Obama to Sarkozy on Netanyahu: “You’re sick of him — but I have to deal with him every day!”

The United Nations Security Council Resolution on the situation in Libya is available online. In summary it authorizes member states to act as required to prevent harm to Libyan civilians, authorizes the establishment of a no-fly zone in Libyan air space, strengthens the arms embargo against Libya, and strengthens the freeze on Libyan assets in [...]

Washington Wire: “I hope today, all of you feel free to make yourselves at home. For those of you with a particular interest in the next election, I don’t mean that literally.” — President Barack Obama, welcoming governors to the White House. A moment later, he gestured toward Mississippi’s GOP Gov. Haley Barbour and the [...]

I’m no Mike Huckabee fan, but I will say I’m glad to see that he said this in an interview with a Christian magazine: According to a Pew survey last August, 29 percent of evangelical Christians believe Obama is a Muslim, while only 27 percent think he is a Christian. Who or what is at [...]

Calls are coming from both sides of the aisle for the U.S. to do “something” about the situation in Libya. It would be better if we didn’t get involved.

Does Russia really spend more on roads than we do?

The title says it all.

This year’s Zogby poll of public opinion in the Middle East exhibits a marked shift on the Obama Administration, Iran.

Both President Obama and General McChrystal handled a bad situation incredibly well.

Doug has already done an excellent job assessing President Obama’s Gulf cleanup speech but I’m going to weigh in with some further thoughts. As has been my custom in recent years, I skipped the speech altogether, preferring to assess it the next morning based on reading the text and gauging the reactions to it.  This [...]

President Obama used the prestige of his very first Oval Office speech to report to the American public on Day 57 of the Gulf Oil Spill Crisis, and it was, quite honestly, less than it should have been: WASHINGTON — President Obama summoned Americans on Tuesday to a “national mission” to move away from reliance [...]

At least one element of the plan that President Obama plans to announce in his speech tonight has been leaked, and it sounds very familiar: WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, in his televised speech to the nation Tuesday, will announce the creation of an oil recovery “czar” to oversee progress in siphoning crude from the [...]

The post title is borrowed from Josh Marshall. Roll Call has a good article (sub.req.) today about the role of former President Bill Clinton in the 2010 election. The gist of the piece is that Clinton is turning out to be an important asset in this cycle since there are many parts of the country [...]

Despite recent dips in his personal approval ratings and the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s no sign yet that any of the most-talked about Republican candidates in 2012 would beat President Obama: President Barack Obama holds an edge over each of his potential Republican challengers in 2012, according to a new Public [...]

One of the most striking developments over the past several days has been news of the way that some Britons seem to be reacting to American anger at BP. It started with statements from Boris Johnson, the always outspoken Mayor London, who accused President Obama of using “anti-British rhetoric:” Boris Johnson has warned that the [...]

The scandal du jour is that Barack Obama was flying to a political fundraiser during a memorial for those killed in the BP explosion: According his official schedule, President Obama did not attend the May 25 memorial service in Jackson, Mississippi for the workers who died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion because he was en [...]

That’s the question raised by yesterday’s announcement that Israel would now allow snack food and drinks to be imported in to the Gaza Strip: Israel is easing its Gaza embargo to allow snack food and drinks into the Palestinian enclave, Palestinian officials said Wednesday, following an international outcry over Israel’s raid on an aid flotilla. [...]

Some are referring to yesterday’s election results as a good night for women, but it was also a good night for one specific woman: Some of Sarah Palin’s riskiest endorsements scored major victories Tuesday for the former Alaska governor, showing off her power in Republican primaries. Palin had four primary endorsements in play – Carly [...]

Last night in my post about President Obama’s “whose ass to kick” comment, I said: It will be interesting to see how the public and the media reacts to this, not the least being because this is the first time that I can remember that a President used and (admittedly minor) vulgarity in a public [...]

More bad news for the Obama Administration in a new ABC News poll about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: By more than a 2-to-1 margin, Americans support the pursuit of criminal charges in the nation’s worst oil spill, with increasing numbers calling it a major environmental disaster. Eight in 10 criticize the way BP’s [...]

In an interview that will air tomorrow morning on Today, President Obama displays another example of what appears to be the “tough talk” strategy the White House adopted late last week on the Gulf Oil Spill: (CNN) — President Barack Obama bluntly defended his administration’s response to the undersea gusher fouling the Gulf of Mexico [...]

A new Gallup poll shows that public support for Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court is lower than it has been for most recent Supreme Court nominees: PRINCETON, NJ — A USA Today/Gallup poll finds just under half of Americans, 46%, in favor of the Senate’s confirming Elena Kagan’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme [...]

Pundits such as  James Carville, Chris Matthews, Peggy Noonan, and Maureen Dowd have given President Obama a lot of heat lately for his response, or lack thereof, to the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and what’s becoming clear is that the longer this story goes on, the more that his entire Presidency is becoming consumed [...]

The unemployment report for May, released this morning, reflects the fact that the economy is still a long way from the kind of recovery that will actually put people back to work: Employers added 431,000 nonfarm jobs nationwide in May, the biggest increase in a single month since the recession, the Labor Department said Friday. [...]

Texas Congressman Ron Paul thinks that the media and the public are being too hard on President Obama for his response to the Gulf Oil Spill: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican lawmaker from Texas, said that people were expecting too much from the president in his ability to react to the ongoing spill into [...]

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich goes on trial this morning, and its a trial that will likely echo all the way from Deaborn Street to Pennsylvania Avenue: Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s federal corruption trial will feature prosecutors feeding voters a steady reminder of the worst elements of Illinois’ political culture — allegations that money, insider [...]

The White House admitted early today that it had offered Andrew Romanoff, who is running a primary challenger to Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, options of Executive Branch employment instead of running for office: The White House acknowledged Thursday that it made overtures to Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff about a possible administration job as [...]

The Treasury Department announced yesterday that the nation’s debt had officially passed the $ 13 trillion mark: The National Debt topped $13-trillion for the first time in U.S. history – reflecting the surge in government spending that will push the Debt to increasing highs through the rest of the decade. Posted on the Treasury Department [...]

This is pretty amusing: When people started talking about President Obama and the return of reading, they probably didn’t mean Ayn Rand. But the Obama presidency has been a boon to Rand’s publishers. Buried in George Will’s upcoming column is the nugget that sales of Atlas Shrugged have tripled since Obama took office. From 2000 [...]

A new Gallup poll seems to indicate that President Obama is beginning to pay a political price for what many are perceiving as a lack of an aggressive response to the Gulf oil spill: WASHINGTON, D.C. — With President Barack Obama and BP taking their most aggressive steps yet in response to the massive oil [...]

“In some cultures, there need to be ritual displays of over the top emotion for some events- profuse groveling including getting down on your hands and knees when making an apology, wailing and beating of the chest and throwing yourself on the coffin at a funeral, and so on. Apparently, this is what we expect [...]

Late yesterday, the officials in charge of trying to stop the Gulf Oil Spill announced that their latest efforts had ended in failure: NEW ORLEANS — In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that [...]

Despite initial reports of success, it’s beginning to look like the “top kill” procedure to stop the Gulf of Mexico oil leak may not be working: BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming [...]

Local officials in Louisiana are accusing BP of busing in workers to the Grand Isle, Louisiana for President Obama’s visit there yesterday to make it appear that the clean-up task was larger than it actually is: BP, the oil company taking flak for its inconsistent response to the massive oil leak in the Gulf of [...]

So it appears that Darrel Issa has requested that the FBI investigate that non-illegal, politics-as-usual act of offering Joe Sestak a job. Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Friday asked the FBI to begin a criminal investigation into efforts by the White House to convince Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.) to [...]

The following headline and picture, currently fronting YahooNews, sums it up: Obama arrives in Gulf as BP tries to stop oil leak Four paragraphs in, AP writers Ben Nuckols and Greg Bluestein get to Obama’s role: President Barack Obama arrived in the Gulf, where he stood on Fourchon Beach in his shirt-sleeves and called reporters [...]

George Kennan famously defined national security as “the continued ability of this country to pursue its internal life without serious interference.”  The Obama Administration, with the release of its National Security Strategy, has re-defined it beyond all meaning. I make the case at greater length in my New Atlanticist essay “Obama’s National Security Strategy Sleight-of-Hand.” [...]

The White House released it’s response to the questions that have arisen regarding the allegations of a job offer made to Congressman Joe Sestak during his primary run against Arlen Specter: At the urging of the Obama White House, former President Bill Clinton asked Rep. Joe Sestak whether he would abandon his plans to challenge [...]

The New York Times has just broken a story about the Joe Sestak job controversy that puts the entire story in a new light: President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of a Senate primary if given a prominent, but [...]

President Obama left for a Memorial Day weekend stay in Chicago last night and will be returning to Washington Monday evening, which means that he will be sending Vice-President Biden to the traditional wealth-laying ceremony at the Tomb Of The Unknowns At Arlington National Cemetery: President Obama is skipping the traditional Memorial Day visit to [...]

At the tail in of today’s press conference, President Obama was asked about the ongoing controversy over the alleged job offer to Congressman Joe Sestak: President Barack Obama said Thursday that “nothing improper happened” regarding allegations that the White House offered Rep. Joe Sestak a job to get out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary. [...]

In the latest sign that the political controversy over whether or not Joe Sestak was offered a job to induce him to drop out of the race against Arlen Specter, seven Republican Senators have asked the Attorney General to appoint a Special Prosecutor: In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder today, all seven Republicans [...]

Over at his own digs, Dave Schuler discusses the politics of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster in a post titled “Beyond White House Control.”   I commend it to you in full, but the key ‘graphs are: All of the experience, expertise, and equipment relevant to dealing with the spill are in the [...]

In case you missed it, here are the highlights from James Carville’s rant against the White House Good Morning America this morning: Man, when a Democrat loses James Carville…….

David Frum’s Washington Post review of Zev Chafets’s Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One has already been attacked by many on the right, but his closing paragraphs make a point worth considering: Chafets acknowledges that Limbaugh has no conception of fairness or objectivity, that he is not an original thinker, and that he is prone [...]

That’s how long it’s been since President Obama last held a press conference: Will Barack Obama go an entire year without holding a formal news conference? He’s getting close: The president’s last full-scale session with the press was on July 22, 2009, which was 307 days ago. When Obama last held a big news conference, [...]

For months now, there have been rumors that the White House attempted to protect Arlen Specter from a primary challenge by Congressman Joe Sestak by offering Sestak an Administration job, specifically Secretary of the Navy. Sestak seemed to confirm these rumors just this past Sunday when he said: “It’s interesting. I was asked a question [...]

President Obama joins his recent predecessors in wanting a line-item veto and has plans to get around the fact that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. As part of what the White House called a campaign to crack down on wasteful government spending, President Obama on Monday asked Congress to grant him new powers to slice lawmakers’ pet [...]

Dave, James, and Alex all did an excellent job this morning of laying out the various problems with America’s current strategy in Afghanistan. I don’t have much to add to their points, but I do think its worth taking note of a new Rasmussen poll that shows that public support for the Afghan War is [...]

Honestly, I don’t know what to add to Dave’s and James’ takes on the current situation in Afghanistan. Like James, I supported the initial invasion of Afghanistan and was also surprised at how quickly the Taliban fell and al-Qaeda dispersed. But now, eight and a half years later, I too have to question the wisdom [...]