James Gardner, formerly the architecture critic of the New York Sun, now writes on culture for several publications.
It must be nice to be the president. In addition to having helicopters, jumbo jets, and motorcades, you get to rifle through the cellars of the National Gallery and the Hirschhorn for artistic masterpieces to adorn your home for the next four to eight years.
According to Obama administration officials, Al Qaeda's capabilities have been severely degraded by a deadly combination of U.S. intelligence operations and unmanned aerial drone strikes. Now, the White House is reportedly considering a strategy that relies on these targeted assassinations over a troop increase in Afghanistan. Click through this slideshow to see some of the militants who have been killed by U.S. drones.
Dana Milbank is turning into the Washington Post's in-house American historian:
Mitt Romney lays out his plan to repeal Romneycare... I mean, Obamacare:
Shortly after Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou took office last fall, he learned that he’d inherited a massive booby prize: a budget deficit that was twice the amount the previous government had disclosed. But, when Papandreou came clean and promised to address the problem, the financial markets reacted violently. Interest rates soared, adding billions in debt-service costs to an already dire budget picture.
MSNBC's First Read reports, "We’re told that the White House and House Dem leaders are fewer than five votes away from 216." I have always thought that the key is to get within four or five votes. Once you're there, you're very likely to win. Why? Because then the White House and Democratic leaders can concentrate all their attention on a few holdouts.
Just now at the White House press briefing, a reporter (I couldn't tell who) pressed spokesman Robert Gibbs about how the administration could be confident of cost savings, given that the Congressional Budget Office itself admits projections deep into the future contain enormous uncertainty. I'm sure reform critics will be making the same argument in the next few days, and that it will reinforce doubts many Americans already harbor.
So let's be clear about why this is wrong.
Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood
San Diego Museum of Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
Tate Modern
Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection
Hirshhorn Museum
For the better part of an hour, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been kicked back in the front cabin of Coast Guard One, the small but handsomely appointed plane on which she travels, chatting easily about the challenges of running the third-largest Cabinet department.
Anthony Wright is executive director of Health Access California, the statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition. He blogs daily at the Health Access Weblog and is a regular contributor to the Treatment.
Jeff Goldberg has the analytic scoop:
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports today that a lot of people at Fox News don't like Glenn Beck:
The Hill reports on the state of negotiations in the House:
There has been a lot of argument over whether passing health care reform or letting it die would offer the most attractive strategy for Democrats. Norman Ornstein and Tom Mann really move the ball down the field by looking more closely at what happened in 1994:
Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party.
The roll call was less than twenty-four hours away. And the votes still weren’t there. It was more than eight months ago--June 25, 2009--and the White House was hosting a luau on the South Lawn for members of Congress and their families. But with the House set to vote on cap-and-trade the next day, key members of the president’s staff and House leaders were huddling about how to proceed. There was even some talk of postponing the vote, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation.
Somewhere in the White House or Capitol Hill, I imagine, is a whiteboard that looks like this:
Two things have become clear in the last few days.
Chris Cilizza reports a nice scoop:
Whether it’s Intrade, the polls, or the increasingly panicked predictions of doom from Republicans, the signs all suggest that the prospects for passing health care reform have been improving. And that's not just luck. Although President Obama and his allies have benefited from exogenous events, particularly the Blue Cross rate hikes, it seems clear they’ve made smart strategic moves, too.
I'm getting to this a little late, but Time's Michael Scherer had an absolutely terrific take on Tuesday night's face off between Glenn Beck and Eric Massa, the former Democratic congressman who resigned this week amid allegations that he'd sexually harassed male staffers:
On Monday, Eric Massa had transformed himself into a Republican hero by railing against the Democratic leadership and hinting that he was being set up in order to facilitate the passage of health care reform. Conservative outlets swarmed with conspiratorial thinking.
Allow me to posit a case study: Two high-ranking government officials are the subject of multiple newspaper and magazine profiles in the span of a few weeks. The first official resists the attention. He isn’t so much as quoted in any of the pieces, whose authors glumly note his lack of enthusiasm for their projects. By contrast, the second official goes out of his way to cooperate with the profile-writers. He submits to numerous, on-the-record interviews and mounts a detailed defense of his actions. His aides even distribute one of the articles after the fact.
In the late summer of 2007, Baghdad was buzzing with talk of a coup. Iraq was gripped by horrific civil war, and the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki seemed at best unable to do anything about it. (At worst he appeared guilty of contributing to sectarian violence himself.) In November, U.S. national security advisor Steve Hadley had returned from a visit with Maliki and reported grave doubts about the prime minister’s competence.
