Foreign Policy

Leave it to the New York Times to worry about income disparity and gentrification… in Cuba. In his August 3 story “Cubans Set for Big Change: Right to Buy Homes,” correspondent Damien Cave reported on how Cubans will finally be able – albeit doubtless with numerous restrictions – to own their own houses come legislative changes expected to be enacted later this year. “[E]ven with some state…

With a post entitled "When Christianity becomes lethal," liberal theologian and Center for American Progress senior fellow Susan Brooks Thislethwaite took to the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog yesterday to indict conservative Christian theology as a catalyst for the terror espoused by Norwegian bomber/shooter Anders Behring Breivik:

It didn't take long for American media to blame this weekend's tragic shootings in Oslo, Norway, on our nation's conservatives. The New York Times splashed it across its front page Monday with the headline "Killings Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.":

James Traub, a contributing writer for the New York Times Sunday magazine, contributed a very positive 5,000-word profile of Obama foreign-affairs maven (and failed liberal Democratic presidential candidate) Sen. John Kerry for the Sunday magazine, under the online headline “How John Kerry Tries to Put Out Diplomatic Fires.” The table of contents and print edition headlines simply hailed Kerry…

In her Tuesday posting on the New York Times's Internet-news blog “Bits,” the unusually named Jennifer 8. Lee (a food writer and former Times staff reporter who now occasionally shows up to write posts for “Bits” and the paper’s local “City Room” blog) interviewed Rebecca MacKinnon of the left-leaning New America Foundation. MacKinnon was speaking at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh about…

At the Associated Press, the task of reporting on the official results of Uncle Sam's June Monthly Treasury Statement fell to Christopher Rugaber instead Marty Crutsinger. Next time, Chris, tell us what happened in the month you're covering instead of going almost exclusively with the federal government's year-to-date results. If Rugaber had looked more closely at June, he would have had to…

He said it, he meant it, and there's no denying it. On Monday, in a statement carried at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the New York Times (Page A8 of Tuesday's print edition), and elsewhere, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad: "The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not…

During former President George W. Bush's time in office, he was regularly described as fascist, murderous, and a war criminal for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if people didn't support the wars, though, Bush obeyed the law and received congressional approval to be in the countries. President Barack Obama is the one acting above the law, having yet to seek approval for being at war with…

After nearly four months of a costly military intervention in Libya to oust leader Muammar Gaddafi, little progress has been made in assuring the quick exit President Barack Obama promised in March. With no end to the conflict in sight, either, Obama's NATO coalition looks like it could fall apart before Gaddafi's regime does. Let us know what you think of the US involvement in Libya in the…

CNN foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria – who has recently had off-the-record conversations with President Obama on foreign issues – noted the president's "restraint" in his dealing with the "Arab Spring" and the conflict in Libya Wednesday. Zakaria previously gave a thumbs-up for Obama's Mideast speech in May and later defended the president's plan for removing American troops from…

President Obama’s nominee to a top State Department post is one of the few American diplomats to have met North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, whom she later described as “smart, capable and supremely confident.” Wendy Sherman traveled to Pyongyang in 2000 in her capacity as counselor to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Visiting South Korea four years later – when she was no longer in…

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that even after President Barack Obama withdraws 33,000 soldiers from Afghanistan by September 2012, there will still be “twice as many” U.S. troops in the country as there were when he took office.

On Thursday's NBC Today, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd recited Obama administration spin as he gave a fully positive assessment of the President's Wednesday announcement of an Afghanistan troop withdrawal: "The President went with the most aggressive compromised withdrawal plan he could get commanders at the Pentagon to sign off on." Moments later, Todd declared: "It was a sober…

Just days after demagoguing the war on terror as a "war of fear," NBC's Richard Engel told Jay Leno "it's probably time to end the global war on terrorism." The NBC News chief foreign correspondent, discussing Mideast policy on the June 22 "Tonight Show," also pushed for withdrawal from Afghanistan and an end to "this chapter in our history." Video follows break