This is going to be brief. Representative William Jefferson (D) has been filmed taking bribes, and someone has pled guilty to bribing him. He is corrupt. He must resign immediately because he has disgraced himself, his constituents, and our government. I don’t give a damn about his excuses, that the FBI shouldn’t be allowed to [...]
The Washington Post today included a piece about “Mustafa Setmariam Nasar,” an “Architect of New War on the West.” While it was interesting as a biographical sketch of a jihadist, the key point had more to do with the tactics he advocated: From secret hideouts in South Asia, the Spanish-Syrian al-Qaeda strategist published thousands of [...]
I was delighted this morning when I read this piece by Sebastian Mallaby at the Washington Post website. I have criticized him in the past, but here he makes a very good point about the relationship between current Republican policies and the growing interest in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth: Ordinarily this film would [...]
Just spent some time analyzing the most recent casualty figures in the Iraq War. Our brave soldiers are still dying, and my analysis revealed that, despite what pundits and politicians are saying, things don’t seem to be getting better–at least, not according to this metric. That thick red line is the linear trendline of the [...]
Ridiculous though they may be, there is something to be learned from these Pro-CO2 advertisements from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The ads make a simple logical claim: Premise: CO2 emissions result from all kinds of processes on Earth, like animals exhaling and the burning of fossil fuels for energy, which shows that CO2 is healthy, [...]
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written a letter to President Bush, and it presents a somewhat perplexing question. Let me frame it by quoting from the Washington Post story about it. First: “This letter isn’t it,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Associated Press. “This letter is not the place that one would find [...]
I was amazed at the level of deference and respect our President offered the President of the People’s Republic of China today. Aren’t we supposedly against authoritarian regimes. Isn’t the Chinese government, you know, Communist? Of course we ought to be polite, and of course China is a huge nation with a huge military and [...]
I have been looking forward to An Inconvenient Truth ever since I heard it was being made. Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance, had a huge impact on me when I first read it during the runup to the 2000 election, and I have always admired his tenacious advocacy for the environment whether it [...]
This opinion piece in the Washington Post really caught my attention. The writer asserts that soldiers currently serving in Iraq have high morale, but that their optimism and commitment to success are rarely reported by the media. For example, writing about Congressman John Murtha: In view of his distinguished military career, John Murtha has been [...]
Via Matt Yglesias of TPM Cafe, we find this short but sweet article in The Atlantic, by James Fallows. It describes a War Game session The Atlantic held two years ago to explore the possible outcomes of an escalating conflict between Iran and the United States. The article is worth a full read, and it [...]