You Have to Try

David Brooks asks:
We’re about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they’ve asked: Why can’t we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront [...]

What is Wrong with Our System

Turkey isn’t the only place with five dumb Supreme Court justices. The Alabama Supreme Court narrowly decided to delay the execution of Thomas Arthur. This after another man confessed to the crime he was going to be put to death for.
Mr. Arthur, 66, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday [...]

And in Tim Kaine’s Favor

Tim Kaine has lost a lot of favor within the lefty blogosphere recently and I must admit, he doesn’t have many accomplishments as governor for someone being considered for vice president. But doesn’t the fact that the Virginia GOP is launching a concerted effort to talk him down to the press say something good about [...]

Turkey Not Screwed

Good news from Turkey.
Turkey’s governing party narrowly missed being banned in a court ruling on Wednesday that released months of pressure in the country and handed a victory to the party’s leader, a former Islamist.
The party, Justice and Development, or AKP, as it is know in Turkish, was kept alive by just one vote — [...]

Is Marc Ambinder Crazy?

In a post assessing Obama’s VP shortlist, Ambinder writes this
Sebelius and Kaine are both governing choices, not campaign choices. They’re not going to match Obama’s enthusiasm levels; they’re not going to do all that well at the VP debates; they’re not even going to solve political problems (even Kaine).  But they are solid; they are [...]

Policy and the End of the Bush Administration

Spencer Ackerman has a spectacular article up about the State Department’s new policy document “Counterinsurgency: A Guide for Policy-Makers,” which is going to be published in November. The policy handbook has a lot of interesting things to say.
The handbook seeks to provide a framework for considering whether Washington should intervene in foreign countries’ counterinsurgency operations, [...]

Turkey on the Brink

One of the big, underrepresented stories going on right now is the crisis in Turkey. As of now, Turkey is the most successful Muslim democracy in the world and the current government, the AKP, has been by far the most successful government Turkey has had in a long time. Yet, somehow, the ruling party may [...]

An Under-Remarked Element of the Iraq Debate

From Harper’s, via Andrew Sullivan
“Number of Iraqis who receive regular payments from the U.S. government in exchange for not fighting:  91,600″
In all the recent discussion about the surge and the Anbar Awakening is the fact that we are literally paying many Iraqis not to fight against us. To put 91,600 in perspective, there are currently [...]

The Press is Biased Against Who Now?

Barack Obama. At least, more of his media coverage is unfavorable than John McCain’s.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of [...]

McCain on the Awakening

As I briefly noted yesterday, John McCain is having some trouble with his Iraq messaging. All he wants to say is that everything good in Iraq is a result of his surgerific good judgement and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Yesterday, when asked about Obama’s views on recent progress on [...]