The Blog (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
The former veep gives an interview to not a real news organization Politico : In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.” “I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe...
Say Anything (Free subscription) | 11/30/2009
Interesting analysis from Warner Todd Huston on Obama’s handling of detained terrorists: Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy, Phillip Carter. It appears that Obama’s...
Hullabaloo (Free subscription) | 11/29/2009
Still Happening by digby As we begin a week of furious debate about the inevitable escalation and heartsnmindsnationbuilding in Afghanistan, it's more than a little bit depressing to read this article in the New York Times yesterday : KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International...
Big Government (Free subscription) | 11/28/2009
Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy, Phillip Carter. It appears that Obama’s GITMO team is being systematically eliminated. One has to [...]
Stop the ACLU (Free subscription) | 11/27/2009
-By Warner Todd Huston Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy Phillip Carter. It appears that Obama’s GITMO team is being systematically eliminated. [...]
AMERICAblog (Free subscription) | 11/26/2009
Maureen Dowd weighs in on the firing/resignation of White House counsel Greg Craig, and what it says about Barack Obama. She's spot on, as she often is when she puts aside the snark. There were complaints that Craig was out of the loop, but couldn’t Obama have walked the single West Wing staircase up to his counsel’s office and looped him in? Craig was, after all, simply defending positions...
Dad29 (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
Instructive narrative from Tom Roeser . ...Take the case of Paul Vallas. An outstanding Democratic public official he served as chief budget adviser to the president of the state Senate, chief budgeter for the city of Chicago under Mayor Daley. Daley took over the job of running the city's public schools by legislative fiat to replace a system where the schools were run loosely by a board of education...
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
Earlier this morning I said that whenever I settle down and take a serious look at the policies Barack Obama has pursued so far, "nine times out of ten" it's pretty much what I expected. Among big-ticket items, the biggest one-time-out-of-ten where he's not doing what I expected is in the area of detainee and civil liberties issues. Glenn Greenwald wonders if this is what led to the abrupt...
The Reaction (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
By Michael J.W. Stickings Yesterday, quoting Andrew Sullivan, I noted that I remain bullish on Obama -- though I also noted my own rather significant reservations. Well, those reservations deepened when I read Time 's excellent piece on the fall of Greg Craig , Obama's ex-counsel. Craig, a Clintonite turned Obama advisor, was the man tasked with undoing the dark side of Bush's war on terror, including...
Perspective Journal: News and Polit (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
Filed under: Iraq, Deep Background I was reviewing the guest list for President Barack Obama’s first state dinner–held to honor Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh–and it was full of interesting picks: Ari Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel’s brother and a notorious Hollywood power-agent; Gayle King, Oprah’s BFF; Greg Craig, the soon-to-be-ex White House counsel; Michael Bloomberg,...
The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
Maureen Dowd's New York Times column this week details the fall of outgoing White House council Greg Craig, and drops an interesting tidbit concerning Caroline Kennedy's senate bid along the way. According to Dowd, a "vengeful" Bill Clinton was aggressively lobbying Paterson to keep Kennedy out of the Senate. Dowd argues that Obama's handling of Craig's departure -- the "death by a thousand...
The Washington Note (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
After publishing a Daily Beast piece titled "The Assassination of Greg Craig," I did this interview above with Cenk Uygar of The Young Turks that some folks may find interesting. -- Steve Clemons...
The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | 11/22/2009
Nearly 100 days after Barack Obama entered office, his top White House lawyer, Greg Craig, braced the President's senior advisers for a potentially explosive development. The Administration was preparing to release photographs of suspected terrorists being abused in U.S. custody. On April 16, Craig asked chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to focus on the issue. Emanuel pleaded for more time to bury the release...
TalkLeft (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
Time Magazine reports on The Fall of Greg Craig : Obama quietly killed the Gitmo plan in the second week of May; Craig never got a chance to argue the case to the President. "It was a political decision, to put it bluntly," says an aide. ...The White House realized it had to start over on a signature issue....First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama...
neo-neocon (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
Elizabeth Drew reports that many inside-the-Beltway Obama supporters are angry that Greg Craig was tossed under the bus by this administration, with Obama’s tacit approval and acquiescence while others did the dirty work. It’s a curiously naive article. The sentence that interested me most in that regard was this: Yes, we knew, or should have, during [...]
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