Just because I’m seeing people on twitter and various listservs I’m on wondering about this: There’s no way Tim Roemer — former congressman, 9/11 commissioner, thinktanker — runs for the Senate seat Evan Bayh is vacating. Roemer is ambassador to India. That’s a great job, managing a crucial relationship. It’s also practically an ATM after [...]

So my hopes are smashed by brutal corporate reality: Wolverine will still be an Avenger when the post-Siege Avengers lineup is unveiled. I’ve read nearly every issue of New Avengers and cannot understand why Wolverine is on this team. Originally the rationale was to have a psychopath on the team who could so some of [...]

Your moment of total facepalmitude today is courtesy of The New York Times piece on Attorney General Holder’s political missteps over the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial. Cue Rahm Emanuel: Mr. Emanuel, who favored a military trial for the Sept. 11 detainees, said his disagreement with Mr. Holder is rooted in different perspectives, not personalities. “You [...]

Excerpt of a press conference on Operation Moshtarek today from Gen. McChrystal. Message: Afghans Are In The Lead, And Hamid Karzai Is Looking Out For You. The clean-shaven Afghan in the fatigues is Defense Minister Wardak. An email I got from an Afghan government spokesman tells me that Interior Minister Atmar is in this too, [...]

Eli Lake reports that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has told his interrogators* that there are other English-speaking terrorists trained by the al-Qaeda’s Yemen/Saudi affiliate. I had heard something similar, but it was third-hand and single-sourced and I had trouble confirming it, so extra credit to Eli for reporting it out. His last graf, though, might be [...]

When I was a junior in high school an epic mishearing of the lyrics convinced me this was the most romantic song in the universe. “The corpses are hanging/headless and limp,” Glenn Danzig observes, fairly wistfully. “Violence with no surprises.” The typical mass murder and mutilation just doesn’t do it for him anymore. Why? “And [...]

A step towards Etherizing al-Qaeda: U.S.-allied intelligence services in Oman intercept a connector between al-Qaeda Senior Leadership and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Isikoffosenball report: U.S. intelligence officials appear to have obtained access to what could turn out to be a significant trove of phone numbers, photographs and documents detailing the links between Al Qaeda’s [...]

This gets into something I’m working on but don’t have enough string yet to actually report, so bear with me. But the Washington Post decided to use Marc Theissen’s dumb “we should be torturing terrorists instead of killing them” Foreign Policy argument as a reporting assignment. A lot of it boils down to saying “this [...]

Valentine’s Day is no time to watch Dick Cheney deliver Cheneyisms on TV — in my household we’ve just kept the Food Network on all morning* — and I gather from Twitter he’s not said anything particularly novel. So instead, I quote from an interview Vice President Biden gave to ‘Meet The Press’: DAVID GREGORY: [...]

This is not how Gen. McChrystal wanted the Marja operation to start. From an ISAF press statement: Two rockets from a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launched at insurgents firing upon Afghan and ISAF forces impacted approximately 300 meters off their intended target, killing 12 civilians in Nad Ali district, Helmand province today. ISAF [...]