The New Republic

The spittle-flacked National Review contributor claims to have a list of all the times President Obama has used the word terror. Conor Friedersdorf, beginning the dark and lonely work of fact-checking McCarthy's crackpot claims, shows that the number is wholly false: READ MORE >>

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Ben Birnbaum has a long, very carefully reported, and highly convincing article in TNR about Human Rights Watch and Israel. Last fall, the founder of Human Rights Watch resigned from the organization and charged it with anti-Israel bias. READ MORE >>

So says Marc Ambinder: For 17 years, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has grabbed thousands of gay soldiers by their collars and thrown them out of the military. By this time next year, that policy will be gone. Gay people will be openly serving in the United States Armed Forces. You might be forgiven for disbelieving that prediction, especially given the angry broadsides that gay rights activists are directing at the White House. ... READ MORE >>

Imagine for a moment that it is late 2010, perhaps a few weeks after the midterm elections. Barack Obama has scheduled a surprise prime-time televised statement from the Oval Office. Looking grave, even shaken, behind the presidential desk, Obama fixes his gaze into the camera and speaks: READ MORE >>

In the summer of 1996, during my short-lived American legal career, I clerked at a large Washington, D.C., law firm. Within a few days of my arrival, a partner dropped a 5,000-page bomb on my desk—the U.S. Air Force report on the plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others in Dubrovnik earlier that year. As at other law firms in the city, there was interest in whether the crash had any "legal implications" (to employ a euphemism much favored by civil litigators). READ MORE >>

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., on March 19, 2010. READ MORE >>

The nuclear order seems to be falling apart. Gone is the uneasy balance between the cold war superpowers. We now face a slew of new nuclear actors. North Korea has reprocessed enough plutonium for perhaps ten bombs, in addition to the two it has already tested. Iran’s centrifuge program seems poised to produce weapons-grade uranium. And Syria was apparently constructing a clandestine nuclear facility, before it was destroyed by Israeli air strikes in 2007. READ MORE >>

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Earlier this month,the conservative organization Keep America Safe launched a p.r. fusillade against Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys who represented Guantánamo detainees. “The crux of the matter,” says Liz Cheney, chair of the organization, “is the American people have a right to know whether lawyers who used to represent and advocate on behalf of terrorists” are working at DOJ. They just want to know who the terrorist lawyers are. An innocent question, to be sure. READ MORE >>