Barack Obama made the hard call in Iraq, but he didn’t answer the hardest questions. As John Cassidy asks in the New Yorker, “Once the bombing starts, when will it end?” There are other hard questions for a president who ran on getting America out of Iraq and who finally did. What is the goal here, and how will we know when we reach it? ISIS is a particularly loathsome enemy. Can Obama really let Iraq fall into its hands? Dexter Filkins argues that Obama has no choice but to help the Kurds hold off ISIS because the Kurds are the only ones who can.
He is a legendary German gun designer. He designed the gun that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. He is now working on making a safer “smart” gun. How do you think that’s going over with the gun-rights crowd? Via the Washington Post.
Ross Douthat argues that Obama doesn’t have the authority to extend the deferred action plan for DREAMers to the non-DREAMER illegal-immigrant population. Via the New York Times.
In the New Republic, Brian Beutler argues that Douthat’s argument is wrong. He puts it this way: Saying “Obama Is Caesar” is sexier than saying “Steve King Is Right.”
We have been lucky in Colorado, but the fire season is not so quiet in the state of Washington, where, Timothy Egan writes, it seems that half the state is on fire. Via the New York Times.
This is your brain on fish – bigger, thicker, healthier and less inclined (with one serving a week) to fall victim to dementia. Via the Atlantic.
[Photo of street art in 2012 by Jonathan McIntosh via Flickr/Creative Commons.]