Eugene Robinson had the best column I’ve seen about the President’s game-playing with war powers on Libya. Blasting dictator Moammar Gaddafi’s troops and installations from above with unmanned drone aircraft may or may not be the right thing to do, but it’s clearly a hostile act. Likewise, providing intelligence, surveillance and logistical support that enable [...]

So I picked the wrong day to be stuck without Internet access, I guess. It was March 19, eight years to the day after the invasion of Iraq, the US lobbed Tomahawk missiles into Libya, attempting to take out air defenses in preparation for enforcing a no-fly zone. We’re on day two of this, still [...]

Good thing the White House is taking the imminent government shutdown so seriously. President Obama designated Joe Biden as his lead negotiator with Congress on a long-term plan to set spending for the rest of the year. They had a meeting Thursday, and I’m not certain they followed up on Friday. And now, Biden’s headed [...]

After that strange speech from Col. Moammar Gadhafi, where he closed by saying “I will die here as a martyr” and accused all protesters of being Islamists and deserving of the death sentence, I think the world should be pretty clear that a madman with fighter jets is in charge of a large country in [...]

I think “baffling” is the appropriate term for the response to the apparent line item in the President’s budget cutting LIHEAP, energy assistance for the poor, by $3 billion (sources now say $2.5 billion). Mainstream journalist Matthew Cooper asks, “Who Wants Grandma to Freeze?” John Kerry, who’s trying to get a job in the next [...]

We are seeing US policymakers moving ever closer to suggesting that Hosni Mubarak must relinquish power in Egypt. John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made that case today in the New York Times, calling on Mubarak to “accept that the stability of his country hinges on his willingness to step aside gracefully [...]

In a small reversal from comments earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged for an end to violence in Egypt, though she made that statement about both the government and protesters. As protests against the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak raged for a fourth straight day, Clinton said the U.S. is “deeply [...]

The Administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan review is out, and it’s very Panglossian, as expected. The five-page summary says that parts of the strategy are “working well” and that “there are notable operational gains.” They claim that the momentum of the Taliban has been stopped and reversed in “some key areas,” and that Al Qaeda senior [...]

John Kerry and Joe Lieberman seem to think that there’s space for a “huge energy debate” in 2011. That’s quite funny. What they are realistic about is that whatever bill they’ll try to muster will be fairly modest, and focused in part on renewing energy tax provisions. Actually, some Democrats are trying to include those [...]

Ryan Lizza offers a tick-tock of the failed effort to pass a climate change bill this Congress. In theory, with 60 Democratic members and the support of an axis of Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and Lindsey Graham, a bill that put a price on carbon could theoretically not be that hard to achieve. In reality, [...]

In a slightly surprising outcome (at least to me), three Republicans joined the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in approving the new START arms reduction treaty with Russia. The final vote on the committee was 14-4. According to Tony Fleming, Richard Lugar, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson joined all the Democrats in voting [...]