Samuel Knight

Helen Thomas, the former White House correspondent who was on the beat for five decades, passed away today at the age of 92. I won’t be able to properly assess her legacy, being neither particularly knowledgeable about the White House press corps nor postwar feminism. However, it’s safe to say she did journalism and women […]

Good morning, sunshine! Here is some news you can use. Or just read. *To meet a prerequisite for the resumption of peace talks, Israel has agreed to release “heavyweight [Palestinian] prisoners who have been in jail for tens of years” but “will not yield on other central issues,” according to Haaretz. A settlement construction moratorium […]

*Marco Rubio said that an immigration reform bill is “95, 96 percent…in perfect shape and ready to go.” “I think the debate now is about what that border security provision looks like,” he said on “This Week.” Colleague Lindsey Graham echoed those sentiments on “Meet the Press” — saying he has “never been more optimistic” […]

New Hampshire is known for it’s wacky libertarian types. Hell, the state has even attracted a couple hundred of them who picked up and moved there in a bid to eventually overrun the place — they call their movement the Free State Project. But today, a seemingly non-ideological event in the Granite State offers us […]

A war with Iran over its nuclear program seems far less likely in the near future, after the country chose Hassan Rouhani in Friday’s (strictly controlled) presidential election. Rouhani, described as the only moderate in the race, was a nuclear negotiator under the reformist administration of former president Mohammed Khatami. Iranian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan […]

David Gregory just had Lindsey Graham, Andrea Mitchell, and David Ignatius on “Meet the Press” to discuss U.S. involvement in the Syrian Civil War — or the lack thereof. It was a textbook example of why Americans have completely lost faith in Washington. The round-table focused on President Obama’s plans to start (openly) arming Syrian […]

*The AP published a lengthy report on NSA surveillance based on interviews with anonymous officials. It’s not clear to what extent reporters were being fed talking points (as a few sentences before the kicker notes, “it’s spycraft, after all”), but it does seem to confirm the warning that the disclosures thus far represent just the […]

*The South China Morning Post is reporting that the U.S. government hasn’t made any official outreach to Hong Kong about Edward Snowden, according to “a source familiar with the situation.” *A New York Times profile of Snowden published today should put to bed all the fuss over his status as a high ranking “dropout.” From […]

POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein came out with a story on Tamerlan Tsarnaev today that could have an impact on the NSA debate. Gerstein noticed that during “a little-noticed exchange before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said that the Bureau had heard of Tsarnaev before the Russian government contacted federal officials about him. […]

Will all Senate staffers please report to the Senate Security Office? That’s what one email from the office effectively said on Friday. According to Forbes, the letter “asks security managers to remind Senate employees and contractors that the [NSA] documents are still technically classified and should be treated as if millions of people haven’t already […]