This is shaping up to be the strangest and most brutal presidential election any of us are likely to see. That’s with luck: there may be worse ones down the line, but if so we’ll all be too busy gathering roots and berries to care.
It’s hard to see any Republican candidate coming out of [...]

House Majority “leader” Steny Hoyer has announced that Democrats are preparing to abandon attempts to impose conditions on new funding for the occupation of Iraq. The Washington Post is reporting that Hoyer, Senate Majority “Leader” Harry Reid and other top Democrats have caved on imposing a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in exchange [...]

No wonder incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared impeachment off limits last year. She can’t impeach Bush and Cheney without impeaching herself.
Pelosi is among several top Democratic lawmakers, including senior House intelligence committee member Jane Harman and current Senate intelligence committee chief Jay Rockefeller, who were briefed on CIA torture methods in 2002 and for [...]

Among the questions raised by coverage of the revelation that Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats knew for years that the Bush administration had ratified torture as official U.S. policy is why so many of those who decried the possibility continue to support, or at least to countenance, Pelosi’s continued tenure as Speaker of the [...]

I haven’t paid much attention to Christopher Hitchens of late because, as prominent born-again wingnuts go, his value to the forces of darkness is much diminished. His latest Slate missive, though, in which he takes after the CIA for destroying the video of interrogations involving the torture of terrorism suspects and participating in the recently [...]

Despite his success in the Iowa polls, Mike Huckabee has had a rough week. News that he labored mightily to get a convicted rapist and soon-to-be murderer released from prison, news that he doesn’t follow the news, news that his views on AIDS are somewhat antiquated and news that maybe God isn’t entirely responsible for [...]

You may have missed it, but for about 30 seconds this week a Democrat drew a line in the sand on funding for Iraq. And then another Democrat shot his foot off.
Appropriations maven David Obey, defying the White House, Congressional Republicans and House Majority Leader Steny “Stand Fast, Retreat Faster” Hoyer, announced that he was [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may be backing off plans to bring a bill to the Senate floor providing immunity for law-breaking telecommunications companies that cooperated in the Bush administration’s illegal electronic surveillance program(s).
Two versions of a bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) have passed Senate committees. One, the version coming out [...]

National Review editor Rich Lowry is joining what threatens to become a parade of GOP flacks and hacks who wish all GOP voters were like Mike Huckabee—bone ignorant, Pavlovian Christians who can swallow the wildest swerves of logic with nary a hint of nausea—but are more than a bit panicked to find Huckabee threatening for [...]

There’s serious business afoot today, what with Democratic senator Chris Dodd trying desperately to deep-six Democratic senator Harry Reid’s early holiday present to the Bush administration. Anyone feeling serious should check in with Glenn Greenwald at Salon or the crew at Firedoglake for updates on Dodd’s filibuster of the Reid-powered FISA bill that would immunize [...]

Babies are so cute, with their wrinkly faces, oversized bald pates and whiny but often seductive (for some) ways. Joe Lieberman was officially reborn as a Republican today when he endorsed John McCain, who is conducting the most protracted fade in GOP primary history, for president. The political press have rekindled their love affair with [...]

The Washington Post has a story today, on page 14, about the results from nineteen focus groups—conducted for the U.S. military—that were held throughout Iraq last month. According to a military analysis of the results, there is good news: Iraqis from every sectarian and ethnic group share many beliefs in common.
And what are those [...]

Lots of people seem baffled by Ron Paul’s fundraising prowess. The answer seems obvious to me: an imploding GOP has assembled the most bizarre slate of presidential candidates in history, and Paul is the chief financial beneficiary. And he isn’t only drawing from disaffected Republicans: his base includes aggravated Republican-leaning independents, Libertarians and Larouchites, [...]

Someone has to win the GOP presidential primaries, but it’s really tough to imagine who. My ongoing encounter with Ron Paul’s supporters tempts me to think that it might be him but I can’t, really; the numbers just aren’t there. Giuliani is tanking; McCain’s support is still limited to the press—now more enamored than ever [...]

Dean Barnett in the Weekly Standard continues the intellectual irreligious right’s jihad against Mike Huckabee today, following in the foosteps of his editor, Rich Lowry, and Ann Coulter at the malappropriately named Human Events.
For my money, Barnett is the clear winner in this kneecapping derby, with an entry aimed at Huckabee’s essay in Foreign Affairs, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Michael O’Hanlon, the Brookings Institution wonk who once famously posed as a harsh critic of the adventure in Iraq in order to highlight his devotion to The Surge, has another (but mercifully more brief) op-ed on the subject in the New York Times.
In this one, he says that “the greatest American military comeback late [...]

Someone may ultimately get convicted of something in connection with the destruction of CIA videos showing the torture of two terrorism suspects, but if so it will be along the lines of lying to Congress or criminal contempt, not anything having to do with torture.
That’s because the Military Commissions Act of 2006 amended the War [...]

Claudine in School, by Colette
Sandbag Shuffle, by Kevin Marc Fournier
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov
Two months ago, I hosted a game of Diplomacy. I am sure I wasn’t the ideal moderator in a lot of respects (especially for letting the whole game lapse when players disappeared), but I tried to provide [...]

Condi did it.
No, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice didn’t pull the trigger or build the bomb or hire the assassin, but it was the U.S. effort to force Pakistan’s dictator, Pervex Musharraf, into a power-sharing arrangement with Bhutto that led directly to her death.
Steve Clemons, proprietor of the Washington Note and an up-and-coming member [...]

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 [...]

Jackson Diehl, the deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, has an op-ed today in which he asserts that the lack of political progress in Iraq is an argument for staying there indefinitely. It’s another version of the now familiar If-Things-Are-Getting-Worse-We-Must-Stay-In-Iraq-And-On-The-Other-Hand-If-Things-Are-Getting-Better-Then-We-Must-Stay-In-Iraq argument that, whatever its deficiencies might be, is at least admirably consistent.
But I’m [...]