Finally, the long awaited announcement has been made! You know what I'm talking about -- a certain someone is about to get a big-time promotion! That's right, Demi Lovato is starting her own record label! Way to go, Demi! Oh, and in other news, a Pennsylvania man announced that he plans on losing the Republican … Continue reading Wingnut’s wingnut launches second doomed vanity campaign for President, nation laughs to keep from crying

Defense Secretary Ash Carter isn't making many friends in Baghdad this week, not after going on CNN's "State of the Union" this week and saying that Ramadi fell to ISIS because the Iraqi soldiers defending it "just showed no will to fight": Carter's remarks are the strongest yet from any Obama administration official speaking on … Continue reading A good point badly stated

Trita Parsi and Paul Pillar (who is not inclined toward conspiracy theorizing, to say the least) suggest the possibility that Israel might start a war with Iranian proxy Hezbollah in order to move Congressional opinion toward rejecting a nuclear deal: If a Congressional vote on a resolution rejecting the nuclear deal were held today,President Obama … Continue reading Would Israel start a war to try to scuttle an Iran deal?

When you're the defense minister of a country that has nuclear weapons but won't admit to having them, citing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as models for dealing with the professed greatest threat to your country's existence is, um, an interesting rhetorical choice. Yet here we have Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, last week at a conference … Continue reading From the “you probably shouldn’t have said that” file

Way back in 2004, King Abdullah of Jordan told Chris Matthews, for some reason, that Sunni governments in the Middle East were askeert about the growing power of Iranian-backed Shiʿa movements in the region, despite the fact that Sunnis constitute about 60% of all Muslims in the Middle East and 90% of all Muslims around … Continue reading About that “Shiʿa Crescent”…

Not much good news, I'm afraid. First, there's been an outbreak of cholera among the Burundian refugees in Tanzania: About 3,000 refugees fleeing political turmoil in Burundi have been infected in a cholera epidemic in neighboring Tanzania, the United Nations said on Friday, stoking fears of a growing humanitarian crisis in Africa's Great Lakes. Up … Continue reading Refugee updates and charity links

Last week's US/GCC "summit" (I'm not sure it counts as a real summit when 4 of the 6 GCC leaders didn't bother showing up) ended so expectedly that, well, I just plain forgot to blog about it. What I wrote before the "summit": As I said on the program on Saturday, one possible outcome of … Continue reading A couple of reasons why Camp David didn’t end with any major agreements

Jonathan Chait is mad at Harper's because the Putin-loving (?) lefties over there aren't making any damn sense: Bromwich explains that the campaign to defame Putin reached its nadir when Obama’s minions descended upon Putin’s own country to arm his enemies with cookies: When Nuland appeared in Kiev to hand out cookies to the anti-Russian … Continue reading The power of the correction, or why Jonathan Chait’s “point” doesn’t “stand”

After it briefly looked, earlier in the week, like their advance might peter out, ISIS appears to have taken control of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra as well as its modern companion city of Tadmur yesterday. As bad as ISIS's capture of Ramadi was in Iraq, I'm going to argue that this is worse, … Continue reading The loss of Palmyra is terrible in so many ways

Those stranded and increasingly desperate Rohingya refugees in the Andaman Sea have gotten a couple of pieces of good news over the last couple of days. Incredibly, Malaysian and Indonesia citizens have been aiding refugees in spite of their governments' having formally barred Rohingya migrants from entering: Sympathetic Malaysians have launched donation drives to help feed … Continue reading A small break for Rohingya refugees