Here I was steeling myself for a big rebuttal from Benjamin Wittes to my “Drone War on Westphalia” post on the implications of our use of drones. But all I got was a difference in emphasis. In his response, Wittes generally agrees that our use of drones has implications for sovereignty. But he goes further–arguing [...]

Jared Bernstein (whose blog I still recommend) has responded to his 2-day PEPCO power outage by posting the crummy infrastructure report card the US got in 2009: Check out the 2009 Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers:Aviation D Bridges C Dams D Drinking Water D- Energy D+ Hazardous Waste D Inland Waterways D- [...]

We’re on our second near-record tornado this year and summer hasn’t even started. Joplin, MO and Birmingham, AL have been especially hard hit, but much of flyover country is set to spend the summer hunkering down to hide from truly horrifying weather. Yet Eric Cantor wants to hold disaster relief hostage to debt hysteria. (h/t [...]

I laughed yesterday when I first saw the SOTU excerpts with Obama’s description of a Sputnik moment. Mind you, he had already used–or rather, cribbed–the language before. So the language itself wasn’t funny. Rather, it was that he planned to use it as an urgent call to action on the day that Carol Browner announced [...]

Joe Biden finally endorsed yesterday what the imperialists in DC have long been backing: an open-ended presence in Afghanistan. “It is not our intention to govern or to nation-build,” Mr Biden said. “As President Karzai often points out, this is the responsibility of the Afghan people, and they are fully capable of it.” But he [...]

Finally, some good news coming out of November’s election. Debbie Stabenow has been selected to replace the outgoing Blanche Lincoln as Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. (There had been some concern that Big Ag would oppose someone like Stabenow and instead push Kent Conrad to take the position.) As I’ve explained before, this means [...]

This could be an interesting, beneficial outcome of this year’s election: Debbie Stabenow ascending to Chair the Agriculture Committee. As of his last calculation, Nate Silver gives the Democrats an 84% chance of keeping the Senate. But they’ll keep it without Blanche Lincoln, whom Nate gives a 100% chance of losing to John Boozman. And [...]

For the first time since Macondo, the Mouth Of Hell, first blew out in a fiery explosion on April 20, killing eleven men in the process, BP seems to have the well under control and there appears to be no hydrocarbons leaking into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

If the Obama Administration and Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar truly believe in the propriety of their six month moratorium, and are dedicated to fighting through appeal for it, why are their lawyers not acting like it? Are they really not trying because they really don’t care, or are they just sloppy and incompetent? It is one or the other.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has voted to have its own commission investigate the BP disaster. The Committee finds that necessary, according to Mary Landrieu, because Obama hasn’t appointed a representative from the oil industry to his own commission. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted Wednesday to create a congressional bipartisan [...]