Rachel Morris

A guest post from Washington Monthly founding editor Charles Peters: First primary of 2012 — October 31, 2011 The New Hampshire primary used to be in March. The present chaotic race to earlier and earlier primaries is a recent development, not required by tradition or reason. The Democratic National Committee, attempting to get this situation […]

I realize this isn’t a foreign policy gaffe of the same proportions as Goolsbee-gate or sniper-gate. But as a native of New Zealand, I feel obliged to draw your attention to an incident in which Hillary Clinton may have gravely insulted this small but very important nation. Asked by Newsweek (seemingly apropos of nothing), if […]

LEAVING….Tom Ricks has a great, if depressing, story today in the Washington Post about Lt. Col. John Nagl — former Rhodes Scholar, co-author of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, a Gulf War platoon leader and all-around rising star — who has just left the Army to join a new national security think tank. Why is […]

BYE BYE BONILLA… Yesterday’s news that Henry Bonilla lost his runoff in TX-23 to Democrat Ciro Rodriguez was surprising in one sense — Bonilla had a couple of million dollars at his disposal, while Rodriguez has never inspired much confidence among Dems as a campaigner. But apart from Bonilla’s sizeable financial advatange, all the other […]

COMMISSION OMISSIONS… A couple of people wrote to me about my post yesterday, pointing out that Chris Dodd and Patrick Leahy both have measures in the works addressing the Military Commissions Act, which is true. But I don?t think these efforts will get very far?beyond Dodd, Leahy, Carl Levin and a few others, there doesn’t […]

HABEAS SCHMABEAS… A lot of shameful things went on in the run-up to the midterm election, but to my mind the worst offence was the rushed passage of the Military Commissions Act, with its denial of habeas corpus to detainees. Jeffrey Toobin has a