Maybe I’m being a little too dismissive, but I don’t think it’s necessary to deal with the particulars of Leslie Gelb’s column in today’s Daily Beast, since its main idea patently ridiculous: The negative, even dismissive, talk about the Obama White House has reached a critical point. The president must change key personnel now. Unless [...]

First, huge thanks to Spencer for letting me guest-blog again. As he mentioned, I spend most of blog-time at my own joint, but you can also find me hanging around the good folks at PostBourgie. By now, it’s obvious that Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate because he is angry; angry at liberal activists for [...]

So there was an interesting post in the NYT Home Fires blog today from a woman named Catherine Ross, a Civil Affairs soldier who served in the Army Reserves for eight years.  She basically makes the argument that women in the armed forces should be allowed to serve in combat MOS (Military Operations Specialty, basically [...]

This requires a bit of explanation, but: I won’t be blogging here today (pending something crucial happens). In late December I got a summons to report for voir dire on a federal grand jury. Dreading it ever since — there’s no guarantee against being picked for something that could take me out of the game [...]

The Taliban’s military commander has been captured in a joint Pakistani-U.S. intelligence raid. A high-five to Langley: this is one serious motherfucking success. Now it’s really important we don’t screw it all up by abusing Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Apparently Baradar has been in custody since last week and is being interrogated by both the [...]

What al-Qaeda lacks in capabilities it’s making up for in bravado. Evan Kohlmann emailed out a statement from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula warning of an ultra-mega-terror attack on the way. After an interminable amount of pseudo-religious and pseudoscientific gibberish — seriously, these guys are as lucid as the fucking New Israelites who play dress-up [...]

This I’m just going to note without comment. An ISAF release I just received. Three Afghan civilians have been killed in three separate incidents in Nad Ali district in Helmand Province during Operation Moshtarak. Following a small-arms engagement with insurgents on Sunday, two wounded Afghan men were brought to a joint Afghan-ISAF patrol. The patrol [...]

Via Jason Sigger, STRATFOR has a rather measured assessment that al-Qaeda doesn’t possess the capabilities to pull off a WMD strike: The pressure jihadist groups are under would also make it very difficult for them to develop a chemical or biological weapons facility, even if they possessed the financial and human resources required to launch [...]

As if this weekend’s accidental deaths in Helmand from an artillery mistake weren’t bad enough, now an ISAF statement acknowledges civilian deaths in Kandahar (unrelated to the current Marja operation) caused by — wait for it — an airstrike, the uses of which have been significantly curtailed. The full release: An ISAF airstrike against suspected [...]

Meat Is Murder, a perfect album for the precocious-teenager-but-still-ultimately-a-teenager you know/remains within you, celebrated its 25th birthday yesterday, right in time for what I consider its most potent lyric to sum up the 2010 Democratic Party. Via The Awl. In related news, I did something to my back and now it hurts like hell, so [...]