Somebody is releasing unauthorized recordings of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his top aides, and what's on them doesn't reflect very well on Egypt's Pharaoh Khedive Supreme Leader Imperator President for Life: For months, a steady trickle of leaked audio recordings has appeared to offer a rare chance to eavesdrop on embarrassing conversations among the inner circle of … Continue reading Sisi and desist

At the Rachel Maddow blog, Steve Benen asks: Is Jeb Bush’s position on Iraq a disqualifier? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-NAIg_3XmM The answer is yes, it is. JEB was asked by Fox News's Megyn Kelly whether, "knowing what we know now," he would have invaded Iraq back in 2003 like his brother. This question shouldn't produce any genuinely enlightening … Continue reading SATSQ: Jeb Bush and Iraq edition

I'm one of those hard to please lefties who won't really be satisfied with any health care reform short of something like single payer or a national health service, but the health care reform we got seems to be better than no reform at all. That said, people are always going to fall through the … Continue reading The most tortured “Thanks Obama” story you’ve ever heard

Incredibly, another large (around 7.3 or 7.4) earthquake hit beleaguered Nepal today, east of Kathmandu: Residents of Kathmandu, the capital, reported that buildings swayed in the earthquake, which was felt as far away as New Delhi. The United States Geological Survey assigned the quake a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, with an epicenter about 50 miles … Continue reading Nepal hit by ANOTHER major quake: links for charities

On Saturday I went on Alhurra's "30 Minutes" to talk about this week's upcoming US-Gulf Cooperation Council summit at Camp David, along with Dr. Anwar Ishqi from Saudi Arabia's Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies. If you have a strong desire to watch a fat guy being dubbed in Arabic (assuming you don't … Continue reading US and GCC (or whoever shows up) prepare to put on a happy face at Camp David

Ezra Klein, filling in for Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, looks at the "decline" of cable news and suggests that it's not so much the news channels that are to blame as the fact that the news itself these days is both generally depressing and (worse) usually pretty boring: The Washington Post's Paul Farhi sees … Continue reading When “the news” stopped being about news

To preface this, I've only read about half of Seymour Hersh's report on the raid (or "raid") that ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, because a) it's very long, plus b) its publication raised such a commotion online that the LRB's website crashed for over an hour, both of which matter … Continue reading About Abbottabad

After floating the possibility of a five-day humanitarian ceasefire in Yemen yesterday, today Saudi Arabia gave that ceasefire a firm start time: 11 PM local time next Tuesday, May 12. This is good news, tentatively, though it should probably be taken with a grain of salt seeing as how the last Saudi ceasefire didn't even … Continue reading Maybe this ceasefire will actually be a ceasefire

Ever since I got the first whiff of the emerging right-wing conspiracy around the military's Jade Helm 15 training exercise, I have gone to great lengths to avoid hearing, seeing, reading about, or otherwise coming into contact with any mention of the whole story. There's just nothing to it. We're talking about a group of … Continue reading Conspiracy theory faceoff

This should go well: The British Conservative Party’s victory in yesterday’s British elections should give hope to U.S. Republicans who remember how Margaret Thatcher’s decisive victory in 1979 preceded Ronald Reagan’s sweep of the U.S. election in 1980. That Prime Minister David Cameron’s party managed to actually pick up seats in Parliament — despite being … Continue reading Just what everybody needed