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You can’t be a conservative today unless you’re taking the hammer and tongs to Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.). The Fox News All-Stars (I always expect them to turn around and start hawking sneakers) pummelled Jindal over his sing-song, carping response speech as can be seen here:

Remember the Center for a New American Security, the counterinsurgent-heavy defense think tank that used to be run by Michele Flournoy and Kurt Campbell before they became, respectively, undersecretary of defense for policy and assistant secretary of state for East Asia? Several other scholars at the think tank are probably going into the administration as [...]

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) returns, and asks about intelligence warnings of Al Qaeda movement into the chaos of Somalia. “What’s your view on what’s gone wrong on that?”
Clinton: “Somalia is strategically located … the idea that Somalia is just a failed state, somewhere over there, where people are just fighting over Heaven knows what is [...]

“We have seen the abuses by contractors,” Clinton says, lamenting the overall trend of moving to a contracted State Department security workforce. “It’s been contractors across the board … I think we have to take a hard look about whether we want the U.S. government to be a contractor agency.” She declines to say, as [...]

Wow. Now Clinton is speaking about how to restructure the State Department to better share the burden with the Pentagon.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has been “decimated,” she says, “and turned into more of a contractor agency,” even though interlocutors like Bob Gates and foreign leaders need USAID’s help. “If we’re going to move [...]

Everyone in the blogosphere — Glenn, I’m looking in your direction — who may have thought that John Brennan was kneecapped just because he didn’t become CIA director should check out what President-elect Barack Obama had to say about Brennan during the Blair/Panetta rollout:
I’m pleased to announce that John Brennan – a close advisor, CIA [...]

In non-shoe-throwing news, Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor does some great reporting about something called the Afghan Social Outreach Program, which is the Karzai government’s attempt at fracturing the insurgency and cleaving the “small-T” Taliban away from Al Qaeda. This would complement the top-down talks between Karzai and the Taliban:

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room notices an ominous development. The Taliban appear to be relaxing their most severe doctrinal demands in order to increase their cohesive capability among the Afghan insurgency. Noah remarks:
In Iraq, we saw that Sunni jihadists’ extremism eventually repelled average people in Anbar province — and pushed them into American arms. The [...]

Following up on Matt’s nice post about the states tapping Obama for help with enormous budget shortfalls…
Few are saying it out loud, but the issue has a ring of class distinction surrounding it. That is, the White House has been quick to secure hundreds of billions of dollars for white-collar workers on Wall Street, but [...]

Interesting phone chat today with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steve Biddle and Dan Markey, both of whom recently visited Afghanistan and shared some thoughts on the war. Neither is really hot on the prospects for what’s increasingly being called “reconciliation” between the Karzai government and the Taliban. This is the case even if we’re [...]