Looking forward to the day when America’s interminable wars finally grind to a halt? Don’t.
There are any number of reasons to be way less than confident that our armies are ever leaving Iraq or Afghanistan, not least among which is that the people responsible for getting US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan tend [...]

If you’re not familiar with the back story, it’s this: James O’Keefe, a patently dishonest right-wing firebrand, if that’s not redundant, and Hannah Giles, a patently dishonest right-wing surf bunny took a hidden camera into various offices of ACORN, an umbrella operation for community organizing groups, and produced a patently dishonest video purporting to show [...]

Retired general and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who did much worse stuff but is best known as the guy who appointed himself acting president when Ronald Reagan was shot, is dead. Barack Obama hails him as representative of “our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.” Jonathan Schwarz [...]

Many years ago, very shortly after BTC News burst upon the blogosphere like a firefly at high noon, we began an occasional feature called My Favorite Warlord. Readers were invited to play along; all that’s required is to choose one among the host of what are commonly referred to as warlords in Afghanistan, and do [...]

Less than 24 hours after promising to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” and “do our work openly,” Barack Obama’s White House began quietly inviting lobbyists to join in “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”
The Hill, which publishes from offices [...]

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the speech was getting Chris Matthews to forget that Obama is not an Irishman. Seriously: Chris Matthews said that “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Dude. Seek help. Never mind.
The White House web site has a transcript of the speech along with a convenient guide [...]

Actually 22 Democrats and one Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders, voted against creating a commission that could force cuts to social welfare programs in order to end deficit spending and reduce the national debt. Interestingly, fewer Republicans than Democrats supported the legislation—16 of the former (plus Joe Lieberman, naturally) and 36 of the latter voted in [...]

Former Democratic Leadership Council chairman Bruce Reed takes a predictable lesson for Democrats away from the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts: Run away, run away! He quotes Missouri Senator Claire McKaskill, who reacted to the election by saying that “people out there believe that we are going too far, too fast,” and he opines that [...]

From big-time Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso: Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.
Plus: IOZ is the Helen Reddy of nihilistic triumphalism.

Blogging requires cat-like reflexes. Some subjects aren’t really time sensitive—the stupidity of the US approach to countering those who wish us ill when clearly no one has, has ever had or will ever have any reason for doing so is never out of style or lacking for an example—but some are and if one doesn’t [...]

Via Digby, an excellent writer trying very hard to cherish her remaining illusions, we learn that Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana GOP representative who left the House to take a multi-million dollar salary as the chief lobbyist for the drug industry shortly after shepherding the drug industry welfare legislation known as Medicare Part D through his [...]

I’ve been remarking for almost two years now that Barack Obama’s insurance reform plan in its original glory is quite similar to, but slightly weaker than, one proposed by Richard Nixon 45 years ago, but upon review I don’t see that I ever provided any concrete details. Behold …

The plan is organized around seven principles:
First, [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote a story yesterday, published under the auspices of an occasional column called “The Big Idea,” explaining how Republicans were never serious about health insurance reform. Slate readers are supposed to be an upscale, well-educated lot so one might assume they’re aware that Republicans recently controlled the White House for eight [...]

I was watching Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show yesterday when she ran a story about ten senators joining together to devise a health care sop for liberals who at this point are like beggars in the desert asking not for a drink of water but only for someone to waft a canteen under their noses.
Which [...]

Ross Douthat has been occupying some of the world’s priciest editorial real estate for a while now, churning out variously incoherent or inane commentary for the New York Times every Monday. He got the job earlier this year when I was lost in a fog so I haven’t paid much attention to him. I think [...]

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some [...]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s in 1996 — most people don’t remember that Dole even ran — John McCain managed to confound my expectations and crack 46%, by quite a bit, in the popular vote. This should be instructive for anyone who genuinely believes a new day is dawning in America, [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

I can’t actually believe someone is talking about Peggy Noonan winning a Pulitzer, but apparently my capacity for belief falls short of reality, because they are. They being a former colleague of Noonan’s at the Wall Street Journal, and Brian Williams, the managing editor of NBC Nightly News who is paid more than $10 million [...]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s single-shoulder-shrug of an effort in 1996, McCain remains in contention for next month’s election. By which I mean he is still alive and not too embarrassed to show himself in public, the latter of which shouldn’t be any surprise because Republicans, and indeed most Democrats as [...]

I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get most [...]

As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.
It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage [...]

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of [...]

The Washington Post should have a special ethics rule for David Broder: he shouldn’t be allowed to meet anyone, ever, because he simply cannot write anything negative about anyone he has met who didn’t throw a punch at him. Today’s exemplar is the now-indicted senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, who, according to Broder, was [...]

Louie Gohmert, a Republican representative from Texas, has a beef with the Supreme Court: its justices are deciding questions of law. Gohmert — not to be confused with Gomer (Pyle) or Homer (Simpson) — is unhappy with the court’s majority opinion that Guantanamo prisoners are entitled to the constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus, allowing [...]

“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.”
Let’s coin some alternatives. “The main reason al-Qaeda is losing in America is not because there are too few terrorists, [...]

A new poll in the New York Times shows that Barack Obama has inexplicably failed to erase the legacies of slavery in the United States, and further, that he has consistently failed to turn concentrated sulphuric acid into a decent cabernet. Analysts are stunned by this new evidence that Obama is at best a demigod [...]

John McCain said in a Thursday interview with the Kansas City Star that Barack Obama is politically to the left of Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Presumably McCain was referring to the National Journal rankings, which named Obama the most liberal senator based upon his sporadic votes—he missed 35% of them—in 2007.
Even the National [...]

By “nick,” we mean something along the lines of the Grand Canyon or Marianas Trench. It is a nick into which millions of erstwhile homeowners, along with millions more investors—but no policy makers, so far—have tumbled with barely a trace, unless you count the recession they’re leaving in their wake.
As BTC News more or less [...]

Among the trophy and sporting photos in the December/January issue of Outdoor Life is one showing a pair of US Border Patrol agents rappelling down a boulder-strewn slope. The photo is part of a recruiting ad for the Department of Homeland Security’s US Customs and Border Protection arm, and it was spotted by one of [...]

The full quote from Thomas Jefferson reads, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Your job, dear readers, is to decide, using the frame of reference enjoyed by our elected national leadership and presidential aspirants, what constitutes the tree’s [...]

Back in 1999, then-Slate political correspondent Jacob Weisberg, now the online journalistic Cream of Wheat site’s editor, penned a story called “Why the Press Loves John McCain“. He opened it with a charmingly self-effacing and abashed confession:
Journalists go weak in the knees around the guy. The few who have attempted to write debunking pieces about [...]

A lot of people are facing a tough November. Barack Obama seems certain to be the Democratic candidate for president. He’s a black guy in a country that continues to host a lot of people who don’t like black guys, especially ones that are smarter than they are and can talk rings around them.
John [...]

Writing in the London Review of Books, Donald MacKenzie describes a form of gambling masquerading as a sophisticated financial transaction that he describes as the “End of the World trade”, in which an insurer bets that “around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America” won’t go bankrupt, [...]

ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary [...]

My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, “You see that Charlie Manson-looking [...]

John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.
There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility [...]

Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse.
Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous Washington pundits, [...]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here [...]

Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional [...]

Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has long held the record for spending the most money to the least effect in a presidential primary campaign. Gramm raised and spent about $20 million in 1995 and early 1996, more than all but eventual GOP nominee Bob Dole, but dropped out of the race before the New Hampshire [...]

Regular readers of BTC News may recall that we were early supporters of Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo’s long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination, primarily on the strength of, as we said at the time, his willingness “to demystify the deployment of nuclear weapons against the civilian populations of religiously significant cities.” We later renewed [...]

Ronald Reagan killed people, and he killed ideals. He began his campaign for the presidency with a paean to states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where that cause—the right to trample the rights of others—had claimed the lives of three civil rights activists barely more than fifteen years earlier. In Central America, he painted nun-raping, dope [...]

This hasn’t been a good week for unity. First the Boren/Nunn Unityfest in Oklahoma disbanded with most of the participants refusing to endorse the concept of a third-party “unity government” presidential bid, and now Unity ‘08, the much-mocked third-party post-partisan movement, is cutting off its head and sending it to a reputable cryogenics facility.
All is [...]

Former Democratic senators David Boren of Oklahoma and Sam Nunn of Georgia have a message for Democratic presidential candidates: pay up or else.
Boren and Nunn say that unless the Democrats declare a “unity government” and agree to appoint Republicans as senior cabinet members, they’ll mount a third-party spolier campaign to prevent a Democratic victory. And [...]

As many of you already know, Weakly Standard editor Bill Kristol recently outperformed the 1918 influenza virus in auditions to win a New York Times opinion column. He put his new platform to good use today by innoculating Republicans to the possibility that Mike Huckabee could actually win the GOP presidential nomination.
Kristol was watching [...]

We now have two momentarily separate movements, such as they are—Unity ‘08 and an as yet unnamed collection of disgruntled old blackmailers—aimed at erasing the partisan divide in America.
That would be the divide with the modern-day barbarian GOP and its 30%+ support on one side, and the Democratic party with its nearly 60% on [...]

Rudy Giuliani is as mendaciously corrupt as a politician can get these days, which is to say, absolutely. With authoritarian tendencies bordering on the fascist, a hyper-inflated ego and a raging sense of entitlement, there’s just not much to like about him as a person or as a politician.
Except this: he knows how to dress [...]

So, Mitt Romney never saw his father march with Martin Luther King, something Romney says is simply a matter of how one defines “saw”, “march”, “with”, and “Martin Luther King.” Most people take the words to mean what they seem to mean, while Romney argues that they are figurative, and easily deconstructed. Neither did Romney [...]

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll sue to overturn a Bush administration ban on tough California greenhouse gas emission standards. The EPA decision, which was made against EPA staff recommendations and appears to have been dictated to EPA chief Stephen Johnson by vice president Dick Cheney, would prevent California from imposing tougher standards than [...]