Adam Weinstein

Engagement Editor

I'm Mother Jones' engagement editor and Tumblrizer, specializing in explanatory journalism and new-media reporting. As a Navy vet and ex-Iraq contractor, I'm also committed to articulating all things martial—good, bad, and weird—to new audiences.

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Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' engagement editor, having previously served the magazine as its national security reporter and copy editor. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the Tallahassee Democrat. He's written for the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, and Newsweek. A Navy veteran, two-day Jeopardy champion and ex-political scientist, he also did a recession-fueled stint as a military contractor in Iraq. For more about Adam and his writing, click here.

The Greatest 110 Words About Dick Cheney, Ever

—By Adam Weinstein

| Wed Aug. 24, 2011 11:32 PM PDT

If you must read a summary of Dick Cheney's new memoir, make it this one, from Charlie Savage of the New York Times. Here, in two paragraphs, Savage manages to summarize Cheney's obstinacy and cluelessness:

Former Vice President says in a new memoir that he urged President to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers—still stinging over "the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction"—expressed misgivings.

"I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor," Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. "But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, 'Does anyone here agree with the vice president?' Not a single hand went up around the room."

Now, Bashar al-Assad is not a nice guy, and inshallah, he's a soon-to-be-ex-dictator. But unilaterally bombing out a "suspected" nuclear reactor? In Syria? At the height of the civil war in Iraq? Bare months after Israel went into Lebanon and World War III nearly broke out?

When even the Bush cabinet, to a man and woman, can't stand Dr. Strangelove's bully ramblings anymore, you know the good doctor has turned one hell of a corner into Crazytown. Read on, and find out why Cheney was so ready for 9/11 and Condi was such a girly-girl.

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VIDEO: Birther Airman Goes AWOL to Protest Obama (UPDATED)

—By Adam Weinstein

| Wed Aug. 17, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

President Obama salutes service members after they became naturalized US citizens at the White House in April 2010.

[UPDATE: It turns out Staff Sgt. Moran misrepresented himself as "AWOL" or missing work; he's actually on approved leave pending separation from the service...for mental health issues, according to his own account. See the full update below.]

It seems so mundane it shouldn't qualify as news: A mid-echelon Air Force enlistee is staging a sick-in from his job as an ophthalmology technician on a medical base in Germany. But Staff Sgt. Daryn J. Moran's decision to go AWOL this week is getting some attention among conservatives in the United States. "My stated goal," he tweeted Saturday, "is to have B. Obama held responsible for his forged birth certificate and not be in the Oval Office for the next election." He later added, "Now it's plain and simple. Arrest B. Obama or arrest me. I'm waiting in my house."

Birther service members have come and gone since Obama's election, but Moran is different in two big respects: He's the first active-duty, overseas-serving veteran to refuse to serve; and rather than pursuing legal means, he's taking his angry case to the airwaves and internet. A self-professed conservative Christian, he has called in to a birther web show (see the video below), sent multiple emails to the site obamareleaseyourrecords.blogspot.com, vented on a Twitter account, and ultimately been profiled by his hometown newspaper, the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald. (In that article, Moran's father—also an Air Force vet—defends the birther ideal. "Quite frankly, my son is right," he says.)

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Revealed: The Electric Hitler Kool-Aid Estrogen Test

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Aug. 15, 2011 11:22 AM PDT

Giving you all the news you can use, the Telegraph of London filed this dispatch today:

Some tried bombs to neutralize the fuhrer, others tried bullets. All failed. Now it has come to light that British spies looked at an even more audacious way of derailing the man behind the German war machine—by giving him female sex hormones.

Agents planned to smuggle doses of oestrogen into his food to make him less aggressive and more like his docile younger sister Paula, who worked as a secretary.

Spies working for the British were close enough to Hitler to have access to his food, said Professor Brian Ford, who discovered the plot.

Ford, a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, says he uncovered the plot while working on his new book, Secret Weapons: Technology, Science, and the Race to Win World War II.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

Rick Perry Plays the "Military Respect" Card

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Aug. 15, 2011 3:03 AM PDT

A soldier at a dining facility on Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq, replaces President George W. Bush's photo with Barack Obama's seconds after Obama is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009.

While speaking at a military tribute Sunday in Waterloo, Iowa, Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry tossed the crowd a red-meat ad-lib. Here's what he said, according to Politico's Ben Smith:

"One of the reasons that I'm running for president is I want to make sure that every young man and woman who puts on the uniform of the United States respects highly the president of the United States," he said.

The obvious implication is that America's roughly 3 million active-duty and reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines don't respect President Barack Obama—whose administration drew down their numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, revamped the Department of Veterans Affairs, increased Pentagon funding, and oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Is Perry for real?

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Rick Scott Pays $360 a Year for State Health Insurance

Florida's anti-Obamacare governor and his tea party allies in the Legislature pay less for state-funded health insurance than janitors, cops, or teachers.

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Aug. 11, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Last year, political neophyte Rick Scott spent $73 million of his own money to bring the tea party's anti-government, pro-privatization agenda to the Florida governor's office. Today, the former executive pays just $30 a month for health care—and lets taxpayers cover the rest.

The governor, a proud bearer of the Republican Party's deregulation standard, has spent his first half-year in office decrying government waste: He's laid off thousands of Sunshine State employees, slashed their benefits, turned down (most of) the federal government's health care dollars, and put extra financial pressure on Florida retirees and Medicaid recipients. But Scott and his dependents pay one-fifth what a janitor in the state Capitol pays for health insurance…and less than 3 percent of what a retired state trooper pays for life-saving coverage.

When asked about the double standard, a spokesman for Scott declined to comment, calling his family's cheap state coverage "private matters."

[Read the full article]