On Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden, who is traveling in Eastern Europe, sent out a warning to millions of Barack Obama’s supporters through the Democratic National Committee’s email list.
We’ve got a fight on our hands. Powerful insurance companies are pulling out all the stops to defeat the President’s plan for health reform.
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Associated Press is reporting that Iran hasn’t accepted–nor has it rejected–the plan negotiated in Vienna to have its uranium enriched for medical use in France or Russia. The Iranians instead propose that they be allowed to purchase the enriched uranium.
There are two ways to look at this reaction: as a haggle or a stall.
Fred Kaplan has a piece about the excellent job John Kerry has done persuading Hamid Karzai to allow a runoff and, perhaps, some reform measures in Afghanistan. This reinforces the piece Jay Newton-Small did for Time earlier this year, about Kerry’s renewed sense of purpose as a Senator.
Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman’s bill of unnecessary …
Add another complication to the tangle of relations–with a happy face–that is the U.S.-Russian relationship. It does not concern nuclear weapons, Iran, missile defense, Saakashvili’s Georgia or even Vladamir Putin’s creepy penchant for baring his pecs. Rather the dispute centers around an alleged criminal, whom Russia authorities seem …
There appears to be real progress toward an interim nuclear deal with Iran. Of course, assorted neoconservatives will see this as appeasement or a betrayal or the impending end of life on earth as we know it…but they’re wrong. It’s not nirvana, but it’s a step in the right direction. It may mean that the anti-missile deal that Obama …
We got sad word this morning of the death of Jack Nelson, longtime D.C. bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times and my first boss in Washington. He won his Pulitzer in 1960, for a series of stories exposing the abuses at a state hospital for the mentally ill in Georgia, and went on to distinguish himself covering the civil rights movement, …
The First Lady strays off-message at a Healthy Kids event at the White House this afternoon, rhapsodizing about the snack she craves the most:
My favorite food in the whole wide world is French fries. I love them. Dearly. (Laughter.) Deeply. (Laughter.) I have a good relationship with French fries and I would eat them every single day
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In last week’s print column, I referred to David Makovsky and Dennis Ross’s book–Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East–merely as a book with a long title. That was unfair and bad karma for my next book, whenever it should bubble forth. You gotta steer people directly to the source and …
A rather strange column today by Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post: the Europeans are concerned by Barack Obama’s “indecision” on Afghanistan:
They know that if the deployment goes forward, they will be asked to make their own difficult and politically costly contributions of soldiers or other personnel. But they are, if anything,
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Sometimes, as a journalist, you just sense the play behind the play. Rahm Emanuel’s statement yesterday that more troops would not be forthcoming until the Karzai government got its act together reflects sentiments I’ve heard expressed by several of the key non-military decision makers in the Afghan policy review. On the surface, it …
This is good news. But why not legalize it, tax it and use the proceeds to pay for health care reform?
“People talk glibly of ‘the total disarmament of the frontier tribes’ as being the obvious policy,” wrote the young Winston Churchill, who gallivanted, a bit too gleefully, with a 19th century British expeditionary force through the areas where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are now ensconced. “But to obtain it would be as painful and as …