Something unfortunately pressing kept me from attending Gen. Petraeus’ talk to the Institute for the Study of War, but I can’t help but notice this discussion of Yemen, courtesy of a transcript ISW emailed me. Petraeus is talking about the effect of a visit to Yemen he took in July: The visit in July, on [...]

My friend Dave Weigel delicately characterizes this as “bungling an ethnic pander.” I feel almost like getting hysterically shtetly about Harold Ford: The two bantered about the difference between New York and Tennessee, with Dicker poking fun at Ford for pronouncing “smear” (as in: “I’ve been the victim of a smear campaign on my position on [...]

So let’s say that in the course of a year — a year that featured significant political turmoil and severe economic hardship — you push insurgents back from their advancing stronghold fairly near your capitol. It yields a really high human toll, including hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons. Then, a couple months later, you [...]

Botox: objectively pro-terrorist. Moments like this are why God created Crass.

My first job in journalism was opening mail for the listings section of the immortal Manhattan weekly New York Press when I was 19. By the grace of Russ Smith, Lisa Kearns, John Strausbaugh, Lisa LeeKing and especially Andrey Slivka and Daria Vaisman, I eventually graduated to factchecker and got to write for the paper. The caliber [...]

The London conference on Afghanistan gets underway this week, and both the Obama administration and Brown government have been raising expectations for it. Among its major components: international support for Hamid Karzai’s efforts to reintegrate low-level Taliban fighters into the new political order. The only thing is, argues Josh Foust, we’re sort of telling ourselves a [...]

There may be a legislative battle over not Mirandizing foreign terrorist suspects. Thanks, Admiral Blair! Why repeat myself… Collins said in a statement that the fact that the FBI read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights “likely foreclosed the collection of additional intelligence information.” But over the weekend, The Associated Press published the most comprehensive account to date [...]

What an amazing game — enough unforced errors, egregious officiating miscalls, turnovers, stupid decisions, tension, reversals and drama to make it practically a Super Bowl. New Orleans, you’ve already won. And who could the NFL possibly have turned to for the halftime show but The Who! Who Dat, right? I hear the league originally wanted [...]

In the course of the Times Magazine‘s LGF-vs-Atlas Shrugged piece comes this excellent observation: Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter [...]

You simply have to read about Marine Lance Cpl Ryan T. Mathison.