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President Barack Obama is eyeing a 2012 campaign modeled on President Harry Truman’s 1948 successful re-election campaign against Congress. First, however, the White House will send to Capitol Hill an assortment of ‘economy-boosting’ legislation in a package that may include a major overhaul of the tax code. “I’ll be putting forward, when they come back in September, a very specific plan to boost the economy, to create jobs, and to control our deficit,” Obama told a friendly audience at a Decorah, Minnesota campaign-event on Monday. “My attitude is, get it done … [but] if they don’t get it done, then...

Contrary to recent media reports, the malicious prosecution of Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan has not ended. Authorities have also charged her with having unlicensed dogs, though they never escaped or threatened anyone. Here’s the unedited scoop straight from her own blog, Oak Park Hates Veggies: Home-grown: Julie Bass has fallen foul of local authorities by growing vegetables in her front yardHome-grown: Julie Bass has fallen foul of local authorities by growing vegetables in her front yard 1- the charges against us were not actually “dropped”. they were dismissed by some judge we have never heard of or seen....

Tea Partiers split over debt strategyBy Erik Wasson - 07/04/11 05:24 AM ET Tea Party activists are split between opposing any new increase to the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling and tying an increase to spending cuts, caps and a balanced budget amendment. On one side is the Tea Party Patriots group, which is urging its supporters to sign a “no debt increase” pledge. On the other side are Tea Party-related groups with significant GOP establishment backing such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. Tea Party Express has joined this side. These groups have joined a coalition calling for “Cut, Cap...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor turned the policy temperature down on austerity this week by rolling out a strong economic-growth agenda. Headlined by a 25 percent top tax rate for individuals and business, the Cantor package includes regulatory relief, free trade, and patent protection for entrepreneurs. It’s job creation and the economy, stupid. Sounds Reaganesque? Well, Eric Cantor has a lot of Reagan blood in him. Back in 1980, while Cantor was still in high school, his father was the Virginia state treasurer of the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign. So the apple never falls far from the tree. In fact,...

RUSH: Sarah Palin announced her bus trip yesterday to take place over the Memorial Day weekend. Now, I want to spend some time trying to analyze something here. I don't want people to be confused when I say that the Democrats will always tell us who they fear. That is true, and I believe -- I firmly believe -- that the efforts that have been made to take Sarah Palin out are rooted in fear. At the same time, there are Democrats who do think she is a blithering idiot, love to make fun of her, and honestly do believe...

I’m busy reading final papers for the grand strategy seminar at Bard this spring, and the students are finishing up their exams and thinking about summer. It’s already time to start reading and thinking about the syllabus for the fall course in Anglo-American grand strategy. British and American strategic thinkers and policy makers developed a new form of global strategy in the last 300 years that enabled the two English speaking powers to build a global political and security order resting on a foundation of liberal capitalism. Understanding the grand strategy that shaped the modern world is surely something that...

www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-assistant-president-homeland-security-and-counterterrorism-john-brennan-csi # Note: The following text is a quote: Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release May 26, 2010 Remarks by Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan at CSIS “Securing the Homeland by Renewing American Strength, Resilience and Values” Thank you very much John, and I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation to CSIS for inviting me back. You invited me here a little after six months after I came into this administration and I greatly appreciate the invitation...

The White House on Thursday is expected to unveil its proposal to enhance the nation's cybersecurity, laying out plans to require industry to better protect systems that run critical infrastructure like the electrical grid, financial systems and nuclear power plants. The Obama administration also is insisting that companies tell consumers when their personal information has been compromised. According to cybersecurity experts familiar with the plan, the administration's proposed legislation also would instruct federal agencies to more closely monitor their computer networks. Several House and Senate committees have been working on cybersecurity legislation for the past two years, while waiting for...

The federal government has no strategy to counter the Muslim Brotherhood at home or abroad, according to the chairwoman of the House panel that oversees counterintelligence and terrorism. “The federal government does not have a comprehensive or consistent strategy for dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated groups in America,” Rep. Sue Wilkins Myrick said during a hearing Wednesday. “Nor does it have a strategy for dealing with the Brotherhood in Egypt or the greater Middle East.” The North Carolina Republican is chairwoman of the House Intelligence subcommittee on terrorism, human intelligence, analysis and counterintelligence. Mrs. Myrick said at...

Up and down the frontier of American global power, from the South China Sea to the Middle East, from the Caucasus to the north Central European plain, U.S. allies are increasingly nervous. Along the littoral rim of East Asia, South Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese and others in the region watched anxiously throughout 2010 as China ratcheted up efforts to assert control over strategic waterways and challenge the U.S. position in Asia. In the Middle East, too, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States ended the year less confident than ever that the United States would somehow bestir itself to contain...

With the world melting down and the Bard semester heating up, I’ve fallen behind in my grand strategy posts; apologies to all and I hope to catch up with a post next week (during Bard’s spring break) on Machiavelli. But today’s business is still the Second Punic War, the conflict between Carthage and Rome that engulfed most of the Mediterranean world in what would prove to be the most important war in the history of what would, thanks to Rome’s victory, one day become western civilization. In the last post I wrote about how Rome had a grand strategy that...

Democrats back calls for Obama to explain strategyLARA MARLOWE in Washington The Irish Times - Friday, March 25, 2011 US ROLE: AMID GROWING calls for President Barack Obama to explain his strategy to Congress and the nation, leading Democrats say questions about the Libyan war raised by the Republican speaker of the house John Boehner are “legitimate”. Deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough told CNN that a letter sent by Mr Boehner to the White House on Wednesday contained “a very legitimate set of questions”. Democratic senator Sherrod Brown said Mr Obama “needs to face the nation and . ....

Barack Obama tried to convince Univision last night that the US has an exit strategy from the Libya conflict, and that strategy is to, er, stick around and fight. Jake Tapper calls it a Lewis Carroll moment, while others might consider it more Orwellian: In an interview with Univision Tuesday, President Obama re-defined the term “exit strategy,” and said our exit strategy in Libya would begin this week. “The exit strategy will be executed this week,” President Obama said, “in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment. We will...

The Muslim Brotherhood's Strategy in Egypt"This is a revolution for all Egyptians--it's not ours" By Eric Trager Feb 10 2011, 9:15 AM ET Some Americans fear that Egypt in 2011 could repeat Iran in 1979, when a small group of religious fanatics hijacked a revolution. They see another popular uprising overtaking a much-hated, U.S.-backed dictator. They know that the strongest opposition group is the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that is unfriendly to the United States (In my years of interviewing Brotherhood leaders, I've almost never heard one say anything friendly about the U.S., which they regard with open and...

...In 2012, the president's strategists can choose between trying to reproduce Obama's narrow wins in the affluent corners of the South (not including Florida) or attempting to hold on to swing states like Nevada and Colorado, where Democratic senators in 2010 won on support from well-organized Hispanic voters and the labor movement. It's not a tough call. It would be almost impossible to make the case for investing political resources in the South. The divorce is final. And largely for the good, as congressional Democrats will no longer have to twist their policies beyond recognition to accommodate Southern Democrats who...

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has written in the Wall Street Journal that we should “un-surge” in Afghanistan. While arguing against total withdrawal, he says “the U.S. effort there should be sharply reduced.” Mr. Haass’s recommendation on Afghanistan sounds similar to his (flawed) recommendation on Iraq during the debate about the surge. In a November 13, 2006, interview with Der Spiegel, Haass said: “We've reached a point in Iraq where we've got to get real.

The Gop Strategic Advantage Bill Connelly, Guest Columnist December 16th, 2010 The measures of Republican success in the 2010 midterm are familiar. The GOP gained: (1) a House majority, with a net pickup of 63 seats, (2) six Senate seats leaving Democrats facing a more challenging Senate playing field in 2012 and 2014, (3) seven governorships, and (4) twenty legislative chambers, giving Republicans control of both legislative chambers in 25 states—an increase of 11. Republicans now control more state legislative seats than any time since 1928. Republican gains include regional advances in the Midwest and Northeast, and important advances in...

With a new bestseller, a blockbuster TV show, and her kids popping up everywhere, Sarah Palin is changing politics forever, says Meghan McCain—and she’s either brilliant or insane. Unless you have been living under a rock, the complete and total media saturation of every single outlet with all things Sarah Palin, all the time, has hit a proverbial fever pitch these past few weeks. Between the premiere of the Mark Burnett-produced TLC reality show Sarah Palin’s Alaska and the launch of her book, America by Heart, today, she is simply everywhere. Her omnipresence and the questions about her future are...

ROVE IS POLITICALLY DEAD! I will personally spend the next two years to make sure that every candidate Karl Rove supports loses in the primary. I will repeat every bad story and every rumor about Karl Rove to make sure I do all I can to destroy any future he has left in politics. We lost the chance to win the United States Senate only because Rove decided to attack and defame the candidate we the people chose to represent the party. Had he been a real man and just supported the conservative after they won the primary, than those...

What would happen if conservatives targeted several dozen relatively weak leftist Democrats in states or districts conductive to the conservative message, and then sought to elect a genuinely conservative Democrat (recruited, of course, within the ranks of the conservative movement)? What would happen if conservatives decided in 2012 to unify behind an articulate conservative to run in the Democrat primaries and caucuses against Obama? Let the small leftist minority in America worry about not just losing a general election, but a primary: what would that do to the appeal of leftism in our political system? It would raise the profound...