The big news tonight is that Sen. Barack Obama has chosen Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.
But another news item of immense import surfaced today as well: the agreement by the Iraqi and American governments on a deadline for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops by 2011.
Now, aside from [...]

Okay, so we only made it through three e-mails last time. I have 61 in my inbox. Fortunately, I don’t have to do all of them — just the oldest and worth saving.
Next up:
An item entitled “Watch ‘Charlie Rose – An hour with General David Petraeus’” I sent myself through Google Reader on 10 SEP [...]

Really.
Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat from an old issue of the New York Press.
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit.
And this:
On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never [...]

Ross Douthat penned an interesting column in a recent issue of the Altantic saying that post-9/11 America has, culturally, returned to the paranoid style of the 1970s.
Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many [...]

I think this is great.
Army Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who led troops in Iraq for the past year, will be nominated by President Bush to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.
Gates said he expected Petraeus to make the shift in late summer or early fall. [...]

Hamas, on the State Department Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list, has all but endorsed Senator Obama . . .
–The Tank, a National Review Online blog
Well, we knew this would come around sooner or later. The primary isn’t even over yet! Can’t these Hamas guys at least hold out until the convention, like Hillary’s doing?
But, seriously, [...]

Here we go again.
The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats they may be forced to serve in Iraq next year and says it will soon start identifying prime candidates for jobs at the Baghdad embassy and outlying provinces, according to a cable obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
A similar call-up notice last year caused an [...]

So, W. Thomas Smith, Jr., who criticized me for a post I made earlier this year by declaring his holier-than-thou reporting and fact-checking methods, seems to have run into quite a bit of trouble himself over his “reporting” in the Middle East.
The story is all over the Web, but the Columbia Journalism Review blog has [...]

I like this comment made in a blog post about the recently released National Intelligence Estimate deflating the Bush administration’s rhetoric advocating bombing Iran:
It reminds me of that quote from Kurt von Hammerstein:
I divide officers into four classes — the clever, the lazy, the stupid and the industrious. Each officer possesses at least two of [...]

GovExec.com is reporting that Foreign Service Officers — the folks who work for the State Department at embassies around the world — are upset over a new policy that would force them to serve in Iraq:
Several hundred U.S. diplomats vented anger and frustration Wednesday about the State Department’s decision to force foreign service officers to [...]