Mr. Obama Goes to Berlin

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Senator Barack Obama will travel to Berlin later this month to demonstrate his popularity abroad and present himself to the world as the post-partisan, post-Washington paralysis candidate. The fact that Germans are receptive to Obama’s candidacy is interesting given the difficulties that German leaders face in speaking honestly about their own country’s challenges.

On Gay Adoption and Gay Parenting

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(Lynne and Dick Cheney hold Samuel David Cheney, the son of Mary Cheney and her wife, Heather Poe) John McCain needs to come spend some time in my neighborhood in Dupont Circle in Washington.

Obama’s Hagel-Brzezinski Plan for Iraq

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Barack Obama has an important op-ed today in the New York Times titled “My Plan for Iraq.” It’s a useful portal into the current thinking in ObamaLand on America’s Iraq policy and continues to emphasize both his opposition in 2002 to the Iraq War and his intention to “end the conflict.

Communists Are Nicer

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Or at least, so says an informal, unscientific (and thus at least partially worthless, but still interesting) survey of people in four countries transitioning to a market economy that I conducted last month.

On Blogging and “Owning an Issue”

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A while back, I spoke at an interesting program on the politics and ethics of blogging at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs organized by well known Japan hand Devin Stewart who runs the program and blog titled Policy Innovations.

Recommended Book on China

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I’ve just read 520 pages of a 544 page paperback on the flight back from China. If you are interested in sampling the seismic political and cultural shifts in China over the last century, I can’t think of a better book I have read.

STREAMING LIVE TUESDAY: Jane Mayer on the White House’s Heart of Darkness

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Tuesday morning, between 9:30 am and 11:00 am EST, I am hosting a conversation at the New America Foundation with New Yorker Washington correspondent Jane Mayer about her news-busting new book on the torture-promoting War Council ecosystem that Vice President Cheney and one of his most tenacious consigliari, David Addington, constructed after 9-11.

Sorry, Mao Can’t Fly

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China has some intense security — sort of the opposite of what I found not long ago in Kuwait. While heading home from the Middle East, I walked through security boarding a United Airlines plane and the buzzer went off. No problem — I was just waved through and wasn’t searched.