[ Posted Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 – 15:22 UTC ]
Today President Barack Obama announced the beginning of the end of America's longest war. This announcement was fully anticipated and therefore came as no surprise, seeing as how Obama was elected in large part to end two wars. He successfully withdrew all American troops from Iraq in 2011, and he announced today the schedule for withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan. From 32,000 current troops, we will draw down to 9,800 by the end of this year. This number will then shrink by half (to roughly 5,000) by the end of 2015. By the end of 2016, they will all be out (except possibly for a small force left for security, in the range of 1,000 troops or less). Thus will end a 15-year-long war effort -- the longest in American history.
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[ Posted Monday, January 6th, 2014 – 18:55 UTC ]
President Obama had a pretty significant month in the polls, which might come as a surprise if all you've been listening to is the conventional wisdom in Washington (which has been happily parroting "Obama's polling is in free-fall!" all month long). In fact, what happened this month was that Obama stopped sliding downwards in the polls, and began actually recovering a bit of the ground he's lost since the disastrous Obamacare website launch at the beginning of October. What's more, Obama looks pretty good to continue this recovery for at least the next month or two. Which, as I said, might just come as a surprise to some.
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[ Posted Friday, September 6th, 2013 – 16:32 UTC ]
Due to the fact that Congress is still on vacation and also due to the fact that it has largely been a one-subject week in the political world, we are going to pre-empt our regular talking points for a discussion of where the country seems to be on the question of attacking Syria. But first, let's wrap up the week and hand out our awards, as usual.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 4th, 2013 – 15:11 UTC ]
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee just voted to approve a resolution to attack Syria on a vote of 10-7, with one member merely voting "present." But the breakdown of the voting reveals that this was in no way a party-line vote. Which, of course, complicates the issue for a media much more comfortable with a "horse race" mentality towards all politics ("Dems are up! GOP down! Film at eleven!"). For once, some complexities have emerged which confound the knee-jerk pigeonholing so regularly practiced by news producers. But maybe that's all to the good. Maybe, in fact, that's why President Obama went to Congress in the first place.
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[ Posted Thursday, March 21st, 2013 – 17:01 UTC ]
Ten years ago this week, America went to war in Iraq for the second time. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, but that certainly didn't stop us from invading. Jingoism ran high in the supposedly-liberal press, and only a few voices were raised against the war in Congress. But plenty of others have been rehashing the whole run-up to the Iraq War, and plenty have been busy this week pointing out all the mistakes that were made along the way. I leave all that to others, though, for now. Instead, what I am left thinking ten years after the initial invasion is how badly America's record is when it comes to cleaning up afterwards.
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[ Posted Friday, January 18th, 2013 – 16:02 UTC ]
Eric Cantor, much to our surprise, almost just did something we not only would have agreed with, but in fact given our wholehearted support to. Almost.
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[ Posted Monday, October 22nd, 2012 – 21:29 UTC ]
To paraphrase an oldie but a goodie: "What if they had a debate and nobody read the agenda?" Tonight's debate was, ostensibly, supposed to be on foreign policy. However, both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama decided fairly early on that the differences between the two policy-wise were pretty small, so they both decided to hijack the foreign policy debate and instead just continue the debates on the economy, instead.
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[ Posted Friday, October 19th, 2012 – 16:04 UTC ]
As always, we are here to bring you the burning questions of the day that nobody else is asking. Today's question: What will we call the 2012 women?
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[ Posted Friday, September 14th, 2012 – 15:22 UTC ]
The second item of note is that today marks the fifth "birthday" of this column series. September 14, 2007 saw the very first Friday Talking Points column ever (although the name and the column format wouldn't solidify for a few months). Since then, almost every Friday, we've been attempting to provide Democratic talking points for politicians to use to get their point across in a snappy and memorable fashion. How much success we've had doing so is open to interpretation, but we're still here doing it, which tends to indicate that Democrats still have a ways to go to match the Republican ability to keep "on script" during interviews. To put this another way, it's the old Democratic "herding cats" problem.
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[ Posted Friday, May 4th, 2012 – 16:36 UTC ]
If you've been hiding under a rock somewhere all week, you may have missed the fact that an anniversary just happened. One year ago this past Wednesday, special operations forces killed America's "Enemy Number One," Osama Bin Laden. When it happened, it was a time for some sober reflection -- and some unsober and spontaneous celebration on the streets. Whether such was a good thing or not, it is what happened.
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