christopher_hallam

Dahlia Lithwick conveys John Yoo’s insistence that torture lead to Osama bin Laden: Take a look at how we were able to kill al-Qaida’s leader this year. How did we get the intelligence for finding Bin Laden’s couriers and ultimately Bin Laden? It was a combination of interrogation methods, sometimes tough or harsh, you can […]

Clearly, he’s just a huge anti-Semite, since he’s now agreeing to negotiate with Palestinians along the 1967 borders, which he once claimed were “indefensible.” Of course, the 1967 lines have been the framework for negotiations for years. Obama’s proposal couldn’t have been news to Netanyahu, who had released a statement with Hillary Clinton last November […]

Pam Geller is pleading for understanding in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Oslo, allegedly perpetrated by a right-wing anti-Muslim extremist named Anders Behring Breivik. Geller, alongside other American anti-Islam bloggers such as Robert Spencer, is favorably quoted in Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto. Libelblogger Charles Johnson is claiming that the Norway shooter is a […]

Walter Russell Mead has a really silly post today on the results of Newsweek‘s rankings of the top public schools in the country: The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: The very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states. Three of the nation’s ten best public high […]

President Barack Obama said today he had ruled out the idea of using the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling: Mr. Obama for the first time addressed — and ruled out — the idea that the Constitution empowers a president to increase the debt limit to prevent default and, as he put it, “basically […]

The latest in Glenn Beck megalomania: Conservative radio and former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck announced that he is moving a mass rally planned for August from the Southern Wall of Jerusalem’s Old City. On his radio show Monday, Beck said that warnings from security officials led him to fear that the event could turn […]

The federal government filed its latest trial brief in the Omer Abdi Mohamed case, alleging that in 2007 Mohamed was a key part of an al-Shabab conspiracy to recruit young Americans to fight alongside the terrorist group in repelling an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Not much that’s terribly new here, but I just want to […]

With the Justice Department investigating Newscorp, it was only a matter of time before conservatives started closing ranks around embattled CEO Rupert Murdoch. Fox News went as far as pretending Murdoch outlets were victims rather than perpetrators of phone hacking, while the Wall Street Journal now pretends the First Amendment is at stake: We also […]

Glenn Greenwald documents howABC and CNN, rather than asking questions about the legality of the CIA allegedly maintaining a “black site” in Mogadishu, reacted to Jeremy Scahill‘s reporting by simply defending the facility’s existence. Just consider what happened here. Scahill uncovered this secret prison because he went to Mogadishu — dangerously unembedded, as very few […]

I wonder who at the New York Times sat down and said, “we should really pick Frank Bruni for the op-ed page because it doesn’t have enough snobs.” All of you have been there, on the outside of some mass-market craze or niche obsession that seemingly two of every three people you know won’t shut […]