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 [...]

Anyone who takes health insurance reform seriously recognizes that universal government-funded health care is the only way to eliminate the abuses of the health insurance industry and control costs to the point that per capita spending on health care in the US falls more or less into line with other developed countries rather than running [...]

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 [...]

Avatar will win a bunch of Oscars, although not enough to suit James Cameron. The first time I saw the film I thought it was a pretty faithful remake of Ferngully, a 1992 animated film about fairies whose forest is under assault by humans, one of whom winds up living among them and ultimately rescuing [...]

The PATRIOT Act was up for renewal this week. Democrats wanted to add some civil liberties backstops to it, but were unable to get it done because, well, they’re Democrats, and the getting done of things just isn’t among their areas of expertise. So they compromised with themselves by kicking the can down the road [...]

The United States, we are often told, is a nation bound by the rule of law. We hear that less and less as it becomes more and more risible but I guess it still officially is, unless you’re the president, or you’re operating an armed drone on behalf of the president, or torturing someone on [...]

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 [...]

This is a multi-subject spectacular. First we address the details of November’s strong words to the Secretary of State regarding Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry—who described Karzai as erratic, corrupt, incompetent and incapable of governing without US support, and strongly objected to what has since become the Obama Afghanistan policy on the [...]

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 [...]

J.D. Salinger has finally got rid of his followers by dying at the age of 91. Here’s the most creative remembrance I’ve found so far. “For all you ‘Catcher’ fans out there, I’m sorry the elusive giant of your memory has at last escaped your grasps for good.”
I guess I like that one because that’s [...]

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 [...]

Stuff worth reading:
The Columbia Journalism Review’s story on the Russian press and Russian journalists. The story cites the Committee to Protect Journalists ranking of Russia as the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind second-place Algeria and the US-created democratic capitalist paradise of Iraq, and describes the gyrations that reporters and writers for independent newspapers [...]

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 [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has a story up in his magazine—and simultaneously in Newsweek, as if what he has to say is so important that it had to be said twice—identifying Barack Obama’s “cool, detached temperament” as a drag on his own popularity and that of his party. Weisberg allows as how Scott Brown’s Massachusetts [...]

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 [...]

I’m not a competent photographer but I received a very nice digital camera as a holiday gift and I’ve been taking it with me pretty much everywhere I go. One of the things I struggle with is recognizing what will make a good picture; for whatever reason I can’t seem to visualize what a [...]

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 [...]

Specifically, our freedom to do whatever it is we want to do to them and their part of the world without consequence.
Disclaimer: I don’t support terrorism as an expression of political or ideological frustration, or in any event, but I understand the impulse and one has to admit that as a negotiating technique, it [...]

A recent exchange with a reflexively anti-Muslim American prompts me to post what is tragically not an unnecessary reminder that not all Palestinians are Muslims, that not all Palestinians and Muslims hate Jews, that not all Jews hate Palestinians and Muslims, that not all anti-Semites are Palestinian or Muslim or Arab, and that reflexive support [...]

Politicians are a necessary evil, or an evil necessity, or a fashion accessory. Can’t live with them, can’t shoot them, as the old joke goes. The people who make government hum, though, to the extent that it does, and it does to a far greater extent than many people will ever admit, are the people [...]

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 [...]

Avatar director James Cameron’s previous films have grossed more than a billion dollars, and his most recent effort may well push him past the $2 billion mark when all the dust has settled. Say what one may about the guy, he knows where the “on” button is (somewhere in the universally shared limbic system of [...]

What is “Why is the United States legally obligated to provide Israel with new military hardware whenever that nation feels a bit insecure?”
Yes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law! The Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008 amended the Arms Control Export Act of 1976 to require that any U.S. arms transactions in [...]

John Dickerson was responsible for one of the half-dozen or so all-time busiest days on my blog, back in March of 2006. I basically called him a moron, enjoyed brief but universal acclaim for doing so and then felt compelled to apologize a day or two later after he persuaded me that he was, for [...]

Returning once again to Tim Noah, Slate’s point guy on the insurance reform story. A few days ago he wrote a story about the astonishingly brief life cycle of the Medicare buy-in plan, which I remarked on here.
Subsequently, he wrote another story acknowledging that whatever comes out of the Senate will lack all of the [...]

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 hardly ever watch Chris Matthews on MSNBC but recently I’ve made an effort to inoculate myself against the madness by watching him and some of the other ADD media types who populate the various aethereal passages. Much of today’s episode was focused upon Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture—assessments of which varied wildly across the [...]

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 [...]

I had every best intention of doing little more than to acknowledge that president Obama made some sort of speech about some sort of strategy in some sort of country called Afghanistan, but people keep writing about it and I keep reading about it and, well, you know.
Most recently, I read the reaction from Slate’s [...]

I wasn’t going to comment on the Obama/Bush/Pentagon/GOP/Dahmer plan to add some 30,000 US troops to the 60,000-some already in Afghanistan because it’s a stupid plan, but I went ahead and read the speech and there’s a relevant point I want to make in response.
According to the guy who wrote the recently (2006) updated Army [...]

I didn’t actually watch or read Obama’s Afghanistan speech but I gather it was similar to but less coherent than his campaign speeches about Afghanistan, which I did read, so I feel comfortable commenting on his announced alleged policy.
But you know, screw it. Who cares? This is not my beautiful house. I will mention [...]

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 [...]

Alien vs. Predator, Rocky vs. Whoever, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Kramer vs. Kramer … the cinema world is replete with films about the conflicts between archetypal enemies. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but one thing they generally share is a run time between 80 and 180 minutes.
Not so with my dream film. Buffy vs. Bella [...]

Do a Google News search on the name of Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum and the odds are sterling that the results will include bad news from Afghanistan.
The Dostum factor was the subject of one of my first BTC News posts, back in October of 2003. The search that week turned up a BBC News [...]

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 [...]

The New York Times, in a story with one of those headlines containing words one never expects to see in relation to one another, is reporting that the director of a La Scala opera based on the Al Gore film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has resigned over creative differences with the American poet writing the libretto. [...]

The news is all around that George W. Bush will be writing a memoir focused on 12 difficult personal and policy decisions in his life. It cannot be an accident that the format so closely apes that of John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage,” which featured the stories of eight U.S. senators who [...]

The way I understand it, mostly from listening to Bob Dylan songs of a certain vintage (“Already confessed/Don’t need to confess again”), once you’ve been washed in the flavorful blood of the Lamb you’re guaranteed passage to Heaven barring a renunciation of it all. Doesn’t matter what you do or say so long as you [...]

Not.
George W. Bush bristles at any attempt to assess his presidency while he’s still alive, never mind in office. By the time history has judged him, he says, we’ll all be dead. But everyone who judged his presidency a disaster before it began — for me the clincher was his disappearance and ashen-faced return [...]

This series of CD compilations started with an encounter with the Los Angeles Junior League and has since Frankensteined its way into an independent being from another planet. The first and the second CDs consisted entirely (I think) of music acquired through the good offices of the Santa Monica Library and its music buyer, about [...]

Both regular readers of BTC News know that of late I’ve been putting together some more or less thematic rock/pop compilations assembled of necessity from albums acquired at the Santa Monica library. This is because my laptop with all of my music-by-choice was stolen. I learn daily some new thing that’s missing because of the [...]

Before I get started, let me first note that one brave newspaper didn’t take the easy out of endorsing one or the other major presidential candidates: the Ann Arbor News flipped them both off. A paper after my own heart in a town I learned to love long, long ago. Except for the weather.
Lots of [...]

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 write something pretty good on Monday, drew quite a bit of traffic albeit none generous enough to comment on it, but I remember very little of the piece or the process. Since then my condition has lost more luster and I’m starting to look, rhetorically speaking, like liver left on the counter so long [...]

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 [...]

I have a hat that I call my Gilligan hat, which I often wear in tandem with some dark sunglasses. The past week or so people have been staring at me. No, really: it has gotten to the point where I’m checking to see if my fly is open or I’m drooling or bleeding or [...]

Well really, this is a bit much: Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine quotes an Iowa preacher begging McCain’s God to stomp the deities of Obama supporters. Well actually not so much begging as threatening: if God doesn’t get McCain elected, then bad things will happen to God. Never mind Joe the Plumber’s concerns about Obama [...]

Someone somewhere asked if the wrecked economy would be George W. Bush’s last gasp as president. The answer is, naturally, no: the one rule that best describes the Bush administration, one that we’ve articulated often, is that no matter how bad what we know they’ve done may be, there’s worse to come. Bush and Dick [...]