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Virginia: Bob McDonnell Campaign a GOP Model for Success

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Time - By Jay Newton-Small - Nov. 03 (News Analysis) - For all the talk of Republican chaos and infighting in this off-year election, the GOP in Virginia seems to have found the formula for unifying its party and delivering a winning message. If the polls are accurate, McDonnell could walk off with a double-digit victory over Democratic nominee Creigh Deeds in Tuesday's election — this in a state that only a year ago was declared to be trending blue. And across the Potomac, Washington is paying attention. "The independent electorate in our state has indicated in a very strong way that they believe the vision that Bob McDonnell is out there promoting is one that satisfies what they're feeling right now," says Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican.

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Karzai Declared President As Election Runoff Canceled

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Time - By Aryn Baker - Nov. 02 (News Analysis) - If the Obama Administration had hoped that pressuring President Hamid Karzai into accepting a runoff election would strengthen the legitimacy of the resulting Afghan government, those hopes have now been dashed. Karzai has been declared the elected President of Afghanistan by election-poll officials, after they scrapped the planned second round of the vote. Independent Election Commission chairman Azizullah Lodin announced that Karzai was the victor during a news conference in Kabul on Monday. "We declare Hamid Karzai, which got the majority of votes in the first round and is the only candidate for the second round of the election in Afghanistan in 2009 ... is the elected President of Afghanistan," said Lodin. He went on to explain that the second round on Nov. 7 had been canceled to save money, for security reasons and to prevent further delays which could damage Afghanistan both politically and economically.

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Iran's Nuclear Response Creates a Quandary for Obama

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Andrew Lee Butters - Oct. 31 (News Analysis) - If the Obama Administration had hoped to get the bulk of Iran's current stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country under a new agreement for reprocessing abroad, those hopes are fading fast. The counter-proposal offered by Iran on Thursday contained such substantive revisions that Western officials are interpreting it as a rejection — at least of the aspect of the deal most important to the Western powers. More worrisome, perhaps, for the future of President Obama's engagement strategy may be the fact that although the deal contained some important concessions to Tehran, the possibility that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might embrace it sparked a storm of criticism from across the Iranian political spectrum.

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How Drug-Industry Lobbyists Got Their Way on Health Care

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Karen Tumulty, Michael Scherer - Oct. 22 (Special Report) - It's understandable the drugmakers would want a roll-call accounting of who their friends and enemies are, considering the size of the investment they are making on Capitol Hill: in the first six months of this year alone, drug and biotech companies and their trade associations spent more than $110 million — that's about $609,000 a day — to influence lawmakers, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics. The drug industry's legion of registered lobbyists numbers 1,228, or 2.3 for every member of Congress. And its campaign contributions to current members of Waxman's committee have totaled $2.6 million over the past three years.

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Overrated Optimism: The Peril of Positive Thinking

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Barbara Ehrenreich - Oct. 13 (Other) - The threats that we face, individually and collectively, won't be solved by wishful thinking, but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world

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Calling 'Em Out: The White House Takes on the Press

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By The Huffington Post News Editors - Oct. 08 (News Analysis) - Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea — that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision.

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Democrats Brace for the Hardest Part of Health-Care Reform

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Karen Tumulty - Oct. 05 (News Analysis) - With the passage of health-care-reform legislation out of the Senate Finance Committee expected this week, the debate moves into a new and delicate stage. It is one that will test the legislative and political skills of Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a scale that no congressional leadership team has had to face in at least four decades. Whether they are up to the challenge will determine not only the fate of the legislation but also, if it passes, whether it will live up to the promises President Obama has made regarding his most ambitious domestic initiative.

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5 Things Cities Can Learn from Burning Man

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Craig Duff, Larry Harvey - Sep. 19 (Interview) - Burning Man's Larry Harvey says the city the project creates in the desert every year has done some radical things other cities should try.

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Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By David Von Drehle - Sep. 17 (Special Report) - What's this rich and talented man afraid of? He is afraid of one-world government, which will turn once proud America into another France. He is afraid that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" — which doesn't mean, he hastens to add, that he actually thinks "Obama doesn't like white people." He is afraid that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington are deeply corrupt and that their corruption is spreading like a plague. He used to be afraid that hypocritical Republicans in the Bush Administration were killing capitalism and gutting liberty, but now he is afraid that all-too-sincere leftists in the Obama Administration are plotting the same. On a slow news day, Beck fears that the Rockefeller family installed communist and fascist symbols in the public artwork of Rockefeller Center. One of his Fox News Channel colleagues, Shepard Smith, has jokingly called Beck's studio the "fear chamber." Beck countered that he preferred "doom room."

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It Gets Worse

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Joe Klein - Sep. 04 (Opinion) - Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary...and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal

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Dick Cheney on Fox News Sunday And the CIA

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Michael Scherer - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - Cheney is saying he does not object to the rogue behavior of CIA agents who went beyond their legal mandate. (In the same interview, Cheney says that the Bush Justice Department found there was nothing "improper or illegal" in this behavior, a determination that is now under review by the Obama Justice Department.) Speaking of the interrogation program as a whole, Cheney says, "It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well."

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After Kennedy's Death: Silence from the Pope

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Jeff Israely - Aug. 27 (News Report) - "Here in Rome Ted Kennedy is nobody. He's a legend with his own constituency," says the Vatican official. "If he had influence in the past it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston and that eventually disappeared too."

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Can Microsoft's Bing Take a Bite out of Google?

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Tom McNichol - Aug. 01 (News Analysis) - The undisputed Sultan of Search, a company whose name has become a verb, Google currently accounts for about 65% of all online searches in the U.S, according to comScore Inc. But Google's comfortable dominance may be in for its most serious challenge in years with the debut of Bing, Microsoft's new search engine.

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Why Pakistan Balks at the U.S. Afghanistan Offensive

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Omar Waraich - Jul. 29 (News Analysis) - Pakistan is not betting on a U.S. victory in Afghanistan, nor is it going out of its way to help achieve one. Instead, say analysts and former top officials in Islamabad, Pakistan views the conflict in Afghanistan through the lens of its own national interests and its conflict with India — and it will act accordingly, prioritizing securing its own interests in Afghanistan's future. And that could be bad news for a U.S.-led military campaign that depends on Pakistan's help for thwarting the Afghan insurgency.

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Republican Grilling of Sotomayor Doesn't Help with Hispanic Voters

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Jay Newton-Small - Jul. 16 (News Analysis) - By the third morning of Sonia Sotomayor's hearings to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, the atmosphere in the room was practically jovial. Despite the best efforts of some Republicans to spark a confrontation on hot-button issues like abortion, gun rights or her general approach to judging, Sotomayor had largely steered clear of any trouble, and the process had taken on an air of inevitability. But that didn't mean the grilling of a Latina woman by a panel made up mostly of white men didn't produce its share of uncomfortable moments.

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Why Sarah Palin Quit: The Five Best Explanations

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Jay Newton Small - Jul. 06 (Opinion) - No federal investigation or teen pregnancy or hikes along the Appalachian Trail. Alaskan politicos who have worked with Palin for years say her reasons for leaving are multilayered, and largely personal. Her unhappiness in the job came as no surprise in Alaska. In fact, given her history — and how miserable the past eight months have been for her — perhaps the surprise is that more people didn't see it coming. Here are the most important factors that Alaska insiders say went into Palin's sudden decision.

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Why Obama's Afghan War is Different

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Aryn Baker - Jul. 05 (Special Report) - So far, so good in the first major offensive of President Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan. For the past four days, 4,000 U.S. Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers have been fighting their way into the southern reaches of Afghanistan's Helmand River Valley, hoping to clear out insurgents there. But other than one limited area of fierce resistance, the fighting has generally been limited to small-scale skirmishes in which few Taliban have been killed, because most of the insurgents appear to have slipped away — as guerrillas tend to do when confronted by overwhelming firepower. More important to U.S. goals, however, is that no civilians have been hurt, because the purpose of the operation is to secure the local population against the Taliban.

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Is Obama's Financial-Reform Plan Bold Enough?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Justin Fox - Jun. 18 (News Analysis) - It's not just that the Obama reforms are less ambitious than those of the Great Depression. They're also inspired by a very different interpretation of what went wrong. In the 1930s the overarching idea was that Wall Street had been very naughty and needed to be put in the penalty box — for good. This time the animating spirit behind the changes seems to be that regulators let a lot of things slip through the cracks, so there's a need both to give them some new tools and exhort them to do better.

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The House's Health-Care Plan: More Moderate Than Expected

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Karen Tumulty - Jun. 10 (News Analysis) - For all the uncertainty surrounding health-care reform, most observers thought they could count on at least one thing from Capitol Hill — that the proposals coming out of the House of Representatives would be bolder and more liberal than those from the more moderate Senate. But as the first details of the actual bills begin to surface, that's no longer so clear.

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Lebanon's American-Backed Government Holds on to Power

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Andrew Lee Butters - Jun. 08 (News Report) - The full results aren't yet official, but it appears that Lebanon's American-backed ruling coalition maintained its majority in parliament after the country voted in record numbers yesterday.

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Can the U.S. Contain Iran's Nuclear Ambitions?

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Massimo Calabresi - Jun. 06 (Special Report) - The U.S. has never been good at making sense of Tehran's knotty power structure, and the distrust is mutual: many in Iran suspect that the U.S. is looking for an excuse to attack their nation, as it did Iraq.

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Israeli Rejection of Settlement Freeze Spells Trouble for Obama's Cairo Outreach

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Tim McGirk - Jun. 01 (News Analysis) - If President Barack Obama thought he could deliver the promise of a few Israeli concessions during his upcoming Cairo speech to the Muslim world, he was sorely mistaken.

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California's State of Insanity

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Joel Stein - May. 31 (Opinion) - Before I moved to California, I enjoyed voting. Once every four years, I thought very deeply for a very long time about the presidential candidates and then voted for the Democrat. I left the crappy high school gym knowing I had voted for a government that would bring progress and change, ignoring the fact that the high school gym kept getting crappier.

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The Limits of Empathy for Sonia Sotomayor

Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Christopher Caldwell - May. 30 (Opinion) - If you doubt that President Obama has changed American politics, consider that we are about to have the first Supreme Court confirmation hearing in almost a quarter-century that does not revolve, in one way or another, around Roe v. Wade. The appeals-court judge Sonia Sotomayor has ruled on just three cases that dealt, indirectly, with abortion. She has written a lot about racial preferences, though. That is one reason the country is set to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over affirmative action instead.

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Sotomayor's Diabetes: Will It Be a Handicap?

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Lester V. Bergman / Corbis - May. 27 (News Report) - "As President Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor approaches the bench with a number of firsts. If she is confirmed to the lifelong post, as is widely expected, Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic to sit on the high court, and she would also be the first Justice with Type 1 diabetes."

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