He thinks that Obama is not doing well, but that there is no reason to think that McCain would be doing any better: The Arena - Politico's daily debate with policymakers and opinion shapers: I’ve gotten this question from several of my conservative friends lately. They know that I publicly dec...

Orin Kerr is a proud and welcome member of the John-Yoo-Is-a-Bad-Faith-Actor caucus: Orin Kerr: John Yoo: "Now that I'm not in the government, part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try to keep the government honest." -- From an interview with the Orange County Register...

Edward Luce: A tragedy of errors: “Harry Truman and George Bush both left office with rock-bottom approval ratings,” says Strobe Talbott, head of the Brookings Institution, America’s most venerable think-tank. “That is as far as the parallel goes.... Truman set up Nato, stren...

Hoisted from comments: Low-Tech Cyclist: Ron Suskind on George W. Bush: There's a Bill James quote from one of his early Baseball Abstracts - 1982 or 1983, I'd guess - about the difference between the way most reporters covered baseball (by watching the games and talking to the players and managers)...

Dahlia Lithwick and Philippe Sands: How the Susan Crawford interview changes everything we know about torture: When Vice President Dick Cheney told the Weekly Standard last week, "I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party there are some people who believe that we really tortured," he probably...

Of all the bizarre things coming out of the Republican Party and the Austrian economics fashion is the claim that the financial crisis is the result of government regulation that forced banks to lend to poor people--especially to poor brown and black people. Here the WSJ news pages weigh in on this ...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times demonstrates once again that he would be more useful to society as a cosmetics testing subject. Rutenberg regards the famous dog-eating Jew-counter Fred Malek as "noncontroversial." He may be noncontroversial to Ruten...

The Spiegel interview: SPIEGEL Interview with Iraq Leader Nouri al-Maliki: 'The Tenure of Coalition Troops in Iraq Should Be Limited' - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News: The situation in Iraq seems to be improving. SPIEGEL spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki about his approval of Barack O...

Ackerman is shrill: ATTACKERMAN » Fight War, Not Wars: Last fall was really the high-water mark for the surge in terms of public opinion.... [P]olling data -- too lazy to Google that now -- never actually reflected a shift in favor of the war again, but the surge did a good-enough convincing e...

You know something? I hate yelling shows. No, that is not right: I HATE YELLING SHOWS! No, that is still not right: I HATE YELLING SHOWS!! Maybe this will do it: I HATE YELLING SHOWS!!!! Called on forty minutes' notice, I trot over to the J-School studio to be a talking head on BBC/Newsnight about F...