Mother Jones

"Regulating financial products based on fairness, simplicity, and appropriate risk is an entirely new paradigm," notes Reid Cramer, director of the New America Foundation-Asset Building Program ...

... we've built to oversee development and maintenance of our nuclear weapons are incompetent," says Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, who has written about the episode. ...

A longtime city dweller with experience as a community organizer, President Barack Obama is uniquely able to make the case for strong and healthy cities--to be an urban champion. And when Obama made good on a campaign promise to create a White House Office of Urban Affairs and announced that Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión would be its first director, urban aficionados cheered. But there's been a hitch: News reports have disclosed that Carrión received unpaid work from an architect associated with a large development project, and a prosecutor is looking into this.

Instead, much of the sharing involves what are essentially electronic versions of paper documents, rather than fully sortable and analyzable information databases.

One day in Iraq, a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad's Mansur district and took me to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We drove past checkpoints manned by "Awakening" militias created by the Americans to counteract the Shiite-led Mahdi Army militia. My friend, a Shiite himself from Shaab, put a tape in the cassette player. "Now we are the Mahdi Army," my friend laughed, as the singing started. The songs praised populist anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi militia loyal to him, which frequently blew up or kidnapped Americans and other foreigners.

In April, Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours, told the tech website ZDNet that the government "could wire Walter Reed or Bethesda (the two biggest military hospitals) for VistA in an afternoon. Technically, there's no big problem." In fact, VistA's code is so flexible that it's even been adapted for use in other countries.

Few Americans had ever heard of a SOFA until earlier this year, when the Internet lit up with a revelation many observers of US foreign policy had long predicted. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, US officials were pressing the Iraqi government to accept an indefinite US military presence, including--and here was the shocker--up to 58 American bases on Iraqi turf.

...Was Lieberman right in his history? Do the evildoers really mount terrorist operations to test new presidents early in their terms? I put this question to Peter Bergen, a journalist who is an expert on al Qaeda and terrorism. (He's written two good books on al Qaeda.) Bergen replies:

"The planning cycle of these ops militate against the idea that they were planned to test the new president. 9/11 was on the drawing board in 1996 and serious planning began in 1999.

Daniel Levy, a former Middle East peace negotiator, is Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation, and of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation:

"I'm going to look at the Israeli side of the equation as I think this is the direction that any action is most likely to come from, although the blowback would of course most likely impact the US (and perhaps embroil it in a war with Iran).

For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped.