Daily Briefing
Deep buzz for the Content-Deprived
The United States has now endured what by some measures is the longest period of war in its history, with more than 6,300 American troops killed and 46,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ultimate costs estimated at $3 trillion. Both wars lasted far longer than predicted. The outcomes seem disappointing and uncertain.
So why is there already a new whiff of gunpowder in the air?...
At a time when many Americansthink their government is inept, the 'Special Operators' get the job done. Just ask the President, who is doubling down on the Navy SEALs...
Last night, after a long day and before a late dinner, I sat down with my wife to watch the news on CNN. Anderson Cooper was broadcasting from a studio in New York, but his tape was from Syria. He rightly demanded that we watch a two-year-old child in the besieged city of Homs die of shrapnel wounds inflicted by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The camera stayed on the child until the last breath was out of him. His father cradled him and kept asking what his poor son had ever done to anyone to deserve it...
Americans haven't put a successful CEO in office since 1928. If Romney is to end the drought, he'll want to avoid appearing to be the second coming of our worst president...
It was my high school physics class and I must have been 17, all gangly and goofy, with an embarrassingly ratty "trash stache" (though I recall thinking my black Springsteen concert T-shirt elevated me into the stratosphere of cool). We were doing an experiment designed to measure the wavelength of visible light. At the time I still didn't get math. It always seemed really, really hard. I was never sure why, or what, I was doing with the calculations. On that day something shifted. All of a sudden I understood why math and science needed to be hard...
he C.E.O., in his usual crisp manner, began the meeting without any small talk. “Let’s get to the business at hand,” he said. “We have to find ourselves a historian, and we have to do it A.S.A.P.”
“Maybe a historian could figure out how we got this silly name,” the vice-president for marketing said. “Freddie Mac!...
Fifty years ago, John Glenn was alone on top of a rocket waiting to blast into space and around the Earth. In these times, when people can become suddenly famous for doing so little, it may be good to recall the daring and imagination of that moment on Feb. 20, 1962.
Two Russians, Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, had already dauntlessly orbited the Earth. The Soviets kept their missions secret until they were under way, but John Glenn would fly with the eyes of the world watching every second...
Drones — more formally armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs — are “in.” Since a Predator strike in Yemen against Al Qaeda in November 2002 — the first known use of a drone attack outside a theater of war — the United States has made extensive use of drones. There were nearly four times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during the first two years of the Obama administration as there were during the entire Bush administration...
If in the year 2000 the U.S. president had told the American people that the government would soon begin using robot planes to track people, including U.S. citizens, all over the world, and would reserve to itself the right to kill them without trial, it is safe to say there would have been an enormous uproar. But that is exactly what is happening today, and nobody cares...
The creator of the Willie Horton ad is going all out for Mitt Romney...
