He’s good. You forget that when you haven’t seen him in a while. He seemed entirely in command, not at all rattled by the toxic political dust storm swirling in Washington. His answers were supple, substantive. The questions were pretty good. The key point that he hammered was the ugliness of the status quo. “If you heard there was a …
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Certified American
I just watched Brian Williams spend a precious five minutes of his evening newscast on the question of whether Barack Obama is actually American. Let me end the suspense: he is. There is a birth certificate. He was born in Hawaii. You knew that, right? But right-wing nutballs and media giants like Lou Dobbs–whose presence on CNN is a …
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
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Hillary and Iran
Hillary Clinton today promised that the U.S. would protect the Middle East–implicitly, with a nuclear umbrella–if Iran ever acquires a bomb. This set off some jitters in Israel, where the Defense Minister Dan Meridor thought that Clinton was implying that the U.S. was ready to accept an Iranian bomb. Clinton then said her statement …
Graham Becomes 5th* Republican for Sotomayor
When President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor made her rounds on Capitol Hill, one of her harshest critics was South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham who said after that first meeting that he was “deeply troubled” by her nomination. Something must have happened on the way to the hearings last week because on …
Palin Faces Ethics Questions
It’s not quite the other shoe everyone was waiting to drop, but Alaska Governor (for the next four days) Sarah Palin is facing some ethics questions about the Alaska Fund Trust, a fund she started to raise money to pay for legal fees to defend against ethics complaints.
An independent report commissioned by the state’s Personnel …
Shot Down
In a rare moment of Congressional courage and sanity, the Senate has refused to fund the continuation of the F-22 fighter jet program. The Pentagon didn’t want the planes, whose best use would have been dogfights against the mighty Al-Qaeda air force. The President threatened a veto. But there were plenty of jobs at stake, especially in …
Free Bijan Khajepour
When I visited Iran in 2001, several people told me I had to meet Bijan Khajepour–an Iranian expatriate who had returned to his homeland after Mohammed Khatami’s victory in the 1997 presidential election, in the hope that Iran wasabout to rejoin the world. In fact, Bijan was not only a great source of information about the country, he
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Getting Defensive at NSC, State
Bob Woodward is body armor in official Washington. He’s protection against the verdict of history, since his insider books are usually the first attempt to explain the inner workings of any given Administration. You want to be on his good side; just ask Colin Powell. So when former General Jim Jones invited Woodward along on a trip to the …
Israel’s Rejectionist Front
Benjamin Netanyahu’s phony flexibility on a two-state solution was always transparent–and it’s now becoming apparent that Israel is the prime impediment to progress in the Middle East. Over the weekend, the State Department asked Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren to convey U.S. displeasure over continued Israeli settlement expansion in …
Monday Morning Mormon Meeting
There’s been some chatter today about the fact that Obama is meeting at the White House today with Thomas Monson, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also referred to as the Mormon church). As with Obama’s Vatican visit a few weeks ago, there’s always interest when a president meets with the head of a major …
Dr. No
The sun rises in the east. The sky is blue. Bill Kristol advises Republicans to vote against health care reform. The first time he tried this, in 1994, he established a reputation for tactical “brilliance,” as he managed to intimidate Bob Dole–whose life was saved by government health care–into opposing the Clinton effort. The …
Afghanistan: The Battle For Helmand
Here’s some good reporting from the intrepid Pamela Constable about the situation in Helmand Province. I love the fact that our new Ambassador Karl Eikenberry is (a) getting out to the provinces on a regular basis and (b) not just visiting the troops, but walking through the bazaar, talking to the locals, getting a sense of what they need.