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Earlier today, I noted George Bush’s cretinous and insulting claim that he had given up golf in solidarity with American soldiers who are dying in Iraq. The move, he said, was prompted by the death of UN envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello:
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the [...]

No comment needed:
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it [...]

John McCain’s out on the campaign trail today promoting his green credentials, but its clear that his climate change proposals would put a McCain administration on collision course with many, maybe most, of its international partners.
Here’s McCain’s headline promise on climate:
By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission, by [...]

Sam Coates at The Times reports from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in DC last week (”where the President and Washington press corps show Hollywood what self-congratulation is all about”).  Along with “Ben Affleck, Colin Powell, Pamela Anderson, Henry Kissinger, Marcia Cross, Jenny McCarthy and other A-listers”, the guest list also included British Government Chief Whip Geoff Hoon and [...]

Would you rather be a member of the liberal left on the western or eastern side of the Atlantic right now?  Not easy.  Labour’s in free-fall.  The Democrats are devising innovative ways to lose an election that they should own.  But Jackie Ashley at the Guardian still sees cause for hope: Gordon might be the [...]

It’s not just Australia that’s been getting it in the neck this week, New Zealand’s PM, Helen Clark, has been compared to a cockroach by Hilary Clinton, in another deft display of foreign policy experience.
This from an interview with Newsweek:
You have any good jokes?
Here’s a good one. Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand: [...]

Yesterday, Congress heard testimony from James Locher III – the head of the Project on National Security Reform and the organisational genius behind the 1986 Goldwater-Nichol defence reforms that put the “joint” into the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later the Cohen-Nunn Amendment, which created the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Bringing together an impressive array of [...]

I had meant to write something wildly insightful about Gordon Brown’s visit to the U.S. and his rather good speech at the Kennedy Library on world order - a distinct improvement in terms of both intellectual clarity and phrasing on his previous outings on the subject in London and Delhi. But then Daniel Korski [...]

Brown’s in the US and is promising a new Atlantic relationship. Unlike his predecessors Brown has not yet launched into a new Anglo-American security or defence deal instead he wants (t)his relationship to be firmly based around skills, science and  innovation.
This new relationship is based on 6 proposals
1 Cooperation between UK and US universities.
2. [...]

Yes, fresh from bringing peace to Northern Ireland and dodging snipers in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton is planning an amazing feat - she’s going to make the US energy independent, switch to renewables, and make energy prices cheaper for working class Americans.
“I told you I wanted to have a conversation so I asked you to send [...]

Over at NetworkWeaving, there’s a bit of compare and contrast going on, between this sort of campaigning:

…and this sort:

Worth a read.

Do, if you get time, read Phillippe Sands on the American ‘torture trail‘ in May’s Vanity Fair. Sands is a law professor at University College London and author of Lawless World, in which he questions US and British commitment to the basic tenets of international law.
Sands, like a growing number of other commentators, believes that [...]

Utilitarian philosopher (and celebrity corpse) Jeremy Bentham famously proposed a “Panopticon” design for a prison: a circular building, with the warder sat at its center able to see all the inmates in their cells around him at all times. The warder would have to be hidden behind Venetian blinds to conceal who he was looking at, [...]

Back in the middle of February I posted on the plight of the Iraqi people in Basra suggesting that while the the city was not in the media spotlight things were turning from bad to worse. I ended saying I think we are going to see a lot more about Basra in the headlines in [...]

Last month, Sixpoint Craft Ales - with which I share a Brooklyn zip code - launched “Hop Obama”, an electoral ale.  It’ll be around until the Pennsylvania primaries and sounds nice:
In keeping with the Illinois senator’s unifying theme, the “Hop Obama” is an indefinable ale that doesn’t adhere to traditional style guidelines. The 5.2% ABV [...]

Most politician bloggers are somewhat half-arsed, but when Barack Obama posted for the first time on uber-leftie group blog, Daily Kos, back in 2005, his post essay was so impressive that he had to come back a while later for two reasons. First, to reply to eight hundred or so comments, and second to chide [...]

A few weeks back, John McCain was asked whether taxpayers should fund contraception to combat AIDS. Here’s the response:
Mr. McCain: “I haven’t thought about it. Before I give you an answer, let me think about. Let me think about it a little bit because I never got a question about it before. I don’t know [...]

The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks.  It has a great piece on how marines  in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks - as well as a thoughtful dismissal of  indie documentaries on the war.  [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
As Ethan Zuckerman observes, this kind of remix culture approach to campaigning has been called “user-generated swiftboating“…

Foreign Policy points us towards this delightful gem from NY’s new governor as of a day ago, carried in New York magazine:
David Paterson just gave his first public address since Eliot Spitzer’s resignation yesterday. He made noises about “getting back to work” and the budget, talked about being black and blind, indicated he wasn’t planning any [...]

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