Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Last Update: Wed 6:00 PM EST

Campaign Desk

Target Practice

The pros and cons of blasting Betsy McCaughey

Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey has been much in the news the last few days, and she’s been... More

Bribe This

Despite years of failure, pundits still want to bribe Pashtuns

There is a dark irony to the faintly racist idea that Afghans are unprincipled mercenaries available to the highest bidders,... More

President, Know Thyself

WaPo’s Cohen on the Afghan war as a presidential self-actualization tool

There are lots of ways of thinking about foreign policy: not just political labels of recent vintage like “neoconservatism” and... More

The Times’s Ten-Step Program

Looking for the least-bad outcome in Afghanistan

The New York Times’s roundtable op-ed on Afghanistan yesterday doesn’t break any new ground, and it won’t carry the same... More

Picking Apart the Polls

Is opinion really shifting on abortion?

If you’re an avid news reader, there’s a good chance that sometime in the last day or so you’ve come... More

Baucus Watch, Part XVI

What we should have known all along

As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus holds the keys to health care reform; any health care... More

A Change That’s Hard to Believe In

Obama calls backsies on shield law

There’s a reason why people don’t trust politicians’ promises: from time to time, they go back on them. That’s exactly... More

The Whole World in His Hands

Overstating the president’s power, again

As any middle-school social studies student knows, the American system of government consists of three branches: the executive branch, which... More

Journalism in the Heartland

A shout out to the Kansas City Star and the Salina (Kan.) Journal

Good journalism doesn’t just grow on the right and left coasts. Two papers in America’s middle show that good reporting... More

An Open Debate on the Afghan War?

A measure of dissent on the full counterinsurgency doctrine

Expert opinion in the foreign policy think-tank world—your American Enterprise Institutes, your Councils on Foreign Relations, etc.—runs, on balance, hawkish.... More

Going for the Gold

Is Obama’s Olympic trip really a big political risk?

One of the persistent memes of American political journalism is that our president must always be testing his political power... More

CJR’s Town Hall Meetings, Part V

The view from the Italian festival, Scranton, Pa.

Everyone, it seems is trying to take the pulse of the electorate—Americans who, as the saying goes, vote with their... More

Baucus Watch, Part XV

What’s the senator hiding in his bill?

As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus holds the keys to health care reform; any health care... More

A Dart to Health Affairs

Policy journal jumps in bed with Aetna

In this day and age, when medical journals have come under fire for failing to disclose researchers’ conflicts of interest;... More

Baucus Watch, Part XIV

The senator confronts the affordability question

As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus holds the keys to health care reform; any health care... More

Missing Michael Hastings

One of the great reporters of his generation died Tuesday at 33. The stories he wrote, and the ones he didn’t live to write

Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies

Hastings was fearless and shook things up - especially with his McChrystal expose. The haters in the media couldn’t forgive him

Snowden versus the dragons

Journalism is about finding flaws and magnifying them, and surely someone who would spill massive loads of state secrets must contain a few broken parts, right?

Call it the Politico rhetorical crutch

The inside-the-beltway publication’s go-to phrase

Rachel Maddow’s tribute to Michael Hastings

“Michael was angry … he was angry about things that weren’t right in the world. He was angry with war and with loss, and that drove his reporting.”

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