Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
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But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
The President of the United States recently told the United Nations that “global warming” poses a threat to national security and may engender conflicts as populations are displaced by rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms etc. etc. etc. However, it is now clear that there is no basis for the notion that the barely-detectable human influence on the climate is likely to prove a threat to climate, still less to national security.
The first principle to which any national security advisor must adhere is that of objective truth. Though he must have an understanding of politics, he is not a politician: he is a truth-bearer. Therefore, he begins by narrowing down the issue to a single, central question whose answer determines whether the suggested threat is real. He then tries to find the truthful answer to that question, and draws his conclusion from that. [Emphasis added.]
Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We've honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's performance at the UN, we're delivering it with just the right tone of outrage:
How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism!
Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie – who's going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust?
The right to self-defense – perfect.
But I'd like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense?
We probably wouldn't admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say – again, in one voice – “No!”
This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We're entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.
In opposition to the Pakistan Act, sponsored byBarbara Boxer [D-CA], Thomas Carper [D-DE], Robert Casey [D-PA], Hillary Clinton [D-NY], Christopher Dodd [D-CT], Richard Durbin [D-IL], Charles Hagel [R-NE], John Kerry [D-MA], Richard Lugar [R-IN], Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI], Ron Paul offers some thoughts worthy of consideration.
Phi Beta Iota: The Republic is now confronted with both an Executive and a Legislative Branch that make decisions without regard to strategy, holistic reality-based appreciations, or public discourse on costs and benefits. The Administration is proposing, and Congress is approving, without serious thought and without regard to the best interests of the American public. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are turning in their graves.
The President says the Constitution is defective, and now Senator Harry Reid is preparing the coup de grace. Once Reid and Obama emerge from their transparent closed-door consultations on how to blend the two competing Senate Health Care bills, Senator Reid has a nifty parlor trick up his sleeve. . . . . . .The plan to railroad Obamacare through was initially reported last week by Huma! n Events and The Heritage Foundation, and has now been confirmed by Senator Reid's office.Here is Senator Reid's plan in a nutshell, from CNS News: A senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told CNSNews.com that it is “likely” that Reid will use H.R. 1586-a bill passed by the House in March to impose a 90-percent tax on bonuses paid to employees of certain bailed-out financial institutions-as a “shell” for enacting the final version of the Senate's health care bill, which Reid is responsible for crafting.The rub here, and the reason Senator Reid has conjured up his little parlor trick, is the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 7: All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.
