[ Posted Monday, March 24th, 2014 – 20:32 UTC ]
Forty-three years ago this month, an obscure branch office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations located in a Philadelphia suburb was burgled. All their files were stolen (being 1971, these files were all on paper) and whisked away to a secret hideout, then they were sorted and sent to the media. This criminal act set in motion the idea that our government should no longer operate in secret without any supervision. It was followed by the leak of the government's Vietnam War plans, a congressional investigation (the first ever of its kind) into the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., the resignation of a president brought about in no small part by leaks to the media, and eventually the modern-day document dumps of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. But while the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the Church Committee are at least somewhat well-known these days, few people (even few followers of politics, recent history, or the debates on the modern security state) recognize "the Media break-in" as where it all started.
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[ Posted Monday, March 17th, 2014 – 13:49 UTC ]
At this point, you may be tempted to ask the barman for what you believe will be a well-known local drink, and you may thus make the mistake of asking for a "black and tan." The reception of what you consider a harmless drink order for a pint glass half-filled with Harp and half-filled with Guinness Stout will not, however, be a merry twinkle of approval from the barman's eye for ordering a local delicacy. Instead, you will (hopefully) be forgiven for such a gross error of etiquette, and (once they hear some more of your American accent, again, hopefully) they will instruct you in the long and grim history of the Black and Tans -- with a helpful suggestion that if you ever want the same drink again in an Irish pub, that you ask for it as a "half and half" instead.
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[ Posted Tuesday, March 11th, 2014 – 17:28 UTC ]
Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Central Intelligence Agency are having an increasingly-public spat, it seems. Feinstein has now accused the C.I.A. of spying on her congressional committee (which is charged with oversight of the C.I.A.) and the C.I.A. has accused Feinstein's committee of taking documents they weren't supposed to have. They are both trying to convince Eric Holder's Justice Department that the other is at fault.
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[ Posted Friday, March 7th, 2014 – 17:59 UTC ]
It's been a busy week in politics -- even without all the CPAC follies -- so let's get right to it.
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[ Posted Monday, March 3rd, 2014 – 18:00 UTC ]
Russia hasn't been on the minds of Americans for a while now (other than the recent Olympics, of course), which is why a whole lot of people are now shocked to discover a basic truth which was self-evident in the days of the Cold War: Russia, much like America, doesn't really have to care all that much what the rest of the world thinks about it.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 11th, 2014 – 17:26 UTC ]
John Boehner just bowed to reality for the third straight time, rather than choosing to create yet another meaningless self-imposed crisis for the American economy. There are metaphors a-plenty to describe today's events, but we're going with how one fellow Republican put it (who didn't even agree with Boehner when it came time to vote): "John Boehner was the adult in the room."
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 28th, 2014 – 22:38 UTC ]
OK, as usual, I'm sitting down to write this without really dipping into the oceans of ink (and electrons) that are being spilled right now by other pundits, so that my reactions to both the "State Of The Union" speech and the Republican response are untainted by either groupthink or the herd mentality. So there's a very good chance (as always) that what I thought will be a long way away from what others think (on both sides of the aisle).
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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, December 27th, 2013 – 17:50 UTC ]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
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[ Posted Monday, December 23rd, 2013 – 17:11 UTC ]
We hereby interrupt our live coverage of Pope Francis leading Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, because we've got some breaking news from the Pentagon. We apologize for pre-empting our traditional Christmas Eve programming, and promise we will continue our coverage after the newsbreak, on a slight time delay so our viewers won't miss a single minute of the Pope.
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