He may have thrown a weak first pitch, but Barack Obama seems to have acquitted himself pretty well with that other presidential baseball ritual: honoring the World Series champs at the White House. Obama didn’t have to take a stab at What It Means to Be a Yankee during his (otherwise perfunctory) speech, but he [...]

GUANTANAMO BAY — Forgive a post from an exhausted blogger, but I figure I should say something about the stakes of the pre-trial hearing for Omar Khadr’s military commission. It’s the subject of my preview piece for the Washington Independent, so consider this post to be a deeply distilled version of that. (Hey, thanks, Bmaz.) [...]

GUANTANAMO BAY — I know, right? I was pretty surprised this morning when a frazzled guy who’d been at an Andrews Air Force Base terminal for way too long asked if I wouldn’t mind letting him cut in line now that he finished getting some nettlesome bureaucratic burden out of the way of his travel. [...]

My friend Alyssa is okay with the recently announced Monsters, Inc. sequel, but would rather see Pixar give the sequel treatment to The Incredibles: The Incredibles also is a movie about a standard-looking metropolis that’s secretly full of extraordinary people. But the questions The Incredibles raise about how talented people fit into and alter society [...]

Andrew Cohen’s praise for the far-sightedness of the Founding Fathers is typical of the genre. Whenever our contemporary politics are gridlocked, and whenever it seems that our system is incapable of working on behalf of future generations, we look at the Founders with envy, “Why can’t our leaders be as wise, or as prudent, or [...]

The interview Ezra printed last week with a Harvard grad turned Wall Street recruit hits on an important point:  the finance sector’s self-serving complexity is partly due to the sociology of who ends up working in it. A lot of the people navigating this deliberately baroque system were chosen not because of any expertise in [...]

Hello Attackerman readers, and thanks to Spencer for letting me hang out here for a few days. It’s always a pleasure. While Tom Friedman’s reading of the Tea Party Movement is hilariously wrong — a movement of GOP stalwarts isn’t going to embrace anything “green” — it isn’t the worst thing about his column today [...]

Hey again, y’all. Thanks to Spencer for having me back and to Jamelle, who sets the guestblogging bar high. No thanks to the Arizona state legislature and Governor Jan Brewer for giving me obvious blogging fodder by passing the most despicable anti-Hispanic law I’ve seen in my (admittedly short) life. Oh, did I say “anti-Hispanic”? [...]

Hi all. Waiting now for a cab to take me to my Guantanamo-bound airplane. The dog is heartwarmingly near to see me off, suspicious of the fact that I’m awake, dressed and not walking him. Will update you when I can, and not just with dumb GTMO ephemera (well, not exclusively). Can I put in [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 332-10 April 25, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died April 23 in Logar province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained while conducting combat operations. Both soldiers were assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Fort [...]