Good Tuesday morning Fellow Seekers,
The Al Franken for Senate campaign put out a two-paragraph response yesterday afternoon to the Coleman campaign’s video attacking Franken for his changing positions on various aspects of the Iraq War. I promised yesterday to pass it along. Here’s the full text of the Franken rebuttal (it’s actually attributed to […]

Good Monday morning Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,
Friday morning at the Humphrey Institute, former congressman, now lobbyist and big-time Republican insider Vin Weber gave an outstanding overview of the state of conservatism, focusing largely on the race for the Repub nomination for president.
Weber is the best I know at promoting his (Republican) side and […]

Good Thursday morning Fellow Seekers,
DFL U.S. Senate candidate Mike Ciresi has been on the attack lately against his chief rival for the DFL endorsement, Al Franken, over Franken’s early support for the decision to invade Iraq. Ciresi has said that he opposed the war from the beginning.
But it is apparently the case — and the […]

A magic moment was missed 87 years ago in Kurdistan. Because it was missed, there is no Kurdistan. And, you could say, because there is no Kurdistan, Turkish troops are threatening to create what would be the latest of the long list of crises imperiling the misbegotten U.S. project in Iraq.
In the past month, […]

No, not Al Gore. My childhood chum and 11th grade chemistry lab partner Roger B. Myerson was announced this a.m. as winner of the economics prize (he won with two others for the development of something called “mechanism design theory.“)
I’m so proud and happy for him. We always knew he was killer smart (although he […]

Good Wednesday morning Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,
Most U.S. military adventures are justified by their proponents, at least in significant part, as expressions of the U.S. commitment to the spread of democracy.
The history of U.S. wars and covert interventions, and their relationship to democratization, plus the long-standing close alliances between Washington and some of […]

Good Friday morning Fellow Seekers,
Media Matters for America is calling attention to a Rush Limbaugh rant from his show this past Wednesday in which he dismisses U.S., troops, including those now serving in Iraq, who disagree with President Bush’s stay-until-victory strategy as “phony soldiers.”
And my colleague Jeff Fecke at Blog of the Moderate Left wonders whether those, including […]

Good Thursday morning Fellow Seekers,
The mainstream accounts of the failure of Sen. Jim Webb’s amendment all emphasize that it fell four votes short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. But if the goal is really to change administration policy in Iraq, this threshold is greatly overrated, because President Bush would have vetoed the […]

Good Friday morning Fellow Seekers,
In his address to the nation on Thursday evening, President Bush attempted to do something that even his own lawyers will not assert is within his power: To impose an indefinite commitment to his Iraq policy on his successor.
“Iraqi leaders from all communities… understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic, and security […]

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) challenged Gen. Petraeus about the 2004 Washington Post op-ed Petraeus wrote, giving an upbeat portrait of the progress he was making in getting Iraqi troops ready to stand up, so U.S. troops could stand down.
Engel (that’s him at right) asked why we should believe that his relatively optimistic assessment today will […]

Writing during the first break in the hearing.
I’m trying to listen with an open mind to Petraeus and Crocker. It’s hard, probably impossible, when the main substance of their presentations have been known in advance, and have been debunked in advance by critics who have become more and more sure-footed by years of experience and […]

In Australia, yesterday, President Bush reflected again on Iraq. He reiterated that the war is an ideological struggle, that Iraq and Afghanistan are two fronts in the war, that the goal is to create new democracies that can be allies of the U.S. in the war, that the U.S. can succeed, and that it will […]

This post replaces the hasty one I threw together at noon, immediately after hanging up from a 45-minute conference call between Sen. Norm Coleman and Minnesota reporters about his weekend trip to Iraq.
During the call, Coleman endorsed Sen. John Warner’s recent proposal to bring 5,000 U.S. troops home by Christmas. That gesture is designed to […]