The New Republic

The Center for Public Integrity has just put out a useful report showing that John Murtha's pattern of earmarking Pentagon dollars to defense contractors who give lots of money--or are represented by lobbyists who give lots of money--to his campaigns is pretty much par for the course on the defense appropriations subcommittee: READ MORE >>

Money quotes from a Pentagon presser this afternoon with the Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs chairman: “The notion that you can conduct a purely kind of counterterrorist campaign and do it from a distance simply does not accord with reality,” Mr. Gates said, adding that successful methods required cooperation with local law enforcement, the use of internal security and intelligence. READ MORE >>

Congressman John Murtha passed away today. Below, you'll find a recent magazine feature that we ran on him--and the town he represented for 36 years. READ MORE >>

The Obama National Security Council has a new director for WMD terrorism and threat reduction in Laura Holgate, a vice president at the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative. NTI is a private nonprofit outfit, chaired by former Senator Sam Nunn and funded by the likes of Ted Turner and Warren Buffett, that has done yeoman's work in helping the federal government address the WMD threat. READ MORE >>

Last week, I linked to a story about the White House floating an executive order that, if finalized, would force the federal government to slash its greenhouse-gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. That'd be a big deal if it pans out, but the draft order's still circulating. READ MORE >>

Earlier today, congressional Democrats held their second hearing on the national security aspects of climate change in little over a week. READ MORE >>

  The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 By Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 394 pp., $27.95) I. READ MORE >>

As Barack Obama tries to avoid the mistakes Bill Clinton made on gays in the military, the new president's hesitation is already causing damage: Last week came news that yet another Arabic language specialist is about to be dismissed for homosexuality, the first under the new White House. What's more, advocates of repeal are now facing political blow-back: Recently, over 1,000 retired officers released a letter claiming that ending the ban could "break" the armed forces. READ MORE >>

Want more evidence of Obama's sincerity about overhauling the Pentagon's procurement process (which, as Jon already highlighted, he vowed to do in an interesting exchange with John McCain yesterday)? He's tapped Harvard prof Ashton Carter to serve as the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer. This is significant, as the Boston Globe reports, READ MORE >>

READ MORE >>