Two major year-end pieces of legislation were readied yesterday, and in this case, House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on the measures, expecting to pass them by the end of the week. First, appropriators agreed to a $1 trillion omnibus spending bill covering the rest of the fiscal year (to September 30 of next year) [...]

For the next several months, every public appearance by a member of the Obama national security team will be accompanies by a warning about how allowing triggered cuts to the Defense Department would threaten the United States. The amount of cuts, combined with the up-front cuts in the debt limit deal, aren’t even as much [...]

Leon Panetta is absolutely trying to set up Pakistan publicly. Yesterday he said in an interview that the US never told Pakistan about the forthcoming mission into Abbottabad to kill bin Laden because they would have tipped him off. Implicit in that statement is the idea that at least some Pakistani officials knew where bin [...]

The military airdrops of seawater onto the Fukushima Daiichi plant continued throughout the day today, and Tokyo Electric Power Co. was nearing completion on a new power line that would restore the cooling systems in the reactors. The outlook remains bleak after a week of crisis, but Japanese officials appear to have settled on a [...]

Here’s what the President managed to put out regarding the shameless murder of citizens today in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen: I am deeply concerned by reports of violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen. The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries and wherever else it may occur. [...]

First of all, great work by Christiane Amanpour to get this interview. We don’t have the transcript or video yet and can only go by her recollection of events, but a few things jump out at me: • Mubarak blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for yesterday’s violence. That’s an answer designed for a Western audience, particularly [...]

The state TV interview with Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman was kind of a joke. Suleiman rejected the early departure of Hosni Mubarak from the government due to the risk to “stability and security” (because Egypt looks so stable). He intimated that satellite TV stations like Al Jazeera “are arousing you against your country.” He [...]

An Obama Administration official told Reuters that they would “review” the $1.5 billion in annual aid sent to Egypt, in the wake of anti-government protests across the country. That doesn’t mean that anything will come of this in terms of actual reductions or eliminations in foreign aid, at least not right away. But just saying [...]

I think everyone was pleasantly surprised by a legitimate, though modest, climate accord in Cancun at the UN global summit. After the debacle of Copenhagen and the clear signal that the US wouldn’t pass a cap and trade package, nobody expected agreement on much of anything other than who buys the shots at Señor Frogs. [...]

The headline here, “U.S. sets example by pledging $60M more to U.N. for Pakistani flood aid,” is a bit too precious, but it’s true that the United States has stepped up their relief aid to $150 million dollars for the tragic events in Pakistan, and that they hope others will follow suit. The U.S. pledge [...]

The flooding crisis in Pakistan keeps growing worse. One-fifth of the country remains soaked, and the public health implications have started to spread: As Pakistan reels from its worst floods in memory, United Nations officials said Monday that 3.5 million children and infants were at a particularly high risk of diseases borne by dirty water. [...]