I thought this piece of Josh Marshall analysis was insightful: [T]his is about meta-politics. If the Democrats, either from the left or the right, walk away from reform, they will get slaughtered in November. They’ll get it from the people who want reform, from the people who never wanted reform and from sensible people all [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 042-10 January 19, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Staff Sgt. Anton R. Phillips, 31, of Inglewood, Calif., died Dec. 31, 2009, at Forward Operating Base Methar Lam, Afghanistan. He was assigned to G Forward Support [...]

Chris Morris is comedy’s greatest living genius. (A very close second is his occasional collaborator Armando Iannucci.)  If you consume mass media, you need to familiarize yourself with The Day Today, Morris’ early-90s parody of the nightly news. (Steve Coogan’s classic Alan Partridge character started out as TDT’s sportscaster.) He followed up TDT with Brass [...]

I just got this release from ISAF: KABUL, Afghanistan (20 Jan.) – Afghan National Police and ISAF forces seized 2,000 pounds (approximately 910kg) of marijuana during the search of a building in the Nehr-e Sajab district of Helmand Province yesterday afternoon. The drugs were handed over to the Afghan National Police. Think about the willpower! You come across 2000 [...]

L.A. County rescue workers dig a Haitian woman out from the rubble. The crowd reacts accordingly. This is America. There’s a reductive argument about public diplomacy in policy circles. Public diplomacy can be a cynical thing: condescending spin that papers over real grievances about American policy. Or it can be a national-security endeavor: highlighting the [...]

Some disturbing news from Steve Aftergood about a new Pentagon doctrinal decision: PSYOP is among the oldest of military disciplines, but the new DoD doctrine continues to wrestle with basic definitional issues. It endorses a new, negative definition of the term “propaganda,” which had formerly been used in a neutral sense to refer to “Any form [...]

I don’t read David Brooks. Nothing personal. I don’t read op-ed columns as a rule. Life is too short and time is too precious to devote to stuff that isn’t directly informative. But this Matt Taibbi evisceration of the ugly assumptions behind David Brooks’ Haiti column is a thing of righteous beauty. Who would write [...]

My friend and former TPM deputy publisher Andrew Golis is now running a new media enterprise for Yahoo News. He’s hiring bloggers. Why don’t you apply? Test your skills. Golis is a great guy and an innovative thinker about the internet and other things.

I joined a conference call yesterday evening with Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, the military commander in Haiti. His description of the logistical challenges to delivering aid was pretty stunning. Check it out.

In re Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, some new information from the New York Times makes me reconsider my assessment that the standards for moving a terror suspect from the general TIDE watchlist to the more-specific/actionable lists maintained by FBI and DHS are the real systemic issue in stopping Abdulmutallab from boarding Flight 253. Apparently in early [...]