Obama Plays Cool Hand, Wins in Pirate Crisis

Can't let hostage-holding House run the country: Paul Krugman

(NEWSER) - Look out, President Obama: House Republicans have created another “hostage situation.” This time, they’re holding the debt ceiling for a ransom of big spending cuts, writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times . The Republican Party doesn't control the White House or the Senate, so you wouldn’t think the party could “impose its agenda on the nation. But the modern GOP doesn’t believe in following normal rules.” And don't be swayed by what those on the right are saying, Krugman contends: If we don't raise the debt ceiling, bad, bad things will happen. More»

Administration bemoans death of bully pulpit

(NEWSER) - Even if it seems like the president is constantly on TV and in the press, the White House says it’s struggling to get its message out: the “bully pulpit” is no more, writes Howard Kurtz for the Daily Beast . “There’s an alternative story here that we’re trying to tell,” says the president’s communications director. "But there’s an element of spitting in the ocean.” More»

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."

Released hostage says he saw child, other women aboard vessel

(NEWSER) - A just-released pirate hostage says the Somalian scallywags are holding a 12-year-old Ukrainian girl captive aboard the British ship Ariana. Captain Ricardo Blach, whose ship, the Alakrana, was released last week after six weeks of captivity, says the pirates at one point brought him aboard the Ariana, where he met the girl, along with her mother and father, an Ariana crew member. More»

Prez reads commander riot act over his 'Chaos-istan' dig

(NEWSER) - President Obama's talk last week aboard Air Force One with Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal wasn't merely a meeting, as was widely reported in the press, but a dressing down over the general's "shocking" recent comments calling for more troops, says the Telegraph. McChrystal was called on the carpet for outspoken remarks in a speech in London, where he ripped an alternate strategy advocated by Vice President Joe Biden to rely on drone missiles and special forces strikes at al-Qaeda targets. More»