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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 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 [...]

This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachine gun.
   - Jim Jones on Jonestown

At home, the Obama Justice Department is busy trying to insulate the Bush administration at large and torture memo author John Yoo in particular from the US Geneva Conventions obligation to prosecute war criminals [...]

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 [...]

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’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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]