I got as far as "But wasn't Saddam also killing his own people?" If someone can point to me an internal rebellion that Saddam was suppressing at the time of the US invasion in 2003, or an instance of large-scale killing of civilians at that time, then we can talk about analogous circumstan...

Hashi Lebwohl,

The BBC I can see as a quality source of news.

NPR and PBS? Unfortunately, they both fall off the left-hand side of the spectrum.

Care to go a little deeper with that detailed analysis?

She Who Must Not Be Named is going to help Covenant defeat Lord Foul. Stave will die. Covenant will come to serve a purpose similar to what he was as Timewarden -- he'll somehow become what Donaldson likes to call the "strictures" of the universe again. The Creator will almost certainly re...

Stave's line to Infelice is great. Coincidentally, I thought some of Donaldson's most beautiful descriptions were of that loathsome Elohim : Imperial and proud, she confronted Linden. Adorned in gems and rich music, and clad in sendaline woven and glittering like the stuff of dreams, the woman advan...

The Vikings have just waived Randy Moss. He is now available on waivers, and can be claimed by any of the Leagues 32 franchises. Let me be the first to say Yay! How much do you want to bet the Vikings just got better? Now how many teams are going to let him fall past them? Welcome to Buffalo Randy,...

It warms my cold New England heart immensely to be seeing the Yankees lose Game 4 right now. If they lose this game, the series becomes exceedingly hard for them to win with Lee pitching Game 7. As for the NLCS, this is the best one I can remember watching for a while. Two great teams, evenly matche...

Cail, You seem to keep missing that...That if it's a government monopoly, it's the opposite of Libertarianism. This seems to me incorrect. Have you read Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick? He's the leading libertarian political philosopher of modern times. (I imagine that both you and Zarat...

shadowbinding shoe, A lot of states crave and ask for international recognition of their statehood, its right to exist and the legitimacy of its structure. Remember that when Israel says it wants its "right to exist" to be recognized, they're talking explicitly about their right to exist a...

For which other countries do we demand an acknowledgment of a so-called "right to exist"? This seems to me to be a specious notion virtually without international precedent. The right of any state to exist is predicated upon the will of its people to let it exist; insofar as it has that ma...

Zarathustra, Are individuals unable to criticize our President unless all conservatives have acted with uniformity and unblemished consistency for the past 30 years? What I'm pointing out in this case is that US support for Egypt has been a given for four decades. It's one of the highest priorities ...

Zarathustra, McCarthy is disingenuous to the extreme on the Egypt charge. I deplore US support for the Egyptian regime, which is exceeded in robustness only by our support for Israel, but it is a decades-old policy dating back to 1978 . Where has the conservative outrage for US support of Egypt been...

SerScot wrote:Nope.

Thanks. Now I'm depressed again.

I've outlined my criticisms of President Obama's conduct of the so-called "war on terrorism" elsewhere in the Tank. That includes rendition, Guantánamo Bay, targeted assassinations and drone missions, etc. (I'll talk about Afghanistan in a minute.) In those departments, no, this was not th...

Hey, where is Plissken at anyway? Let's get that guy back here. We could all use him.

wayfriend, This is not a conventional war. My own view is that terrorism is a grave crime and should be treated as such. That means capturing and trying the perpetrators of that crime. As a nation, though, we have pursued the terrorists as wartime enemies. But what kind of war is it that is perpetua...

Cail, How many non sequiturs can you fit into a single post? I'm sure the Kochs will come out with a PR piece meant to improve their image (the rebuttal you refer to). Fine. But knowing what I do about The New Yorker 's fact-checking policy, and the soundness of the evidence they produce (it's prett...

wayfriend is indeed correct. The targeted killing policy was as bad five years ago as it is now with the minor adjustments that have been made to it (citizenship) and the serious ratcheting up of the frequency of them under the current administration.

Koch had ample opportunity to set the record straight, but he denied numerous requests for interviews by The New Yorker . The article never says he personally funds anything -- but they have direct evidence that organizations he funds (e.g., Americans for Prosperity) are funders of the Tea Party, wh...

Zarathustra, Where were these remarks when Bush was in office? Did 2003-2008 seem like a "remarkable consensus" to you?? The consensus was here , here , and here (see below for why it shifted). There was no unanimity. But there was broad support for the invasion in Congress and among the e...

Cail, - The US has had a standing policy of not engaging in targeted killings. I happen to strongly believe in that policy. The US has had a standing policy of not engaging in assassination . According to a leading scholar on the subject , "targeted assassinations" are not the same thing a...