Power

Plus, a nugget catastrophe.

When a fire at an electrical substation knocked out power for half a day at the Atlanta airport recently, airlines canceled more than 1,400 flights and thousands of passengers were stranded. Some sat in the airport terminal in the dark, while others waited on planes out on the tarmac for hours.

Tony Smith, political science professor at Tufts, is a man on a mission. His mission: save Wilsonianism from its perversions by post-Cold War social scientists, military strategists like General David Petraeus, the RAND Corporation—and especially the neocons and neoliberals of the Bush and Obama…

Like the Bourbons, Barack Obama and his national security advisers have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.  They have not forgotten that they were first elected in 2008 to “end” Middle East wars, and the administration’s response to the attacks in Paris last week reveals that they have yet to…

During the debate in Las Vegas, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Jim Webb how, if were he elected, “he would not be a third term for Obama.” Webb said that “there would be a major difference between my administration and the Obama administration,” and it would concern “the use of executive authority.”

As the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign closed the books on its first month of operations, campaign manager Robby Mook emailed supporters with a rather remarkable claim: Hillary Clinton "didn't have a lot of the usual resources that other candidates might have" to launch a campaign. Tellingly, Mook…

Here's video, via Fox News, of the power outage at the State Department today:

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas delivered his maiden speech from the floor of the Senate on "Ending America’s Retreat, Restoring America’s Military Dominance," as the speech was titled. Watch here:

A great Gary Schmitt line Peter Baker's piece on presidential powers in the New York Times today:

President Obama made a gaffe in an interview with NPR when he called Tehran a "country." But the gaffe isn't the news from the interview at all.

President Obama quietly issued 12 pardons and 8 commutations late yesterday afternoon, which happened to be one of the busiest news days of the year.

With the price of oil plunging, the ruble crashing against other currencies, and its interest rates soaring, Russia has announced to the world that it: 

CBS's Mark Knoller reports that the lights went out briefly at the White House this morning. 

Bret Stephens is the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning foreign affairs columnist. He is also author of a new book, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming World Disorder, detailing the Obama administration’s foreign policy blunders. Recently I spoke with Stephens about…

The White House has argued that President Obama's executive amnesty order last week was made well within the existing law. But in remarks in Chicago tonight, President Obama went off script and admitted that in fact he unilaterally made changes to the law.

George Washington, 1796:

White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri defended President Obama's planned executive amnesty by saying it "doesn't" shred the Constitution:

Writing at the New York Times, Thomas Edsall makes a provocative and counterintuitive argument about earmarks:

Two and a half years ago, President Obama tired of the Senate's refusal to confirm several of his nominations. Dissatisfied with the Constitution's general requirement that the president make appointments only after receiving the Senate's "advice and consent," he chose a more direct route. He…

The Associated Press reports:

When the EPA released its new rules aimed to get the nation on the road carbon free (sort of) energy generation, the news was plainly bad for coal. No surprise there.  The prospects for renewables – solar, wind, hydro, etc. – were enormously enhanced by the plan. This was also unsurprising.  But…

The Obama administration will roll out a plan, today, for fixing the climate, having already fixed foreign policy and the economy. As Wendy Koch of USA Today reports:

The first question that national security types, including the president, supposedly ask in an international crisis is, “Where are the carriers?” Soon, that opening line will be rephrased to something like, “Where are the … oh, never mind.”

Hillary Clinton is an advocate of something she calls “Smart Power,” which she presumably exercised during her time as Secretary of State and will, again, should she become president.

Barack Obama’s latest State of the Union address was a dreary, tiresome affair—which, to be fair, could be said of most such addresses by most modern presidents. The only real surprise was how he soft-pedaled the problem of inequality. Pre-speech hype had promised this would be the centerpiece…

In his latest email to supporters, President Obama bemoans his lack of political power. The email, sent today, is signed by Obama and sent to the list of Organizing for Action, his former reelection campaign group.

That little American girls still yearn to be princesses only shows how little history they read. So it is too bad that The Deadly Sisterhood, which is about Italian Renaissance princesses, is not written for them. It verifies the reality of all those Disney lures: the sumptuous weddings to princes,…

Yesterday in Cape Town, South Africa, President Obama talked about bringing energy and power to the continent of Africa. Today, President Obama is expected to reveal that part of his Africa energy plan involves a soccer ball that carries an electric generator inside.

At a Jewish American Heritage Month reception last night in Washington, D.C., Vice President Joe Biden talked about Jews, power, and influence.

Inside the beltway, there is a pervasive sense of impending doom. The rest of the country may not much care, but sequestration is here. According to warnings by the Obama administration, failure to avert these automatic spending cuts will lead to planes falling from the skies, bridges collapsing,…

At a hearing today on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that sequestration will lead to America becoming a "second-rate power":

Retiring Virginia senator Jim Webb explains why he decided not to seek reelection and leave the Senate in an exit interview with public radio.

As he showed in the final presidential debate, President Obama’s understanding of the U.S. Navy—or for that matter, any navy—is suboptimal. His explanation about Navy carriers “where planes land on them,” and “ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines,” left out the largest single group of naval…

There’s been an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, a Rose Revolution in Georgia, and a Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that helped launch last year’s Arab Spring. Is democracy sweeping the globe at last? Well—not yet, according to our author, a former editor at Foreign Policy who has been doing some…

On Tuesday, Russia announced it was sending 11 warships to the Mediterranean—some of which would dock in Syria, where Moscow keeps a base in Tartus. If some onlookers believed that the “unusually large size of the force” was meant to send a message to Washington, the fact is, the Obama…

Newt Gingrich issued a warning, based on the destructive storms that hit the Washington, D.C. area over the weekend, on Twitter: 

An anti-Occupy Wall Street movement (who call themselves  "Occupy Occupy D.C.") protested bird killing wind turbines today at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. The group gathered "to highlight the threat that wind, a celebrated alternative energy source, poses to the American bird community,"…

In 1942 George Stevens made a romantic comedy for MGM called Woman of the Year. Based on the journalist Dorothy Thompson, one of the subjects here, it concerned the obstacles to marital bliss faced by an emancipated woman and her former colleague turned husband. With Katharine Hepburn and Spencer…

Wipe that smirk off your face, Mister President. “We cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society.” Is there some Sidwell Friends night school class liberal politicians take to perfect an expression of smug disdain? When Teddy Roosevelt was…