Politics, perhaps depressingly at its best, is about strategic compromise, the “art of the possible,” as was once so famously put by German-Prussian politician Otto Von Bismarck. A goodly proportion of that art, then, is the fine skill of knowing what is and what is not possible at any given time. Because, to borrow from another socio-political prophet: you can achieve some things some times, but you can’t achieve all the things all the time. So while I understand that recent(ish)...

On the estimable Fox News this past Sunday, former head of the CIA Michael Hayden has this interesting bit to say about the Obama administration’s decision to release the memos outlining interrogation techniques used against enemy combatants and what may or may not constitute torture, which caught my ear: There’s another point, too, that I have to make. And it’s just not the tactical effect of this technique or that. It’s the broader effect on CIA officers. I mean, if you’re...

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” – Nietzsche It is a popular notion to suggest that the problem with American politics is that they have been taken over by a a virulent strain of hyper-partisanship that rendering its victim paralyzed Opinions vary as to the appropriate vaccine, but I would like to suggest that any course of treatment for the malady will fail to be effective because the thrust of the prognosis is off-base. It...

Some weeks ago I posted a piece saying that Republicans and conservatives were missing a golden opportunity to engage in a full-throated reconstruction dialogue under the Obama administration and noted that to date Republicans seemed to be presenting themselves as nothing more than the Party of No. The presentation of what is by all accounts an extremely flimsy budget alternative seems to indicate that not much has changed. In that post, I said that conservatives and Republicans needed to put themselves...

With Obama’s recent Af-Pak announcement, I thought it might be a good time to pull my musings around moral clarity and foreign policy back out of the closet and dust them off to have another look. When last I ruminated on this topic, it was over at my home digs at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen where co-blogger E.D. Kain had expressed perfectly reasonable concern over basing foreign policy on something as mercurial as moral clarity and said that he would be interested to see how I managed...

Whatever your opinion about how we humans are best suited to deal with the impacts of climate change and our role in generating that phenomenon, when countries have to start redrawing their borders as a result of those impacts it’s hard to argue that there isn’t any phenomenon to argue over.

Matthew Yglesias has a post up that Andrew Sullivan links to (approvingly it would seem given the context?) that adds to the articulated outrage of millions of Americans over the AIG bonuses, If the folks running Citigroup and Bank of America and AIG were good at their jobs, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. That’s the point. But they weren’t good. They lost staggering sums of money. Their companies went broke. They had to beg for taxpayer dollars. You don’t get to do that...

Like many bloggers, on November 4, 2008 I was feverishly watching election results come in and manically trying to live-blog something of importance from what information I had available to me. It was a good night, regardless of what side of the ideological street on which you happened to be set up. It was good because watching election results roll in on a contest as heralded as the presidential election is a thrilling experience, especially when you’ve been paying obsessive attention to it...

David Brooks has received mostly taunting for his trouble in writing a New York Times op-ed last week lamenting Obama’s failure to govern from the center. Most of taunts have come from the right, deriding Brooks for failing to recognize earlier that Obama is a classic, dyed-in-the-wool, tax and spend, big government liberal. That taunting may be fair all told, but I think it misses the more intriguing element of Brooks’ piece: that moderate on both the left and the right band together...

I dug Tony Campbell’s analysis of the Limbaugh-Steele show down below. At the same time, I can’t see it as but a good thing when different heads in that hydra start challenging one another. There has been far too much yes-sir-ism in the Republican party over the past eight years and there tends to be too much of it in politics in general. Just as I cheered when House Democrats took Obama on about his stimulus package, so too do I take to be a bit good thing that some lines are being drawn...

I was reminded yesterday why it is that I never fell in for the popular Ron Paul, younger generation hype by watching his CPAC address. Overall it was a good speech, full of thought provoking suggestions and interesting analysis. I suppose the other reason that I didn’t fall in for Paul is that I often times don’t agree with his take on things. It seems to me that Paul provides an interesting flavour on foreign affairs, both military and economic, but that at core he is one of those folks...

Last week, five-month-old Culture 11 — an site that was part blog constellation, part online magazine, and part social networking community — announced that it was shuttering its operations and laying off its staff based on funding availability. At the site’s primary blog, The Confabulum, Culture 11 CEO David Kuo left the following explanation, Sometimes there are simple stories. Culture11’s is one of them. We raised a certain amount of money last year predicated on the assumption...

As many of you will have read below, Patrick Edaburn notes that it appears as thought the political showdown in Canada has finally come to an end and that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives have staved off defeat. Newly appointed Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has agreed to provisionally support the Conservative budget so long as an amendment calling for regular updates on the stimulus impact of the budget are provided, and the Conservatives seem to have agreed at least unofficially. Some...

Many called the 2008 Presidential election the first “You Tube election”. The below video may demonstrate that in 2009, You Tube is expanding its reach far beyond just elections: Not surprisingly, the video has come in for some criticism from right of center bloggers for being weird and creepy and generally worth of mockery. There is a muted tone to the mocking from James Poulos and Rod Dreher tries his best to hold back saying, I swear, I’m trying to be kind about this. But it’s...

Barack Obama is a President of firsts, to be sure. Obama is the first African-American President, he is the first gen-xer to be elected President, and he’s arguably the first President to enter office with such a large raft of problems to attempt to address. The first thing that caught my eye, though, is that in his ever expanding and impressive display of commitment towards the “team of rivals” concept, Obama was the first President to be sworn in by a Chief Justice whom he voted...

It’s hard to know what to say on a day where it feels like everything has probably already been said. It was a big day, particularly for Americans, but the entire world was resonating with a sense of hope and exhilaration. The election of Barack Obama fulfills many people’s dreams, perhaps overfills them. But it’s hard to deny people the joy and ecstasy they feel at the event of such a President’s swearing into office. Apart from the historic nature of Obama’s presidency,...

A mash up of public information about who donated to Proposition 8 in California and a Google map plotting all of that information out is causing a bit of a stir in the old blogosphere. Rod Dreher of Crunchy Con first wrote about the map saying this, Here is a Google map that allows you to find your way to the homes of people who donated money to Prop 8 in California. It’s damn creepy, is what it is. What could possibly be the use of this kind of information, presented in this way? It’s...

There has been a whirlwind of curiosity about Obama’s thoughts on the Gaza conflict that has only been been whipped into a low-level fervor due to Obama’s wise decision to stay tight lipped on the issue. Despite Obama citing foreign policy as perhaps the most important area for the rule of one president at a time, reporters and pundits have attempted a variety of approaches to get more out of the President-Elect to no avail. Listening to ABC’s This Week via podcast on my way into...

In response to the push-back / cool reception / dissenting voices that met the initial introduction of Democrats to Obama’s proposed stimulus package, Obama adviser David Axelrod astutely quipped, I’m going to characterize it as people doing their jobs If I can just say, amen! Far too often in modern American politics, the voicing of dissent is seen as a sign of weakness. An administration that has its stuff together is identified as an administration whose congress-people and senators...

As the RNC goes through the motions of finding a new (or perhaps not so new) leader, many Republicans may be thinking the same thing as CNN: all hope rests on this decision. While I don’t disagree that the leader of the Party is an important post and that the right or wrong person will make a difference in the future of the Party, I think it is misguided to pin the entire future of the Party on that one person. The people who really determine the future of the Party are its base, the rank...

Via Alex Massie I see that David Cameron’s Tories now have a second — second — openly gay, prominent member of his shadow cabinet who has publicly entered into a civil partnership [Nick Herbert]. The Telegraph reports, [T]he civil partnership ceremony was held at Lambeth town hall in south London last week and was attended only by close relatives. The reception, a small lunch for both families, was held at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. Herbert, the 45-year-old successor to Howard...

Is it tacky to start ruminating over the potential presidential run of someone whose name has only really just come up before the person who just got elected has even taken office? I don’t know, but it’s starting to happen. While Katheryn Jean Lopez might be right that Jeb Bush for President isn’t the craziest idea out there, she also points out why flying the idea already is binding it to a doomed fate: it’s way too early and gives the anti-Bush campaign lots of time to...

Nostradamus, James Carville is not, 2009 will be a year in which the Republican Party will be confronted with a near catastrophic ideological rift. There is no obvious Republican leader on the horizon, and the party is caught between its Southern/talk-radio base and the rest of the country on whether they should oppose or cooperate with Obama’s administration. The combination of the lack of an obvious leader and the general political combustibility of the Republican Party will lead to a dangerous...

I get where Chrysler is coming from with this thank-you ad but, given how unpopular the bailout was, it might have been best to let well enough alone. (h/t: Upturned Earth)

There has been much begrudged acknowledgment of Time Magazine’s designation of Barack Obama as the Person of the Year. The pick was such a no-brainer that, while perhaps deserved, left many grumbling with its anti-climatic qualities. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not an Obama hater. I was a relatively early supporter of Obama’s and found him exciting both throughout the primaries and the general election, though that excitement waxed and waned in waves. I was as excited and...