Kiss Afghanistan and say goodbye? Not quite. But President Obama wants to make it clear that we're outta there ...eventually ... while letting Pakistan know that we're not "abandoning the region."
"It’s accurate to say that he will be more explicit about both goals and time frame than has been the case before and than has been part of the public discussion,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity to discuss the speech before it is delivered. “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.”
The officials would not disclose the time frame. But they said it would not be tied to particular conditions on the ground nor would it be as firm as the current schedule for withdrawing troops in Iraq, where Mr. Obama has committed to withdrawing most combat units by August and all forces by the end of 2011. ...NYT
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More jobs. That is, in addition to the 30,000+/- in Afghanistan. Paul Krugman notes that we're at the highest levels of unemployment we've seen since the 1930's and lays out a design to restore employment levels.
Now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers. This is wrong and unacceptable. Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean that full employment is just around the corner. ...Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.So it’s time for an emergency jobs program.
Any measures taken, says Krugman, should be direct measures rather than an indirect stimulus like a tax cut. No more trickle-down: no more of that "Reagan pees, we catch the drops" approach.
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Pakistan is the real concern. (Don't pay attention to what Obama says. Watch what he does.)
Despite the public and political attention focused on the number of new troops, Pakistan has been the hot core of the months-long strategy review. The long-term consequences of failure there, the review concluded, far outweigh those in Afghanistan."We can't succeed without Pakistan," a senior administration official involved in the White House review said. "You have to differentiate between public statements and reality. There is nobody who is under any illusions about this." ...WaPo
New (old) controls on Wall Street? Many of us would like to see controls that work and can be sustained -- no matter how off-beat they may seem.
Sen. Maria Cantwell wants to use state gambling laws to regulate parts of Wall Street, saying someone needs to police financial markets where "casino capitalism" involving highly speculative trades she likens to sophisticated betting continue unabated and threaten to create yet another financial crisis. "She's going for their jugular," Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor, said of the effort by Cantwell, a Washington state Democrat. ...Cantwell wants to repeal parts of a 2000 law that barred states from using their gambling laws to help rein in the nearly $600 trillion derivatives market. ...McClatchy
Harry Reid is feeling more pressure from the left. Even as he's trying to keep right side of his party in line on health care reform, unions are pressuring him from the left.
According to union officials, the bill’s employer mandate needs to be expanded to include all employers. Further, they are lobbying for the elimination of an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans, known as “Cadillac” plans. Finally, labor’s support of a robust government-run insurance plan, the “public option,” puts the Senate leader in tough spot considering centrist senators either want to jettison the plan or find a weaker compromise before voting for the bill. ...The Hill
