Why Can’t AIG Get Rid Of Its Non-Toxic Assets? Don’t say AIG never put anything in your wallets, taxpayers! The company just sold its Taiwanese securities unit to the Bank of East Asia, for something between ten and twenty million dollars, or between five and nine retention bonuses. Which…
Spakovsky Finds More DOJ Politicization: Brazile Speech On …. Women’s Achievements! One the one hand: Firing US attorneys because they won’t bring politically motivated prosecutions. On the other: inviting Donna Brazile to speak at a “Women’s History Month” event. Pretty much the same thing, right? That’s what voter suppression guru and…
Are Facebook Friends Really Your Friends? The ease of creating virtual friendships teaches us that what we crave aren’t just cyber connections, but meaningful connections.
Business and Health Care, Money and Merit Why doesn’t business get out of health-care provision? It really does seem like it’s more ideology and inertia than anything else. And not just on the part of business: I don’t get the sense that it’s really popular politically…
Coherent Reform Requires New Principles I agree with Bob Litan that we’ll get change, for better or worse. To get rid of dead ideas, and move forward to a good place, I think America needs to have a discussion on the principles for change….
The Crisis and Fresh Thinking It may be wishful thinking on my part but I think that the current crisis and likely slow recovery will afford considerable opportunities for fresh thinking, including a willingness to reject some of those dead ideas targeted by Matt…
Obama On Afghanistan: I Will Not ?Simply Assume That More Troops Always Result In An Improved Situation? Since President Obama announced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan last week, he and his administration have been careful to distinguish it from President Bush’s surge in Iraq. Today on Fox News Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stressed that the focus of the mission in Afghanistan has been “narrowed”: “I think what we need […]
Since President Obama announced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan last week, he and his administration have been careful to distinguish it from President Bush’s surge in Iraq. Today on Fox News Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stressed that the focus of the mission in Afghanistan has been “narrowed”: “I think what we need to focus on…is making headway and reversing the Taliban’s momentum and strengthening the Afghan army and police, and really going after Al Qaeda.”
Today in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Obama underscored this point. He pointed out that the reason he has increased troops in Afghanistan is because levels there are “greatly underresourced.” However, he is not going to “simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation”:
OBAMA: What I will not do is to simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation. […]
But just because we needed to ramp up from the greatly underresourced levels that we had doesn’t automatically mean that, if this strategy doesn’t work, that what’s needed is even more troops.
There may be a point of diminishing returns in terms of troop levels. We’ve got to also make sure that our civilian efforts, our diplomatic efforts and our development efforts are just as robustly encouraged.
Obama added that it this strategy doesn’t work, the answer won’t necessarily be more troops. “It’s not going to be an open-ended commitment of infinite resources,” he said. Watch it:
The 17,000 additional U.S. troops will be focused on fighting the Taliban in the south and east, allowing the U.S. to “partner with Afghan security forces and to go after insurgents along the border.” Later this spring, Obama will also be sending another 4,000 U.S. troops to help train Afghan security forces.
While the increase in U.S. forces has received the majority of media attention, Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy is actually a “comprehensive civil-political effort to improve basic services, accountability, and overall governance in order to defeat the hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda fighters at the heart of the insurgency,” as CAP’s Peter Juul has written. The President has also ordered an increase in humanitarian aid and civilian support, recognizing that the effort there cannot be won solely by military means.
A Budget Watcher’s Guide to the Action As the House and Senate take up their versions of President Obama’s budget plan this week, the congressional budget process will be on full display. While the quirky, arcane proceedings can be mystifying at times, here are five things you need to know to follow the action.
Momentum Grows for Relaxing U.S. Policy on Cuba; Bill Would Lift Travel Ban Roughly a year after Fidel Castro stepped aside and handed much of the responsibility for leading Cuba to his brother Raúl, there is new momentum in Washington for eliminating the ban on most U.S. travel to the island nation and for reexamining the severe limitations on U.S.-Cuban economic…
There has been much hand-wringing, not to mention finger-pointing, regarding who knew what, and when, about the financial calamities that have recently come to pass. However, Brooksley Born and Sheila Bair won’t be counted among the willfully or accidentally ignorant: They’ve been named this year’s winners of the JFK Profile in Courage Award for sounding the alarm far ahead of time.
Bloomberg.com:
Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and Born, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission until 1999, were honored for “political courage,” the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced yesterday [Wednesday] in a statement.
The policy makers “recognized that the financial security of all Americans was being put at risk by the greed, negligence and opposition of powerful and well-connected interests,” Caroline Kennedy, the foundation’s president and daughter of the late president, said in the statement.
Bair, 54, who took over the FDIC in 2006, was among the first regulators to prod the mortgage industry to modify loans at risk of foreclosure to help borrowers keep their homes as losses mounted after the collapse of subprime market. Born, 68, lost a fight to bring over-the-counter derivatives under the regulatory control of the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], after warning in 1998 that the contracts “pose grave dangers to our economy.”
“The catastrophic events of recent months have proved them right,” Kennedy said.
Read a tribute to Brooksley Born by The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel here.
Born was vindicated, according to this Bloomberg story from last November, when her warnings finally started sinking in—a decade later—among those she most wanted to take action.
Around that same time last fall, Bair was locking horns with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson over how to help homeowners who faced foreclosure, as this U.S. News & World Report article details.
The Hollywood Liberal is an anti-war, anti republican, from right here beautiful Hollywood California.
This site was originally started to help get The Worst President Ever G.W. Bush Jr. Out of office. Now that we have accomplished that
the goal is to get Obama to start acting like a Democrat, and not an butt kissing Republican Wannabee. We will continue to fight for that goal
. Thanks H.L.
