My two cents: Obama will win the primary. He will then go on to win in November. I am considering going to Washington for the result. Though it will be an eventful night no matter who wins.
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Regardless of the politics, I do enjoy watching him speak.
Things look that way at the moment. Not long to go.
Yup, it’s them.
Obama, I think, will be in the White House in 2009.
Obama speech:
A couple of things to note.
No autocue. Memorised. Prepared. He also chose to stand on the podium on his own, leaving his family aside. This was a contrast to all the other candidates - Hilary had husband and supporters behind her, Huckabee the same, including Chuck Norris.
It was a good call. Standing on his own makes him look more like a leader, he is presidential. He speaks like John Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
My biggest worry? They were both assassinated.
The excellent FP blog sums up some of the stories that made the headlines in 2007. However, some stories the public found more interesting, but did not interest the media. They use a Pew poll for the findings.
Gas prices were very important to readers in 2007. I think this is an indication of where things are heading for the 2008 election. Iraq may not feature as prominently as some thought. It’s the economy, stupid, may yet again become the mantra.
Come November, the US may have slipped into recession and oil prices look set to remain high, if not go higher. These issues will be top of the agenda for most Americans - and I predict - lead to a Democrat in the White House.
I’m not going to make any, yet anyway.
Dan Drezner does. The biggest surprise? Obama for president.
I have a funny feeling he may be right.
Mr Moore goes for Blitzer’s jugular.
This higher definition video makes it appear that Bush’s watch was stolen in Albania. The White House is saying he put it in his pocket. Hm.
Rummy needs to resign.
My goodness indeed.
When referring to the number of troops that went into Iraq, Rummy said: “I guess history will make a judgment on that”.
How long do we have to wait before history kicks in? It’s well over three years since the invasion. Can we not at least start to speculate about whether the number of troops was too low? Does Rumsfeld believe history can look back in three, ten, twenty or fifty years from now, and then make a judgment?
I don’t think so.
I think three years is plenty of time to see that the number of troops was too low. By putting things on the long finger and saying ‘history’ will decide, he is simply saying ‘ask me when I am no longer Defence Secretary’.
Interesting interview over on C & L where Ron Suskind alleges that the US deliberately bombed al-Jazeera in Kabul in order to teach them a lesson. He also gives an insight into the Cheney’s thinking in the months after 9/11.
Paxo wasn’t as good as I thought he would be against the American firebrand.
You can watch it here (latest programme), and fast forward to 13.25.
Steve Clemons has a very interesting take on these two guys, having a attended a dinner with both in New York last week. Most notably McCain, who will be running in the primaries. And an equally interesting insight into Soros, with this remark:
But then George Soros discussed a bit of his background and tutelage under the famed Karl Popper — and his thinking about where Popper’s views on “open society” were limited and no longer useful. Soros suggested that simply undermining totalitarianism did not automatically lead to open societies and that such implosion of power and control could lead to ongoing collapses within the respective country.
Is Popper still relevant?
He seems to have fallen over board too:
Rescue crews searched the Chesapeake Bay for a prominent publisher and diplomat Sunday, hours after his sailboat was discovered empty in the water with the engine still running.
The Coast Guard dispatched a C-130 aircraft, a helicopter and a boat to assist in the search for 72-year-old Philip Merrill, who had been sailing alone Saturday.
Senior Chief Steve Carleton said the Coast Guard was operating under the assumption that Merrill fell overboard.
“When we found the boat, the engine was running and his wallet was found on board the vessel,” he said.
Ken Turner, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources police, said Saturday night that two boaters found Merrill’s unoccupied 41-foot sailboat.
I have been closely following the furore created by Coulter’s latest book, Godless. In the book she makes a rather controversial remark in relation to some 9/11 widows she dislikes, amongst many others. Click here for the video.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”
Some on the right have expressed shock at her comments, while others have sought to defend her.
Now we have the rather obligatory satirical and definately not work-safe blog about Coulter. (413 comments and counting) It’s not exactly quotable, but I did like this bit in relation to the tax-cuts. I edited it for, eh, work safety.
A stock’s value is even now only partially tied to the actual value of any publicly traded company. But who’s going to profit from inflated valuations when stock prices swell irrationally from the forced, artificial injection of capital?
…
‘You might as well shoehorn billions of dollars into the Baseball Card market. The price of a Derek Jeter rookie will be driven up to hundreds of thousands of dollars—before the bubble bursts and the whole market crashes massively.’ It was getting hard to stay on point as she tongue-fucked my shitter vigorously.
…
‘The top 1% will sell stocks at the inflated valuations to the novice investors-by-necessity, the market will swell and crash, and the same 1% will come back and re-purchase their holdings at pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Social Security will go bankrupt and all the novice investors will be eating catfood for the duration of their “golden years,’’ barring a massive Federal bailout several hundred times in excess of what the Savings & Loan scandal cost us.’
In relation to Coulter’s original quote about the 9/11 widows she dislikes so much, it looks to me more like jealousy. Here is her quote again:
These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.
Or you could say:
Coulter is a millionaire, lionized on TV and in Time magazine, reveling in her status as a celebrity right-wing pundit, stalked by left-wingers. She spent years working to get into that position and is jealous of women who got the spotlight by simply being widows of victims of terrorism.
Olbermann’s criticism of Coulter is well worth watching:
Yes it’s Colbert again, this time at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. 3 parts.
Colbert wins hands down.
Do you still believe the Bush administration?
At that meeting, Drumheller says, “They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.”
What did this high-level source tell him?
“He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” says Drumheller.
“So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?” Bradley asked.
“Yes,” Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.
“It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us,” Bradley remarked.
“The policy was set,” Drumheller says. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.
But he says he was taken aback by what happened. “The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested,” Drumheller recalls. “And we said, ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said, ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.’”
Josh Marshall has it covered.
Plus C&L.
A very interesting picture.
It was released last week, and is worth a look.
Steve Clemons has launched Bolton Watch over at TPM Cafe. It should be good. Steve talks about a story that gives you some indication of the style of Bolton over on his own blog:
When he arrived at the UN, one of the first meetings he had with other Security Council principals had him stepping in and saying:
I’m John Bolton, and I’m here to pursue the interests of the United States.
Those who are here to pursue the interests of the world, please yourself.
I have been looking into the philosophy of Leo Strauss in more depth recently, and found the first episode of the BBC series, ‘The Power of Nightmares’ (60mins) quite helpful. It is worth a look. Some interesting stuff in there about the early days of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
This is related to a recent article by Robert Kagan in the Weekly Standard, denying that he is a Straussian.
Benjamin Shwarz has a thoughtful piece on how America must deal with it’s primacy. He argues that since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not fully dealt with its new position, and must seriously consider it’s position, and soon. He notes:
Defense analysts have grown increasingly nervous about the convergence of several strategic developments. In “The End of Mutual Assured Destruction?,” a brilliant and sobering study of military analysis that is being prepared for publication in an academic journal, Keir A. Lieber, a scholar at Notre Dame, and Daryl G. Press, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant to the Defense Department and to RAND, have trenchantly surveyed the trends that are troubling the experts. The first is the precipitous erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities. Compared with its forces in 1990, Moscow has 55 percent fewer intercontinental ballistic missiles, 39 percent fewer strategic bombers, and 80 percent fewer ballistic-missile submarines, or SSBNs (the component of a nuclear arsenal most likely to survive a first strike). Moscow itself has stated that its nuclear forces will decline by an additional 35 percent in the coming years, but many experts believe the total Russian arsenal could shrink even more, from about 3,800 strategic warheads today to as few as 500 (the United States currently has more than 5,200). More important than this quantitative reduction, though, has been the even steeper qualitative decline. Owing to financial constraints, Russia can’t ensure unbroken monitoring of American ICBM fields, and can’t plug the holes in its missile-warning networks that render it blind to attacks from U.S. submarines in launch areas in the Pacific. Maintenance, supply, and training deficiencies afflict Russia’s nuclear forces generally and its submarines most crucially. A viable Russian deterrent demands that a number of SSBNs be at sea at any given time and that they successfully evade the U.S. attack submarines that stalk them. But in fact most Russian SSBNs must now remain pierside—the Russians weren’t able to conduct any patrols in 2002 and could carry out only two in 2004. This makes the SSBNs highly vulnerable to a U.S. first strike, and it means that the skills Russian SSBN crews need in order to elude U.S. subs have been greatly vitiated (most Russian crews haven’t been on patrol in years). Largely for these reasons former commanders of Russia’s ballistic-missile fleet warned as long ago as 1998 that their supposedly invulnerable submarines would be detected and destroyed in a conflict with the United States.
And he concludes, crucially:
Confronted with the growing nuclear imbalance, Russia and China will be forced to try to redress it; but given America’s advantages, that effort, as Lieber and Press note, could take well over a decade. Until a nuclear stalemate is restored—if it ever is—Moscow and Beijing will surely buy deterrence by spreading out their nuclear forces, decentralizing their command-and-control systems, and implementing “launch on warning” policies. If more than half a century of analyzing nuclear dangers and “crisis stability” has taught us anything, it is that all these steps can cause crises to escalate uncontrollably. They could trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons; this could lead to inadvertent nuclear war.
American military preponderance now embraces the entire “spectrum of conflict,” as Pentagon planners put it. That is to say, we’re miles ahead of everyone in every type of warfare. But if that preponderance is leading to a world in which Russian and Chinese launch commanders are fingering nuclear hair triggers, the game may not be worth the candle. Without any public scrutiny or debate the United States has emerged as the nuclear hegemon, in possession of a destabilizing first-strike capability. It does not matter whether this has come about by accident or design, or whether America’s motives are worthy or malign; the condition itself is the problem. The ramifications of this state of affairs are of the gravest significance to America’s security—and the world’s. It’s time for scrutiny and debate to begin.
The Daily Show do a great piece on how the journalists of America could learn something from Oprah’s grilling of James Frey.
Watch the video here.
I find the Random House blurb by Coates Bateman quite funny:
What’s interesting is that the most affecting scenes (for me at least) are not gratuitously violent. They’re not graphically explicit. They’re not emotionally manipulative. They’re quiet conversations between a son and his parents. But, they are some of the most devastatingly honest, heartfelt, self-loathing, eloquent and hopeful conversations one will come across in a book.
He succeeds because of his honesty, responsibility, a sense of humor and a greater sense of purpose.
James Frey lied. Nobody died. (Or did they?)
Following wholescale rewriting of bios on Wikipedia by suspected staffers in the US Congress, Wiki have decided to block IP ranges.
Congressional staffers have made more than 1,000 changes to entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in the past six months, an investigation by the Lowell Sun has found. The Massachusetts newspaper highlighted changes made by staffers for U.S. Rep Marty Meehan, D-Mass., including the removal of a mention of his broken term-limits pledge and information about the size of his campaign war chest.
This is indeed a curious turn of events.
The internet search engine Google is resisting efforts by the US Department of Justice to force it to hand over data about what people are looking for. Google was asked for information on the types of query submitted over a week, and the websites included in its index. The department wants the data to try to show in court it has the right approach in enforcing an online pornography law. It says the order will not violate personal privacy, but Google says it is too broad and threatens trade secrets.
Yahoo and MSN meanwhile, either admitted or tacitly admitted complying. What is Google protecting? Is it trade secrets?
Update: Dan Drezner adds his weighty two cents to the debate.
I meant to link to this last week, I found it via Steve who provides his own comments here.
Elizabeth Holtzman argues that George Bush has done enough in office to be impeached, and she doesn’t pull any punches:
As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law–and repeatedly violates the law–thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.
Hot on the heels of his ‘lets kill Chavez’ remark, Robertson has another stonker:
And now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or United States of America.
God said, “This land belongs to me, you better leave it alone.”
Save me Jebus.
As John speculated in a comment on here last week, the CIA are seeking information about the leak.
Notes the NY Times:
The Central Intelligence Agency has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation to determine the source of a Washington Post article that said the agency had set up a covert prison network in Eastern Europe and other countries to hold important terrorism suspects, government officials said on Tuesday.
The C.I.A.’s request, known as a crimes report or criminal referral, means that the Justice Department will undertake a preliminary review to determine if circumstances justify a criminal inquiry into whether any government official unlawfully provided information to the newspaper. The possibility of this new investigation follows by less than two weeks the perjury and obstruction indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., then Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, in a leak case involving other news reporting about a national security issue.
Hardly surprising but doesn’t help much:
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
By asking for the extradition of Sean Garland, has the US government blown the lid off what looks like the biggest money laundering schemes in history? In the IHT, John Cooley writes that for the first time the US government has acknowledged that North Korea prints ’superdollars’ to support its economy. The Federal Warrant charges:
…Garland, who denies his guilt and was released on bail pending receipt of U.S. extradition papers, arranged with North Korean agencies “for the purchase of quantities of notes and enlisted other people to disseminate” the bogus money, known as superdollars or supernotes
And this is another story I hadn’t heard:
In the summer of 1998, the U.S. Treasury refused comment when the Japanese Navy seized a North Korean ship stuffed with superdollars. The Japanese police, backed by the Tokyo field office of the U.S. Secret Service, rounded up intended distributors in Japan. Within 48 hours of the ship’s seizure, officials in Tokyo and Washington had muffled the affair.
I wouldn’t mind my own mint in the attic.
Following the publication of an article by Carole Coleman in the Sunday Times, there has been a recent upsurge in searches fo the video of the interview she did with George Bush last year. She has written a book about her time as Washington correspondent ala Mark Little. It is an interesting take on the interview, as there was widepsread praise and criticism of the interview last year. I think Richard even featured on Liveline, criticising her interview tactics.
Interestingly she did notice the response on the web, which can be found by simply Googling her name. I have logged about 1200 visits specifically searching for information about the interview.
Anyways here’s the navel gazing blog juicy reference bit, and her conclusion. It is a good piece until she starts citing Michael Moore.
When I returned to my little world on the street called M in Washington, I felt a tad more conspicuous than when I’d left for Ireland. Google was returning more than 100,000 results on the subject of the 12-minute interview. The vast majority of bloggers felt it was time a reporter had challenged Bush.
At the White House, the fact that I had been asked to submit questions prior to the interview generated enquiries from the American press corps. “Any time a reporter sits down with the president they are welcome to ask him whatever questions they want to ask,� Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told the CBS correspondent Bill Plante.
“Yes, but that’s beside the point,� replied Plante.
Under repeated questioning, McClellan conceded that other staff members might have asked for questions. “Certainly there will be staff-level discussion, talking about what issues reporters may want to bring up in some of these interviews. I mean that happens all the time.�
I had not been prevented from asking any of my questions. The only topics I had been warned away from were the Bush daughters Jenna and Barbara, regular fodder for the tabloids, and Michael Moore — neither of which was on my list.
Moore did notice RTE’s interview with the president and in the weeks that followed urged American journalists to follow the example of “that Irish woman�.
“In the end, doesn’t it always take the Irish to speak up?� he said. “She’s my hero. Where are the Carole Colemans in the US press?�
I think that’s fair, at the time I seen far more blogs praising her than condemning her, and I read more right wing blogs than lefty ones.
I know that some people on the right in America forget that Bush is a fundamentalist Christian, and some even argue that having a devout Christian in the White House is a good thing. I have my doubts. Especially when you are waste high in Islamic countries. But the White House has denied he ever said anything of the sort. I doubt that too. Of course it is based on the accounts of Palestinian politicians so the whole story is not exactly on solid ground.
It just gets worse and worse for poor old Tom DeLay:
Texas grand jury has brought a new charge of money laundering against Rep. Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader indicted last week on conspiracy charges stemming from a campaign finance probe, the congressman’s office said Monday.
In a written statement, DeLay called the indictment another example of “prosecutorial abuse” by District Attorney Ronnie Earle.
“He is trying to pull the legal equivalent of a ‘do-over,’ since he knows very well that the charges he brought against me last week are totally manufactured and illegitimate,” said the Texas Republican. “This is an abomination of justice.”
Steve Clemons has more.
Gitmo, as it has become known, still remains in a sort legal limbo. I had wondered what had happened since the Supreme Court ruling in June last year, the Economist clarifies:
Earlier this summer, there was talk of Guantánamo being shut down. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called it a “national disgrace� and “the primary recruiting tool for our enemies�. George Bush also seemed to wobble on the issue. But Mr Rumsfeld, who has just spent $100m refurbishing the camp, has never wavered from the idea that America needs a place to hold people indefinitely. If you want to create a “legal black hole�, to use the words of a British law lord, it is certainly a lot easier to do so outside the American mainland.
But what about the Supreme Court’s ruling in June last year giving Guantánamo detainees the right to challenge their detention in American courts? The justices, alas, did not give any details as to how this could happen. The administration promptly set up review panels to determine whether detainees had been rightly designated as “enemy combatantsâ€?; all but 38 of the 558 detainees had their status confirmed. Banned from attending the proceedings, their lawyers have dismissed them as a sham.
Dozens of habeas corpus lawsuits are working their way up through the federal courts. In January this year, a Washington, DC, district court judge ruled that the detainees were entitled to challenge their detention in normal courts. But a few days later, another district court judge issued a contradictory ruling. Both sides have appealed (oral arguments were heard by the DC appeals court this month), but the issue will surely go to the Supreme Court.
What appears to have gone largely unreported is that many of the current ‘prisoners’ are on hunger strike.
Over the past month, more than 100 detainees have been on hunger strike in protest against their indefinite detention without charge. Many have been held for nearly four years. A military spokesman said this week that 85 were still refusing food, including 15 hardliners who were undergoing “involuntary feeding� in hospital. Preventing prisoners from harming themselves was part of “standard operating procedures� in both American civilian and military prisons, he said.
Although not specifically banned under international law, force-feeding of prisoners is prohibited under the World Medical Association’s 1975 Declaration of Tokyo, which has been endorsed by the American Medical Association. The International Committee of the Red Cross also strongly advises against it. Its use in Guantánamo is likely to further enflame anti-American sentiment among Muslims; on the other hand, it may be preferable to a succession of deaths in Guantánamo.
I tend to agree with comments Ann-Marie Slaughter made at the Terrorism and Security Conference in Washington earlier this month - Gitmo is essentially America shooting itself in the foot, do as we say but not as we do.
I have so much posting to catch up it’s not funny. I have bookmarked lots of interesting links. And so many things to read. And this DeLay story looks like it could be pretty darn funny. See Steve’s take. Looks like Roy Blunt will be the new majority leader.
While I am holidaying in the US, I hope to attend this conference in Washington. A great list of speakers and no doubt there will be bloggers there too.
Among the people I would be most interested in seeing:
Steve Clemons
Jim Fallows
George Soros
Michael Lind
Robert Kuttner
Tom Clancy
Ann-Marie Slaughter
Francis Fukuyama
Charles Kupchan
Juan Cole
Nicolas Gvosdev
A follow up post on the CIA book I talked about yesterday and John commented on. Apparently Porter Goss has started something interesting, reported by Time Magazine. Dan Drezner gets it right again too, why so late?
In what experts say is a welcome nod to common sense, the CIA, having spent billions over the years on undercover agents, phone taps and the like, plans to create a large wing in the spookhouse dedicated to sorting through various forms of data that are not secret–such as research articles, religious tracts, websites, even phone books–but yet could be vital to national security. Senior intelligence officials tell TIME that CIA Director Porter Goss plans to launch by Oct. 1 an “open source” unit that will greatly expand on the work of the respected but cash-strapped office that currently translates foreign-language broadcasts and documents like declarations by extremist clerics. The budget, which could be in the ballpark of $100 million, is to be carefully monitored by John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who discussed the new division with Goss in a meeting late last month. “We will want this to be a separate, identifiable line in the CIA program so we know precisely what this center has in terms of investment, and we don’t want money moved from it without [Negroponte’s] approval,” said a senior official in the DNI’s office.
Dan has a very interesting post on the latest deal between India and the US. This is a very curious development indeed.
President Bush agreed yesterday to share civilian nuclear technology with India, reversing decades of U.S. policies designed to discourage countries from developing nuclear weapons.
The agreement between Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which must win the approval of Congress, would create a major exception to the U.S. prohibition of nuclear assistance to any country that doesn’t accept international monitoring of all of its nuclear facilities. India has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires such oversight, and conducted its first nuclear detonation in 1974….
In the latest issue of the Atlantic is an article by Scott Stossel on how the US would fight a war with North Korea. He details the history of the regime in North Korea back to 1993 when they supposedly first started making efforts to build nuclear weapons:
The seeds of the current crisis were planted late in the winter of 1993, when North Korea declared that proposed International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of two of its nuclear sites represented an unwarranted violation of sovereignty. The Kim regime subsequently threatened to begin converting 8,000 spent fuel rods from its Yongbyon plant into weaponizable nuclear material. As tensions rose, Pyongyang became more belligerent, at one point reminding the South Koreans that it wouldn’t be hard to turn Seoul into “a sea of fire.” The United States, for its part, contemplated pre-emptive strikes on Yongbyon.
By the spring of 1994 the United States was probably closer to nuclear war than it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. On June 15 President Clinton and others sat in the White House Cabinet Room listening to Secretary of Defense William Perry present an array of military options against North Korea. Clinton was preparing to evacuate American civilians from the country when word came that Jimmy Carter—who was in Pyongyang as an independent citizen, not as an official emissary of the Clinton administration—had reached a preliminary deal with the North Koreans and was about to go on CNN to announce the terms. The parties returned to the negotiating table, and in October of 1994 they signed the so-called Agreed Framework. In exchange for North Korea’s freezing nuclear-weapons development, the United States, South Korea, and Japan would supply Pyongyang with light-water nuclear reactors and with 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil annually.
And let to the current impasse:
In the summer of 2002 U.S. intelligence discovered that the North Koreans had secretly restarted their weapons development using highly enriched uranium. When Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly went to Pyongyang in October of 2002 to confront the North Koreans, he expected them to deny the existence of the uranium program. They didn’t; in fact, evidently they soon restarted their plutonium program, by continuing to reprocess the 8,000 spent fuel rods from Yongbyon (which had been in storage since the signing of the Agreed Framework). In October of 2003 the North Koreans said they had finished the reprocessing—meaning, if true, that they had enough fissile material for up to six new nuclear weapons. The Bush administration, not wanting to appear to reward bad behavior, has since adamantly refused to negotiate directly with the North Koreans. Six-party talks involving China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea—regional powers that the Bush administration hoped could help hold the Kim regime to account—began in August of 2003, but after the third round of talks, last June, the North Koreans pulled out, demanding direct bilateral negotiations with the United States.
So the Atlantic got a bunch of people together to brainstorm a conflict with North Korea.
Colonel Sam Gardiner led the proceedings
Playing the part of the CIA director was David Kay—a man well equipped for this job.
The secretary of state in this exercise was Robert Gallucci. The dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University, Gallucci has extensive real-world experience in dealing with North Korea.
Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, who spent thirty-five years in the U.S. Air Force as a pilot, a commander, and a strategic planner, played the role of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Filling the newly created position of director of national intelligence was Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Rounding out the Principals Committee was Kenneth Adelman, who would be serving as secretary of defense.
It is a hugely interesting discussion. The conclusion was more or less summed up by Gardiner:
Sam Gardiner came away with one overriding message. “I left the game with a firm conviction that the United States is focusing on the wrong problem,” he told me. “Iran is down the road. Korea is now, and growing. We can’t wait to deal with Korea.” The president needs to engage the North Korean question for a very simple reason: “The military situation on the peninsula,” he said, “is not under control.”
“I’m The Guy They Called Deep Throat”, or so says the headline in Vanity Fair. It seems to be the answer to the question many have posed over the last 30 or so years, the Washington Post have apparently confirmed it:
The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was “Deep Throat,” the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.
I am inclined to agree with the comments Matthew Yglesias made on Bush’s position with regard to embryonic stem cell research.
If Bush truly believes that it is immoral why does he only plan to veto federal funding for research? For him it seems that murder is fine as long as its not federal money paying for it.
On the issue itself, and moral issues aside, I believe that the US making a mistake that could result in them falling years behind the rest of the world in research. But who is to say whether the next president does not back track on Bush’s policy?
Robert McNamara’s piece has appeared on the FP website, go have a read.
…just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, “I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.… There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade.â€? I share his fears.
Dan Drezner deconstructs Andrew Sullivan’s recent article in the New Republic. Glenn Reynolds has also weighed in. The debate, especially Drezner’s thoughts, is an interesting one.
Dan Gillmor points out this rather curious story from the US, covered by Bruce Schneier. Choice quote:
I’ll say it: the TSA lied.
Steve Clemons has put the call out. He wants bloggers to mobilise against John Bolton becoming US ambassador to the United Nations. He notes:
We need language to reward and inspire Senators willing to oppose Bolton — and language that shames those willing to stand with Bolton and who essentially want the United Nations to be a non-entity. It is worth remembering that Bolton once stated, “The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
According to Clemons, people in the know are saying:
FYI, I’m hearing that they are trying to move this nomination very quickly because the longer it hangs out there, the more time opponents have to mobilize. The State Department’s material for the confirmation hearing (Q&A, etc) is due by COB today; they hope to schedule his hearing for next week.
He also cites Sidney Blumenthals piece in the Guardian, and afterwards puts his views in no uncertain terms:
Appointing Bolton to this position is the same as smiling at and talking about fresh start with the international community, like Bush did in Europe, while at the same time sliding a sharp knife into the world’s back.
I am sure there are some US bloggers out there with some opinions on this, for my own part I am still in the information-gathering stage.
This archive is a great place if you have broadband…some good debates. I liked the James Fallows one especially.
Kimberly Marten and Alexander Cooley, professors of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, argue that military bases won’t work.
In Iraq, it seems unlikely that the U.S. military will shake its current negative reputation, in spite of the good intentions of most American soldiers. As a result of mounting civilian deaths, the failure to establish security, and the enduring images of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, America will always be regarded as an unwelcome occupier by most Iraqis. Politicians in a democratic Iraq will have a ready-made election issue to exploit if bases remain.
Considering all these factors, a continuing U.S. base presence in Iraq is unlikely to be politically tenable. When the United States finally decides to leave Iraq, it should remove troops under an interim agreement that allows it to retain its most important facilities only for the few months necessary to complete withdrawal. Any long-term presence, no matter how small, would make American troops the focus of political unhappiness and the targets of violent attacks.
In case anyone missed it, back in 2000 Condi Rice wrote this piece for Foreign Affairs. It’s a good insight into the mind of the new Secretary of State.
Foreign policy in a Republican administration will most certainly be internationalist; the leading contenders in the party’s presidential race have strong credentials in that regard. But it will also proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community. America can exercise power without arrogance and pursue its interests without hectoring and bluster. When it does so in concert with those who share its core values, the world becomes more prosperous, democratic, and peaceful. That has been America’s special role in the past, and it should be again as we enter the next century.
Late last year I wrote a post about rumours circulating concerning Condi Rices’ sexuality. Some more people recently added comments including:
Condoleeza has a wife in the D.C. area and used to roll with Anita Hill in lesbian haunts.
Comment by Anonymous
Everyone knows that Condoleeza Rice is into girls she is a devout lesbian. Isn’t it hypocritaical that Cheney’s allegience is to Bush and not his family (lesbian daughter Mary) and Condi’s allegiance is to Bush (literally) when Condi is out of town she’s into pussy. Also Barbara Bush (jr) gw’s daughter is into girls as well…oh my!!!
Comment by whitehouse aid
Barbara Boxer and Howard Dean are the guts of the democratic party now, none of the rest to include Kennedy or Kerry make too many waves anymore I’m so dissappointed! well at least Kerry disapproved of Rice….but seems most of the democrats now are all milktoast
Comment by observer
Not that there is anything wrong with being a lesbian.
Fred Kagan in the Weekly Standard on why Rumsfeld must go:
With more troops in Iraq during and immediately after the war, we would have been able to do the following things that we did not do:
* Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time still concentrated in combat units and had not yet melted back into the countryside with their weapons and their skills.
* Guard the scores of enormous ammunition dumps from which the insurgents have drawn the vast majority of their weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
* Secure critical oil and electrical infrastructure that the insurgents subsequently attacked, setting back the economic and political recovery of Iraq.
* Prevent the development of insurgent safe havens in Najaf and Falluja, or at least disrupt them at a much earlier stage of formation.
* Work to interdict the infiltration of foreign fighters across Iraq’s borders.
If the U.S. Army had begun expanding in 2001, we would have been able to:
* Establish reasonable rotation plans for our soldiers that did not require repeatedly extending tours of duty beyond one year.
* Avoid the need to activate reservists involuntarily.
* Dramatically reduce the frequency with which soldiers return from one year-long tour only to be sent immediately on another.
* Let the troops that would still have been overstrained know that help really was on the way.
The U.S. military did not do these things because of Rumsfeld’s choices. He chose to protect a military transformation program that is designed to fight wars radically different from the one in which we are engaged. He chose to protect Air Force and Navy programs that are far less urgent and under far less strain during the current crisis rather than augmenting the service carrying the lion’s share of the load. He chose to focus on high-tech weapons technologies that are virtually useless to the troops now in Iraq rather than providing them sooner with the basic requirements of their current mission–including armored Humvees, body armor, and a regular complement of armored vehicles. Even the deployment of Stryker light armored vehicles, which many now tout as a major contribution to the fighting in Iraq, was not Rumsfeld’s initiative, but that of General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki was the Army chief of staff whom Rumsfeld drove out of office, partly for correctly predicting that Operation Iraqi Freedom would require more than the handful of units that Rumsfeld and his staff were willing to send.
It is not that Rumsfeld’s decisions were without a rationale. The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America’s military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission. That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.
Update: Kevin Drum offers his two cents, Andrew Sullivan does the same
I do wish I had satellite sometimes - but I do enjoy watching the Daily Show when I get a torrent or something…of course I’m just saying that because of these figures…
With vulgar fare such as The Man Show, South Park, and Reno 911!, the cable network Comedy Central has earned a reputation for pandering to the Rabelaisian tastes of slackers, stoners, and frat boys. But is that reputation deserved? The Annenberg Public Policy Center set out to answer this question by comparing viewers of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show with those of David Letterman’s and Jay Leno’s (relatively) staid offerings. The findings are surprising. To be sure, Stewart’s viewers are much younger and much more heavily male than his late-night competitors’. But they are also wealthier and better educated: 30 percent have annual household incomes above $75,000, compared with only 25 percent of Letterman’s and Leno’s viewers. Some 39 percent of The Daily Show’s viewers have college degrees, compared with only 29 percent of Letterman’s and 27 percent of Leno’s. In a perhaps not unrelated finding Annenberg discovered that Stewart’s audience is also more politically aware: 46 percent of Daily Show watchers follow politics “most of the time,” versus 38 percent of Letterman watchers and 39 percent of Leno watchers. And when the researchers asked respondents six questions about contemporary politics, Stewart viewers on average answered 60 percent of them correctly; Leno and Letterman viewers on average answered only 49 percent correctly.
I meant to blog this article ages ago, but I really did enjoy it. Read the whole thing.
Yes, I want to get almost the entire Republican side of the House of Representatives to bend its ethics rules just for me. I want to be able to twist the arms of House Republicans to repeal a rule that automatically requires party leaders to step down if they are indicted on a felony charge - something a Texas prosecutor is considering doing to DeLay because of corruption allegations.
But most of all, I want to have the gall to sully American democracy at a time when young American soldiers are fighting in Iraq so we can enjoy a law-based society here in the United States and, maybe, extend it to others. Yes, I want to be Tom DeLay. I want to wear a little American flag on my lapel in solidarity with the troops, while I besmirch every value they are dying for.
If I can’t be Tom DeLay, then I want to be one of the gutless Republican House members who voted to twist the rules for DeLay out of fear that “the Hammer,” as they call him, might retaliate by taking away a coveted committee position or maybe a parking place.
Yes, I want to be a Republican House member. At a time when 180 of the 211 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Iraq who have been wounded in combat have insisted on returning to duty, I want to look my constituents and my kids in the eye and tell them that I voted to empty the House ethics rules because I was afraid of Tom DeLay.
If I can’t be a Republican House member, I want to be Latrell Sprewell, the basketball player for the Minnesota Timberwolves. I want to say with a straight face that if my owner will only give me a three-year contract extension for a meager $21 million, then he’s not worth working for, because “I’ve got my family to feed.”
Yes, I want to be Latrell Sprewell. At a time when NBA games are priced beyond the reach of most American families, when half the country can’t afford health care, when some reservists in Iraq are separated from their families for a year, I want to be like Latrell. I want to make sure everyone knows that I’m looking out for my family - and no one else’s.
If I can’t be Latrell Sprewell, I want to be any American college or professional athlete. I want to be able to fight on the court, off the court, in the stands and on the sidelines. I want to respect no boundaries and no norms. And when I make your kids cry, I want to be able to tell you to just “chill” - that my coach says “stuff happens” and that my union rep is appealing my punishment in the name of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta. Yes, in my next life, I want to be The Man.
If I can’t be The Man, then I at least want to be the owner of a Hummer - with American flag decals all over the back bumper, because Hummer owners are, on average, a little more patriotic than the rest of us.
Yes, I want to drive the mother of all gas-guzzlers that gets so little mileage you have to drive from gas station to gas station. Yes, I want to drive my Hummer and never have to think that by consuming so much oil, I am making transfer payments to the worst Arab regimes that transfer money to Islamic charities that transfer money to madrasas that teach children intolerance, antipluralism and how to hate the infidels.
And when one day one of those madrasa graduates goes off and joins the jihad in Falluja and kills my neighbor’s son, who is in the U.S. Army Rangers, I want to drive to his funeral in my Hummer. Yes, I want to curse his killers in front of his mother and wail aloud, “If there was only something I could do.” And then I want to drive home in my Hummer, stopping at two gas stations along the way.
If I can’t be any of these, then I want to be just a simple blue-state red-state American. I want to take time to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own. And I want to thank them for doing this, even though on so many days in so many ways we Americans really don’t deserve them.
Slashdot are pointing to a story in the CS Monitor and NPR concerning electronic voting:
A combination of human error (setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes when eight thousand people voted) and a software malfunction (the machine kept accepting ballots after its memory was overloaded) resulted in the loss of 4,500 votes in an election decided by only 2,300 votes.
Jeff Jarvis is not happy with FCC Chair Michael Powell, Colin’s son. Powell wrote this opinion piece in the New York Times.
James Fallows in the Atlantic asks the question posed on here not so long ago - will Iran be next in line? A subscription is required for this lengthy piece…
Prospect has an interesting interview with uber-hawk, Paul Wolfowitz. He makes some curious remarks. Go have a look.
This document linked to by Roger is a curious one, the Selective Service System is seeking information from the Department of Education. Is this routine, or is it the start of a call up?
The Guardian is reporting that recent documents have revealed that the US is looking towards the using orbital platforms for weapons, and researching the use of weapons in space:
Internal USAF documents reveal that seizing control of the ‘final frontier’ is deemed essential for modern warfare. Counterspace Operations reveals that destroying enemy satellites would improve the chance of victory. It states: ‘Space superiority provides freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack. Space and air superiority are crucial first steps in any military operation.’
Theresa Hitchens, vice-president of a Washington-based independent think-tank, the Centre for Defence Information, said: ‘These documents show that they are taking space control seriously.’
Inevitable I suppose.