christopher_hallam

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave a speech at Notre Dame’s commencement yesterday making this argument: If history – and religion – teach us anything, it is that there will always be evil in the world, people bent on aggression, oppression, satisfying their greed for wealth and power and territory, or determined to impose an […]

The American Enterprise Institute hosts a panel: How important were CIA interrogations in the killing of bin Laden? Are critics right that enhanced interrogations do not produce reliable intelligence? In light of recent events, should the Obama administration continue its current policy of killing rather than capturing and interrogating terrorists? And if not, should the […]

Yesterday Ben Armbruster flagged this comment from Republican 2012 hopeful Tim Pawlenty arguing that the solution to U.S. problems in Libya is to just kill Moammar Ghadafi the way Osama bin Laden was killed. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is exploring a run for president, said he would have used U.S. forces to remove […]

Bob Somerby has been arguing for some time that birtherism has little to do with racism. Today, citing copious examples of Republicans demonizing previous Democratic presidents, he writes that “White liberals live for one thing—for the chance to call conservatives racists.” Those polls suggest that tens of millions of Republican voters believed this latest tulip […]

Andrew Sullivan opposes a San Francisco ballot initiative that would ban male circumcision, in the process referring to it as “mutilation.” It seems dumb to me that there isn’t a religious exception. Practically and constitutionally, you can protect the religious right of Muslims and Jews to mutilate their infant children, while reducing the number of […]

Passover is, for a number of reasons, my favorite holiday, because it’s a reminder that adherence to the Jewish faith is inseparable from a commitment to social justice. We remind ourselves that we were once slaves in Egypt, that we might never be slaves again, and that we might rescue others from a similar fate. […]

Donald Trump, and now apparently Andrew Breitbart, have glommed onto Jack Cashill‘s rather laughable contention that the true author of Barack Obama‘s autobiography was former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. Dave Weigel cites this paragraph in Breitbart’s new book: In the past few years alone, citizen journalists have deposed Dan Rather for his scurrilous and […]

Even though Planned Parenthood survived the budget negotiations, this Washington Post piece on Planned Parenthood in Montana reflects the way the political conversation over the organization’s existence has been reframed. In Montana, women — and a few men — cross lines of protesters to tend to their most intimate problems. They drive hours to get […]

This, from PPP, is disturbing: Only 38% of Republican primary voters say they’re willing to support a candidate for President next year who firmly rejects the birther theory and those folks want Mitt Romney to be their nominee for President next year. With the other 62% of Republicans- 23% of whom say they are only […]

In an otherwise admirable op-ed criticizing birtherism, Peter Wehner tries to draw an equivalence to Democratic opposition to George W. Bush: There’s more than a partisan cost to all this. Mr. Trump is succumbing to a pernicious temptation in American politics: not simply to disagree with political opponents, but to try to delegitimize them. The […]