The Politics of Economics: Vignettes

TNR Senior Editor Noam Scheiber thinks that Elizabeth Warren is confirmable if nominated and thinks that Obama wins by pushing this button.
TNR Senior Editor Noam Scheiber thinks that Elizabeth Warren is confirmable if nominated and thinks that Obama wins by pushing this button.
(Boats in Brittany, photo credit: Ben Rosengart; click image to make larger) Long-time TWN reader Ben Rosengart sends in three views from three windows. I’m going to post them one at a time. This is part two, taken in Brittany. This was part one. The next yet to come is Paris.
(photo credit: PBS NewsHour) My New America Foundation colleague Steve Coll, a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and one of the nation’s leading national security and intelligence experts on Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, appeared on The PBS NewsHour yesterday evening along with NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown and journalist Philip Smucker to discuss the impact and…
While I think that RNC Chairman Michael Steele was pretty much on the money with his critique of the Afghanistan War, this is probably yet another wrong-headed landmine he’s stepped on. As TPMdc has revealed, Steele is organizing a party fundraising event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles featuring Andrew Breitbart and others….
A member of the 82nd Airborne Division recorded this clip above of Afghan National Police puffing on a marijuana pipe before going out on patrol.
The editors of the Sun Herald, the leading paper for Biloxi-Gulfport and South Mississippi, certainly are able to see good sense through the war hype.
I don’t know if Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry has ever met Daniel Ellsberg or not, but with this statement — which stands in stark contrast to the condemnatory comments from the White House about the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Logs — Kerry shows he has a respect for Pentagon Papers moments.
I’m sympathetic to the Obama administration’s view that Israel’s blockade of Gaza in order to keep weapons from Hamas does not equate to starving and punishing the Gazan people.
The extraordinary WikiLeaks dump of some 91,000 classified reports into the public sphere on America’s war in Afghanistan may be the game-changer in American support for a war that continues to worsen.
This is a guest note by Al Jazeera correspondent Clayton Swisher who is currently embedded with US troops fighting in Afghanistan. This essay originally ran on Al Jazeera’s “The Asia Blog.” (The photo below is of 82nd Airborne soldiers in Arghandab; Photo by Tom Nicholson; reprinted with permission.