Afghanistan

George Packer’s recent New Yorker piece The Empty Chamber - Just How Broken Is the Senate leaves no doubt that our “most deliberative body” does barely any deliberating at all. Instead, it’s a pathetic nest of nasty egotists, damn-the-facts party loyalties and take-no-prisoners special interests. Just down the Conde Nast hallway at Vanity Fair , Todd Purdum answers the question How Broken Is Washington? in depressing detail, revealing the overwhelming obstacles the executive branch faces in trying to get anything done.

And so it has come to passeth on this day that Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Nevada, has been endorsed by the Lord Almighty himself.

Sarah Palin dropped her lengthy foreign policy manifesto on Facebook last week and we’d like to recap some of the former vice presidential candidate’s key points. Building on a speech that she gave at ” Freedom Fest ” in Norfolk, Virginia last week, Sarah Palin expressed a hawkish doctrine outlining her sharp disagreement with the Obama Administration on nine key areas of foreign policy.

The fracas over General McChrystal departing Afghanistan is a reminder that impressive fireworks exist year round in our nation’s capital. I’m hoping everyone got a good refresher on civil-military relations out of this experience because we, as a nation, really need it. And despite what you think of the situation, McChrystal has exited gracefully. A manner of departure which, in itself, is another credit to his public service. Something we Americans often forget is that our country is widely admired for the civilian dominance in our governing DNA.

Each day in this (still young) summer, it grows harder for many of us to read the front page of the newspaper, listen to the top stories on television or scroll through the links on an Internet news site. The prospect of almost 1000 barrels of oil seeping into the Gulf of Mexico every second of every day–for some 63 days now–has become a kind of “shock and awe” from which we instinctively turn away. So, too, has the buying and selling of Congress on the Wall Street reform bill.

To help local economies rebuild themselves in two countries plagued by war, the Business Council for Peace (Bpeace) presents the Race to Innovation , an online competition that is raising money for six social entrepreneurs. The Business Council for Peace is an international network of business professionals who believe that by encouraging local businesses, they can help war-torn communities rebuild peaceful, thriving economies and stable, equitable societies.

I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan . The views expressed below are my own. As the US gears up for its inevitably bloody assault on Kandahar , the plans have hit a bit of a snag. There’s a dispute raging between the military and civilian sides of our war effort over, believe it or not, development aid.

President Barack Obama has been the target of endless tirades from the Republican opposition, nonetheless, the president has remained poised as he has made progress on a wide range of important issues. But will the “Yes we can!” voters of 2008 be energized enough this fall to overcome those whose rallying cry is “Hell no!”? The incumbent party almost always loses House and Senate seats in a midterm elections, and that will certainly be the outcome this coming November.

Judge them by their enemies. More evidence that Barack Obama might be shaping up as a good president is that Norman Podhoretz hates him so much. In a Wall Street Journal column Monday the guru of the neoconservatives declared: “I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.” I know that does not properly address all of the serious questions raised about the Obama presidency by progressives, myself included, and as of today we must now add offshore oil drilling to the list.

With Democrat Jerry Brown finally declaring his candidacy for California governor today and billionaire Meg Whitman’s super-rich Republican rival Steve Poizner starting his own TV ad campaign against her, this seems a good time to talk about a big new negative theme about the rather tarnished Golden State. Is California America’s first “failed state?” That’s what a lot of people are saying.