[ Posted Wednesday, May 28th, 2014 – 16:59 UTC ]
In the past month, the Obama White House has found itself at the center of two new scandals. While one is being (so far) treated as a minor matter, it may later grow in importance once Republicans wake up to the political embarrassment potential for the president. The second scandal is systemic and entrenched, and is going to require a lot of drastic action to fix. How Obama reacts to both the "outing" of the C.I.A. station chief in Afghanistan and the ongoing problems at the Veterans Administration will wind up reflecting on his presidential legacy, for better or worse.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 – 15:22 UTC ]
Today President Barack Obama announced the beginning of the end of America's longest war. This announcement was fully anticipated and therefore came as no surprise, seeing as how Obama was elected in large part to end two wars. He successfully withdrew all American troops from Iraq in 2011, and he announced today the schedule for withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan. From 32,000 current troops, we will draw down to 9,800 by the end of this year. This number will then shrink by half (to roughly 5,000) by the end of 2015. By the end of 2016, they will all be out (except possibly for a small force left for security, in the range of 1,000 troops or less). Thus will end a 15-year-long war effort -- the longest in American history.
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[ Posted Monday, January 6th, 2014 – 18:55 UTC ]
President Obama had a pretty significant month in the polls, which might come as a surprise if all you've been listening to is the conventional wisdom in Washington (which has been happily parroting "Obama's polling is in free-fall!" all month long). In fact, what happened this month was that Obama stopped sliding downwards in the polls, and began actually recovering a bit of the ground he's lost since the disastrous Obamacare website launch at the beginning of October. What's more, Obama looks pretty good to continue this recovery for at least the next month or two. Which, as I said, might just come as a surprise to some.
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[ Posted Friday, September 6th, 2013 – 16:32 UTC ]
Due to the fact that Congress is still on vacation and also due to the fact that it has largely been a one-subject week in the political world, we are going to pre-empt our regular talking points for a discussion of where the country seems to be on the question of attacking Syria. But first, let's wrap up the week and hand out our awards, as usual.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 4th, 2013 – 15:11 UTC ]
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee just voted to approve a resolution to attack Syria on a vote of 10-7, with one member merely voting "present." But the breakdown of the voting reveals that this was in no way a party-line vote. Which, of course, complicates the issue for a media much more comfortable with a "horse race" mentality towards all politics ("Dems are up! GOP down! Film at eleven!"). For once, some complexities have emerged which confound the knee-jerk pigeonholing so regularly practiced by news producers. But maybe that's all to the good. Maybe, in fact, that's why President Obama went to Congress in the first place.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 30th, 2013 – 17:12 UTC ]
The news of Bradley Manning's conviction today on multiple charges (and his acquittal on the most serious one) has people lining up to either defend or denounce the verdict. We'll probably be hearing about it all week, in fact. When he is sentenced, it will spur another round of this debate, no doubt.
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[ Posted Friday, March 8th, 2013 – 18:12 UTC ]
Our column's subtitle this week is a silent homage to guitarist Alvin Lee of the band Ten Years After, who sadly died this past week. Anyone who has seen the movie Woodstock knows of Lee's incredible talent on the electric guitar, and we just wanted to begin by noting that Alvin Lee is "Goin' Home" for the last time. Requiescat In Pace.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 14th, 2013 – 16:28 UTC ]
I got an extraordinary amount of very well-thought-out answers from you folks, some of which I agreed with and some of which I did not. But rather than answer points in the comments, I decided the best way to enter the conversation was to just post my answers, as I sent them off. So here is the second part of last week's column. These are my "separation of powers" answers.
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[ Posted Friday, January 18th, 2013 – 16:02 UTC ]
Eric Cantor, much to our surprise, almost just did something we not only would have agreed with, but in fact given our wholehearted support to. Almost.
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[ Posted Friday, December 28th, 2012 – 18:02 UTC ]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
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