“Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.”
Powers
If you’re looking for a good new comic book to read (and who isn’t) let me recommend Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. I read the first, second, seventh, eighth, and ninth trade paperbacks last week at the beach and it’s really solid stuff through-and-through. The basic premise is that you’re reading noir-style detective stories focused on two homicide comics working the “powers-related” beat. It’s a neat way of dealing with super hero themes, iconography, and other good comics-y stuff without making it a super hero book per se, since it has much more the look, feel, and tone of crime and detective stories.
The complete first story arc, “Who Killed Retro Girl?” is available online.
Ed Gillespie may replace Dan Bartlett.
Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie “has emerged as a potential replacement to Dan Bartlett as counselor to President Bush. … After taking the reins of the national party in 2003, Gillespie was part of the Bush-Cheney inner circle in the 2004 campaign. He also served a key role for the White House in shepherding Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts through the Senate confirmation process after Bush’s reelection.”
Eric Alterman Fought The Law
And, it seems, the law won.
UPDATE: Eric’s side of the story is a bit long for the front page, but it’s here below the fold and Read more
Debate Late Liveblogging
Okay, I forgot to tune this in until very late in the game and came on board just in time to see Joe Biden saying something moronic about Darfur.
On the “defining rich” question, Edwards kicked Obama’s ass even though he spent most of his time talking about the misguided element of his college tuition scheme.
On the deficit, Bill Richardson is sounding a bit like a slick Republican and I don’t mean that in a good way.
It’s too bad that Dennis Kucinich is such a weirdo, since while I don’t really agree with what he has to say, his message deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than it is.
Now my roommate is changing back to the MTV Movie Awards.
Where Was Pat?
Andrew Sullivan quotes from Daniel Larison: “My 2000 Buchanan vote seems smarter and smarter every day.”
This reminds me that Buchanan’s 2000 campaign struck me as wildly undermotivated at the time. By today, it looks very well motivated in retrospect — there seems to be a clear political space for someone who espouses a Buchanan-esque combination of foreign policy restraint, globalization skepticism, nativism, and culture war populism. Crucially, this political space also seemed to be open in 2004. If Buchanan had run then rather than in 2000, it seems to me that he could have easily picked up 3-4 percent and tipped the election to Kerry.
Officials discuss ‘detailed’ plans for permanent bases.
“For the first time, the Bush administration is beginning publicly to discuss basing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades to come, a subject so fraught with political landmines that officials are tiptoeing around the inevitable questions about what the United States’ long-term mission would be there.”
Administration officials and top military leaders declined to talk on the record about their long-term plans in Iraq. But when speaking on a not-for-attribution basis, they describe a fairly detailed concept. It calls for maintaining three or four major bases in the country, all well outside of the crowded urban areas where casualties have soared. They would include the base at Al Asad in Anbar Province, Balad Air Base about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and Tallil Air Base in the south.
Never mind, as Bill Scher notes, that the Iraq spending bill that President Bush just signed includes the following provision:
SEC. 3301. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this or any other Act shall be obligated or expended by the United States Government for a purpose as follows:
(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq.
(2) To exercise United States control over any oil resource of Iraq.
Swopa has more.
14:
Number of U.S. troops killed during “three deadly days in Iraq. … The deaths raised to at least 3,493 members of the U.S. military who have died since the war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.”
Spotlight on Thomas Friedman
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has been rolling in green editorials.
Mid-April he wrote a major piece called “The Power of Green” in which he made the case for his generation to follow the footsteps of the Greatest Generation to become the Greenest Generation in the eyes of the future. He writes:
We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.
More recently, Friedman has weighed in on how to begin to change the environmental decisions our political leaders make, and it starts with the upcoming election. In “Turning the Election Green” Friedman proposes a presidential debate on the environment and energy. According to a poll Friedman cites done for the Center for American Progress, a substantial percentage of Americans want policies to address global warming and redirect our energy policy.
Today, Friedman has another piece, “Our Green Bubble.” He writes:
Nice Work
People put hard work into putting together health care plans and this is what they get for their trouble:
Health care is also likely to provide points of difference. Obama laid out his health-care plan last week. Edwards offered his plan much earlier, and Clinton had put some of her ideas on the table as well. All point toward universal coverage as their goal but differ in how rapidly and dramatically they would move to get there.
That’s the last graf of a 1,000 word article. It manages to neither describe the differences between the Edwards and Obama plans nor the point of similarity. It doesn’t even say which candidate is moving more “rapidly and dramatically” in the direction of universal coverage. It doesn’t note that Clinton has not, in fact, laid out her ideas for expanding coverage. And yet, were the candidates to not release policy proposals for the press to ignore, the press would condemn them as lacking substance.
