Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings — Heinrich Heine (1821) I hadn’t paid much attention to the growing "banned books" problem in American schools and libraries, but I saw an ad on a Chicago train yesterday and dug in a bit.
US-Cuba relations are not high on the roster of priorities for many Americans, and yet small moves in the terms of that relationship could have enormous political consequences. Recently, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did battle over what their policies would be towards Cuba if elected President.
President Bush still does not know who actually controverted his policy on keeping Saddam’s military intact and instead disbanded it. That’s an incredible admission — unbelievable! This from a revealing New York Times piece today on Bush biographer Robert Draper’s interviews with Bush (and in his forthcoming book Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W….
Larry Craig won’t be Idaho’s Senator after September 30th. He made his resignation announcement today. There has been a lot of ridicule of Craig in the last several days — much of which was deserved given his well-preened anti-gay persona, but now he’s out. He’s terminated one of the big contradictions in his life.
The other day, I posted a tidbit on the endorsement of Senator Chris Dodd by the International Association of Fire Fighters. I’m a big fan of Chris Dodd. I think he’s an adult when it comes to thinking through what a serious foreign policy for America’s future would look like.
There is informal discussion among some in the military set — and increasingly among some pols — that General David Petraeus could be an interesting presidential prospect on the Republican side of the line a few years from now.
(photo credit: Jay Westcott, Washington Examiner) I’m going to out myself. I have friends — lots of them — inside the American Enterprise Institute. Some of them I can’t mention here as they used to work at AEI and then went to work for political players that this blog has been at cross-purposes with.
Here is some thinking I have written up about America’s ongoing neocon problem and the threat that that movement represents over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. And for those in Chicago or at APSA, I’m blogging away in the fantastic lounge of the Sheraton Hotel on the Chicago River.
David Corn has gotten hold of a secret report — still in draft form — outlining the concerns that the US military and foreign service have about a “norm of corruption” in the current Iraqi government.
Here is a pdf copy of the “Restricted Distribution” report by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, “Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
