Dramatic developments in Georgia, as federal judge Dudley Bowen, who presided over the trial and sentencing of former Georgia senate leader Charles Walker, acknowledged that he never should have been…
From the Baltimore Sun: Wells Fargo loan officers guided minorities toward high-rate mortgages and joked that they were “riding the stagecoach to hell” for routinely steering prime-loan-qualified customers toward subprime…
Correction, June 11, 2009: Scott Horton writes in to point out that Ward Casscells’s term as assistant secretary of defense ended April 28. I had written that my interview took…
From the Department of Justice: Defendant Mary McCarty was sentenced today to 42 months of imprisonment, to be followed by 3 years of supervised release. Defendant McCarty was immediately remanded…
From The Hill: In public, Senate Republicans have kept their distance from conservative attacks on Sonia Sotomayor— but behind the scenes, they have encouraged activists to keep their crosshairs trained…
I watched Barack Obama’s much heralded speech in Cairo this morning asking myself, How much of this speech could I imagine being delivered by George W. Bush? There are a…
From Politico: It was Barack Obama himself who first proposed that Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe make a play to be this generation’s Theodore White—the legendary journalist whose insider account of…
In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof remembers what transpired twenty years ago today on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. “So, 20 years later, what happened to that bold…
The pro comes from M. J. Rosenberg: Mission accomplished. For the first time in memory, an American President spoke to Muslims and Arabs not as antagonists who need to take…
From the BBC: So little is known about Kim Jong-un – the youngest son and reportedly the named successor of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il – that even his date…
The media treated George W. Bush very well during the early days of his administration (as it does every incoming president) but the slavish devotion to Barack Obama is an…
From Politico: The congressional cussing caucus is in need of new members. The Capitol lost its prince of profanity when Rahm Emanuel left for the White House five months ago.…
It’s a commonplace among political philosophy students to note that the Neocons may be Straussians, but that hardly makes Leo Strauss a Neocon. After all, he died in 1973, and…
We’re now a month past the CIA’s release of a summary to the Senate Intelligence Committee concerning its briefings of Congressional leaders about the introduction of the Bush program of…
Those who expected to hear Stanley McChrystal come clean on what he knows about mistreatment of prisoners in the custody of JSOC units that reported to him in the Iraq…
Mary Beth Buchanan, among the most political of the Bush-era U.S. attorneys, hoisted the white flag of surrender today, announcing she would no longer pursue corruption charges against former county…
Four months after he left office, the media image of Dick Cheney has been amazingly transformed. He’s gone from being a reclusive man of few words to a poster figure…
In one of her best essays, “History by the Ounce,” published in Harper’s back in July 1965, Barbara Tuchman talks about the role of characteristic detail in providing an historical…
Today General Stanley McChrystal appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss his appointment as the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan. The New York Times has published an editorial…
President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a Bronx-born, divorced, childless, diabetic, Hispanic federal judge on the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to replace Justice David Souter on…
At a packed function last night at the Times Center in New York, former commanding general of multinational forces in Iraq Ricardo Sanchez issued a call for the creation of…
General David Petraeus gives a fascinating interview to Fox News. Martha MacCallum presents him with the predictable set of Fox-Cheney talking points, and he bats them down with ease one…
The former sheriff of Page County, Virginia, Daniel Presgraves, has been indicted on 22 counts of public corruption, including accepting bribes to protect cockfighting. Based on the indictment, Presgraves appears…
From Politico last Friday: Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury looking into the PMA Group, a once-high flying lobbying firm that collapsed after a…