Politics
The Band of Leakers
The nominal occasions for a conference call today with “Julian Assange & Whistleblowers” were, obviously, Edward Snowden’s recent leaks; the ongoing Bradley Manning court-martial; and the one-year anniversary of Assange’s “embassy confinement” (he took aslyum in Ecuador’s embassy in London; during the call, he accused Britain of violating international law by refusing to allow him to travel from the embassy to Ecuador itself).
John Harwood has a piece in The New York Times today that exemplifies such astonishing levels of silly conventional wisdom that it must be read in full. Harwood's contention, which is almost too boring to summarize, is that Obama has ignored the "red" areas of the country, rarely visiting them and thus failing to heal our country's divisions. (Sorry, cliched writing is almost impossible to avoid on this subject).
Yesterday, that venerable institution, the U.S. House of Representatives, passed yet another Republican-backed bill that will never become law. No, it’s not their thirty-eighth attempt to repeal Obamacare, though that’s surely around the corner. It’s a restriction on abortion that flies in the face of Roe v.
A demented tale of how the Army actually does business.
Prepare to Forget About the NSA
The president’s approval rating has dipped, probably because of the NSA surveillance revelations or the accumulated effect of supposed or actual scandals. As Mark Blumenthal has pointed out, the decline probably isn’t as large as suggested by yesterday’s CNN poll, which pointed toward a big, 8 point decline in the president’s approval rating.
Barely had the executive jets departed Boston's Logan Airport filled with disappointed Mitt Romney backers after the 2012 election than Bobby Jindal was out of the box declaiming on what the Republican Party needed to do to win back the White House.
Obama Ist Kein Berliner
Fifty years after JFK's visit, and five since his own, Obama returns to Berlin—to a much different mood
Fifty years after JFK's visit, and five since his own, Obama returns to Berlin—to a different mood.
Politico has two new pieces about Marco Rubio's attempts to pass an immigration bill. The first story, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, explains the risk Rubio faces of being labeled an "insider" for his work with the Gang of 8.
"What Part of 'Politico' Do You Not Understand?"
A conversation about the dark art of driving the conversation
A conversation about the dark art of driving the conversation.
Just last Friday, walking down the street, I saw a handmade sign above a dumpster warning passersby not to deposit their trash there. "Smile. You're on camera," said the sign. A few minutes later, reading on my phone, I came across a comment on a story about the NSA that quoted a computer firm executive as telling a crowd at a lecture he was giving, "You have no privacy. Get over it." Then, about twenty minutes after that, I went to send an e-mail on my computer and a little window popped up informing me that Safari, my Web browser, wanted "to access" my stored personal information.
