No one is happier - no one is prouder - to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?
President Obama addressing the White House Correspondents Dinner. I love that Trump is chilling in the audience trying to make himself invisible (for once!)
Broadly, the Americans seek a strong and relatively centralized Afghan government commanding a large army that can control its territory. Almost all those ends are objectionable to Pakistan, which while it calls for a stable Afghanistan, prefers a more loosely governed neighbor where it can influence events, if need be, through Taliban proxies.
“What is the endgame for the U.S. in Afghanistan?” asks TIME, quoting this New York Times article
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
- Noam Chomsky (via thesuccubusmanifesto, androphilia, miketodd07)
Sound familiar?
reblogged from erickd
Each American embassy comes with two permanent features – a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards.
P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell
Love The Economist’s moderately snarky run-down on potential Republican presidential candidates
Daily Chart: Republican presidential contenders. Who will take on Barack Obama in 2012? We ranked the 15 front-runners: our briefing has more.
reblogged from theeconomist
Rahm Emanuel: “The One-Man Political Machine” in The New York Times
For far too long, the public has suffered under the tyranny of dueling narratives served up by one or another interest group seeking self-serving shortcuts around nuanced truths, all the while shortchanging the clarity of important debates about the biggest issues of the day — from health care reform to defense policy to education. Journalists have too often perpetuated the false notion that seemingly any issue can be cleanly divided into right and left, conservative and liberal, because these labels make our work simpler, supplying us with a handy structure we can impose at will on typically uncooperative facts.
“Beyond Left and Right: it’s about reality”, Huffington Post
(I for one welcome our new 1990s-era AOL overlords)
(I for one welcome our new 1990s-era AOL overlords)
“So does this job ever get to be fun?”
“Well, yes. But I really don’t recommend you do what I did for fun.”
reblogged from obamarama
I think America will be at a standstill for almost a decade. If you get another administration it doesn’t turn this around overnight. China and Brazil are just booming ahead. China is buying up and developing half of Africa.
An unusually candid interview with Chairman Murdoch in the AFR
History of the Soviet Union as told by Lego men (via @annarosekerr)
Absolutely love this New York Times ‘budget puzzle’ that lets you cut things from the U.S. federal budget and what impact it would have on the deficit.
Shows how incredibly tough it will be to get the U.S. federal government’s finances back in order.
Hard to imagine anyone in Congress will have the political capital or willpower to do it until things get bad.
Really bad.
We find out nothing about Alaska that we didn’t learn in elementary school. I know that some Americans think Palin is stupid, but I never realized that she thinks we’re stupid.
Nancy Franklin reviews Sarah Palin’s new reality TV show in The New Yorker.
The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect. At the very least, the role of the officially neutral, apolitical aid worker in most contemporary conflicts is, as Nightingale forewarned, that of a caterer: humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of sustaining casualties, and supplying the food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst—as the Red Cross demonstrated during the Second World War, when the organization offered its services at Nazi death camps, while maintaining absolute confidentiality about the atrocities it was privy to—impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity.
‘Alms Dealers’ in The New Yorker looks at the dark side of humaniatrian aid
reblogged from newyorker
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