-victory. Eleven of the panel’s 18 members voted in favor of the plan, meaning it earned the majority that traditionally constitutes a win. But under the executive …
The House Republicans’ best-known budget big-thinker, Paul Ryan, is saying he finds the new proposal from President Obama’s fiscal commission an unacceptable step “backwards.” Unlike some other conservatives, who are focusing on the specter of possible tax hikes, Ryan’s big complaint has to do with health care. He’s right that the …
