Speaking as a big skeptic of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, and as a major critic of nation-building, I basically liked President Obama’s surge speech last night. I think he did himself some good with it. I notice today that General McChrystal spoke positively about both the speech and the policy.
Regularly reading the Financial Times (Britain's leading financial daily) can put an American in a fighting spirit. At least, it puts this American (transplanted former Englishman and naturalized American citizen that I am) in such a disposition.
The last Thanksgiving of my childhood started out promisingly enough. It was 1969, and we were going to my parents' best friends' house. I had a crush on their second oldest son, and with luck (a lot of it), we'd end up in his room listening to Led Zeppelin. He was much cooler than I was, but I was who would be there on Thanksgiving.
This just in from the Times of London: After the leak of highly embarrassing e-mail messages from the University of East Anglia's influential Climatic Research Unit, CRU has been forced to admit that it dumped "the original raw" climate data used to bolster the case for human-caused global warming, while retaining only the "value-added" -- read: massaged -- data.
This is a nation of goose-necked children hunched over their electronics in front of a TV. They will turn into goose-necked adults with vitamin D deficiencies, the result of spending their sunny hours downloading songs in darkened rooms. Obesity will plague many of them.
As Air Force One heads to Copenhagen for the climate summit Dec. 9, it will presumably not make a U-turn while flying over the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia near Norwich, England. But perhaps it should.
"Going Rogue: An American Life" acquaints the reader with author Sarah Palin's life and work before she was plucked from her Little House on the Tundra to serve as John McCain's running mate and turned into a national caricature.
When President Obama attends the United Nations meeting on climate in Copenhagen, you can be sure that the deniers of global warming will go on a romp.
It's that time of the year again. Time to feel like a fool. I started early this year, at Bed Bath and Beyond. Mind you, I love the store -- two shiny new floors of beautiful things that you don't have to try on. I'm a goner for candles and diffusers, not to mention cordless vacuum cleaners.
Double-digit. That hyphenated adjective has been used most often recently to describe October's 10.2 percent unemployment rate. But it can also be used to describe the federal budget deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product. That precise number is not yet known, but it may turn out to have a more dire effect on our national life than October's unemployment rate.
The puzzling thing about politicians of either party who claim to be "centrist" or "moderate" is how much they sometimes sound like party-line right-wing Republicans.
Two noteworthy responses to my column last week ("An Exit Strategy To Die For") deserve my reply. In the online magazine Commentary, Max Boot, one of the most respected foreign-policy voices on the right, explicitly dissented from the central premise of my column.
On Wednesday, President Obama will issue the White House's standard hokey pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey. It goes with the job.
Doctors would jab sharp instruments into King Henry VIII's arm and drain blood out of his body. The best medical minds of the 16th century prescribed bloodletting as a means to "rebalance the body's humors," the spring equinox being the ideal time. Henry didn't argue with his physicians. After all, Tudor England had the best health care system in the world.
Is Congress, behind on Barack Obama's deadlines on health care and cap-and-trade legislation, and flummoxed by the failure of the stimulus package to hold unemployment below 10.2 percent, prepared to address the immigration issue next year?
"I'm not scared of what (self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) would say at trial," Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee as he defended his decision to prosecute Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 planners in a federal criminal court.
So, as it turns out, did I not need to have my breasts squeezed in the mammogram machines every year between the ages of 40 and 50? Could I have missed the two scares in there, especially the one when both of my kids were babies?
Now that we've put the 2009 races to bed, we can start to focus heavily on 2010. Since our last update in June (available here), some critical Senate contests have undergone a transformation of sorts.
A recent Gallup poll found that 55 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the mass media. Hence, many readers may have felt little outrage when they read a few weeks ago that Scott Gerber, then communications director for California Attorney General Jerry Brown, recorded interviews with reporters -- most notably, my friend and colleague Carla Marinucci -- without notifying them.
President Obama took his declining dollar to the Asia-Pacific economic conference, and he added to it a declinist opinion of America's economy. His big message? Don't count on American consumers to lead the world from recession to recovery and beyond. His second big message? In the U.S., we must save more and spend less.
