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Mitt Romney’s speech in Texas on Thursday was supposed to be an attempt to fend off religious bigotry. Instead, it betrays some prejudices of its own (against secular people), and seems to provoke others to bigotted statements. It has been likened to the speech of John F. Kennedy on his Catholicism. But we knew John […]

Gov. Mike Huckabee did not know about the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran when asked about it on Wednesday. It had caused a furor in Washington because it concluded that Iran had halted any weapons-related experiments in 2003. It is not such a big scandal that Huckabee hadn’t heard the news. When you are […]

Farideh Farhi, at our group blog, Global Affairs, says she listened to Bush’s press conference on Tuesday — which was full of implausible statements — and now wants to know what George W. Bush has been smoking. Uh, I don’t think that substance is typically smoked so much as snorted. Or maybe his current favorite […]

The USG Open Source Center surveys Iranian, German, French, and Israeli reactions to the US National Intelligence Estimate that holds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. One is struck by the Israeli reactions, on both sides of the aisle. Former Labor prime minister Ehud Barak dismissed the report. ‘OSC Report: NIE on […]

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran says that Iran did have a nuclear weapons research program until early 2003, but then dismantled it. See Farideh Farhi’s excellent discussion of this development at our joint Global Affairs weblog. There is now a high level of confidence that Iran is no longer seeking nuclear weapons. This […]

Here is the transcript of Monday’s news conference: Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley James S. Brady Press Briefing Room 3:35 P.M. EST MR. HADLEY: Good afternoon, I’m Steve Hadley, the President’s National Security Advisor. I want to talk a little bit about the recent National Intelligence Estimate that was released to the […]

A specter haunts the Democratic Party, and it is the exclusion of Michigan and Florida delegates from the Democratic Convention. Both the Republican and the Democratic National Committees have been penalizing states that move their primaries up to January, as Michigan and Florida did. The DNC says it will only recognize the Iowa, New Hampshire, […]

A Pakistani newspaper has accused George W. Bush of thinking that Nawaz Sharif of the Muslim League-N is a Muslim fundamentalist, and of expressing worries about him on that score. In fact, Nawaz Sharif is a wealthy industrialist and his “Muslim League” is mainly a rebranding of the old Unionist landlord party of the colonial […]

At the Firedoglake blog, Swopa will be hosting a book Salon on Sunday starting at 2 pm EST on my Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. I’ll be answering questions online.