Mark Halperin and John Harris, co-authors of The Way to Win, are participating this week in Slate’s “Breakfast Club” feature. Halperin is the political director at ABC News; Harris is his opposite number at the Washington Post. The “Breakfast Club” is a feature in which two or more luminaries in one field or another politely [...]

What is it, precisely, that you as a person (and by extension we as a nation) stand for and believe in, and what will you ‘stand for’—or tolerate as we attempt to allay (and sometimes) stoke the fears that we collectively face.

From time to time the White House holds background briefings in which the briefer is for various reasons unidentified. Sometimes the subject relates to foreign policy matters where the administration wants to send a message that might be considered undiplomatic if attached to a named official. Sometimes it’s a question of domestic policy where the [...]

Happy neoconservatives are hard to find of late. Richard Perle and David Frum accuse the Bush administration of botching their program. Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and one of the most eloquent proponents of neoconservatism, has bailed on the movement altogether. But there is at least one optimist among the crowd: American [...]

During today’s press gaggle aboard Air Force One, press secretary Tony Snow said Iraq can “sustain, defend and govern itself.” That’s great. Can we bring the troops home now?
The context was a question about whether the administration would have a response to tomorrow’s announcement of the verdict in Saddam Hussein’s trial. Snow said he didn’t [...]

Yes, Donald Rumsfeld is smug, irritating and possibly insane. Yes, he’s been an unmitigated disaster as defense secretary. But so what?
The Air Force Times, Army Times, Marine Times and Navy Times are all running an identical editorial calling on Rumsfeld to resign. In so doing they join a long list of Congressional figures, former generals, [...]

You are perhaps aware that George Bush personally expedited the internet publication of instructions for building a nuclear weapon. Today, New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader has run a blistering editorial placing the blame for the fiasco squarely where it belongs: on Al Gore and John Kerry.
The short version of the story is that the documents [...]

The horse race is between Republicans and Democrats. The real contest is between starkly different measures of maturity, morality and character.
If you think Americans are so immature that we cannot be trusted to judge what our own government does in our own country’s name, vote Republican.
If you think America is so pitiably weak [...]

A Washington Post story Sunday discloses classified Pentagon plans to send more National Guard and Reserve troops to Iraq. The new plans reverse a modest downward trend in the number of National Guard members deployed to Iraq and continue an upward trend in the number of Reserve soldiers mobilized, and reflect the increasingly dire military [...]

In April of 2004 and again in November of that year, just after the presidential election, US troops led massive assaults on Fallujah. More than 100 US troops, thousands of civilians and an unknown number of Iraqi combatants on both sides died in the fighting. Since the November 2004 battle, which destroyed much of the [...]

We have no idea who will win which races. If you’re looking for practical prognostications, start here and follow the arrows. What we have to offer is more in the way of election day advice and post-election color commentary.
First: if you’re getting a bunch of annoying computer-generated phone calls about Democratic candidates, you’re being harassed [...]

Update: on the second printout, Abercrombie, Akaka and Hirono are all above 60% with Abercromie edging toward 70%. Go, Neil.
Hawaii voters don’t have any Republican national office holders to kick out, so you mainland people have to do it for us. Please, please, please.
The only nail biters here are for the gamblers betting the [...]

Former Sandanista leader Daniel Ortega appears to have won the Nicaragua presidential elections, and the US isn’t happy. Why? Who the hell knows. And who knows why exactly the US feels simultaneously free to meddle in south-of-the-border elections and to pout when those countries resent us for doing so?
These are rhetorical questions.
Ortega first came [...]

Democrats appear to be hurtling toward a serious House majority**. And according to the Jerusalem Post, Jews are doing well too.
The headline, lede and much of the rest of the story seem to have been rewritten since the Google News appearance, but thanks to the miracle of screenshots, the original is preserved in all [...]

George Bush has a lot of nicknames for Karl Rove. There’s “Boy Genius”; there’s “The Architect”; and there’s “Turd Blossom,” bestowed to honor Rove’s legendary ability to frolic in the muck and emerge smelling like a rose.
But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.
Just like the GOP majority in the House, and possibly their Senate [...]

George Bush has nominated yet another Iran-Contra figure, former CIA director Robert Gates, to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Gates served as deputy CIA director under William”Wild Bill” Casey for Ronald Reagan and was chosen in 1991 by the elder Bush to head the CIA. Although Iran-Contra prosecutors found Gates less than credible regarding his involvement in [...]

This was going to be a pair of historical fiction novels from classical Greece, but the geography’s off by a hair. Gates of Fire is certainly in Greece, but Soldier of Sidon, unknown at the time I planned this, took a right turn to the heart of the Nile. But the time is [...]

Iraq’s health minister says 150,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion, and the Pentagon needs another $160 billion to keep up the good work. The new supplemental budget request for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the War on Terra® will push the total cash expenditures since the Iraq invasion past [...]

Iraq’s health minister says 150,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion, and the Pentagon needs another $160 billion to keep up the good work. The new supplemental budget request for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the War on Terra® will push the total cash expenditures since the Iraq invasion past [...]

Nothing less than a Time Lord will help us salvage Iraq, and love him or hate him, Robert Gates is no Dr. Who; more like Dr. “What?“, according to the Iran-Contra prosecutors.
BTC News is now three years and one month old. Every so often I don my own Time Lord gear and head back to [...]

A few days ago I wrote about my sense that a military draft will be instituted before the end of president Bush’s term in office. The piece generated some interesting comment which I think is worth reading. The gist of my case is that the increasing strain on the military imposed by Iraq is nearing [...]

Is George W. Bush reverting to type and handing the remaining two years of a failed family enterprise — the presidency — to his father?
With the Democratic sweep in Congress, Bush’s domestic agenda has gone from comatose to dead; his sole remaining domain is foreign policy and for several reasons I’m not remotely convinced [...]

John McCain has had a lock on the maverick label since the 2000 presidential campaign. Reporters are fined heavily and demoted if they don’t use the term when writing about him. But there are signs he’s losing his maverick mojo, and senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia may put the final bullet in the myth.
McCain is [...]

If a German court agrees to file war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld, he can blame the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Germany’s universal war crimes law grants the country jurisdiction over war crimes committed anywhere in the world, but the court rejected a 2004 attempt by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo inmates to have [...]

If you’re a creationist looking for a quick answer to the vexing question of hominid fossils, I have two words for you: Ratso Rizzo. Lucy, Australopithecus, Homo erectus … they’re nothing more troubling than the post-Garden ancestors of Dustin Hoffman’s consumptive anti-hero in Midnight Cowboy.
The Guardian’s Stephen Bates paid a visit to the Creation Museum, [...]

Multinational drug firms seeking to crash the gates of the UK’s National Health Service are getting a boost from the White House. The Guardian says that the US deputy health secretary wants the NHS formulary open to every new drug and wants the British government to permit consumer drug advertising rather than limiting it to [...]

The Center for Constitutional Rights and German lawyers have filed an historic lawsuit against current and former US officials including outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales and others accused of violating international law by abusing prisoners at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and the US internment camp at Guantanamo Bay [...]

The Bush presidency began with a Supreme Court decision disavowed by the very judges who made it, and has only gotten stranger. Now, six years in, the leader of the free world — the man who has claimed dictatorial powers unto himself, the war president, the decider — is the object of a very public [...]

Apparently John Gibson has a feature on Fox News called “The Big Story,” in which he fulminates against this or that outrage. Today’s outrage is all about the lawsuit filed by US and German attorneys seeking to have a German court hear war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld and other current and former US officials [...]