Not the Misfits cover band. I’ll be on the Rachel Maddow show tonight at around 9:45, talking about this piece. Tune in, won’t you? Update, 11:32 p.m.: And, thanks to our moderators, here’s that clip. Rachel, it is always an honor to be interviewed by the country’s bravest and wisest newswoman. OK, long day. See [...]

A couple commenters thought I went too easy on Eli Lake’s NIAC piece because he’s my friend. I’ve thought about it a lot, and not just because I got shithammered with Eli last night. I don’t think my take on the piece was equivocal at all. Eli certainly didn’t see it that way, and we [...]

This is just absolutely stunning: GUESTBREAKER: You Share Custody of your Dog with your Ex-Girlfriend We had gone on a few dates and things were going quite well.  When I agreed to come over for dinner, knowing full well that we’d probably be naked by the time you were done cooking as nothing turns me [...]

Unfortunately, I had to miss Dave Kilcullen’s talk yesterday to the National Security Network at the Center for American Progress. Since Dave is one of the defense thinkers I most respect, I really wanted to attend, but luckily Tom Ricks attended, and he presents an overview of where Dave’s head is at these days on [...]

Another great Ambinder catch, from the Washington Post: Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too [...]

This is an encouraging sign for reasons that stretch far beyond Afghanistan: “I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost,” Mr. Obama told CNN in an interview [...]

Well, shit. Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi said Wednesday that he had vetoed Iraq’s new election law, throwing preparations for the January voting into disarray. This is about sectarian proportionality in parliament, but it’s layered atop a simmering Kurdish acrimony, so the electoral commission chief says that the parliament is basically out of time to pass [...]

Marc Ambinder has a gem today in a post about intelligence wars between Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair: The conflict became public earlier this year, after the CIA protested when the Director of National Intelligence appointed a senior National Security Agency representative to be the DNI’s representative in Kurdistan. Traditionally, the CIA’s chief of station [...]

What the fuck? I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right [...]

I have a numbers-heavy story in the Washington Independent today based on deployment data provided to me by the U.S. Army on every active-duty and National Guard combat brigade. It struck me as odd that we were having a debate about escalation without a clear sense of how many soldiers — there will be Marines [...]