carl levin

Just released from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
Our hearts go out to the families of the brave Americans who lost their lives in today’s senseless violence at Ft. Hood, Texas, and to those who were injured. For all Americans, and especially for those of us who know and work [...]

It’s not quite a call to end the Afghanistan war, but Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the crucial House Appropriations Committee and a participant in Tuesday’s congressional meeting with President Obama, has emailed out a very long statement saying that waging a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is likely to be “futile.” Even Sen. Carl Levin’s [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) clearly prefers to read entire speeches in context before calling a general insubordinate. After attending yesterday’s congressional meeting with President Obama on Afghanistan, Levin told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin that the president expressed high regard for his chosen commander:

ThinkProgress has the video from “Good Morning America,” in which the ousted deputy U.N. special representative to Afghanistan says that the stolen election has unmoored U.S. strategy for Afghanistan to such a point that increasing troop levels doesn’t make sense. TP’s transcript:
In the absence of having a credible Afghan partner … it makes no sense [...]

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has put out a statement mostly in support of the version of a fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill making its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Mostly” because the White House is taking issue with a few funding priorities in the bill. In the statement, OMB offers [...]

Not that this was in any real doubt, even after the admiral’s dust-up last week over Afghanistan troop levels with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but the committee just unanimously voted out Adm. Michael Mullen’s nomination for another two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has rejected a written request, penned on Sept. 18, by his fellow armed-services-committee senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to compel testimony from Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Afghanistan ahead of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. Here’s Levin’s letter, sent early this evening:

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) read the McChrystal strategy review before Bob Woodward put it on The Washington Post’s frontpage, and among the thing he’s tried to do for the past two weeks is play up Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s emphasis on what McChrystal calls “radically expanded and embedded partnering” with Afghan forces as a way to [...]

It went kind of underneath the radar yesterday when President Obama decided to replace the proposed outdated-before-it-was-ever-built anti-ballistic missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic with a new four-phased plan for Iran-based missile defense, but Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had an intriguing speculation about what the [...]

In sharp contrast to the Lieberman, Boehner and Cantor statements is this missile-defense-shield reaction from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who must find issuing such things to be a tiresome and unfortunate concession to the reality of being surrounded by dishonest people. I’m going to highlight the good parts.
President Obama has made a sound choice that [...]