A Justice Department memorandum apparently prepared for Congress lays out for the first time the criteria that the national security establishment uses to decide whether to kill an American who is a senior al Qaeda leader or the the leader of one of its operational arms. Honors go to NBC's Mike Isikoff for the score. The memo has no classification markings on it, which tells me that it is a distillation from a larger, probably classified document prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. Generally, the executive branch keeps secrets in one of two of ways. They classify something formally, or they claim that something not classified is tantamount to internal work product or private legal advice intended for the president and his advisers only....  More»

Thomas Frank does not like Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. Not one bit. The heroes are not pure in motive; the 13th amendment was not born from a virginal doctrine of racial equality. The President and his team had to bribe their way to victory, forcing men of conviction like Thadddeus Stevens to disclaim their own core beliefs in order to assure the amendment's passage in Congress.  Well, never. Frank's specific beef is with historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who seem to celebrate corruption and pass on to future generations the idea that Great Ends are indeed justified by their unclean means.

But when has American politics ever been clean?  Not in 1800, after the death of George Washington, when every faction Washington worried about was let loose, and when such grand men as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson cut deals to...  More»

I think the answer is clear: no. I also think the question deserved to be asked.

My own history with obesity is here, in all its gory glory. Fat stigma is an anathema to me, and I wish that we could ignore the issue entirely. We can't. And that means that the fat of Christie's will inevitably bleed over into the zone that perpetuates stigma and stereotypes. We have to find a way to judge Christie's weight in the context of what the job of being presidential entails, and then, at the same time rigorously segregate it from any other type of judgment. If we can answer the question, then we ought to accept that answer and move on.

Christie himself has acknowledged that his weight raises the probability that he will acquire debilitating medical conditions, and has thus admitted to the public square a fact about his body that requires communal judgment....  More»

More than 10 years after the United States first used an unmanned aerial device to kill an al Qaeda militant, a discussion about the wisdom and applications of drone use is finally upon us. Actually, it's been about 10 years since the first senior American official bragged about such lethal strikes. The proximate cause, of course, is John Brennan's nomination to direct the Central Intelligence Agency. But the functional cause is years of work by the ACLU, civil libertarians, and the media. Even though the drone programs have been SILOs — Secrets In Law Only — the executive branch has fiercely and without rest resisted a debate. The executive branch has used the pretext of official secrecy to squash any informed discussion of the subject, even though another form of secrecy, the habitual unofficial custom that protects internal policy...  More»

Here's a bit of news I found fascinating: Even though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta all backed the idea of arming rebels in Syria, President Obama decided against this course of action.

I had assumed that the U.S. was covertly arming the rebels, either directly or through another country. (The president could issue a "Finding" allowing the CIA to do this, or instruct the Pentagon to supply the rebels using a Presidential Decision Directive.) I had assumed that President Obama had authorized such a program because that's what the U.S. has done historically even when it says it is staying out of conflicts.

Covertly arming rebels is a way for presidents to feel like they are doing something to bring a humanitarian crisis to an end without risking American lives....  More»

A small quiz, or quiz-ling, to start the week.

1. On Tuesday, President Obama will tell Congress that the state of our union is:

(a) Strong. As strong as a master of a Thigh-master.

(b) Strong. Not red hot-sauce strong, but strong enough.

(c) Delaware.

(d) Pretty much whatever speechwriter Jon Favreau feels like it ought to be. Probably: optimistic, since Favreau is going to Hollywood.

2. The sequester:

(a) Will turn out to be the worst double-bluff ever, with Republican leaders unable to muster any support for any deal that contains revenue, and the White House credulously assuming that Republicans aren't willing to actually call their, uh, bluff.

(b) A fan of a non-very-well-made NBC science fiction drama in the 90s.

(c) Is a word that only juries used to learn....  More»

President Obama is expected to sign an executive order that would require private companies that operate critical infrastructure to get their cyber defenses in order. Congress has tried, and failed, to pass legislation aimed at voluntarily creating a system of national standards, and all manner of cyber exploitation and attacks keep coming.  Though virtually every actor in the debate believes that some sort of legislation is necessary, corporate America is split in two about how much risk they ought to be required to assume. Within most companies, IT teams push for more elaborate defenses and for disclosure of problems; general counsels counsel silence, and customer service executives complain about cyber architecture that is too costly and would put them at a competitive disadvantage....  More»