Obama

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy thinks he sees light at the end of the Obama administration’s strategy and resource review tunnel:
Reliable sources tell The Cable that the review has entered its final stages, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Jim Jones now taking the lead and putting on the final touches.

The Detroit Free Press reports:
As expected, President Barack Obama this morning signed into law a bill extending benefits for out-of-work Americans who have exhausted their unemployment checks or will do so by year’s end.
Only 45 days after the House first passed the bill.

Jason Linkins, in fine form after Jerome Corsi’s conspiracy ramblings about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and President Obama, does some reporting:
I contacted Frank Cillusso, the director of the HSPI at George Washington University, who tells me that Nidal Hasan has no affiliation with the HSPI or with George Washington University, at all. “[Hasan] has no [...]

Conspiracy-theorist Website WorldNetDaily posts the inevitable “connection” between Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and President Obama, and it possesses the same level of rigor and responsibility we’ve come to expect from the leading source of disinformation that the president wasn’t born an American. Under the headline “Shooter Advised Obama Transition,” Jerome Corsi — [...]

In Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s statement on  the new unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, he argues that “it is time the Obama administration stop spreading their phony ‘saved or created’ talking points and start creating the dependable jobs America needs”:
President Obama promised jobs during his campaign for president, and the elections in Virginia [...]

The Senate just tabled the amendment proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would have prohibited use of Justice Department funds to prosecute the 9/11 terror suspects in U.S. federal courts. Effectively, that means it’s dead.
The amendment, S.A. 2669, to the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, would have forced the government to [...]

From the conservative Committee for Justice, a key player in judicial nomination fights, comes this reaction to the nominations of one Hispanic and one African-American judge to circuit court slots.
Does President Obama or his advisors believe that southern white men are likely to be bigoted, making them unfit to serve on the second most powerful [...]

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) just took to the House floor to decry the Democrats’ health reform bill because, she said, it would leave too many folks uninsured. She must not have read the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the GOP’s legislative alternative, which, CBO found, would leave 52 million nonelderly Americans uninsured in 2019 — [...]

“Political isolation is something the Iranians are very much concerned about,” said Thomas Pickering, who served as undersecretary of state in the Clinton administration, arguing that continued diplomacy gave the U.S. the leverage of presenting Iran with a united coalition.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), the moderate Democrat who’s been a loud critic of her party’s plan to create a public insurance option, is warming to the proposal, Roll Call reported today.
“The president was right to move us in the direction of finding a way to turn this cost curve down. We cannot accomplish any of [...]