So the president went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and asked the nation’s CEOs to give a shit about someone other than themselves. He promised them he will work on that pesky tax code (the one with the loopholes they exploit? That one.) He said he’d go after “unnecessary and outdated regulations” — whatever [...]

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Taking a break from watching and reading about the revolutionary activity in Egypt so I can, ya know, write about it. It’s called “processing.” Or vomiting, your pick. So the WaPo was the first Respectable Beltway News Organ to publish an opinion piece giving George Bush credit for the wave of popular democratic uprisings against [...]

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Driving my daughter home from school, I caught the first fifteen minutes of All Things Considered. First up, a story on the “bipartisan” seating arrangements between Democratic and Republican congress-things during tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Secondly came a piece on the speech itself, discussed by Mara Liasson with an emphasis on the “narrative” [...]

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Last week President Obama flew to India to sell them $5 billion for 10 Boeing C-17 cargo planes — the sixth biggest arms deal in U.S. history. As Jim Hightower points out, this deal doesn’t do much to boost American employment (despite administration hopes), but it does help escalate the arms race India runs with [...]

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Iran is a threat because Washington says so. Certainly, WaPo accepts the charge at face value: Iran’s ambitions, which have cast a long shadow over the greater Middle East, may serve as a common bond keeping a frail peace process intact despite threats that have arisen even before the negotiations open Thursday at the State [...]

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I don’t dispute Dennis G’s simple take on the mid-term elections: In November we face a choice between the Confederate Party and modernity. But sweet baby jeebiz, that’s a downer. If “modernity” is defined as the corporate crony Democrats currently overseeing two wars, Plan Mexico, and a continuation of police state policies created by the [...]

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Oh, Daily Beast, you are a wonder. When I tire of the right wing war blather, there you are, serving up the liberal equivalent. But first, I agree with Atrios — Peter Beinart has a point: Last summer, he tried to split the difference—surging in Afghanistan while simultaneously pledging to retreat on the theory that [...]

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ONOZ. Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge on why [McChrystal] must be fired—and how Obama is in danger of becoming a wuss. Not a wuss! At first I thought this choice of words came from the Daily Beast editors, no strangers to crass and reductionist language. For most of the column, Hoge himself takes the long [...]

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I hate opinion pieces like these. Peter Beinart advances the useless notion that President Obama’s address to the West Point Academy wasn’t stirring enough: Obama is clearly trying to ensure that the Afghan war no longer be run on a blank check. That’s why he famously brought OMB Director Peter Orszag to be photographed at [...]

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Under Bush I recall a lot of talk of “outrage fatigue.” Things were so bad, with news of the administration’s nefarious activities or the out-of-control consequences of its policy decisions hitting the public every day, that anyone not in the Reflexive Apologist Camp felt overwhelmed and almost helpless.1 Thank goodness for elections. Not that people [...]

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