Look, I don't mind if the President sends a budget which he knows is not going to achieve anything. But when he prefaces his remarks as we just saw by saying we have to put politics aside, posing again as the one person in the country who rises above partisanship and party, speaks for the national interest, it's really grating.
The great divide in American foreign policy thinking is between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power.
Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.
Tuesday's victory was big. But it did nothing more than level the playing field and give you a shot. Take it.
Preemption is a kind of pre-deterrence that stops the threat at an earlier, safer stage.
In reality, Kyoto was a huge transfer of resources from the United States to the Third World, under the guise of environmental protection.
The only reason the president insists on raising [tax] rates is because he knows it will destroy Republican unity, it will cause a complete fracture of the Republican majority in the house, it will hand him a Congress that he can then manipulate for the next two years at least because the Republicans will be neutered. ... This is entirely a political action, a way to get a surrender from the Republicans.
What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology. Writing after Wilmut's successful cloning of the sheep, Dolly, that research on the cloning of human beings cannot be suppressed.
If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.
Guerrilla war is a test of wills. Obama's actual objectives - rollback in Iraq, containment in Syria - are not unreasonable. But they require commitment and determination. In other words, will. You can't just make one speech declaring war, then disappear and go fundraising.
A three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow.
This week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni government, heretofore pro-American. In September, they overran Sanaa, the capital. On Tuesday, they seized the presidential palace. On Thursday, they forced the president to resign.
In science, modesty and genius do not coexist well together. (In Washington, modesty and cleverness don't.) Einstein is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule.
The Democratic line is that the Republican House does nothing but block and oppose. In fact, it has passed hundreds of bills only to have them die upon reaching the desk of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He has rendered the Senate inert by simply ensuring that any bill that might present a politically difficult vote for his Democratic colleagues never even comes to the floor.
I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.
The indecisiveness and ambivalence so devastatingly described by both of Obama's previous secretaries of defense, Leon Panetta and Bob Gates, are already beginning to characterize the Syria campaign.
If the president signs any of it, good. If he vetoes, it will be clarifying. Who then will be the party of no? The vetoed legislation would become the framework for a 2016 GOP platform. Let the debate begin.
Pass legislation. When Obama signs, you've shown seriousness and the ability to govern. When he vetoes, you've clarified the differences between party philosophies and prepared the ground for 2016.
Somebody actually said that I'm the only entity on earth, other than rogue states, that has received an apology from the White House.
Ron Paul is not going to be president, so we don't have to worry about who's going to be in his cabinet.
If Russia were to do something that it could do, it looks like it might even be preparing to do, to invade Ukraine and essentially to dismember it, this would be the one item that could reflect really badly on Trump because of the warm way he spoke about Putin.
Obama has committed the U.S. to war on the Islamic State. To then allow within a month an allied enclave to be overrun - and perhaps annihilated - would be a major blow.
Third parties in America gravitate not only to the extremes, but to irrelevance. (John Anderson's upcoming presidential campaign will undoubtedly confirm both tendencies.)
The Houthi have local religious grievances, being Shiites in a majority Sunni land. But they are also agents of Shiite Iran, which arms, trains, and advises them. Their slogan - 'God is great. Death to America. Death to Israel' - could have been written in Persian.
I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.
