Today’s edition of quick hits. * Reuters: “Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the ‘war on terror’ is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday. A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a ‘fundamental re-think is required’ […]
Under pressure from Democratic lawmakers and Iraqi officials, the State Department announced late Friday that it would expand its oversight of Blackwater private security forces dramatically. The efforts include cameras being installed in Blackwater vehicles and diplomatic babysitters joining every Blackwater convoy. Iraq isn’t satisfied. Iraqi authorities want the U.S. government to sever all contracts […]
Kevin Drum raised a point this morning that bears repeating: Hillary Clinton’s “polarizing reputation might actually help” her presidential campaign. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s absolutely right. For more than a decade, she has been attacked in a shelfload of books, on countless websites and in repeated direct-mail drives. Her detractors see her as a […]
Earlier this year, right around the time the Bush administration announced its so-called “surge” in Iraq, British troops started to withdraw in large numbers. This morning, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would cut the number of British troops in Iraq in half by next spring, according to an AP report, leaving a contingent of […]
Right Wing News, a fairly prominent conservative blog, conducted an interesting poll of its brethren, asking other right-of-center bloggers to pick their favorite people on the right, and their least favorite people on the right. The voting process was pretty wide open — participants could pick anybody (there were no names to choose from). I’m […]
Demonstrating the kind of bizarre foresight for which it is famous, the Bush administration is pursuing a poppy-eradication program in Afghanistan that could undermine the Karzai government, already on shaky ground, and give the Taliban a boost. [A]mong European diplomats here, a far greater concern than any environmental or health dangers of chemical eradication is […]
About a month ago, at one of the debates for Republican presidential candidates, Rudy Giuliani said, “The reality is that I’m not running on what I did on September 11th.” He managed to say it with a straight face. It seemed like an amusing comment, of course, given how often the former mayor cites the […]
The last we heard from the Bush administration’s abstinence-only program, there was a definitive, congressionally-authorized report issued in April*, showing that the initiative doesn’t work. The federal government has spent nearly a decade, and billions of dollars, giving minors inaccurate information about sexual health, all in the hopes of convincing them not to have sex. […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Republican leaders in Iowa are apparently set to make Jan. 3 the date for the party’s presidential caucus, with the hopes that the state Democratic Party will do the same. (Rumor has […]
The top-tier Dems have all unveiled pretty good healthcare plans, but none are willing to consider a single-payer system. (To his credit, Kucinich has a single-payer proposal, but his position has not yet influenced the larger policy debate.) Barack Obama told a YearlyKos audience that if he were starting a healthcare system from scratch right […]