By Steve Hynd
The BBC reports on the property bubble in Kabul.
According to local estate agents, prices in some parts of Kabul have risen by 75% in the past year.
Part of this increase is due to the prices that international agencies are willing to pay to acquire properties in [...]
By Steve Hynd
The scariest domestic political story of the day is this one: "Matters of faith, politics on table as Palin visits Graham"
"He's followed her career and likes her strong stand on faith," said son Franklin Graham, who was present for the 2 1/2-hour get-together. "Daddy feels God was using her" [...]
By John Ballard
Health Information Technology is to wasted revenue what tapeworms are to nutrition.
If waste is part of the revenue stream, then reducing waste reduces revenue.
Most people would reply "So what?" until they realize that reduced revenue leads to reduced profits, especially if you are selling something that is [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Democrats don't want to be in the majority. They don't want Republicans in the majority either, but the Democratic elected elite has minimal interest in being part of an effective governing majority. The healthcare bill is the best example. They have managed to shed their left flank, Ron [...]
By Ron Beasley
For the last seven years the University of Southern California has dominated the PAC10 college football league.
That domination came to an end in the extremly deep and competitive PAC10 this year. In what has to be the thriller of the year Oregon Quarterback Jeremiah [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
The headline reads:
Reid pulls together Senate Dems to take huge step on health reform
Although the Senate’s action was a mere procedural vote, it represented the end of weeks of anxiety for Reid while foreshadowing difficult legislative and political battles ahead. Applause from spectators greeted the final tally announced by [...]
By Derrick Crowe
If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.'s predicament in Afghanistan, he'd tell you:
The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.Think about that for a moment. We are paying roughly $1 million per troop, per' [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
I have said for years that the best way to end foreign misadventures like Iraq and Afghanistan was to make the millionaire pundits and neocons pay for them. Let's see how enthusiastic Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes are when their wars are being paid for by them. [...]
By Ron Beasley
Oberammergau, from a Kodachrome slide taken in 1970.
Click on picture for larger image
[...]By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, my good friend Derrick Crowe posted a quote from a recent piece on just wars by the Center for American Progress. It struck me as perfectly encapsulating the pitfalls of the kind of "we didn't mean to aquire one" notion of benevolent empire Americans seem to' [...]
By Steve Hynd
David Milliband, the British Foreign Secretary, is a typical Blairite. If his lips are moving, he's spinning something - nothing gets said without it serving a domestic political purpose. Yesterday he had this to say about Afghanistan:
In an interview with the Guardian at the end of a visit [...]
By Ron Beasley
DaveNoon at Lawyers, Guns and Money is reading Going Rogue so we don't have too. Now I'm not really interested in even reading about the book but I found this amusing.
I realize this is a pedantic complaint, but would it be possible for Sarah Palin to launch [...]
By John Ballard
Let us turn our attention away from the turkeys in Washington to those in the grocery stores.
Thanksgiving Day is nigh.
Purists may want to consider a real turkey this year instead of what we have been taught to eat in recent years.
I've not had one, incidentally. They're [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
Here in my State of Oregon it was announced this week that health insurance premiums will be going up 16 percent in 2010. Some employers will increase the amount of the employees share while some small and medium sized businesses will be priced out and have to [...]
By John Ballard
Frank Sharry is Founder and Executive Director of America's Voice. With the support of allies in the immigration reform community, he created the new organization in early 2008 to focus on communications and media as part of a renewed effort to win comprehensive immigration reform. Prior to heading America's Voice, Frank [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
I am old enough to remember the thrill of the moon landings and the national pride that followed. There was little doubt that The United States was the worlds technology leader. Thanks to foolish wars and tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent the mantle of technology [...]
By Steve Hynd
Last December I wrote: "it is already an accepted fact among the Very Serious Person set that Obama's idea of negotiation without preconditions will get exactly one shot, will fail, and then the bombs will begin to fall." Well, that looks to be the way events [...]
By John Ballard
Said before.What a golden opportunity has been missed to educate Americans about the implications of their health care choices. Otis W. Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, in an op-ed in today's Washington Post condemning the USPSTF guidelines, confirms [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Another edition of what Ian Welsh said:If you’ve been right down the line, then you are precisely the sort of person who isn’t “serious” and shouldn’t be listened to when it comes to what it takes to fix the problem.
Why? Because everyone knows that fixing the problem will end [...]THE DEPROLIFERATOR -- As you no doubt know, deterrence is the product of a balance of power -- nuclear arsenals, in other words, that are roughly equal. Constrained by the eye-for-an-eye principle, but to the umpteenth power, states armed with nuclear weapons, such as the United States and [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
The wingers are outraged. Why? Because Sen. Patrick Leahy said there was no reason to interrogate Osama bin Laden if he's captured. This was a stupid thing for Leahy to say but the outrage is just as stupid.
The writers of fiction know it, movie makers know' [...]
by Eric Martin
Johann Hari has a fascinating piece in The Independentthat recounts his interviews with several British nationals that have made the journey from active participantsin jihadi/terrorist causes and back. Hari's quest to find out how and why certain people join terrorist groups, or espouse and propagate radical Islamist ideology, had been frustrated by the reticence and dissembling [...]
By Steve Hynd
Dan Froomkin asks today what I asked yesterday: what's taking so long with Obama's AfPak decision? And he comes to the same answer: fear of the Wuss Factor.
according to Paul R. Pillar, a Georgetown University professor who formerly served as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst for [...]
By Steve Hynd
Hamid Karzai has survived his inauguration for a second term as Afghanitan's president, and has spoken like a King: he has promised to end' [...]
Schradenfreude may strike Texas, as a plain reading of their anti-gay marriage laws and amendments that passed in 2005 implies the possibility of all marriages not being legal in Texas. [h/t James Joyner]
From McClatchey:By Dave Anderson:
Accidental systems disruption happened in New York earlier this week. Fox has the local story:Commentary By Ron Beasley
No, it's not the dreaded "liberals" who are singing that song to Sarah Palin, it's the Republicans and conservatives who dream of winning again.
First we have Conservative and Evangelical Christian Rod Dreher:
The rap on Palin is that she's too shallow and inexperienced for the presidency — a [...]
By John Ballard
This is too long to tweet and too short to blog, but too good to miss.
Tom Watson riffs on the Palin phenomenon.
Journalistic poetry.
...Newsweek went with the full Joan on its cover this week, fronting essays by Evan Thomas and Christopher Hitchens, pieces that are also accompanied by [...]
By John Ballard
This quote speaks for itself.
For a fuller view go to the link.
Hospitals have no incentives to prevent unnecessary hospitalization. Physicians, paid mostly by fee-for-service, have every incentive to order more tests and procedures. Neither is rewarded directly for making – or keeping – patients healthy. Key to [...]
By John Ballard
The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force kicked over a hornet's nest this week by changing the long-standing recommendation for routine mammogram screenings for breast cancer in women. I cannot imagine any reader who missed the story, but in case anyone just recovered from a coma here is a [...]
By John Ballard
Dina Temple-Raston's report this morning on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed does little to explain how this man became a poster child for terrorism. Though it comes as no surprise, I had no idea he had been a foreign student in an American university in his younger years, but [...]
By Steve Hynd
It's become fairly conventional wisdom that the regional winner of the Iraq war was Iran, which now has its pensioners in control of the Iraqi central government and - theoretically - all that oil. Kurds and Sunnis may have something to say about that, however, especially [...]
An Afghan policeman auditions for the role of Estragon
By Steve Hynd
Even those of us who oppose any kind of McChrystal Plan for troop escalation in Afghanistan are getting a bit antsy waiting for Godot Obama to make his mind up. I realise that its a complex set of issues [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Just a few quick hits on institutional and governmental capture and failure. I would write more, but I have to change diapers and get to a play-date in a few minutes (I have my priorities.)
Brad Delong on institutional failure and a Depression:In my [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Chris Briem has an accurate and scary paragraph at Null Space for anyone interested in municipal finance in the State of Pennsylvania:
And connected to everything are the finances at the casino. Revenues down there have clearly settled into a range. No joke how everything comes back [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
Judging from his campaign rhetoric we might have assumed that Barack Obama would have stood up to the Corporatocracy not join it but as Robert Scheer points out join it is what he did.
What's up with Barack Obama? The candidate for change once promised to take [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen told reporters that the Army isn't at a "tipping point" yet, even though the stress of repeated combat deployments has driven Army and Marine Corps suicides up to a record rate alongside cases of post-traumatic stress.
Today, Spencer Ackerman' [...]
By John Ballard
OFA (Organizing For America) had a contest to select an amateur video to promote health care reform using paid advertising. The contest energized the base, then from among twenty finalists one entry was selected by voting. In order for one's vote to be counted it was necessary to' [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
Obama has to make a decision of Afghanistan - is he going to make an LBJ decision and be a one term president or.....? Harvey Wasserman explains the wrong decision will make him a one term president.
As the world awaits Barack Obama's decision on Afghanistan, [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Listen, transcribe, submit is the Stephan Colbert indictment of the press corps during the Bush era.
There were minimal "serious people" who actually had the gall to look at what they wrote three months ago from the same source, or three years ago, and comparing it to the [...]
Two stories from the same edition, yesterday's New York Times. The first outlines the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's botched negotiations with later rescued insurance giant, AIG:
The Fed “refused to use its considerable leverage,” Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, [...]
By Dave Anderson:
What happens when the money that that Iraqi government has been spreading around runs out? The New York Times Op-ed page raises this question:
As much as 51 percent of the Iraqi labor force is either unemployed or underemployed; the number is even higher for young workers...
Iraq’s private [...]
by Eric Martin
Colonel Gian Gentile, the antidote to the epidemic of irrational exuberance invested in the ability of counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) to solve any insoluble military/political conundrum, offers yet another reality check:
History shows that occupation by foreign armies with the intent of changing occupied societies does not work and ends up costing [...]
By Steve Hynd
Wonderful news: our protoges have learned their lessons well and outstripped us:
Lawless Somalia and war-torn Afghanistan topped a blacklist on Tuesday of the world's most corrupt countries drawn up by the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International.
TI's annual corruption index showed how countries devastated by conflict have become overrun by [...]
By Ron Beasley
Daniel Larison has another great Palin post but the quote of the day comes from commenter nomakesense who makes a lot of sense.
The current direction of the Republican party is, quite frankly, horrifying. Policy is being directed by people who are essentially entertainers. I don’t believe that Palin has [...]
By Dave Anderson:
I wrote in August 2008 that defensive legalization of at least marijuana would become part of the national political debate because it is the most direct attack on cartel cash flow that is fueling the hollowing out of Mexico amidst massive political violence:
Quite a few people are willing [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Pakistan supports the Quetta Shura Taliban and other anti-government insurgent groups/networks in Afghanistan because Pakistan wants strategic depth against India. The warlords of the Northern Alliance and the Karzai government have a long history of having good working ties with India. Crushing Pashtun nationalism and strength in the [...]
By Steve Hynd
Did the U.S. and allies just put Karzai on the "dead pool" list?
The establishment of a new investigations unit with the backing of Scotland Yard's Serious Organised Crimes Agency and the FBI was announced in Kabul by senior officials flanked by the US and British ambassadors following' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Faced with cratering support for the occupation in Afghanistan, Britain's Gordon Brown is trying to thread the needle by claiming that the UK's presence there is justified while looking for the fastest possible exit strategy- preferably a strategy that shows tangible progress before next year's general election. In what' [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
It has become obvious that the Republicans will attack and try to obstruct anything - anything the Democrats and the Obama administration try to do even if it was something they might have agreed with a few days before, In yesterday's New York Times Oregon's Representative Earl [...]
By John Ballard
This is an information only post.
Having listened closely for years and still not figuring out this reporter's name, I finally got around to looking it up. Doualy Xaykaothao has been reporting from all over Asia since 1999 and with every broadcast I have turned up the radio [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post ran a short piece claiming that:
Iran has completely rejected a UN-brokered nuclear deal, but US President Barack Obama has postponed the official announcement on Teheran's refusal due to internal political reasons...The official reportedly told journalists in Paris that Iran has also refused to [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
I covered the dangerous senile rantings of the old fool David Broder here yesterday morning.
It's still getting some play over at memeorandum this morning.
Steve Benen has a great reaction:
I realize there's been a painful decline in the quality of Broder's analysis' [...]
By Steve Hynd
There's been a substantial change in Obama administration rhetoric in the last week or two, which has only accelerated after Gen. Eikenberry put his spanner in the escalationists' works. Hillary Clinton, talking to ABC News this Sunday, gives the clearest indication yet that the administration is looking' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Support for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan is cratering in Britain, according to a new poll for the Independent on Sunday.
In a ComRes poll for the IoS this weekend, an overwhelming proportion – 71 per cent – supported this newspaper's call for a phased withdrawal of British [...]
By John Ballard
Dead Pool time.
Get braced for a deluge of opinions as KSM goes on trial in NYC.
Everybody who is Anybody (as well as the Nobodies) will have something to say.
My post is prompted by something said by a new contributor at Coming Anarchy.
...whether it’s by military [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
It's not too surprising but the narcissistic ignorant insensitive wingnuttery are upset because:
Obama has now done it again. Andrew Malcolm asks (and reports): "How low will he go? Obama gives Japan's Emperor Akihito a wow bow."
Obama's breach of protocol is of a piece [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Pakistani press has noticed a letter by Sir Nicholas Barrington, former British envoy to Pakistan, in the London Times:
“Massive foreign bases encourage ideas that the Americans and NATO want to stay in, and dominate, Afghanistan . Many think that the West is motivated by a [...]
By Ron Beasley
Juan Cole on the Republican Party:
This decision by the Obama administration demonstrates faith in the American way of life, and a conviction that even the worst mass murderers can be dealt justice by democratic institutions.Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight the decision, since they much prefer to hold people forever without [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
David Broder proves beyond all doubt that he is not just a senile old fool but a dangerous one at that. In Enough Afghan debate he channels Dick Cheney and says:
The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Pennsylvania has a tradition of electing governors from the same party for two terms and then giving the other party two terms. That has gone back since 1968 when the governorship was term limited to two terms. So just based on a historical pattern, it would not be [...]
By John Ballard
Immigration reform may be the Next Big Thing.
Janet Napolitano fired the first shot yesterday speaking to the Center for American Progress.
We all know the story: A steady influx of undocumented workers, crossing our borders illegally in search of work and a better life. A market among [...]
By John Ballard
This man is so rational he makes me want to move to Vermont.
His constituents must be very proud of him.
Contrary to my previous post, I'm reluctantly back to undecided about the Coathangar provision of the bill.
A Massachusetts race indicates it's too soon to expect [...]
By Ron Beasley
AP (sorry) fact checks Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue, and finds it lacking when it comes to facts.
Meanwhile Matthew Continetti asks: can Sarah Palin Make A Comeback? He finds some really lame reasons to answer yes but Daniel Larison says No She Can't and Ann [...]
By Steve Hynd
A shockingly insensitive U.S. Army has arrested a single mother and soldier who couldn't find a carer for her child while she was on deployment to Afghanistan. The Army also handed the child over to Child Protective Services and now plans to fly the soldier to Afghanistan for' [...]
By John Ballard
Most Progressives, myself included, reacted to the Coathanger Amendment with dismay. After all the time and effort spent plowing the ground getting ready for eventual Congressional action on the Freedom Of Choice Act, the leadership of the House betrayed everyone by caving to one of the most [...]
By Steve Hynd
Stories like this encourage my view that diplomatic ranks tend to be drawn from over-privileged frat boys with only a tenuous hold on reality.
The interior ministry said an 'unidentified object' found recently in the vehicle of Danish embassy security advisor Chris John turned out to be a fake bomb, the [...]
By Steve Hynd
The news that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other detainees accused of helping orchestrate the 9/11 attacks are headed to New York for federal trial has all the wingnut pantswetters beside themselves in horror. You'd think KSM was Magneto from the way they carry on.
The perfect' [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
As our current health care system collapses people will suffer but so will the health care industry and the insurance companies as fewer and fewer people can afford their services. It's already happening:
A weak economy has reduced the insurer's customer base
Regence BlueCross BlueShield, Oregon's largest [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
Revisionist history is nothing new. As they say the winners write history. We saw it with Ronald Reagan. Shortly after he left office the process began to white wash the negatives and invent positives. He is giving credit for ending the cold war and bringing down the [...]
By John Ballard
Charts like this are supposed to make us feel better. Light at the end of the tunnel and all that.
I would feel better if I didn't have such a bad attitude about the Reagan/Clinton/Bush years. The last two and a half decades will be remembered as the Age' [...]
By John Ballard
Found at Facing South
More links and details at the source.
By Steve Hynd
According to the Financial Times:
As US President Barack Obama prepares to make a final decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, his visit to Beijing next week will be an opportunity to press China to [...]
By Steve Hynd
Peter Galbraith, who was recently in the news in a good way for slamming UN complicity in Afghan election corruption, is back in the news in a bad way. Galbraith, who was a signator of the PNAC letter calling for the invasion of Iraq and a major influence [...]
By Steve Hynd
Today's must-read is by Aram Roston over at The Nation as he gets in-depth about a major part of the Taliban's funding: "the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes" in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors and' [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
It looks like Obama may be getting closer to doing the right think in Afghanistan will we see the same thing on the economy. If he does he needs to look at what happened and how we got here. Robert Weissman reminds us that this [...]
By Steve Hynd
Spencer Ackerman has a great piece today based around a leaking staffer inside the National Security Council's deliberations on Afghnaistan strategy. The staffer noted that everyone at the NSC is annoyed with Ambassador Eikenberry for apparently leaking his own cables to Obama and confirms that the NSC' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
What was the Dean campaign critique of the Democratic pro-Iraq invasion position --- If you offer people Republican and Republican lite, they'll take the Republicans as they know they believe their crazy instead of mealy mouthing it.
Ian Welsh notes the Democratic Party elite has not' [...]
By Dave Anderson
By Steve Hynd
Just as it seemed that all was hunky for the escalationists, US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry has stuck his oar in the works. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post have the leaked story of secret cables from Eikenberry to the White House:
expressing deep [...]
By John Ballard
Let's hope the teabaggers can peek out from behind their American Flags today long enough to check out this report regarding immigrants in the armed forces.
Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Richard Durbin (D-IL), Kristin Gillibrand (D-NY), and Russ Feingold (D-WI) have introduced' [...]
By John Ballard
This is something for Veteran's Day I came across several years ago. I posted it at my old blog with regularity since most readers don't read archives and items like this are unforgettable. The original link is still active but the formatting has become messy.
August 13, [...]
By Steve Hynd
Reuters has an interesting report today from diplomats at the IAEA in Vienna:
Iran has effectively stopped expanding active uranium enrichment since September, diplomats said, while considering a big power offer to fuel a medical reactor if it turns over enriched material seen [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
The right wingers are pro life until the baby is born but then it and it's family is on their own when it comes to medical care or proper diet or living conditions that would allow a life worth living - hypocrisy!
The' [...]
By Steve Hynd
I have to admit that, as a European - a Scotsman - in a foreign land I don't really get America's Veterans Day. Reading blogposts and tweets by American writers today, I've seen countless expressions of support for those who serve because they "defend our freedom". I managed' [...]
By Gregg Carlstrom
Leah Farrell, the editor of the excellent All Things Counterterrorism blog, has an op-ed in The Australian looking at Al-Qaeda and the Obama administration's proposed Afghan strategy.
The whole thing is worth a read, but to summarize Farrell's point: Al-Qaeda wants the U.S. to increase its military [...]
By John Ballard
I use the term in progress advisedly. In Washington terms like "progress" or "in progress" don't mean the same as when used in everyday conversation.
Pat Garofalo at the The Wonk Room compares the two versions of financial services regulatory reform being crafted in the House and' [...]
By John Ballard
Posted without comment.Today my little brother Bill would have turned 51.
Which means he's been dead almost 9 years. Can't quite understand that.
He was waiting for health insurance to kick in at his new job: We'd watched how medical costs had starved our family when we' [...]
Commentary By Ron Beasley
I have have said that a bad health care bill is worse than no bill at all. Dr Marcia Angell agrees:
Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry [...]
By Dave Anderson:
Allegheny County's politics have been thrown into a tizzy this afternoon. Judge Wettick has ordered a four year rolling reassessment for the entire county as the base year system produces highly inequitable results. Re-assessments are the local political career killer and everyone in the regional political system' [...]
By Dave Anderson:
This is a casino post, while the next post will be a broader political-economy and municipal finance post. The Post-Gazette reports that Allegheny County will assess the Rivers Casino in the near future instead of putting the problem off by hiring consultants to conduct the assessment. [...]
Ron Beasley, Hootsbuddy, Dave Anderson, Steve Hynd, Eric Martin, BJ Bjornson, Gregg Carlstrom, Jay McDonough, Russ Wellen, Derrick Crowe, Kenneth Anderson
