Mark Mazzetti talks to Terry Gross about President Obama’s foreign policy:

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that [Obama] believed in drone strikes, but what has been surprising, I think, is the extent that these shadow wars really have come to define Obama’s foreign policy. That, you know, he ended the war in Iraq and, after the surge in Afghanistan, he’s now winding down, and it was interesting he said during his second inaugural address, ‘A decade of war is now coming to an end,’ but that’s a decade of the wars that we know about. It’s the decade of the public wars. What are continuing? Are these more secret wars, and there really isn’t any evidence yet of them abating. The drone strikes continue and we’ll see what happens in the second term.

Image from Obama’s January 2013 inaugural festivities via The White House

If you look at the two largest Super PACs on the Romney side, they have raised $122 million. By July they had, anyway. And in contrast, the two largest supporting Super PACs that are supporting Obama have raised only $30 million by that period, so it’s a very big differential. But it doesn’t begin to explain how much of a gap there is in money. There’s an even bigger gap in other kinds of outside groups that are not Super PACs — there are nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors and there the differential is just overwhelming. Obama is being completely out-raised in these secret donations which are piling in for Romney at this point.

— The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer on Fresh Air

“The Supreme Court is saying that campaign spending is a matter of free speech, but it has set up a situation where the more money you have the more speech you can buy,” Axelrod says. “That’s a threatening concept for democracy.” He adds, “If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there’s no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We’re averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or even eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we’re back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.”

-from Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article, Schmooze or Lose

Barack Obama signs the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into law

Tomorrow: 1st Lt. Josh Seefried and 1st Lt. Karl Johnson on the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Seefried blogged under the pseudonym JD Smith (for The Daily Beast) and Johnson wrote under the pseudonym Officer X (for Time) before DADT was repealed. Seefried is one of the co creators of OutServe. 

The numbers on a dollar bill are written in Helvetica font.

nprfunfacts:

The official font of President Obama’s presidential campaign was Gotham.

Everything written on this blog is sung in Comic Sans.

Saying that the action will strengthen the nation and end a practice that forced some members of the military to lie about themselves, President Obama this hour signed legislation that repeals the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that bars openly gay men and women from serving in the U.S. military.