Making the rounds today is a piece up at the Guardian in which a former top CIA terrorism official admits the obvious: that the drone war if overly broad, kills too many civilians, provokes anti-American hatred, and could inadvertently create terrorist safe havens....
I hate a Roman named Status Quo! Of course Ray Bradbury would have hated such a man, too. When he wrote these words as part of the gripping dialogue in his 1950 would-be classic, Fahrenheit 451, he was railing against the conformity and emptiness, the...
From Today's Downsize DC Newsletter: Do you want to deny your consent for the following Federal actions . . . Undeclared wars Occupations Nation-building Civilian drone-strikes Torture, kidnapping, and murder If so, tell Congress to repeal the...
While in the midst of pledge drive, I nearly missed one of the few sources of joy in this business: Watching Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton smoke out suit wearing think tankers who would clearly be more comfortable wearing sheets. In a two part series at Think Progress,...
Via Marc Lynch, "a useful addition to the growing body of analysis and argument" in opposition to any direct intervention in Syria from Prof. Eva Bellin and Prof. Peter Krause in the Middle East Brief from Brandeis University (PDF). Here's their takedown of why a...
Scott Shane from the New York Times has issued a clarification on their blog regarding last week's story about President Obama's role in deciding who to add to his ever-growing "kill list." The clarifications are two-fold, mostly lashing other sites that took the...
The great Robert Higgs lists Axioms of Political Geometry. My two favorites: The shortest distance between a free society and a totalitarian society passes through war. The whole of society is greater than the part that government officials can comprehend, and much...
It's no Kony 2012! I'm enough of a cynic to know that no one learns anything from the past, at least Eugene Jarecki can sleep well knowing he was right. While Jarecki's documentary "Why We Fight" was released in 2005, it (sadly) seems just as fresh as it did seven...
According to Bonnie S. Glaser at the Center for Strategic International Studies (no relation), next year "could see a shift in Chinese foreign policy based on the new leadership’s judgment that it must respond to a U.S. strategy that seeks to prevent China’s...
