News & Views

WASHINGTON - During his intensive initial round of media interviews as commander in Afghanistan in August 2010, Gen. David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces: in a 90-day period from May through July, SOF units had captured 1,355 rank and file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and killed or captured 365 middle or high-ranking Taliban.

A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.

The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.

With Obama increasingly under fire from progressives for his harsh treatment of whistle-blowers, Daniel Ellsberg speaks up about the Nixon-esque tenor of our current so-called national security laws. All the crimes Nixon committed, he notes, are now legal.

WASHINGTON - With only three weeks left before U.S. military forces are scheduled to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, the debate over the size and pace of that withdrawal has become increasingly intense.

WASHINGTON - With only three weeks left before U.S. military forces are scheduled to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, the debate over the size and pace of that withdrawal has become increasingly intense.

2012 presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty (R) yesterday laid out his economic “plan,” which is based around huge tax cuts that Pawlenty claims will spark a decade of 5 percent GDP growth, even though growth staying at that rate for that long hasliterally never occurred in America. As Michael Linden noted, Pawlenty’s tax plan would cost $7.8 trillion over ten years,triple the size of the Bush tax cuts.

Nothing ends a honeymoon quite like financial worries.

A new poll shows that the bump in approval that President Obama enjoyed in the wake of the Osama Bin Laden killing has dissipated and that public disapproval of the president’s handling of the economy has reached new heights.

There’s no chance consumers will soon rescue the economy. The only hope for a speedy recovery is for the government to increase spending in the right ways.