A couple of quick notes. First, episode 2 of Foreign Entanglements is up; this episode feature Matthew Duss of the Center for American Progress against Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of FPI: Not much maritime content, but certainly some national security talk. In the near future I hope that have a more maritime-themed episode. Second, my WPR column last week was yet another unhinged screed against airpow...

  German Family Minister Kristina Schröder announced plans on Tuesday to devote 2 million euros ($2.6 million) to the establishment of a nationwide information and research center to combat right-wing extremism. Meeting with Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, representatives of trade unions and members of the religious, sporting, immigrant, welfare, and youth communities at a s...

Will the predictable results of the Arab Spring in Egypt be a major part of the State of the Union Speech? Unlikely! Isn't it funny how President Obama was so present during the so-called Arab Spring and the assumed move by the people of Egypt towards a democratic form of government? The leader of the free world was front and center demanding that Hosni Mubarak step down so that the free will...

TGIF this week is dedicated to a mystery politician! This may not be very difficult to figure out, but here are the clues: This man has served time for cocaine possession after being videotaped smoking crack, was sentenced to probation for tax issues, was arrested for stalking and was front and center when Congress took control of D.C. government due to fiscal mismanagement. But, as we have recent...

James Taranto quotes Thomas Edsall, saying (among other things) this, about the kinds of votes that Democrats are now trying to get, and other votes that they are no longer bothering to try to get: All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahea...

At 6:11 a.m., He Xiuling was trying her new outfit. Her execution drew near. She disliked the white top, as it made her look fat. The head of the detention center then got a black top for her. Extraordinary photospread...

New York University Law School study looks at three terrorism prosecutions and makes the assertion that the Muslim men had been entrapped and the claim that the homegrown terrorism threat in America has been "manufactured! The study is titled "Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States (New York: NYU Sch...

The Center for a New American Security has a new study out in which they put forward four broad force structure options in support of national strategy.  Each takes as a given a certain level of budgetary pain, and each is successively more painful based on the estimate of the cuts needed.  It is well written and logical.  From an email the incomparable Peter Swartz of CNA put out, ...

Center for a New American Security think-tank issues warning if the defence budget is cut by more than $550bn over the next decade

According to information linked to by Glenn Reynolds, the New World is poised to become the center of gravity for oil production by the end of this decade. There is as much as 2 Trillion Barrels in the US; another 2 trillion in South America and 2.4 Trillion reserves in Canada. This affects the Middle East but it hits Russia even more. Over the last decade two of their big earners have been oil ex...