The Daily Beast

The impact of drones in the counterterror campaign is hard to overstate:  terror groups, like many organizations, develop into global threats not because they can recruit suicide bombers but because they have leaders with vision, capability, commitment, and experience.  Tactical leaders might view a local government as their primary adversary; strategic leaders, from Osama bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, have broader horizons.

Mitt Romney should stick to Mormonism. Yesterday in Jerusalem, the GOP presumptive nominee offered some thoughts on Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, and various other calamities, in Jewish history. Tisha B’Av, he declared, “calls forth clarity and resolve,” because as in the past, today “Israel faces enemies who deny past crimes against the Jewish people and seek to commit new ones.” He then went on to talk about, you guessed it, Iran.

Call it the nostalgia tour. On Tuesday, when Mitt Romney leaves for his much-hyped international trip, he won’t merely be traveling overseas; he’ll be traveling back in time.

The dream is always the same:

His daughter is crossing the street, holding his hand, when he hears a whistle blow—loud, mournful, insistent. Behind her, in the middle distance, he sees a train racing toward the intersection.

He tightens his grip to hurry them across. But suddenly they’re unable to move, like in the games of freeze tag he played as a boy.

Instantly, his torso drenches in sweat. He shouts to passers-by: “Help us! Stop the train!” But they ignore his cries, as if they can’t hear.

How messed up is California government? In Tuesday’s state elections, the interest group that struck the biggest blow for representative democracy and good governance was Big Tobacco.

Punditry is a strange business. On the one hand, many television pundits—especially those who also work as reporters—are supposed to be objective. On the other hand, they’re supposed to offer their opinions.

Every time I hear about a massacre like last Friday’s in Houla, Syria, I think back to Srebrenica, the July 1995 Bosnian massacre that helped turn me—and many other post-Vietnam era journalists and policy types—into liberal hawks. Since then, humanitarian intervention has become a recurring feature of American foreign policy debates. After the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan (no, they weren’t humanitarian interventions but they have sapped America’s capacity and stomach for war), I’d have thought discussions of humanitarian intervention might go the way of the dodo bird. They haven’t.

However, says Shannon Brownlee, director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation, because urologists often see patients with advanced prostate cancer, they might struggle to see the full context of the issue objectively.

There’s a feel-good myth that governs much American punditry: that good policy and good politics go hand in hand. Often, sadly, it’s not true. Take President Obama and Afghanistan: On no other major issue has Obama been so cynical. And on no other issue has his cynicism proved so politically shrewd.