Robert Farley

Erik Loomis at Alterdestiny and Maggie at m-pyre have some good discussion of what went wrong in New Mexico on Tuesday. Long story short, there weren’t enough ballots or polling places for the turnout, and the polling places didn’t open until relatively late. The New Mexico Democratic party comes in for substantial blame in these […]

This would be good… The Democratic National Committee is pressuring Michigan and Florida to hold Democratic presidential caucuses so the delegates they’ve lost for holding January primaries can be seated at the national convention, a top Michigan Democrat said today. DNC member Debbie Dingell said it’s unclear whether either state would hold caucuses since they’ve […]

Barack Obama has won the support of the remaining members of the Grateful Dead. This should make any Obama supporter with a lick of aesthetic sense reconsider his or her vote. — Robert Farley

Via Defense Tech, Charles Pena has a nice op-ed on airpower and counter-insurgency in The Bulletin: Even if civilians are not killed (the military claims that 35 al-Qaida militants were killed in the attack that dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs and that there were no civilian casualties), bombing results in destruction and devastation (the attack […]

The Parag Khanna excerpt continues to produce some interesting discussion. Yglesias: In 1945-46 the U.S. economy completely dominated the world, contributing some absurdly high share of total output. Every other significant country on earth had been completely destroyed by war, and we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Over time, this dominant position unraveled. To […]

A couple weeks ago Yglesias, Drum, and Marc Lynch wrote about plans for a new French military base in Abu Dhabi. The speculation centered on French strategic thinking; was the intention to challenge what was becoming an American monopoly of influence in the Gulf? Was it intended as a message of resolve to Iran? A […]

This last Sunday, Parag Khanna published a long excerpt of a new book in the New York Times Magazine. Dan Nexon at Duck of Minerva loved it. Dan Drezner didn’t. I’m pretty much in the camp of the latter Dan, who opined: I will heap praise on Khanna’s agent for getting the excerpt placed into […]

In terms of how it plans to fight the enemies the America might face, not so much, but in terms of how it can fight the Navy and the Army for precious procurement funds, absolutely. Thomas Ricks: Here, the Air Force uses the jargon of modern warfare to discuss its competition with the Army and […]

According to the NYT, Canada has suspended transfers of prisoners to Afghan authorities after becoming concerned about the treatment of such prisoners in Afghan custody. The policy of turning prisoners over straight to the Afghans was instituted in 2005, and replaced a policy under which prisoners were turned over to the U.S. military. It’s unclear […]

Via Yorkshire Ranter, the Russians seem to be staging what amounts to a massive exercise in the Atlantic, involving not only the Air Force (Tu-95 and Tu-160 heavy strategic bombers) but also the Navy (including the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov). This is on the heels of a big Russian bomber incursions into the North […]