Phil Carter Quits Administration
Phil Carter, well known to longtime denizens of the blogosphere as the former proprietor of Intel Dump, has suddenly resigned as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy. The NYT buries this news on A20: The Defense Department official in charge of closing the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has resigned after only seven months in the job, the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 25, 2009 10:55
Does Foreign Policy Community Love War?
Glenn Greenwald revisits an old debate, arguing that "Our war-loving Foreign Policy Community hasn't gone anywhere." Building off of Marc Lynch's blog post yesterday pointing out that General McCrystal's strategic review calling for more troops in Afghanistan was written by "a dozen smart (mostly) think-tankers," Greenwald writes,"What would a group of people like that ever recommend other than continued and escalated ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 22, 2009 09:39
Jenna Bush and the Meritocracy
Adam Serwer is incensed because he has "a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists" who are "now struggling to find work" and yet Jenna Bush Hager now has a job on Today despite having only a few years' teaching experience. As Glenn ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 1, 2009 07:40
American Royalty – Nepotism in Politics and Media
Glenn Greenwald laments the rise of "American royalty." They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 31, 2009 07:33
Ideological Wind Tunnels
Glenn Greenwald rebuts those who think his strident attacks on Presidents Bush and Obama for abusing their power make his blog "an ideological wind tunnel" and that he is "oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with." By the design of the Founders, most American political issues are driven by the vicissitudes of political realities, shaped by practicalities and resolved by ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 30, 2009 11:29
Obama Trying to Block AIG Bonuses
Responding to understandable public outrage, President Obama is vowing to figure out a way to get back the money AIG paid to the people who ran the company into the ground. President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of "recklessness and greed" and said he intends to stop it from paying out ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 16, 2009 15:35
Outraged or Just on the Other Side?
Jules Crittenden is shocked that lefty firebrands Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald have continued ranting and raving about injustice now that their guy is in charge over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One possible explanation for this is that, rather than having simply been partisan hacks fomenting faux outrage at the Bush Administration, they're intellectually honest ideologues who are genuinely motivated by ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 16, 2009 14:58
Obama Invokes State Secrets Privilege
Meet the new boss -- same as the old boss: In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration. In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 10, 2009 08:03
Bush’s Flight Suit
Glenn Greenwald notes that Joe Klein has changed his mind in the last five-and-a-half years about President Bush's now infamous flight suit gambit. Now: "The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure." Then: "[T]hat was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day." Says Glenn, People who regret ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 26, 2008 11:49
Will Blogs Kill Political Magazines?
Andrew Sullivan, who was editor-in-chief of The New Republic when he was 12 and now works at The Atlantic, notes that the websites of conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard get no more traffic than the top conservative blogs. So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of individual bloggers with relatively no overhead ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 18, 2008 12:13
Taking Separation of Powers Seriously
Glenn Greenwald, reacting to reports that Barack Obama has told Harry Reid that Joe Lieberman should not be stripped of his committee chairmanship and thus making it very difficult for him to do so, has written a long and passionate plea for a return to vigorous separation of powers with strong institutional jealousies. [W]hatever the outcome here is, it's vital that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 11, 2008 15:12
Documents Link Ivins to Anthrax Attacks
Documents released today by the government offer some strong circumstantial evidence linking Army scientist Bruce Ivins to the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people. Army scientist Bruce Ivins had sole custody of highly purified anthrax spores with "certain genetic mutations identical" to the poison that killed five people and rattled the nation in 2001, according to documents unsealed Wednesday in ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 6, 2008 15:37
Enforcing Civility in Blog Comments
Alan Jacobs: "Nothing could better justify Ross’s decision to start moderating comments on his blog than the comments on the announcement itself." For those who don't click links, Ross Douthat has announced that, "From now on, one of the Atlantic's crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business day, deleting any comments that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 17, 2008 06:45
Goldfarb and McCain
Yesterday's announcement that Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb is taking a leave of absence "to serve as deputy communications director of the McCain campaign" has been greeted with surprising interest from bloggers across the political spectrum. Just sampling those in my RSS reader: Radley Balko points out that "Goldfarb has written (falsely, by any reasonable reading of the Constitution, Federalist ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 3, 2008 08:10
Racist Morons
Tim F. offers the "Deep thought of the day" that "any honest discussion of race will inevitably reveal that some people are honestly racist morons." The corollary, of course, is that there will be widespread disagreement on whose these people are. For every Glenn Greenwald reader who thinks the description aptly fits Glenn Reynolds, there will be a Glenn Reynolds ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 24, 2008 11:22
