Cheney vs. Obama  —  Two speeches, two very different men.  Former Vice President Cheney seeks no political future.  He speaks from the vantage of one who witnessed the killing of our fellow citizens, who deliberated and defined the strategy that would successfully prevent further murders of our fellow Americans.

Text: Obama's Speech on National Security  —  Following is a text of President Obama's prepared speech on Thursday on national security issues.  —  These are extraordinary times for our country.  We are confronting an historic economic crisis.  We are fighting two wars.

Cheney vs. Obama: A Mismatch  —  I've read both speeches.  —  Obama's is the speech of a young senator who was once a part-time law professor—platitudinous and preachy, vague and pseudo-thoughtful in an abstract kind of way.  This sentence was revealing: “On the other hand …

Obama: U.S. went ‘off course’ on terror  —  President Barack Obama declared defiantly Thursday that the U.S. “went off course” in fighting terrorism over the past eight years, and said his policies will “better protect” the country against al Qaeda.  —  In a major address at the National Archives …

Obama's civil liberties speech  —  Obama's speech this morning, like most Obama speeches, made pretty points in rhetorically effective ways about the Constitution, our values, transparency, oversight, the state secrets privilege, and the rule of law.  But his actions, in many critical cases, have repeatedly run afoul of those words.

House rejects probe into Pelosi CIA claims  —  WASHINGTON (AP) - House Democrats on Thursday defeated a Republican push to investigate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claims that the CIA misled her in 2002 about whether waterboarding had been used against terrorism suspects.