Top Items:
Jacob Siegel / The Daily Beast:
Obama's Iraq Plan Has a Killer Flaw—and Airstrikes Alone May Not Save It — The U.S. gambled on local militias to keep ISIS in check. The president's authorization of airstrikes is an admission that bet didn't pay off. — Friday morning, with a humanitarian mission already underway …
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Peter Baker / New York Times:
Obama, With Reluctance, Returns to Action in Iraq — WASHINGTON — In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama on Thursday night found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row …
Washington Post:
U.S. airstrikes target Islamic State militants in northern Iraq — U.S. military jets carried out two airstrikes Friday on Islamist militants outside the Kurdish capital of Irbil, hours after President Obama authorized attacks against the Sunni extremists advancing on the northern Iraq city.
Discussion:
New Yorker, Fox News, TalkLeft, Outside the Beltway, Hit & Run, National Review and New York Times
Natalie Andrews / Wall Street Journal:
Pentagon Announces Iraq Airstrikes With a Tweet
Pentagon Announces Iraq Airstrikes With a Tweet
Discussion:
The Verge, Mashable, Twitchy, Yahoo! News and New York Times, more at Mediagazer »
Dion Nissenbaum / Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Planes Start Airstrikes on Iraq Militants
U.S. Planes Start Airstrikes on Iraq Militants
Discussion:
RedState and Business Insider
Dion Nissenbaum / Wall Street Journal:
Airstrikes Could Be Used More Broadly in Iraq, Officials Say
Airstrikes Could Be Used More Broadly in Iraq, Officials Say
Discussion:
USA Today, Business Insider, Hot Air, Lawfare and ThinkProgress
Sam Biddle / Valleywag:
Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods — Is there any way to keep white people from using computers, before this whole planet is ruined? I ask because the two enterprising white entrepreneurs above just made yet another app for avoiding non-white areas of your town—and it's really taking off!
Discussion:
Lawyers, Guns & Money, DCist, Hinterland Gazette, Business Insider, Shakesville, The Daily Caller, Gothamist, The Raw Story and Unfogged
Monica Potts / The Daily Beast:
The Big, Long, 30-Year Conservative Lie — Inequality, conservatives insist, is natural. Trying to combat it will slow growth. Well, guess who now says otherwise? Standard and Poor's. — First came Occupy Wall Street, and its pitch-perfect slogan on inequality: “We are the 99 percent.”
Discussion:
Washington Monthly
New York Times:
Cease-Fire in Gaza Expires, and Strikes Resume — JERUSALEM — As a 72-hour truce in Gaza expired at 8 a.m. Friday, Palestinian militants fired barrages of rockets into Israel and the Israeli military responded with airstrikes, one of which killed a 10-year-old boy, according to relatives.
Discussion:
Firedoglake, Hit & Run, Reuters, Outside the Beltway, Right Wing News, American Thinker and Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion
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Isabel Kershner / New York Times:
Israeli Procedure Reignites Old Debate
Israeli Procedure Reignites Old Debate
Discussion:
Tikun Olam and Marginal REVOLUTION
Paul Krugman / New York Times:
Inequality Is a Drag — For more than three decades, almost everyone who matters in American politics has agreed that higher taxes on the rich and increased aid to the poor have hurt economic growth. — Liberals have generally viewed this as a trade-off worth making …
Discussion:
National Review
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John H. Cochrane / The Grumpy Economist:
S&P economists and inequality — Neil Irwin at the New York …
Andrew W.K. / Sound of the City:
Ask Andrew W.K.: My Dad Is a Right-Wing A**hole — [Editor's note: Every Wednesday New York City's own Andrew W.K. takes your life questions, and sets you safely down the right path to a solution, a purpose or — no surprise here — a party. Need his help? Just ask: AskAWK@villagevoice.com]
Discussion:
Mediaite, Hot Air, The Daily Caller, Ricochet and No More Mister Nice Blog
Peter Beinart / The Atlantic Online:
America's Moral Obligations in Iraq — Which politician uttered the following words: “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch an entire people be slaughtered or do we marshal military forces and move in quietly to put an end to it?” John McCain? Joe Lieberman? Scoop Jackson? Wrong.
Discussion:
The Dish
Anthony Reuben / BBC:
Caution needed with Gaza casualty figures — War zones are not easy places to collect statistics. — In the Gaza conflict, most news organisations have been quoting from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which leads a group of humanitarian organisations known as the Protection Cluster.
Discussion:
Washington Post, Hot Air, Algemeiner.com, Elder Of Ziyon, The Times of Israel, Israel Matzav and Mashable
Kristina Wong / The Hill:
Wolfowitz: We ‘won’ the Iraq War — Paul Wolfowitz, a former senior George W. Bush administration official and one of the chief Iraq War architects, said on Tuesday that the U.S. “won” the war in Iraq. — When asked his thoughts about the current situation in Iraq and whether the war was a mistake …
Discussion:
Informed Comment, The Dish and The Mahablog
Eliana Johnson / National Review:
Don't Give Booker a Pass — Cory Booker may be the most puzzling man in the Senate. We don't know where he lives. We don't know whom, if anyone, he lives with. And he's been caught in lie after lie about his heroics. Yet, this enigma of a man has emerged as the king of odd-couple bromance …
Discussion:
Weekly Standard
Associated Press:
Rep. DesJarlais, challenger trade leads in Tenn. — NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Scandal-plagued Tennessee Rep. Scott DesJarlais (day-zhar-LAY') and challenger Jim Tracy's race is still too close to call as election officials in the largely rural 4th Congressional District tally outstanding votes.
Discussion:
Washington Post
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Chas Sisk / Tennessean.com:
Scott DesJarlais, Jim Tracy in nail-biter
Scott DesJarlais, Jim Tracy in nail-biter
Discussion:
The Hill, Talking Points Memo, Nashville Public Radio, Washington Post and The Daily Banter
Chris Moody / Yahoo! News:
Mitch McConnell's wife sits on the board of a group working to kill the coal industry Yahoo News 1 hr ago — For months, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell has accused his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, of engaging in a “war on coal,” casting her as an outright enemy of one of the state's most vital industries.
Discussion:
ThinkProgress, Daily Kos, ABC News and Booman Tribune
Fred Barnes / Weekly Standard:
The Democrats' Goldwater — Elizabeth Warren leads the party's leftward march. — Republicans had Barry Gold-water. Democrats now have Elizabeth Warren. What do they have in common? Years back, he pointed the way for his party, and now she's doing the same thing for hers.
Claudia Rosett / Wall Street Journal:
The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas — The relief agency in Gaza, financed in part by the U.S., has become a patron of Palestinian grievance.
Discussion:
Israel Matzav and National Review
Shannon Behnken / WFLA-TV:
Family says Tampa church canceled funeral because son was gay — Julie Atwood was standing at her son's casket when the phone rang. The church where her son's funeral was scheduled to be held the next day decided to abruptly cancel the service, after the pastor learned the deceased was gay …
Discussion:
The New Civil Rights Movement, KFOR-TV and The Raw Story
Paul Steinhauser / CNN:
CNN Poll: Trust in government at all-time low — Washington (CNN) - Four decades after President Richard Nixon resigned, a slight majority of Americans still consider Watergate a very serious matter, a new national survey shows. But how serious depends on when you were born.
Discussion:
Washington Post, Outside the Beltway, Politico and Mediaite
NBC News:
U.S. drops bombs on ISIS — This late-breaking news from NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube: U.S. officials tell NBC News that two US Navy FA-18's dropped two five-hundred pound bombs on ISIS enemy forces outside Erbil this morning. No word on casualties.
Discussion:
Billings Gazette and Booman Tribune