THE NEW YEAR is here. I'm celebrating the fact that I've finished the next installment of The Beltway Series.... Book 2, which will be out in May 2017. The cover reveal is on January 28, 2017, so mark your calendar. Book 3 will be out in the fall of 2017. It's a big book year [...]
Obama Targets Russian Villains BETTER LATE than... Reporting from David Sanger The Obama administration was riven by an internal debate about how much of its evidence to make public. Although the announcement risks revealing sources and methods, it was the best way, some officials inside the administration argued, to make clear to a [...]
Kerry Warns Israel of Trump's Naïveté photo via State Department, public domain Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, and right now Obama and Kerry rightly believe that Israel is driving drunk toward annexing the West Bank and becoming either a bi-national Arab-Jewish state or some Middle Eastern version of 1960s South Africa, where [...]
WISHING YOU a very Merry Christmas. It's especially merry in our world because The Beltway Series, Book 2 is written, which will be out in May. Now the fun part begins. Editing, which takes a raw form story idea and makes it into something that develops what was begun in Boook 1 and opens out [...]
Obama's Watch: Aleppo Collapses, Russian Cyberterrorism “We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen." So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to [...]
State Diplomacy Business: Rex Tillerson Trump Pick Under Rex Tillerson's leadership, ExxonMobil struck oil this summer drilling in Russia's Arctic region, despite U.S. sanctions against Kremlin-controlled partner Rosneft. Back home, Tillerson has urged an end to the decades-old ban on exporting U.S. crude oil and also supports lifting regulatory constraints on the building [...]
Bernie Sanders Straight Talk in Trump Countryscreen capture via Senator Sanders, Instagram IT IS never easy moving forward after a stunning loss. It's good to see Senator Sanders doing exactly what the Democratic Party should have started doing the day after the election. Walking into Wisconsin and talking with voters on all sides. [...]
THE MAGNIFICENT MISS SLOANE. JESSICA CHASTAIN owns Miss Sloane and it's the strongest character she's played since her Oscar-nominated performance in Zero Dark Thirty. But it's the strength of her character's commitment to her career over everything else, including a personal life, that is making reviewers a little crazy. She doesn't smile and [...]
U.S. Intel Agencies, 'High Probability' of Russian Hack They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they [...]
Donald Trump, Time's Person of the Year Now it’s difficult to count all the ways Trump remade the game: the huckster came off more real than the scripted political pros. The cable-news addict made pollsters look like chumps. The fabulist out-shouted journalists fighting to separate fact from falsehood. The demagogue won more Latino [...]
