The New Republic

A landmark cinematic event in 280 words, or one for every $500, 000 of weekend box office:   Senior year. How’d you get so old so fast? Oh, good. Cullen’s here. I’m 109. Maybe I shouldn’t be dating such an old man. Bella. Jacob. Hello, biceps. I’m just filling out. The Volturi are a very old, very powerful family. Don’t hate the truck. Ow, paper cut. READ MORE >>

Ever on the lookout for ways to shrink the party’s tent still further, a few of the masterminds at the Republican National Committee are pushing a resolution to establish an ideological purity test for prospective GOP candidates. Those who fail on three or more of the following ten criteria would be deemed ineligible for RNC funding and endorsement: READ MORE >>

Controversy has been brewing around Disney's new release this week, The Princess and the Frog, which is the studio's first movie to feature a black protagonist. READ MORE >>

Ex-Bush strategist Matthew Dowd has a perplexing op-ed in today's WaPo. Looking to chart a path by which Sarah Palin can reasonably reach the Oval Office, he lists a handful of steps she should take. His bullet-point categories are as follows: READ MORE >>

Given that everyone agrees Israel can't just destroy Iran's nuclear program--what with underground bunkers and secret facilities--people often wonder why Israel would launch air strikes that could have calamitous consequences. This Council on Foreign Relations analysis offers one explanation: READ MORE >>

The NYT Science section has a blurb in its "Vital Signs" roundup bemoaning the fact that, as the headline notes, "Smoking in U.S. Declines but Not by Much." According to the CDC, around 20.6 percent of Americans smoked last year, "barely down from 20.9 percent in 2004" and up a smidge from the 19.8 percent of reported smokers in 2007.  READ MORE >>

So, multiple outlets are reporting that Obama is days away from a decision on his Afghanistan strategy, and that he will likely present it to the nation in a prime time (unlike his mid-March speech, which was delivered on a Friday morning). For now there's not much to say, except to remind people that the waiting game has just begun. It will take months to get those troops over there. The winter will put a chill, so to speak, on combat operations. And it probably won't be clear many more months--maybe a year--whether we've turned the conflict around. Take your patience pills. READ MORE >>

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On the eve of the Obama administration's first State Dinner--a dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh--The Indian Express has a major scoop. The 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodyha led to the deaths of more than 1000 people, and arguably remains the most controversial event in recent Indian history. A retired supreme court justice, M.S. Liberhan, led a commission that investigated the massacre. READ MORE >>

As has been the case all year, progressives are giving mixed reviews to the latest legislative step health care reform legislation, the 60-40 Senate vote-to-proceed, which is basically a preliminary cloture vote. While everyone's happy that the vote wasn't lost, there's a fair amount of angst over the threats of some Democrats to vote against the final bill, or against cloture on the final bill, unless actions unacceptable to most progressives are taken to change the bill. READ MORE >>