Josh Rogin examines how the Romney campaign has "doubled down" on treating Russia as a geopolitical foe. Some ideological habits are hard to break. In this case, the US-Moscow relationship is fraught enough to render the position wrongheaded but not completely...
Most of the attention paid to Ferguson's anti-Obama Newsweek cover story has focused on his mendacious and unprofessional discussion of the administration's domestic policies -- notably its stimulus...
The caption for this photo is, no joke, "All the experts posing for a group photo after the event."So, here's all the experts.Conventional wisdom from a foreign-policy expert: It is one of the...
UN members last month failed to reach agreement on the Arms Trade Treaty after a month-long conference. This is the latest setback in a decades old attempt to control the trade in small arms. A...
Regular blogging will begin to resume over the next weeks now that I'm back from a family road trip down the eastern seaboard and starting to gear up for the academic year. In the meantime, of possible interest to Duck readers is this terrific exhibit on The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which we randomly stumbled into one day during a fire drill at the International Spy Museum across the street. Here is one of the video trailers of the exhibit:
This must be satire. It isn't? No, it has to be. I mean... seriously?In a post on his Twitter account, Calderón offered his condolences to the victims but then added that the incident showed that “the American Congress must review its mistaken legislation on guns. It’s doing damage to us all.” It was hardly a new theme from Mexico’s lame-duck president. But his latest statement requires an extraordinary amount of gall. During Calderón’s presidency, more than fifty thousand of his people have died in the war on drugs that he chose to escalate. A foreign leader with that awful of a track...
I posted this on Facebook some time ago, but not on the Duck. The setting is Edinburgh Castle. Time time is shortly before the firing of the One o'Clock Gun. Skip to about 50 seconds in.
I get a lot of emails asking for advice about putting together their graduate-school applications. I also get a lot of emails asking how to "improve" an application to make it "more competitive." I suspect that these emails come to me because I am Director of Admissions in the Government Department, and people assume that part of my job description is "helping them get into graduate school." Nonetheless, because I like to think of myself as a "nice person," I try to answer these queries with the sage advice that comes from many years on admissions committees. But it grows tiring to...
That aircraft carrier base in Perth? Not so much.Against self-epublishing ("self-epublishing"? Gah!).Artillery as "The Last Argument of Tyrants."Gerard N. Magliocca asks if Washington, DC is unconstitutional. The correct question, though, is if it is the greatest place to be?Jamie at Blood and Treasure on the flap over the Churchill bust: "People close to the seat of power in the United States, at least in the geographical sense, are arguing over the positioning of a minor hearth God relative to the household altar."Jay Ulfelder at his home blog: "I think that political science deserves the...
From Department of OmnishamblesMore good stuff where this came from (via Jairus Grove).
This is a guest post from Tanisha Fazal, a professor of political science at Columbia University, and Jessica Martini, a human rights and international trade attorney based in New York City.To conduct research on terrorism and insurgency, it’s best to be able to talk to people. Combing through incident reports is helpful, but often an informal conversation over a cup of tea is as, if not more, illuminating. But according to ban on providing “material support” (18 United States Code (U.S.C.) 2339B), buying a cup of tea for a terrorist can land you in [US] jail. In 1996 the Antiterrorism...