carl levin

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It went kind of underneath the radar yesterday when President Obama decided to replace the proposed outdated-before-it-was-ever-built anti-ballistic missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic with a new four-phased plan for Iran-based missile defense, but Sen.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 [...]

There are two ways to read this quote that Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) gave to Josh Rogin:
The troop numbers are only one piece of a much larger set of policy adjustments, Levin said, including more trainers, more equipment, and more support for Afghan forces.
“The media has been focusing on [troop numbers] like it’s the public [...]

Big scoop from Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy: right in time for that closed door briefing to the Senate on the metrics for judging progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, here the metrics are. I can’t help but notice in light of this post that it begins with a restatement of the anti-al-Qaeda goal that the [...]

As I pointed out a couple weeks ago when reporting on a joint press conference, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seems more comfortable with increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan than Defense Secretary Bob Gates does. And today, when Mullen, testified for his Senate hearing to be renominated as chairman, he [...]

Last week I urged people to watch Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Reps. David Obey (D-Wis.) and Jack Murtha (D-Pa) for barometric measurements of deflated Democratic congressional support for the Afghanistan war. Levin, of course, came out on Friday for deferring a second troop increase this year. Now Murtha is opposing [...]