I just got back from a very short trip to the UK to attend the wedding of an old classmate. One thing that struck me while I was there was the complete unpopularity of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The polls show Labour trailing the opposition Conservatives by as much as 15 points, with less than ten months to go until the next election. In the old British colony now known as the United States, we seem to take it for granted that it was the mistakes of our politicians and bankers that provoked the...

It was certainly quite a jolt to pick up my Wall Street Journal and see this big headline smack in the middle of Page One: Taliban Now Winning. The article is based on an interview with US commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The very first words in the story are, The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, But no matter how hard you look, you won’t find an actual quote from McChrystal in which he says the Taliban is winning or that they have...

A cost effective approach to health care: Dozens of rabbis and Kabbalah mystics armed with ceremonial trumpets took to the skies over Israel on Monday to battle the swine flu virus, according to local media reports. About 50 Jewish holy men chanted prayers and blew shofars (ritual rams’ horns) in an aircraft circling over the country in the hope of stopping the spread of the virus, some of those involved in Monday’s venture were quoted as saying. “The aim of the flight was to...

Recently, the Weekly Standard mocked the NY Times for confessing to no fewer than seven factual errors in its remembrance of Walter Cronkite. Then yesterday, the Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, devoted an entire column to exploring just how it’s possible for the Paper of Record to make seven mistakes in a single article. Hoyt reports, Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it… Seemingly...

Via the always thoughtful Dan Twining: Last Friday, Indonesia’s electoral commission certified the winner of the country’s recent presidential election, a free and fair contest that demonstrated the strength of democratic norms in a country ruled for decades by strongmen supported by Washington. Meanwhile, next door in Burma, a political show trial is preparing to convict that country’s legitimately elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, of “crimes” she did not commit, most...

James Kirchick has a very interesting article in the Sunday Post. Since declaring himself as a candidate for President, Barack Obama has consistently stated that he opposes gay marriage. Yet it is practically an article of faith among liberals that Obama secretly supports gay marriage, but says the opposite for political reasons. James writes, I’ve lost track of the number of liberal friends and acquaintances, gay and straight alike, who assure me that Obama “really” supports...

As noted below, the WaPo described President Obama’s candidates for the Presidential Medal of Freedom as not “particularly controversial”. Aside from the points MK raised about Ted Kennedy, it’s worth noting that Desmond Tutu isn’t exactly a stranger to controversy either. Wikipedia reports that Tutu has persistently compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, called on Jews to forgive the Nazis, and suggested in 2002 that “the Jewish lobby” suppresses justified...

On Thursday, President Obama announced that he would award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to sixteen individuals, including Sen. Ted Kennedy. Mary Katherine is not amused. She asks how many individuals considered complicit in vehicular manslaughter could be given such an honor. Would a conservative (or any non-Kennedy) rise to the heights of the Senate with Chappaquiddick on their resumes? Yet that was forty years ago. Kennedy has won re-election...

Kevin Drum notes that the NYT had three correspondents all live-blog the President’s beer with Skip Gates and Jim Crowley. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

The Orlando Sentinel reports on an Alaska blog’s claim that Sarah Palin is getting a divorce: The No. 1 search term in Google right now is “sarah palin divorce.” The reason? A couple of bloggers in Alaska posted stories this morning claiming to have inside information that former Gov. Sarah Palin is divorcing her husband, Todd. The bloggers went on to claim that Sarah Palin plans to leave the state, possibly moving to Montana… The story, naturally, is getting attention on politics...

Analogies are flying. What year is this for Republicans? 1964? 1976? 1992? I think 1937 deserves more attention. I noticed this in a review of a book about FDR: Roosevelt had won the 1936 election by a crushing landslide–a total of 61 percent of the popular vote that enabled him to carry all but two of the 48 states–and his Democratic coalition of labor, northern liberals, and the Solid South had similarly steamrollered through Congress in 1936, leaving the wounded Republicans, who...

This may make sense if you’re Jewish: Gail, as you know, I begin and end my days by reciting Congressional Budget Office reports. I even put on tefillin, just to make it seem holy. FYI, Wikipedia has a pretty good description and photo of tefillin. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Are we committed to nation-building, or are we just going to take out Al Qaeda? Here’s Obama announcing his new strategy in March: I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. Here’s how the Pentagon described our objective in its new report to Congress: The focus of the new strategy is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat...

What leads someone to become a fire-breathing right-wing talk show host? Answer: A Ph.D. from Berkeley in nutritional ethnomedicine. Seriously. The current issue of The New Yorker has a very interesting profile of Michael Savage [registration required]. Although the magazine’s profiles of conservatives often degenerate into caricature, this one is surprisingly fair-minded, even affectionate. As for Savage’s origins, we find out that in 1978 Michael Alan Weiner earned a degree that...

This week’s New Republic has a great feature on Leopold Munyakazi, a Rwandan exile and American college professor accused of initiating a mass murder during the genocide in 1994. NBC is going after Munyakazi as part of a new series focused on war criminals living in the United States. For NBC, it’s a simple, compelling story about good vs. evil: After class, a swirling retinue of about ten cameramen, technicians, and professional interrogators descended on Munyakazi, a broad-faced middle-aged...

Matt Yglesias is frustrated with the nutty and dysfunctional nature of “fee-for-service” medicine in which doctors are paid for doing stuff rather than for treating illness. I feel the same way, but not about medicine. My wife is an attorney at a large firm, where the firm’s earnings depend on how many hours its lawyers bill, not whether the client’s legal illnesses get treated. It’s an extremely frustrating system, since it punishes lawyers for their efficiency. If a good...

Tom Friedman, Sunday morning: I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing. Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. As Dick Cheney might have said, the extremists are just “dead-enders”. What we are seeing today in the Middle East is just “the...

How often do you see a review that begins like this? It’s hard to know where — and with whom — to begin when assessing the depraved, worthless piece of filth that is “Orphan,” a high-gloss horror show about a well-meaning couple who bring home a 9-year-old girl to join their family, only to discover, way too late, that she’s a homicidal psychopath. The quote is from Ann Hornaday’s review in the Washington Post. Interestingly, most of the comments on Hornaday’s...

Maureen Dowd is a free woman because “Being obnoxious isn’t a crime.” That is the opening line of Dowd’s column from this morning. She intended her words as a defense of Henry Louis Gates, but it’s awfully tempting to see them as a sort of mea culpa. Although Kathy offered considerable praise for Dowd’s column, I protest. Dowd’s column is an exercise is just the sort of profiling that she claims to denounce. In what way? Without any evidence to back...

When I first saw the headlines about Gates being arrested, I thought to myself, “How in the world did the Secretary of Defense get arrested?” No, not that Gates. Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard. I read the WSJ’s first write-up of the story and thought to myself, “Please let this be a one-day story. Please, don’t let this become a pointless racial brouhaha.” IMHO, if there are going to be a whole bunch of headlines about Gates, and there are wars going on in Iraq...

Counterinsurgency blogger Andrew Exum, aka Abu Muqawama, is back from Afghanistan. Andrew explains: I was asked by General McChrystal to be part of a small team of scholars and practitioners helping to conduct his 60-day review of strategy and operations in Afghanistan. So I have spent the past month traveling around Afghanistan conducting interviews and trying to evaluate ISAF’s operations. The three main points Andrew took away from his visit are: Winning will be extremely hard. Gen. McChrystal...

As always, my role is the amateur plunging into a pool of expertise. On Thursday, George Will quoted Mark Steyn to the effect, If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. Kevin Drum dismissed Steyn’s comment as a denialist talking point: Global temps have been trending up for over a century, but in any particular year they can spike up and down quite...

The Wall Street Journal has a very good profile today of the West Point Class of 1976, whose graduates include Ray Odierno, our commander in Iraq, and Stanley McChrystal, our commander in Afghanistan, along with several other prominent generals. The article mentions in passing that Odierno’s son lost his arm in 2004, in a firefight near Baghdad. Later, the article mentions in passing that the daughter of Gen. Keith Walker was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2005. This kind of tragedy...

This would’ve been much bigger news if not for the Sotomayor hearings — Kevin Drum notices that moderate Senate Democrats have excised the card-check provision from the Employee Free Choice Act. From the NYT: A half-dozen senators friendly to labor have decided to drop a central provision of a bill that would have made it easier to organize workers. The so-called card-check provision — which senators decided to scrap to help secure a filibuster-proof 60 votes — would have required...

If I were Judge Sotomayor, I would be concerned about the gun lobby. But I would be much more afraid of the nunchuk lobby. Doesn’t anybody remember what happened to the last Supreme Court nominee who suggested that states have the right to ban ninja weapons? Of course nobody remembers! When ninjas take you out, they make sure that nobody even remembers you even existed in the first place! In an ominous sign of things to come, celebrity ninjas have already begun to speak out against Sotomayor: Ninja...