There is no reason to stay in Afghanistan. Rachel Maddow’s excellent “special comment”
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Paul Krugman Redo That Voodoo
Republicans are feeling good about the midterms – so good that they’ve started saying what they really think. This week the party’s Senate leadership stopped pretending that it cares about deficits, stating explicitly that while we can’t afford to aid the unemployed or prevent mass layoffs of schoolteachers, cost is literally no object when it comes to tax cuts for the affluent.
Roger Cohen argues that The State Department, “a repository of underused talent, should not be the White House annex for non-critical affairs”. That includes the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
You’ve got to salute Hillary. She’s got guts to go with that razor-sharp mind. It’s a heck of a job being secretary of state when the White House puts a tight collar around the big issues – Afghanistan, Iran, Israel-Palestine and Iraq – and you’re left with Nagorno-Karabakh, disputed Ottoman crimes of World War I and, if you’re lucky, U.S. bases on Okinawa.
The situation might be slightly less troubling if the boys in the White House – and they are overwhelmingly boys – were foreign-policy heavyweights. They’re not. Indeed, I’m told Henry Kissinger refers to them as “the kids.”
snip
After firing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Obama said he would tolerate debate but not division. My sense is his foreign-policy house is divided – and the weaker for it. Gen. James Jones, his national security adviser, speaks fine French – the French love that – but he’s left most people unconvinced. Tom Donilon, Jones’ deputy, dances around the vacuum as best he can. Like (Denis) McDonough, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel were brilliant campaign strategists, but should they be foreign-policy strategists?
In Clinton, Obama has a Baker-class secretary of state. For how much longer is he going to delegate her to Nagorno-Karabakh? The State Department, a repository of other underused talent, cannot be the White House annex for non-critical affairs.
Robert Reich comments on the inadequacies of the much touted Financial Regulation Bill the won’t.
The New Finance Bill: A Mountain of Legislative Paper, a Molehill of Reform
The American people will continue to have to foot the bill for the mistakes of Wall Street’s biggest banks because the legislation does nothing to diminish the economic and political power of these giants. It does not cap their size. It does not resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated commercial (normal) banking from investment (casino) banking. It does not even link the pay of their traders and top executives to long-term performance. In other words, it does nothing to change their basic structure. And for this reason, it gives them an implicit federal insurance policy against failure unavailable to smaller banks — thereby adding to their economic and political power in the future.
The bill contains hortatory language but is precariously weak in the details. The so-called Volcker Rule has been watered down and delayed. Blanche Lincoln’s important proposal that derivatives be traded in separate entities which aren’t subsidized by commercial deposits has been shrunk and compromised. Customized derivates can remain underground. The consumer protection agency has been lodged in the Fed, whose own consumer division failed miserably to protect consumers last time around.
George Lakoff sees Conservatism’s Death Gusher
Conservatism is an ideology of death.
It was conservative laissez-faire free market ideology — that maximizing profit comes first — that led to:
* The corrupt relationship between the oil companies and the Interior Department staff that was supposedly regulating them
* Minimizing cost by not drilling relief wells
* The principle that oil companies could be responsible their own risk assessments on drilling
* Maximizing profit by outsourcing risk assessment that told them what they wanted to hear: zero risk!
* Maximizing profit by minimizing cost of materials
* Maximizing profit by failing to pay cleanup crews and businesses for their losses
* Focusing only on profit by failing to test the cleanup methods to be used if something went wrong
* Minimizing cost by sacrificing the health of cleanup crews, refusing to allow them to use respirator masks to protect against toxic fumes.
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