The strange thing about the crackup in U.S.-Saudi relations is that it has been on the way for more than two years, like a slow-motion car wreck, but nobody in Riyadh or Washington has done anything decisive to avert it.

The breach became dramatic over the past week. Last Friday, Saudi Arabia refused to take its seat on the United Nations Security Council, in what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, described as “a message for the U.S., not the U.N,” according to the Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence, voiced “a high level of disappointment in the U.S. government’s dealings” on Syria and the Palestinian issue, in an interview with Al-Monitor.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) today sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry urging the United States leverage its influence to end the increasing practice in the Middle East to silence religious freedom.

“The freedom of religion is one of our most precious constitutional liberties,” Inhofe wrote in the letter. “The increasing attacks against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East is a violation of the basic human right of the freedom of religion. The United States must send a strong message that it will not accept such violations.”

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Updated with humor (Jon Stewart clip):  Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration’s showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors.

As questions mount over the website’s failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private developers with more expertise.
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Republicans were distracted from combating the country’s rising debt by fighting to repeal ObamaCare in the clash over the government shutdown, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said on Sunday.

Instead of focusing on the healthcare law, Republicans should have been trying to limit government spending, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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Saudi ambassador Abdallah al-Mouallimi’s reaction to election on Security Council, in New York on Thursday, October 17, 2013 (UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras)

After campaigning for its first ever seat on the U.N. Security Council and winning it in an election Thursday, Saudi Arabia in an astonishing move Friday said it would not take up the position CNSNews.com is reporting

In a statement published by the official SPA news agency the foreign ministry said while the kingdom was grateful for having won a two-year term, it had decided not to join.
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