Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is not stepping down. The deadline to form a new government is passing without a new government being formed. Maliki, perhaps taking a tip from U.S. House Republicans, is planning to sue Iraqi President Faud Masum. The state of democracy in Iraq is anything but stable. And meanwhile the fighting continues, and Americans, in a limited way, join the fray. It’s no wonder that Barack Obama, the president who finally got American troops out of Iraq, is worried about getting America too involved in the battle against ISIS.
With much of the world in crisis, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both weighed in with major foreign policy interviews – Obama with the New York Times’s Tom Friedman and Clinton with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Clinton got the big headline by calling Obama’s Syria policy a “failure.” Her interview was actually much more nuanced than that, but, as Maggie Haberman writes in Politico, it looks like Clinton positioning herself for 2016.
Meanwhile on the Republican side of 2016, Molly Ball explains Ted Cruz’s strategy in the Atlantic. And Robert Draper wonders in the New York Times magazine whether Rand Paul will steal the libertarian-leaning youth vote from the Democrats.
CNN does a piece on Colorado’s dramatic drop in teen pregnancy — and the role played by lost-cost IUDs.
Amy Walter explains why the improving economy is doing nothing for Obama‘s approval rating. Via the Cook Political Report.
In Colorado, a multi-million dollar incentive package for the Gaylord Rockies hotel and conference center is the result of a complex layering of financial deals by the city of Aurora and raises questions about “corporate welfare” and a “tax giveaway,” according to a Gazette investigation.
Whatever you might have heard, it’s not the Ivy League’s fault that Americans work too much and think too much about work. It’s something called modernity. Via the New Yorker.
[Photo of signs in Iraq from 2009 by Chris De Bruyn via Flickr/Creative Commons.]
