Pentagon
The Budget Impasse And the Policy Riders
The budget impasse seems to hinge as much as anything else on the fate of a series of "riders" -- measures attached the the budget by the House GOP that don't have anything to do with the budget: Top budget staff, after working through the night, returned Thursday morning with a proposed $34.5 billion in cuts, with $3 billion of that to come from the Pentagon. Democrats said Mr.
Blossoms and Choppers
At the Tidal Basin the other day I was reminded that the most stimulating experiences are the unmediated ones. I was educated for mediation, for middle terms that unified logical or lived discrepancies and conquered them with a category. Contradictions were to be eliminated, like dissonances in music, or shown to be false, and in their resolution lay a release. But I have lost my confidence in single descriptions, and I am a little bored with the dream of release.
OK, Let's Talk About Death Panels
Critics of the Affordable Care Act keep saying health care reform will kill people. Perhaps they should talk to Dallas Wiens. Wiens, 25, lost most of his face in a freak work accident. Earlier this week, doctors in Boston performed an experimental face transplant. The Defense Department and the hospital underwrote the surgery. (The Pentagon hopes the know-how can someday help wounded soldiers.) But Wiens will depend on expensive immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life. The Affordable Care Act will allow Wiens to pay for those drugs.
Spy vs. Spy
Most Americans only ever hear about the director of national intelligence (DNI) when the person who holds the job happens to stick his foot in his mouth. Take Dennis Blair, President Obama’s first pick for the position, who landed in hot water when he proposed Chas Freeman—a former adviser to a Chinese national oil company who asserted that U.S. interests were being subverted by Israel’s Likud Party—to chair the National Intelligence Council.
Rumor Debunked
Herzliya, Israel—For years, American neoconservatives have been accused of being lackeys for Israel, namely the Likud party. In 2008, Time’s Joe Klein wrote, “The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for [the Iraq] war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S.
Bye Bye, Big Bird. Hello, E. Coli.
Now we know what life will be like if the House Republicans get their way: Financial aid for college will decline, food-borne illness will spread more easily, Head Start programs will shrink, and Big Bird might be out of business. After a difficult week of negotiations, the House Appropriations Committee on Friday evening released a detailed list of spending cuts that would reduce non-defense federal expenditures by about $60 billion* between now and September, when the fiscal year ends. In so doing, House leadership addressed the concerns of Tea Party activists and newly elected Republicans,
The Failure of U.S. Aid in Egypt
If you go to the website of the U.S.
Game Changer
I confess that I’m torn. I had the same cranky reaction to Time’s Person of the Year choice as pretty much the entire Internet: It’s hard to see the calculation that makes Mark Zuckerberg more influential than Julian Assange in 2010. Still, there’s something about this conventional wisdom that’s annoying in its own right. When people riff about the impact of Wikileaks, you typically hear how it’s forever changed diplomacy or intelligence-gathering. The more ambitious accounts will mention the implications for journalism, too. All of that’s true and vaguely relevant.
Should the CIA Turn Against Pakistan's Spies?
The recent chief-of-station (COS) cover-shredding brouhaha between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate marks an ironic and possibly important shift in the historic affection that Langley has had for Pakistan’s premiere intelligence service.
Three Cheers for Obama and the Dems
After last November’s election, one might have expected the Obama White House and Democratic Congress to take six weeks off to mull their defeat. Instead, they used the lame duck session in December to win cloture-proof majorities for some very significant bills. Just today, the Senate ratified the new START arms control treaty by a whopping 71 to 26 vote. On December 18, the Senate voted by 65 to 31 to strike down the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy against gays serving openly in the armed forces. Today’s ratification of the New Start treaty reduces U.S.
