Steven Taylor’s “Makers and Takers?” has generated an enormous amount of commentary, especially for a posting late on Super Bowl Sunday. That it takes on a column written by Glenn Reynolds, and that he not only linked the post (always appreciated) but engaged in the comments discussion (I believe a first for us) were major factors in that.

Given the enormous help that Glenn Reynolds and Bill Quick were in helping to launch OTB back in early 2003 and their kindnesses during some hard times in my personal and professional life, I’m a bit distressed at how they’ve reacted to the piece and have a few thoughts on the matter.

First, Glenn’s summary on Steven’s post–”and I should kill myself or something”–is great for driving traffic (thanks, again!) but an unfair reading, to put it mildly. Rather, Steven found the core argument of the column simplistic and expected more nuance from someone of Glenn’s stature. Yes, Glenn is most famous as a pundit–an insta-pundit, no less–but he’s an enormously accomplished legal thinker, not a talk radio host.

Second, I think a lot of Steven’s frustration with the piece stems from the headline (“It’s takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning”) itself. I don’t read the column itself making the black-and-white claim that the headline suggests. Having been on the other side of that in a few pieces I’ve placed elsewhere, it’s a pretty common occurrence for readers to frame their reaction to it by the headline–which the column author almost never writes. So, I think Steven’s reacting as much to the general argument being made too often by talk radio hosts, columnists, and political candidates that there’s a huge class of non-contributors that the rest of us are having to support as to the column itself.

Third, in terms of Glenn’s column itself, my own objections are largely over framing rather than substance. We agree that farm subsidies, corporate welfare, and bailouts for those who make stupid business choices are really bad public policy. Further, we agree on the pernicious effects of rent seeking in the system, particularly the enormous incentives to spend a lot of time and money lobbying for special treatment in the tax and regulatory code.

While reflexively sympathetic, however, I’m less sure that subsidizing or otherwise providing some government assistance to those who are underwater in their mortgages is necessarily problematic. It largely depends on what form the policies take.

Likewise, I almost completely disagree that unemployment insurance provides some enormous incentive to permanent mooching. While it’s probably true that providing long-term benefits provides a disincentive for those at the bottom of the economic ladder to seek gainful employment (why bust your ass doing a lousy job for minimum wage when you can get 2/3 as much for doing nothing) the benefits are so meager that almost anyone else is much better off finding a job.

Further, framing as makers vs. takers “People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits” implies that it’s a no-brainer that people should take whatever job comes their way. Someone laid off from an $80,000 job in a field they’ve spent years preparing for really shouldn’t be expected to take a $24,000 job doing manual labor and lose everything they’ve worked for prior to a serious effort over a few months to get back on their career path and thereby exhausting other options. Doing so not only wastes human capital but it makes it much harder for that person to get back on track, since they not only lack the time and energy to look for more suitable jobs but they’ve devalued their resume by taking those steps back.

On the other hand, I’m much more sympathetic than Steven to Glenn’s argument that an underlying problem in the debate is that the federal government has become so powerful that rent-seeking and other corrupting behaviors are natural consequences. Just as people rob banks because that’s where the money is, people lobby government because it controls so many of the outcomes of the system.

But I think Steven’s right that the observation falls short of substantive policy analysis, for a variety of reasons. Like it or not, the political structures of 1789–or even 1936–simply won’t work in our modern society. The United States isn’t and hasn’t for well over a century been an outpost of 13 more-or-less separate states that had little interaction. While I’d like to see the federal government generally smaller, the serious debate is within a margin of 15 to 20 percent, not 85 or 90 percent.

Fourth, Bill Quick’s suggestion that OTB has shifted its ideological views over the years and is much less friendly to right-libertarians than it once was is one I’ve seen made by many others who were allies in the heady days of the fight over the Iraq War. There’s probably some truth in it. First,  because we’ve gone from a solo blog to a group blog that I dominated content-wise to one where the vagaries of time leave me as a much less frequent contributor, there’s a widening scope of views seen here. Second, my own views on some issues have in fact evolved over time.

I reject, however, the notion that the shift is a function of my having “burrowed ever deeper into the Washington establishment.” While it’s true that I now work just off of K Street in downtown Washington, I’m at a non-ideological foreign policy think tank and we spend less time talking about US domestic politics here than in perhaps any other job I’ve ever had.

Instead, the fact that I’ve spent a little over nine years writing on an almost daily basis about politics in a public forum having to defend my views while being intellectually honest has made me realize that some things that I once fervently believed were true are either outright false or a hell of a lot more complicated than I once thought. That Steven Taylor, who has remained back teaching at the small town Alabama campus where we first met as colleagues some fourteen years ago has had a very similar evolution reinforces my sense that it’s not DC that’s changed me but rather blogging.

Fifth, I’m befuddled by the early commenters on the post–who, contrary to some suggestions are actually not OTB regulars–who make the argument that Reynolds and/or Taylor are unqualified to comment on the matter because they’re employees at state universities and therefore somehow on the government teat themselves. Granted, I’m sensitive to the matter having worked for government–as a military officer, as a college professor, and indirectly as a military contractor–but providing honest services to the taxpayer for hire isn’t remotely equivalent to being on the dole.

My latest for The Atlantic, “Why Obama Is Right to Withdraw From Afghanistan Early,” has been posted. The lede describes a paradox: Everything the critics say about the decision is right–and so is the decision.

The Obama administration’s acceleration of its Afghanistan withdrawal deadline to 2013, a year earlier than planned, is a break with America’s commitment to its NATO and Afghan allies, an abandonment of a mission Obama deemed “essential” in his 2008 campaign, and kills any chances of negotiating an acceptable settlement with the Taliban. It’s also the right thing to do.

The next few paragraphs lay out in brutal detail what an abrupt turnabout this is from the NATO policy that Obama extracted through heavy arm twisting a mere 14 months ago, his Afghanistan goals as laid out in the West Point speech, and his campaign rhetoric about this being the “necessary” war that was derailed by the Iraq distraction. We’ve simultaneously undercut our allies and strengthened the hand of the Taliban. And yet:

[T]he alternative is to continue getting people killed — not to mention inadvertently killing innocents — in a fight we can’t win.

[...]

It’s become painfully obvious in recent months that the governments in both Kabul and Islamabad are, to put it mildly, less than reliable allies. There’s simply no reason to think staying another year is somehow going to turn things around.

Whether NATO’s goals are achievable with unlimited time and resources is debatable. It’s also moot. Most of our allies were going to have, at most, a token force in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. They were there largely at America’s urging and they’ll be happy to leave.

[...]

As with many other Obama foreign policy decisions, one might have wished for a better rollout. Consultation with our NATO allies and partners on the matter would have been good form. And, after a more than a decade of fighting, a presidential speech rather than a casual announcement by the defense secretary would have been more fitting.

Ultimately, though, hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call.

Much more at the link.

Stephen Green is marking the tenth anniversary of his blog Vodkapundit by linking to the first post he wrote back in the Stone Age of the Blogosphere.

I can’t remember when I first started reading blogs on a regular basis, but Vodkapundit, along with OTB, was among the first that I started reading regularly.

So congratulations Steve and keep it up. However, considering all the drunkblogging you’ve over the years, I would have thought your liver would at least deserve some recognition of its role in this great endeavor.

Her first birthday without her mother is also the first one she remotely cares about. She’s still only vaguely aware of the significance of Christmas, birthdays, and other milestone events but now she enjoys and anticipates the surrounding pageantry.

OTB is a featured item under the News section and can be accessed directly at http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAowk0o/outside_the_beltway_mobile_edition.

As one might imagine, my focus on the site is limited at the moment to checking the comments on that post. I expect to return to whatever the new normal in a few days.

A pre-Thanksgiving afternoon item from Fishbowl DC’s Betsy Rothstein titled “WaPo’s Ezra Should Have De-Kleined” is making the rounds.

From JournoList to activist, it appears that WaPo‘s liberal blogger Ezra Klein is once again blurring the lines between being a journalist and trying to sway politics. In what appears to be at a minimum a breach of journalism ethics, Klein spoke to a group of Senate Democratic Chiefs of Staff last Friday about the Supercommittee, just days before the Committee announced its failing. “It was kind of weird,” said a longtime Senate Democratic aide, explaining that while people “enjoyed it” and gave it “positive reviews” this sort of thing is far from typical.

A longtime Washington editor who deals with Capitol Hill regularly also said this is not the norm: “”I have never heard of a reporter briefing staffers. It’s supposed to be the other way around. This arrangement seems highly unusual.”

It goes in circles from there, hitting its crescendo with “his readers need to demand answers from him if they are going to trust the integrity and validity of his journalism.”

Now, I haven’t the foggiest idea why Klein was briefing Democratic chiefs of staff about the inner workings of Congress. If there’s a scandal there, it’s that a 27-year-old blogger is apparently more clued in to the workings of our legislature than the people heading up Senate offices.

But here’s the thing: I just doesn’t matter. Klein isn’t a reporter. He just isn’t. He’s an opinion writer. Yes, he’s now doing wonkier work on certain aspects of domestic policy that he’s interested in. Still, he’s not trying to hide the fact that he’s a die-hard progressive.

He started blogging a couple weeks after I did while still a student at UCLA and had a meteoric rise. He blogged for the liberal American Prospect before getting hired on at WaPo. He’s a regular commenter on liberal talking heads shows, including Rachel Maddow, Hardball, and the defunct Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Anyone who doesn’t understand where he’s coming from politically is simply not paying attention.

Given how obvious this all is, one can’t help but wonder if this isn’t more of the “juicebox mafia” resentment felt by so many old line journalists toward people making their names in the media without paying the traditional dues. Traditionally, one didn’t get a column in the Washington Post without years of hard work in the trenches, working one’s way up from the police and city hall beats to national reporting. Only after years and years of that did one perhaps get a chance to do commentary. Klein bypassed all that, becoming a well-known commenter before graduating UCLA and getting the WaPo gig a few days after his 25th birthday.

That’s got to be as annoying as hell to people who think people like Klein and Matt Yglesias cut in front of them in line. But that’s no excuse for this silly pretense that some rules of “objectivity” and “journalistic ethics” are being violated when an opinion columnist shares his opinions with likeminded politicos.

UPDATE: Hours after Rothstein’s blog was posted, we get a possible answer to the question “Why in the hell did the Democratic staffers invite Ezra Klein to brief them on the supercommittee?” in the form of Klein’s latest Bloomberg column. The headline: “In Political Crosshairs, Staff That Saves Congress.”

As you have no doubt heard by now, the supercommittee failed. So did the Obama-Boehner negotiations that preceded it, and the Biden-Cantor negotiations that preceded that. Those efforts failed because the principals — and the political bases they represent — couldn’t come to an agreement. What chance they did have was almost entirely because of the staff scurrying in the background.

The idea that a handful of politicians, few of whom have any formal background in economics or budget analysis, were the ones doing the heavy policy lifting, is laughable. They’re in the room to make the final decisions. In some cases, they’re there to show that they and their party are taking the negotiations seriously. It’s common to hear stories of bored legislators tapping their feet through these sessions like schoolchildren waiting to be released for recess.

But behind the scenes were dozens of staff members putting in long nights and giving up weekends to try to find something, anything, that could lead to an agreement. The Congressional Budget Office was offering nonpartisan, detailed estimates on the costs of various proposals. The Congressional Research Service was sending out clear, detailed summaries of the provisions under consideration. Amid seemingly endless partisanship and polarization, the work of congressional support staff is, in most cases, an oasis of professionalism.

Perhaps the briefing was the staff taking a page out of the book of the military, which constantly invites reporters and columnists to tour combat zones in order to give them a guided tour of the parts of the war that they want them to see.

Answered:  no.

Next question.

My latest for the Atlantic, “For Europe, Some Fear a Conflict Between Union and Democracy,” expands on a theme I briefly explored earlier in the week.

For now at least, the Greek referendum that could have been the beginning of the end for the euro has been shelved. The panic that it provoked, however, says something about the tension between democracy and effectiveness that has marked the European project from its outset.

[...]

There are times when national leaders make unpopular choices because they fear dire consequences if they don’t. On both sides of the Atlantic, bailouts for the financial industry and austerity measures have been enacted despite howls of popular protest. Governments have fallen in Europe and several others teeter on the brink. President Obama’s party suffered heavy losses in the 2010 midterms and mired in the 40′s in the opinion polls for two years.

Direct democratic participation in the form of referenda, popular in many EU countries and a handful of U.S. states, does not appear to have been working very well. The outcome is easily manipulated or distorted by question wording, election timing, and deceptive advertising. Representative democracy, where leaders make decisions and face electoral consequences, seems to be more effective, though at times elected leaders may feel compelled to do things that their constituents don’t want — such as bail-outs or austerity measures.

The problem, as Farrell puts it, is “whether there is a European Union that could be affirmed (after long and painful debates) by both the Greek and German publics.” In other words, is there a version of the EU that is acceptable to its Greek as well as its German constituents, both of whom currently have to live under EU rule. If there’s not — and this well might be the case — then it raises the question of whether the European Union, a collection of some of the world’s most democratic governments, is actually democratic itself.

Much more at the link, naturally.

What started off as an early-morning answer to a blog comment turned into my latest for The Atlantic, “The Changing Definition of ‘Conservative’.”

It’s based on two data points.

First, Rush Limbaugh, who today proclaimed ”Romney is not a conservative. He’s not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn’t,” was proclaiming Romney the only candidate who “embodies . . . all three legs of the conservative stool” om February 2008–nearly two years after the “RomneyCare” law that Limbaugh cites as his primary evidence and a year after Romney left the governor’s mansion.

Second, David Frum — who made his name as a conservative opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the The American Spectator and whose  first book, Dead Right (1994), was described by William F. Buckley as “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation” and who, as speechwriter for George W. Bush coined the phrase “axis of evil”–yesterday resigned from NPR’s “Marketplace” on the basis that he couldn’t in good conscience represent the conservative viewpoint as a counter to Robert Reich.

My explanation:

Parties losing elections tend to take one of two paths. Either they collectively decide that their platform is out of touch with public sentiment and adjust accordingly, or they decide that their problem was a poor candidate and weak messaging and double down.

[...]

The Republican Party took the second course after its 2008 defeat. Despite respect for his enormous courage during seven long years as a prisoner of war, conservatives never considered John McCain one of their own. He was nominated almost by default when Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and others more popular with the base imploded before the race really got started. And conservatives had been sold the idea that a relatively moderate candidate who could count on favorable press coverage would do well with the coveted “swing voters.”

[...]

This sentiment grew into a force of nature with the tea party movement. Ostensibly a backlash against government bailouts and out-of-control spending, it became something of a purge of Republicans who were deemed too moderate, with tea-party-backed candidates challenging Republican incumbents and establishment favorites — including McCain, who for a time looked likely to lose his Senate re-election race to former congressman J.D. Hayworth, before rallying for a comfortable win.

Longtime Delaware congressman Mike Castle was defeated by upstart Christine O’Donnell for the party’s Senate nomination. Longtime Utah senator Bob Bennett lost to Mike Lee. Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski was beaten in the primaries by tea-party favorite Joe Miller. All three of the tea-party candidates lost, although Murkowski narrowly won re-election anyway, as an independent.

To be sure, conservatives had plenty of successes, most notably the populist Scott Brown taking the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by liberal lion Teddy Kennedy. And Marco Rubio, who successfully primaried sitting Republican governor Charlie Christ, went on to easily win the general election and looks to be a rising star in Republican politics.

The result of all this — in addition to retaking the House and coming close to taking back the Senate — is a Republican Party and conservative movement that is largely bereft of the moderates of the past. After years of political leaders spouting conservative mantras without doing much to turn them into policy, the congressional delegations now feature a critical mass of True Believers.

Democratic leaders have charged their Republican counterparts with bad faith and hypocrisy for filibustering and vilifying policy proposals that their own party had proposed in the recent past. In some cases, this is justified. In many, though, it’s simply a function of the center of gravity having suddenly shifted. Proposals that came from the pages of National Review or the halls of the Heritage Foundation in 2006 may not be “conservative” by 2011 standards.

As many have noted, while conservative politicians constantly reference Ronald Reagan’s legacy as the gold standard, it’s arguable whether the Gipper himself would pass tea-party muster. After all, he signed a huge amnesty bill for illegal aliens into law and his signature tax cut left the top marginal rate at 50 percent. As we all know, anything above 35 percent is socialism.

Thus far, the presidential nominating process seems to be the last redoubt of the old conservatism, with Romney looking to be the likely nominee. But it’s been a rapid, stunning transition.

Balloon Juice‘s mistermix takes exception to this morning’s one-liner post joking about a Harry Reid op-ed, seeing it as part of some grand scheme to have it both ways:

This Joyner post is typical of the way that OTB will handle an issue.  First, both he and Mataconis weigh in with fairly sober analysis.  Having established their bona-fides, they’re free to throw red meat to the base. If anyone objects to Mr. Hyde’s observations, they’ll be sternly reminded of Dr. Jekyll’s posts.

The post, which is under Quick Takes rather than a featured post–a deliberate design choice intended to signal to the reader a distinction between full length editorials and one-offs– is a quip about the disconnect between the headline and the substance of Reid’s article. It didn’t strike me as requiring much analysis to understand that one doesn’t “restore comity” by accusing the other party of trying to kill American jobs in order to make political hay.

Blogs, unlike op-ed pages, are meant to be read in serial.  As mistermix notes, Doug and I have both already offered longer, more substantive commentary on the merits of Reid’s arguments and the so-called “nuclear option.” See Friday’s “Reid Triggers Nuclear Option Lite” and Saturday’s “Will Harry Reid’s ‘Nuclear Option’ Make The Senate Better, Or Worse?”

There’s no disconnect–much less some grand master plan–between posting detailed analysis on a topic while also tossing out snark. I simultaneously think Reid was probably justified in changing the rules of the game given Republican abuse of them, that doing so will probably bite Democrats in the ass nonetheless, and that explaining himself while drawing harsh contrasts between Democrats and Republicans is unlikely to lead to increased comity.

I’m befuddled by the notion that OTB is some nefarious plot to simultaneously appear reasonable to some unnamed readership while keeping another readership happy with some red meat. That would be the worst possible business model. It’s far, far easier to attract a large and loyal following by being predictably, stridently on one side or the other.

Instead, from literally the earliest days of this site, I’ve been excoriating the most shrill voices on both sides of the aisle, violating most of the shibboleths of the conservative movement, and yet defending a brand of conservatism that’s currently attracting some 2 percent in the polls.

Further, I’ve assembled a roster of contributors from all over the map–disaffected Republicans, hard core Libertarians, soft core Democrats, and at least one Tea Party conservative. We bring a similar analytic approach and conversational sensibility but we’re otherwise rather disjointed on some key issues in the debate and favorite candidates. And, aside from occasional email discussions about site policies or technical issues, there’s no editorial agenda at all aside from very infrequent event-driven blog series: Everybody just writes about what they want, when they want, and posts.

My latest for The Atlantic, “Romney’s Realist Foreign Policy Is a Lot Like Obama’s,” has been posted.

It’s ridiculously long, looking at the key points of a 27-page white paper, and therefore defies excerpting. The headline actually does an excellent job of capturing my conclusion:

Aside from the standard point scoring that goes along with a campaign to oust a sitting president, it’s remarkable how much continuity there is between Romney’s vision and Obama’s — which itself isn’t all that different from that which George W. Bush campaigned on in 2000 and governed by starting in 2006 or so. There’s some shibboleths uttered for the crowd to signal that he’s one of them but this is fundamentally a realist foreign policy vision couched in a lot of rhetoric about values.

Like Romney himself, it’s not particularly exciting. Nor, thankfully, is it frightening.

Many if not most foreign policy wonks will focus too much on the shibboleths. There’s quite a bit of silliness and cheap shots at the Obama administration. But, as I note in the piece, we have to read it with an understanding that “this is fundamentally a campaign document rather than a governing platform.” If one reads it with that in mind, there is a lot of sanity in the document–signals that Romney is not a neoconservative ideologue hell bent on invading every last country on the planet to promote democracy and American Greatness.

I point, for example, to this paragraph:

The United States will apply the full spectrum of hard and soft power to influence events before they erupt into conflict. In defending America’s national interest in a world of danger, the United States should always retain a powerful military capacity to defend itself and its allies. Resort to force is always the least desirable option, the costliest in resources and human life. A Romney administration will therefore employ all the tools of statecraft to shape the outcome of threatening situations before they demand military action. Though the use of armed force will never be off the table when the safety of America is at stake, a President Romney will take a comprehensive approach to America’s security challenges. The tools of “hard” and “soft” power must work together to be effective. They are complements not substitutes for one another.

This is at once incredibly banal and potentially a breath of fresh air. The buzz words “soft power,” “all the tools of statecraft,” and “comprehensive approach” amount to a coded signal that the days of treating military power as the solution to everything are behind us. Of course, having Eliot Cohen, a signatory to the Project for a New American Century declaration that founded the modern neoconservative movement, write your foreword sends the opposite signal.

This is just a roll-out; one expects Romney’s foreign policy vision to evolve somewhat as we get to the point in the campaign where we really start talking about the topic. But, unlike another roll-out four years ago (see “Rudy Giuliani’s Dangerously Stupid Foreign Policy Vision“) I’m mostly pleased.

My latest for The Atlantic, “The Thorniest Question: When Can a President Order an American Killed?” has been posted.

It’s a longish piece but the bottom line is this:

What’s to prevent a president from simply declaring Americans he doesn’t like for whatever reason “enemy combatants” and having them murdered? The same thing that prevents him from launching nuclear weapons, launching military attacks, and otherwise abusing the incredible power that comes with that office: the system, such as it is.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the road to the Oval Office goes through the American people. The grueling two-year campaign cycle serves as a powerful vetting tool, weeding out candidates without the character, judgment, and temperament to sit in the big chair. It’s not a perfect safeguard, of course, and there’s room to quibble over the quality of a few who made it through.

Second, we have a system of checks and balances. Congress has the power to force its way into the decision-making process in cases like this one, where action is planned over months and even years. In the Awlaki case in particular, Capitol Hill has had plenty of time to insist that the Obama administration lay out its case for action. Either they’ve done that (behind closed doors in the appropriate national security committees) and been satisfied or they’ve abrogated their responsibility. Further, lacking such advance warning, Congress can certainly exercise its oversight powers after the fact, calling the administration on to the carpet. Its members have enormous power in this regard, up to and including the ability to impeach the president.

Additionally, the courts also have a significant role to play in safeguarding the Constitution. While they’ve historically been deferential to elected policy-makers on matters of national security policy, they have, as seen in Hamden, Boumediene, and several other cases, been willing to limit their prerogatives, even when applied to unsympathetic defendants, in order to defend larger principles.

I don’t claim it’s a satisfying answer. But we trust the president to make these calls and Congress and the courts to keep him in check. If there’s a better system for balancing the legitimate national security interests and civil liberties of Americans, it has yet to be devised.

The German Marshall Fund has just released its annual Transatlantic Trends report, which measures U.S. and European public opinion on transatlantic issues and trends. The big headline is that a bare majority of Americans, 51 percent, now think the countries of Asia are more important to their national interests than the countries of the European Union, which only 38 percent of respondents called more important. But this change, likely driven by Asia’s economic rise and Europe’s economic decline, isn’t the only major piece of news: NATO is still seen as essential by 62 percent of both EU and U.S. respondents, demonstrating that the transatlantic military bond is still, despite a rough decade, firmly entrenched in American and European views of the world.

The strong public support for NATO is interesting precisely because it has been so steady, remaining at essentially the same levels for years now, despite the tremendous challenges it has faced: the U.S.-European tensions of the George W. Bush Bush years, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, and the global economic crisis.

[...]

EU approval of the U.S. president has been as high as 83 percent (2009) and as low as 18 percent (2006). Bush peaked at 38 percent (2002) and Obama has fallen to 75 percent with the latest survey.

Similarly — and in rough parallel — Europeans have fluctuated in their conviction that “U.S. leadership in world affairs is desirable.” It peaked at 64 percent (2002), dropped to the mid-30s after the Iraq squabble, and rebounded to the mid-50s during the Obama years. But, through it all, the NATO numbers stayed steady.

[...]

For over six decades, NATO — the transatlantic military alliance — has been the one constant throughout ever-shifting interests, affections, and priorities. For Europeans, it’s a guarantee that the world’s dominant military power will treat an attack against them as an attack against us. For Americans, it’s a tangible partnership with those whose values we share. That the U.S. and Europe are so military close is something we just assume — and that’s a good thing.

Much more at the link.

Good luck to Josh in getting up and running soon. This is an outrageous, if unsurprising, attack on the free press.