Are Republicans coming around on New START? Eight GOP members voted to open debate on the treaty in the Senate last night, which some see as a “proxy” for the final vote. New START needs nine Republican supporters in the Senate to pass.
As repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell passes the House for a second time, it picks up another Republican supporter in the Senate: “‘After careful analysis of the comprehensive report compiled by the Department of Defense and thorough consideration of the testimony provided by the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the service chiefs, I support repeal of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law,’ [Sen. Olympia] Snowe said in a statement.”
Well, this pretty much ensures that the next Organization of the Islamic Conferences summit is going to be sufficiently awkward: “Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak compared Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East to a ‘cancer,’ according to a cable released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. ‘President Mubarak has made it clear that he sees Iran as Egypt’s — and the region’s — primary strategic threat,’ says the secret cable, sent April 28, 2009, from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.”
Two writers and recent Columbia graduates discuss in the New Republic the problematic politics of the university’s controversial new Center for Palestine Studies: “Of course, there is nothing wrong with gathering a broad-based community of scholars behind a new academic initiative. Columbia and American academia need a venue for the interdisciplinary study of Palestine. But, unaccompanied by a dedication to real expertise, the CPS will be little more than a clique of like-minded academics whose defining commonality is hostility toward Israel. In its current form, it’s likely that the first Palestine Center at an American university will lead the way not in ‘a new era of civility,’ but, rather, in politicizing Middle East studies further than ever before.”
The Guardian is predictably outraged that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was given to, apparently, a neocon: “[Liu Xiaobo] has endorsed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. … Liu argues that ‘The free world led by the US fought almost all regimes that trampled on human rights [and the] major wars that the US became involved in are all ethically defensible.’… Liu has also one-sidedly praised Israel’s stance in the Middle East conflict. He places the blame for the Israel/Palestine conflict on Palestinians, who he regards as ‘often the provocateurs.’”
Ross Douthat responds to Mitt Romney supporters who excuse the politician’s “serial insincerity”: “I believe that Mitt Romney is a more serious person, and would probably be a better president, than his campaign style suggests. But issue by issue, policy by policy, that same campaign style makes it awfully hard to figure out where he would actually stand when the pandering stops and the governing begins … because everything he does feels like a pander, I don’t know where he really stands on any of them. And freak show or no freak show, base or no base, that’s no way to run for president.”
Yes, Obama is picking Clintonites like Bill Richardson to fill his cabinet positions, but who else is he going to pick?? He hasn’t been in politics long enough to have created his own crew of Obama-ites. He has to pick the Dems that are out there and are qualified. The last Dem Prez before Clinton was Jimmy Carter 28 years ago. Let’s hope Obama stays as far away from those remaining people as possible.
The article by David Brooks you link is quite disingenuous; he has been drunk in kool-aid for a while.
What’s his point about the IvyLeague educated people? It’s not the first time…and doesn’t necessarily mean great policy. It’s interesting he leaves out Tim Geithner Tsy Sec.: is it because it doesn’t fit the IvyLeague stupidity he’s trying to push? (And so that you don’t get me wrong I am IvyLeague educated as well)
Brooks writes “But the personnel decisions have been superb” … What he doesn’t say is that is thanks to BO’s “brilliant” transition team formed by the same seasoned people in the Clinton Adm. that BO carelessly and in a wholesale fashion trashed along w/the Bush Adm. all throughout the campaign….
Brooks doesn’t eleaborate on the his stupid jab at HRC at State saying it needs to be complemented by Samantha Powers at UN? OMG….
I can’t stand how intellectually dishonest Brooks has become.
PS: I forgot Brooks’s point about balance in his choices (c’m on Brooks!!). Is it just me or is it obvious to everyone but the kool-aid-drinkers that almost every governor that broke for Obama in the primaries is being paid back?
Napolitano (Homeland) Richardson (Commerce) Sebelius (Labor) Kerry (…well he really wanted State but he’s get Biden’s job as chairman of foreign relations committee). I’m waiting to see what Deval Patrick gets next….
I say to the Republicans: be smart and start working quickly and hard looking and financially supporting candidates at the Gov. level : it seems there are quiete a few states that are losing their Dem. Governors.
Note to self: never take up reading David Brooks on a regular basis.
Heaven forbid Obama picks smart people with good ideas to fix the mess caused by dumb people with bad ideas. Is there any doubt Commentary stands opposed?
The irony in Obama’s (or Brooks’s) adoration of credentials is that this is how one of the laziest and most inefficient employers hires — the mega law firms. By relying almost entirely on academic credentials (or the other kinds of goodies that you get based in large part on academic credentials), these firms in effect allow colleges and professional schools to screen their hires for them.
They do so because it fits their business model. Huge law firms want reasonably smart (certainly not the smartest), ambitious, hardworking kids who will make the firms a ton of money for 3 to 5 years doing intellectual grunt work. But — and this is just as important — the firms want 80 to 90% of these kids gone after those 3 to 5 years, that is, once they’re senior enough to making really big money or are in line for a piece of the partnership pie. The desirability of a high failure rate provides a fail-safe for an otherwise flawed hiring model.
You’ve got to wonder, though, how this model would work for choosing advisors. This hiring process basically outsources personnel decisions to professors, is based on attrition, and fits the pyramid structure of big law firms, where the broad base of an army of grunts supports a few big shots who make the important decisions. It’s not a particularly collegial environment — no team of rivals there. Nor is it particularly geared toward finding the best and brightest. A-students are great low-level workers because they’re good at, and highly-motivated toward, finding out what their boss wants and delivering it.
How funny, though, to see Obama — who shunned the big corporate law firms — now imitating their practices.
The 2016 Olympics in Chicago? Come on, Obama, is this payback to your cronies in the Windbag City?
Good thinking, good politicking, Mr. One! Campaign to get the pompous pageantry of the pretentious World Games to one of the most corrupt, dysfunctional cities in the nation. The sucking sound of siphoned stash will be so loud that even the pandering press will have to cry, “Enough!”
No, Mr. O, Chicago does not need the Olympics – it needs to be cleaned up, not for over-steroided athletes, but for the good citizens of the state.
#2 Rod, I certainly hope Obama picks Deval Patrick for something. I’d have a different governor then!
#3 J.E., I’m a step ahead of you. I’ve never paid any attention to Brooks.
Ritchie Emmons #8: I hope so to LOL !! (he’s my Gov. as well although I have no clue what he’s been doing. Seems like…literally nothing.)
Rod, I must confess that I haven’t been paying much attention to what our dear Governor has been doing lately either. The beginning of his reign involved some quality gaffes and over the top personal spending. I just pulled the shade down at that point. Maybe I’ll raise it again if we get a new installment.
The Chicago Olympics bid is a tribute to the megalomania of our mayer, Richard Daley. Plus it can be used as another incentive to get the citizenry with the highest sales tax in the country to entrust even more money to the city to buy infrastructure improvements plus a huge increase in public housing.
Too bad Obama won’t be taking Mayor Daley or Gov. Rod Blagojovich to Washington!
I have lots of experience with high-visibility, industry-significant, Chapter 11 reorganizations. I wonder why it is that this fails to ring a bell with me:
Hmm, do you think it might have something to do with bankruptcy courts’ predilection for firing management?
I’m unfamiliar with any such predilection. Indeed, I know of nothing in the bankruptcy code that would allow for such a predilection, absent a showing of mismanagement by fraud or criminality. Wagoner and his crew are guilty of neither, so far as I know.
No criminality? Everyman have you seen the Pontiac Aztec?
Messrs. Dyer & Emmons: Hear, hear, hear, hear!
Putting the terms “Bill Richardson” and “competence” in the same paragraph is unfortunate. The only thing he is competent at is kissing ass.
Jeffrey Goldberg writes:
“I would like to see Hillary as secretary of state because I think she’s best-equipped … to engineer the comprehensive peace plan that I (and Scowcroft and Brzezinski!) believe is absolutely necessary right now, because at some indeterminate time in the very near future, it will be too late.”
For many years we’ve been exposed to this canard that if peace between Israel and Palestinians isn’t reached “now,” it will be too late. Goldberg only points out the ludicrousness of this claim with his apparently un-ironic statement that a peace deal “is absolutely necessary,” “right now,” because of an outcome that he predicts “at some indeterminate time in the very near future.”
Really, Jeffrey? Why will it be too late? How far out in the “very near future” will it be too late? Why is your claim that now is the last chance for peace any more accurate than all the previous claims to this effect? Can’t you just, you know, be a little less vague?
The Chicago Olympics would be the final end game. Interest has been sliding & there is not ONE person in the whole world that wants to look at Chicago on TV much less go there..
The Olympics in Chicago? Jennifer! WHAT do you have against the Olympics? To promote such a thing you must first answer some questions:
1. Will the winners, when they go to get their medals, be holding their hats over their faces?
2. Will the diving and gymnastics judges find the cards they write on have disappeared and they have to use special, pre-printed ones?
3. Will all the contestants have to slip an envelope to a judge just before the event?
4. Will they be allowed to play The Star Spangled Banner if an American wins something?
5. Will the athletes have to live in the low-income housing that Rezco and Obama built that homeless people won’t stay in?