New York Times

... The president will never get the near-term stimulus through that he wants and that the economy needs without combining it with a credible bipartisan, multiyear deficit-reduction plan like Simpson-Bowles.

“I really think they've built a better platform,” said Lucy Bernholz, a philanthropy consultant who also has a blog, Philanthropy 2173. ...

Many analysts say the president and Congress could send a strong signal to global markets by agreeing this year to a package of both long-term tax increases and spending reductions, especially in the popular entitlement programs, that would not take effect until 2012. That is the recommendation of two new studies, one from a diverse group sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and a separate joint project of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. ...

Could we give Barack Obama a break?

Even among his supporters, opinions about his handling of health care reform range from the view that he messed up to the view that he really, really messed up.

True, the more charitable critics grant that Obama faced tenacious Republicans in Congress egged on by rabid Tea Partiers. And some acknowledge that, more deeply, he faced a “polarized” nation and was beset by “special interests” on both the left and the right.

The C.I.A. launched more than 50 such strikes in Obama’s first year in office, more than during Bush’s entire presidency, according to data compiled by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation

Original Article

Early in the morning of Aug. 29, 1949, a mushroom cloud soared up over the Kazakh deserts. The Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb, a thrilling feat of engineering and physics. The man who had supervised the effort, the pitiless chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, raced to telephone Stalin. But when the leader came on the line he declared that he already knew and hung up.

It was an enigmatic and devious response from the ultimate enigmatic and devious man. Stalin’s aim, Michael D. Gordin suggests, was just “to put Beria in his place.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington.

For anyone who has had to wait a long time to schedule a medical appointment, it might seem as if the world needs more doctors, and that training more of them would be a good idea. An amendment that teaching hospitals are pushing to include in the health care legislation before a final vote is taken in the Senate and the House would do just that. It would add 15,000 medical residency slots to the 100,000 residencies the federal government now finances, most of them through Medicare.

Steve Coll, author of “The bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” said the news from Tehran “provides the first open evidence of the ...