President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
March 28, 2009 04:30 PM UTC
91 Comments
Seriously. I’m not trying to pick a fight with my conservative counterparts, but the House Republicans fell into the trap that President Obama set.
He called them out, and they hastefully threw together a response, a “blueprint” as Rep. Boehner put it, with solid numbers to come next week.
Strategically, I can’t call it a win for them. I would have suggested that they call for a press conference to react to the president calling them out, and use that time to guarantee a solid and well-thought budget to show that they have a handle on things. Their response as it was came off as hasty and poorly executed.
I’m just making a dispassionate analysis of what I saw. This is one time I’m not trying to pick a fight. I sincerely believe in a 2+ party system to hold our elected officials accountable.
Does anyone else have a suggestion on how they could have executed this presentation more effectively?
of “nattering nabobs of negativism” for weeks (thank you William Safire, who wrote this line for Spiro Agnew). They’ve had all that time to come up with reasonable, meaningful alternatives to Obama’s proposed budget, stimulus plan, etc. If they had done that, instead of being the party of “no,” I believe they would have had far more support than they’ve had to date.
They’re focusing too narrowly on blocking President Obama’s priorities that they don’t have anyone minding the store when it comes to actually coming up with their own ideas. And “drill baby drill” doesn’t count. That’s a slogan, not a policy proposal.
They just didn’t bother to do so until they realized that they looked stupid just saying no all the time.
Pass the largest expansion of government in the nation’s history without even reading the document. And while you’re at it, don’t allow the minority to force a vote on an alternative which would have created twice as many jobs at half the cost.
This is different than how the ruling Republicans passed their greatest expansions of government in the nation’s history how?
By the way, no one believes that tripe about the GOP “plan” creating any jobs by throwing tax cuts at the recession, but you can keep repeating it as though it weren’t utter nonsense.
(1) Pelosi changed the rules, so the minority party can no longer offer substitute motions. It’s the first time in at least a century that the majority party has prevented the minority from offering substitute motions.
(2) The Republicans used the same modeling the Dems did. It’s not hard to create more jobs than the Obama plan, which is chalk full of non-infrastructure spending programs like Medicaid that do nothing to create jobs. Unless you buy the crazy notion that government spending has a multiplier of greater than 1.0, then tax cuts are the only way to really create jobs. If you do believe the multiplier is greater than one (i.e., that a dollar of government spending generates more than a $1 worth of economic growth), then by all means, let’s spend five times as much as we did.
It seems to be as elusive as the numbers in the GOP budget.
http://republicanwhip.house.go…
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/t…
Maybe I missed a link from the link?
But let’s go from there, what I see are huge amounts of spending, with no taxes being collected. As always, no proposals for cuts are forthcoming.
Do we all send China separate Christmas cards, or do we just send a huge one from all of us?
you’re hawking, you might have a serious business going…. That is, if consumers are willing to buy toxic crap with a clever and misleading label.
First of all, who would want our legislators personally to read all of the legislation they have to vote on? Their brains would be mush; they would have no better, deeper, subtler, or richer understanding than they currently do; and it would lead to worse rather than better governance. Instead, they are figureheads of a team that acts as an organized whole. People on their team read parts of the legislation, and distill those parts for them. This is called “division of labor,” at it is often considered the fundamental building block of civilization.
Second, the biggest expansion of government so far was the New Deal, which laid the foundation for the spectacular, historically unprecedented, sustained and generally accelerating post-WWII economic boon that led to unprecedented prosperity, optimism, innovation, population growth, and generally, by all measures, what people generally consider indicators of having gotten it right. So you’re complaining that Obama is trying to keep getting it right, by following the model that is the most historically and theoretically proven one to date.
Third, politics is politics, and Obama and the Democrats (not in as coordinated and mutually consensual fashion as some of us would like) are doing exactly what they should they be doing under the circumstances: Taking advantage of the current political configuration and the current environmental circumstances to accomplish what needs to be accomplished for the nation’s long-term welfare. In fact, it is a package of things that almost all thinking people, including many conservatives, realize must be accomplished, and could not be accomplished previously due to the political obstacles involved. So, you are now saying that it is unfair not to pretend that such endemic obstacles still exist, rather than to exercise the authority granted by our representative democratic system to accomplish what otherwise could not be? Good for you, KK. You just stick with that unique wisdom of yours.
Thanks for your contribution: You create an ideal foil for thoughtful rebuttal.
(1) The reason we had the AIG mess was because the bill was rushed through and members only had hours to review the bill! Obama said every bill should get 3 days for review. I agree.
(2) There are plenty of economists who believe the New Deal, coupled with Hoover’s protectionism and higher taxes, prolonged the Depression. Makes sense to me. A dollar spent by the government is a dollar taken OUT of the economy. The government doesn’t create wealth. The private sector does.
(3) I don’t know any conservatives who believe cap-and-trade, explosive government spending on social programs and growing bureaucracy, regulations that would allow the government to micromanage businesses, and more government-oriented health care are a good way to go. I’m sure there is someone who calls themself a conservative and believes in what Obama is doing, but that would preclude them from being a genuine conservative.
Investments in science and infrastructure that private enterprise won’t tackle. Hoover and Bonneville dams, the TVA, the space program, rural electrification and telephone service, scientific benefits from research, the list is long.
And, Mr. Economist, just where do you think that dollar of government money goes? Thin air? Cyberspace? No, Mr. Slow on the Draw, IT IS SPENT AS WAGES AND PURCHASES OF GOODS! That, in turn, is spent on more purchases and the jobs that support them.
BTW, Mr. Ideologue, a tax cut “stimulates” to the tune of another, whole, three cents. Money spent on jobs and programs has a 1.18 (IIRC) multiplier. It’s even higher for welfare programs because guess where most of that money winds up within days? Yeah, down at the grocery store.
“There are plenty of economists…” Yeah, a few off on the fringe ones that the right wing has found and holds up as experts and of great number.
Check the stats, Mr. Living in your own Head: FDR still holds the record for job creation for a dozen years. Year after year except when he decided to listen to the hard right and cut back. Whoops, immediate negative results. Keynes was correct.
When Moynahan (I think it was) said that you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts he was thinking of you.
Perhaps I should have been more precise. A dollar of government spending does not create NET wealth. By taking a dollar out of the productive private sector and putting it into the less productive public sector, net wealth is lost. I’m not saying there aren’t important government functions — such as infrastructure, a reasonable safety net, law enforcement, etc. — that are proper and needed. But very few economists buy the original Keynesian notion that government spending creates jobs in the long term. Even the CBO scoring of the porkulus bill shows that in the long term jobs are lost on the net. I don’t think the CBO counts as a “fringe,” in your words.
was a net loss? Are you kidding me? Yes there is government spending that is wasted (as there is in the private sector). And there is government spending that is necessary but is more of a keep things running than it is an investment (like clean water).
But there is also a lot of things the government does that is an incredible investment in the future. The most powerful one is probably public education, followed by R&D spending.
Transaction Cost Economics has largely taken over the discipline, by virtue of its superior match to reality. An overwhelming majority of economists supported Obama’s economic plan over McCain’s during the election (see the Economist magazine which did the survey; don’t have the cite handy), in recognition of the fact that the field of economists recognizes the government-private sector partnership that is a vital component of modern economies.
Can governments be improved? Of course, as can all corporations, and as can markets. That is what thoughtful people of good will dedicate themselves to doing: Analyzing social systems, considering current challenges and opportunities, and devising well-considered political-economic strategies. Do your broad-brush-stroke ideological ramblings contribute anything at all to that enterprise? Of course not.
The first major challenge that faces those of us who try to combine reason, imagination, and compassion (or “good will”) in the constant effort to refine our social institutional framework to continually increase environmentally sustainable prosperity, social justice (equality of opportunity), and human welfare in general, is to broaden and deepen the agreement that that is our shared goal as participants in the human condition. Once that obvious but absurdly difficult step is taken, we can then engage in the more productive and detail-laden process of debating how best to accomplish that task.
One thing is clear: Both those who believe that government is the answer (Communists) and those who believe that the market is the answer (Libertarians) have been thoroughly discredited by both historical evidence and precise analysis. The thoughtful and useful conversation has come to recognize that the question is what the precise balance should be. People who continue to try to claim that the answer lies at one of the poles of a single continuum rather than somewhere in the space defined by various axes are contributing only noise to the discussion.
is because the conditions were inherently messy, and any government action would have become entangled with those conditions.
More economists (including the most recent Nobel Lauriet) believe that the New Deal was successful until FDR was convinced that it had been successful enough to try to balance the budget (1937), which caused another downward spiral, from which WWII (*another massive public spending program*) ressurected the economy. Most economists recognize that the institutions put in place during the New Deal contributed heavily to the sustained, accelerating, phenomenal post WWII economic growth.
Virtually all economists recognize that, due to transaction costs and externalities, government is a vital partner in the economy. The most obvious and simple examples are the provision of a government backed currency and the definition and enforcement of property rights, without which the economy would shrink to almost nothing. Those are government investments that have huge returns. Similarly, for instance, there is an avalanche of evidence at this point, widely accepted (even by many conservatives), that private health care costs are economically crippling, and that government must play a vital role in removing those shackles from the economy.
The fact that not many conservatives believe in cap-and-trade either is one of the most eloquent arguments in existance for why conservativism has become a completely short-sighted and self-destructive force in American and world affairs. All evidence and analysis make it abundantly clear that there is an urgent need to make our economy environmentally sustainable as well as robust, and cap-and-trade is the most market-sensitive way to accomplish the task.
You can repeat your Medievalisms endlessly, but they will not prevail: They will only fall by the wayside on top of the dung heap of other well-jettisoned anachronisms.
But this is new to them and so it is going to have false starts and the first couple of times will be a mess (although this was pretty bad).
The giant question is will they truly apply themselves and start coming up with detailed alternatives. I hope so because then they become an effective alternate voice at the table and we will have better laws from the compromises that then occur.
That explains alot.
Seriously, the “shadow government” thing works only if you pretend you’re running things. Their problem is they’ve accepted the minority party position and gone off to take a nap, occansionally waking to complain on camera.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03…
Ken Gordon brought up an intriguing idea: consider making some of the minority party members committee chairs. At the time, the Dems only had a one or two-seat majority, so the idea was not so far fetched.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as to name Schultheis or Renfroe as chair of state affairs, but worse things could happen than seeing Ken Kester or Al White chairing the finance or appropriations committee.
Besides, it would drive a nice big wedge between the wing nuts and the RINOs which is usually a good thing.
But since the Dems now hold 21 to 14 margin, the votes of those two moderates, while nice to have, are not crucial.
Like Lew Entz for agriculture.
There have been instances in other states where there were power-sharing arrangements made between the (just-barely) majority party and an ideologically-compatable faction of the opposition.
Who put the kabosh on his suggestion?
For instance, a more prominent role for Lew Entz might have made it more difficult for Gail Schwartz to win the seat from him, which she did in 2006. Of equal consequence, any vice chair given to an R is one less Democrat who can claim that distinction in his own re-election. Personally, I liked the idea, but I don’t hold an elected office.
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a sincere respectful wingnut is allowed to post next to a sitting Congressman.
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from the Boulder Daily Camera
Attention GOP talking points – oil & gas employement is down, except its not all that much…
from ABC News
from Simon Johnson @ The Atlantic h/t TPM
here it is – must reading – http://www.theatlantic.com/doc…
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
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but not as good as Simon Johnson.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
If you watch the whole thing (I did a couple of months ago) there are a few dead moments and minor gaffes. But overall, superb.
I was surprised how many issues were still hot buttons.
Charlotte, Sarasota, Manatee counties, plus or minus.
So, if we do the rough rule of thumb of doubling the unemployment rate so that it more accurately reflects the older ways of determining it, 20-22%
Not a depression? Certainly a decession.
Thank you Republicans….and the Dems who got sucked into the ideologies of the plutocrats.
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but may actually be pulling out of it.
We’ll have data in 4 months. I’ll let you know.
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The most recent recessions were 1973-74,1981-82, 1991-92, and 2001-02.
See a pattern here?
Last major unemployment here was 9.7% in 1976.
See a pattern here?
I do believe, as some economists do, that the difficulties we had under Nixon were due to things set in motion by Johnson. On the other hand, maybe not. It could be argued forever.
AS this chart shows, Dems do much better in job creation: http://makethemaccountable.com…
And, of course, the Wait, Wait, Was It the Republicans quiz?
Which president produced:
1. The highest growth in the gross domestic product?
2. The biggest increase in jobs?
3. The biggest increase in personal disposable income after taxes?
4. The highest growth in industrial production?
5. The biggest rise in hourly wages?
6. The lowest Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment)?
7. The lowest inflation?
8. The largest reduction in the federal budget deficit?
Done guessing? Okay, here are the answers: 1. Truman; 2. Carter; 3. Johnson; 4. Kennedy; 5. Johnson; 6. Truman; 7. Truman; 8. Clinton. A Democratic sweep.
Recessions hit after big growth in spending and regulation (e.g., Nixon’s wage and price controls, the Carter years (I love how you fail to mention the misery index and that we had a recession in 1980!), the big growth in taxes and spending under Bush 1, the recovery from the Clinton greed stock market bubble and then 9/11, and now the explosion in the size of government under Bush and Obama).
But by the same measure Carter was a frigging genius compared to the horrible job Bush did.
Keep rewriting history to fit your view.
Over and over, Republicans are bad for the economy. It’s hard to swallow but not hard to see.
After reading you several comments above I know that trying to be objective with you is a waste of time.
Where do you get this shit from?
And he gave me a cite on pajamas media.
Don’t even bother to engage him.
. . . with info about the alternative stimulus plan. The Pajamas media article was a serious article. I can understand why you wouldn’t want others to read it, though, as it’s devastating to your side.
What I can’t understand is why KK would want to refer anybody to Cantor’s site considering how devastating it’s been for the Republicans every time he’s opened his mouth on the economy lately.
Britney Spears paraphernalia and concert photos on Cantor’s site. You know, what America REALLY cares about these days.
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The military proceeds with preparations to install Missile Defense in Europe:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=op…
The missile system is no good as a bargaining chip unless we look serious about deployment.
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The missile defense system isn’t effective by measure of cost or tactical accuracy. I think(and hope)that in the end the system is scrapped. The savings could then be used for something more useful, like health care.
You have a good point about deployment. A missile defense system isn’t as strategically tangible as boots on the ground. A situation isn’t considered serious until assets are committed.
Brenda Starr just got laid off. You know it’s rough when a comic strip character gets laid off.
I was talking to someone who’s pretty high up and they said that amoung I guess you would call it the middle circle (ie more than just the inner circle) they think Obama views Geithner as not able to handle the job and he will be replaced in a month or two.
I think he clearly is floundering. And he may be too much a part of the existing system to be able to see the major systemic changes we need. But then the interesting question becomes – who?
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I don’t see him as floundering.
I think he has a vision of what it will take to fix the problems, and it is far more radical than he has let on so far.
So as not to shock the delicate sensibilities of moderate voters, he is dribbling out minimal information on the radical transformation he envisions.
I think at this early point he has not yet convinced even the most progressive of the Dems that the changes required to achieve his radical vision are warranted.
I think he has nightmares of being blamed for the coming terrible crash (the worst is yet to come,)
and yet he is unable to bring about the massive changes that he believes are absolutely necessary to prevent it.
This is an extremely intelligent and extremely confident man. I assume his plan is brilliant, and would work if properly implemented. But I think he will fail because he won’t able to get buy-in from key Dems.
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is that many times it’s a smoke screen for no actual plan.
And many other times it turns out that if they had listed out the plan, others could have pointed out the major problems in it before it was implemented.
If he’s got some great way to solve this he needs to put it out there so it can be evaluated.
Because it looks like Geithner has weathered the worst criticism and the demands to get rid of him seem to be fading. Stock market helping. Even John McCain sounded kinder toward the administration’s stimulus and bank rescue plans on Meet the Press today than he has in the recent past. Of course I don’t have any contacts with ANY of the administration’s circles, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.
My point was that “secret” plans generally are a cover.
Just wondering how likely it really is that he’s on his way out. You mention having a mid-level connection so you would be in a better position to judge how serious that is than I am.
It was the take-away of just one person and even if true then, things change. So we’ll have to wait and see.
who do you replace him with? No one seems to have an answer to that.
I’m not sure why you think he’s “floundering” though. Yes, he does a pretty bad job on TV and in front of Congress, but his actual plans, what he and the Administration are actually doing, seem to be, at least, OK.
I question whether or not the Administration and Congress actually want to make systemic changes in the first place. From my non-economist perch, it seems like they’re more interested in band-aids and tweaks, not a systematic overhaul. If the latter is the case, Geithner is on the right track and I think the prez knows that. But that’s just me…
Geithner stumbled on rolling out the original plan, but recovered nicely with his actual plan this past week. However, his inability to fill key staff positions along with his general inarticulateness is killing him. Perhaps he may be a better consigliere than administrator/people-person.
Larry Summers was the first choice for Treasury, but was considered unconfirmable. I suspect Obama would rather salvage Geithner (if he’s salvageable) rather than go through another Cabinet upheaval.
The rumblings that David heard could also be discounted as the typical behavior of DC sharks circling a seemingly bloodied prey.
Guess we’ll soon find out how good a swimmer Geithner turns out to be.
Geithner did pretty well on both This Week with George S. and on Meet the Press this morning.
Perhaps he was a little bit too much in the Alan Greenspan mold (platitudes, not answering the questions directly) on This Week. But he did manage to lay out a few good confidence-building points.
He did better on Meet the Press, I thought (even managing to crack a couple of smiles). Not as inarticulate as I had considered him to be earlier.
His biggest image problem is his constant pose with head down, eyes peering over an imaginary set of reading glasses. It isn’t an engaging or reassuring pose for viewers.
Ok, I have no financial background and this involves a lot of hand waving. But there might be the germ of a good idea in all of this.
The root problem we have is the financial system is heavily damaged and many businesses operate by using the credit markets. They borrow money to buy the input goods so they can then add their value to those goods, sell them, and pay back the loan.
All of the businesses are good, but the credit market has frozen up their ability to operate.
Instead of waiting for the feds to address this at a nationwide and worldwide level, what if we could get it working here in Colorado? And in so doing, set an example for other states to fix it in those states?
Virtually all states are individually healthy and maybe the more effective way to fix this is from the bottom up.
Is there a way that the state can invest it’s money in local banks, bonds, etc (where we still recurie the same level of security), with a requirement that it is used to provide credit locally?
And could this be worked in such a way that all financial institutions in the state then get a level of assurance or security from other institutions in the state that they start lending between each other? And this could potentially included the major banks Colorado operations?
I view this not as state-level protectionism or an ABC scheme (which I disagree with). But rather as rebuilding the financial infrastructure from the ground up at a local level. And state borders, due to banks being structured by state, is a reasonable limit for this rebuild.
As I said, not sure if this makes sense or if it does, how it should work. But I think if we can get finances running smoothly again in most states at a state-wide level, that would go a long way to fixing this.
And as no one knows for sure what the best way to fix the financial crisis is, having 50 different experiments gives us a much better shot at some states chancing upon the best response.
Setting aside the major point that the systemic problems are at the national and international level, your proposal about what can we do as a state to bootstrap our own economy is a good one.
But, the question I have is: Can we really shift a significant portion of the state’s non-local investments into local institutions?
In another thread, Ali Hasan was complaining about Cary Kennedy’s investment choices, but my feeling was that if the long term risk/rewards were good, then while they may be underwater at the present, there is no realized loss unless forced to sell them into a weak market. But shifting those investments into local banks would have that exact impact.
So the biggest problems are twofold: is the state’s portfolio liquid enough to help, and would the portion that is liquid big enough to help?
But again, I think this is a useful discussion for our state economists and government to have.
Rigid standards for the companies that borrow, i.e., good long term history (or possibly startup with proven leadership), promises of the old ABC program when possible, and some plan for job creation.
I”m guessing that the cost of borrowing would be less than an appropriate interest rate, which could either be used to pay defaulted loans and/or make a few shekels, and administration overhead.
OK, we solved the economic crisis, what’s next?
AND NO OFF SHORING OR OUT OF STATE SERVICES.
Seems that the Florida tourism folks, very heavily subsidized by taxes, set up a call room out of state. Legislators not happy.
but I don’t see how that would play out. Even assuming Colorado could somehow get around the wiles of TABOR that so severely restrict its ability to act, it’s not really a state-level problem. States could all pump tons of money into local banks and it probably wouldn’t do much. First, because local banks have been largely unaffected by this crisis, and the credit freeze has been occurring at the big banks that have the funds to deal in the paper markets that give out large short-term loans. Secondly, the fed has already been pumping trillions of dollars into the credit markets, the problem is that we are in a liquidity trap, and no one is lending out the money they are getting because of the high-risk and fear that dominates the financial sector. Maybe if the state could do something to lower the foreclosure rate, or stop the collapse of housing prices? That would certainly help and would seem to be something that the state could deal with, but I’m not sure what that policy would like. But fixing the credit crunch as a whole isn’t really something an individual state can do.
Michael Yon has clearly provided some of the best reporting on the war in Iraq. And he was accurately predicting what would happen 6 – 9 months ahead of most everyone else.
He shifted to Afghanistan about 9 months ago and has done the same superb job there. And he sees Obama’s approach headed for failure:
I don’t think Michael Yon is fully taking into account the fact that Obama will demand far more accountability from AfPak leaders than was ever the case with the Bush administration. He will privately, and publicly if necessary, hold the leaders accountable.
And as the corruption endemic to the region is widely acknowledged, it will perhaps be a bit less brazen or lucrative going forward.
At worst, perhaps Obama’s plan is guilty of being a half-measure. But political and economic reality is the major constraint to any planned solution. Training 200,000 security forces is a massive undertaking (just recall the debate during the 2004 election on numbers and timing of training Iraqi forces for far fewer numbers). Training 400,000 in short order would consume unimaginable resources that we (and NATO) are unlikely to have.
Obama is, I believe, quite the master of managing expectations (by underpromising and hopefully overdelivering).
Previous administrations typically have at this point in their terms felt proud simply to have finally located their posteriors with both hands.
I know I must sound like an Obama shill, but I really do need to hope for the best, given the unprecedented challenges he faces on all fronts.
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But that’s not exactly how Pakistanis view things.
Of course, there are a variety of authentic Pakistani views and perspectives, and I cannot fathom them all, but there are a lot of Pakistanis who think that their government has already gone too far in accommodating US demands.
For instance, their nuclear weapons are a source of immense national pride, and yet their government has allowed the US Air Force to set up a weapons escort detachment less than 5 miles from where they are stored.
Fer Pete’s sake, their government lets us violate their airspace several times every day with armed drones. They let us shoot missiles at sites of our choosing, without so much as a notification to their government.
We forced them to allow Bhutto and Nawaz to return and to run for election. Nawaz is as fundamentalist Islamist as most Taleban.
We supported Musharraf when he took over the government in a coup. He trashed their Constitution.
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As far as “accountability” and “corruption” go, you do know that English is the official language of their government, don’t you ?
They read the websites at the New York Times and the Washington Post before we do.
I estimate that 10% of the posts at those websites are from India or Pakistan, and another 10% are from China.
There is no way that government corruption in that country could ever compare to the level of corruption in our own, measured in dollars. Step back for a minute. Just in the last 2 months, we’ve seen that the most powerful Democratic legislators sold out the public trust for favorable loans, campaign contributions and payola. That was also rampant when the GOP was calling the shots.
The bailouts and TARP and AIG, all of that is connected to corruption within our federal government. These aren’t coincidences or accidents; the government is systematically pillaged by the 2 major parties. More than anything else, that’s what elections are about: getting in position to steal. If such indelicacy offends you, don’t read this website.
So, to a Pakistani reader, your pompous talk about the White Man teaching ethics to the Brown Man is laughable. Especially since our financial upheaval is causing massive deprivation in his country. Massive.
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Pakstan was formed from the five Northern Units of the British Raj when it collapsed – Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan.
Pakistan is roughly 50% Punjabi, 15% Sindh, 10% Pashtun, 10% Balochi and the rest are Kashmiri and a dozen other small groups. Almost all Pakistanis I’ve met in the US are Sindh, including (I think) the Hassans. The Sindh, Punjabi and most of the smallest groups want to hold the country together. There is a 50-year old separatist movement in the Baloch areas, and separatists in Kashmir, and the Paktuns mostly don’t accept any international borders imposed by the British or other colonizers.
To many Pakistanis, the fight in Afghanistan is mostly to get Paktuns to accept US colonial rule. Pathans in Pakistan are sympatico with their cousins across the ridge that divides them. 100 years ago, the word “Afghan” referred to the Pathan/ Pashto/ Paktun people specifically. The area now within the borders of Afghanistan include a dozen different ethnic groups, with the Pashto making up 40% of the 14 Million who live there.
6 million Pashto in Afghanistan = 40% of the country.
16 million Pashto in Pakistan = 10% of the country.
Pakistan has extremely close ties to China.
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I don’t think you sound like an Obama shill, but you seem to let an ethnocentric tint color your remarks.
Pakistanis are not unwashed heathens that need to be civilized by us. I would guess that more Pakistanis have read the collected works of Shakespeare than people in the US South and Southwest.
And while it might be fair to think of Afghan people as being less civilized, they do not want and did not ask to be “civilized” or Westernized.”
I am no Obamatron, but I was pleased at how limited his objectives are in the region. They are still way beyond what we can possibly accomplish, but they are much closer to reality than the Bush ambition to turn Afghanistan into a modern nation-state. Never going to happen.
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I carefully read Harrydoby’s comment and didn’t see anything about civilizing unwashed Afghans.
Make that unwashed Pakistanis.
Barron, that’s a first for me!
I suppose the statement that raised your hackles is my comment regarding the issue of endemic corruption. I was addressing (agreeing) with the conclusion of Michael Yon, who is in theatre, as well as with numerous news articles I’ve read over the years, particularly about corruption in the Afgani administration of Karzai. That is not a comment on either their culture or ethnicity; simply that when huge amounts of money flows into any country, with little oversight or control, then greed will often result (see Haliburton, KBR, Blackwater, etc.).
You are certainly welcome to dispute that, but I wouldn’t compare it to the “corruption” you speak of in our own political system. That’s a whole different discussion.
The comparsion you make in terms of absolute dollar amounts is a phony one. Given that the Afgani GDP is only about $35 billion ( http://www.intute.ac.uk/scienc… compared with our nearly 14 Trillion dollar GDP, comparing absolute dollar amounts (which isn’t captured by Pew, Neilson or the Census Bureau, anyway) is not verifiable nor useful.
In fact, the real issue is that the corruption in Afganistan is pervasive. I don’t have the numbers handy (Google has it’s limits) but if we and NATO are spending nearly as much on our battle in Afganistan as their entire GDP, you can see where corruption, even if just in the few billions, would count as pervasive where, accepting your thesis that US corruption is also in the many billions, would be comparatively less of an impact to us vis-a-vis our overall GDP.
I don’t expect either of us will understand, much less solve the many complexities of the AfPak theatre in this forum, but thank you for the enlightening information on the Pakistani cultural makeup. I did find it interesting and useful, as at work, I deal with my global teammates from almost every part of the world on a regular basis.
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all I know about the region I learned either by going through the MBA program at USC-Pueblo that was endowed by Ali Hassan’s family,
or on a project I wrapped up in January to provide a strategic atlas for a briefing book that Secretary Gates wanted put together to brief his replacement.
USC-Pueblo has since been renamed. There were a lot of Sindh from Karachi in the program when I attended in the late 1990’s.
Half the faculty and half the students were from Muslim countries; it was Dr. Hasan’s wish to help bridge the cultural divide, and for that I respect him and his entire family.
I guess not too many people are going to be looking at that graphic I put together, since Gates was held on. I had a lot of errors in the first couple of iterations, and was tutored at the knee of the DOD’s top expert in the region.
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yes, I went overboard. It’s called “projection,” I guess. Please accept my apology. You clearly never said what I accused you of, but once I get going, its hard to stop. Maybe I shouldn’t post so much late at night.
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Barron, I noted the late hour of your reply and tempered my reply in kind.
While I realize we are on different ends of the ideological spectrum, I have always respected your sincerity and deeply principled replies to all of us.
My only disappointment is that no one bit on my assertion that:
In my profession, we take silence as agreement 😉
You really wanted someone to bite that?
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What are the objectives ?
Perhaps Mr. Yon is hoping to show that the deaths of hundreds of US servicemen in Afghanistan were not in vain.
That’s not a legit objective.
We don’t need a 400K or even a 200K proxy army to achieve the objectives President Obama just laid out.
In fact, we will not make progress toward his objectives until we give up on trying to make Afghanistan into a modern nation-state, and turn our attention to building security and stability by empowering those dastardly warlords. They are the only ones who can do the job.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/f…
Does this open the door to a handpicked Omaba Chairman who will see the company through a soft, labor focused bankruptcy? Through the evolution to succeed in the new cap and tax environment? Through a massive downsizing that was needed years ago?
Hey it will only require another $16.6 billion of your hard earned money or as some of you on this board would refer to it, the states money that they it so graciously allows us to use for a slight set of taxes and fees.
It looks as though circumstances are such that Mr. Wagoner will leave “retire” Monday following a speech by The One in which he will outline Autoporkulous II. At least for now this appears to not have the secret plans and hands on Secretary Geithner on it … well at least for now.
figuring out how to make all of it a retirement and not a 90% taxed bonus.
one too many round kicks to the head. Just eat your jello and try to remain calm, okay?
and copious amounts of hours on which to drive more forced union dues. Hell, Gettlefinger will probably get to select 51% of the GM labor contract negotiation team.
Just how much does Gettlefinger make anyway and how many relatives does he have on payroll. If non, he should call UFCW #7 to find out how to pass last minute lockout bills to affect upcoming contract negotiations and hire your relatives.
The job of the union is not to maximize the profits of the company, it’s to maximize the pay & benefits that go to the worker. Now it’s fair to say that the unions got so much it helped kill the companies – but the primary blame for that lies with management, not with the unions.
Arguably, the ultimate fault lies with management because they ultimately agreed to the contracts, but the unions have a lot of actuarial folks and they knew exactly what they were doing. Yet they continued to hold GM and the Big 3 hostage with their strikes.
…for the terrible diet of us Americans – by making their food available.
or we can stuff our faces, pass a few trial lawyer bills, abdicate responsibility and then sue the crap out of McD’s for millions.
Ever notice how many really fat people eat fast food, I mean really out of shape fat fuckers?
In the context of corporations, workers need organized representation to secure a fair share of the profits produced by their labor. But our current zero-sum model is dysfunctional, with unionized workers fighting for ever-bigger pieces of the pie against corporate executives who often view workers as dehumanized production in-puts (though sometimes, generally in information intensive sectors, responding to the humanizing pressures of models that get more out of workers by creating more workplace satisfaction). The result is similar to the evolution of certain mountain elk, whose males grew their antlers ever bigger to demonstrate a surplus of nutritional intake to females looking for strong bucks, but as a result became non-viable (and eventually extinct) due to oversized and cumbersome antlers: Unionized workers demand ever higher salaries and benefits to the ultimate destruction of corporations disciplined by the marketplace. We need to arrive at a model in which workers, management, and shareholders are partners who recognize a combination of convergent and divergent interests, and have an apparatus within which to pursue their divergent interests without undermining their convergent interests. Exactly what that model is, I don’t know: Worker-owned corporations had seemed like the right idea, though some economic analyses suggest that they have some highly dysfunctional qualities. Without adopting the model wholesale, I think the Japanese model has something to contribute. Beyond that, all I see is the challenge, not the solution to it.
What is it with Americans and roundabouts? Is it DNA? Time zones?
That one in Vail by I70 has some doozies.
Now they’ve started putting up traffic lights. It’s fun in a car the size of a bathtub. Or horribly frightening. Sometimes terror blocks memory.
Army of Dude is a soldier, 3rd rated milblogger, and former G.W. Bush supporter. And here’s the key para from his post about the horrible impact of IRRs.
I get the feeling that there’s not a whole lot of love lost between the military and the GOP chickenhawks.
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People in the military identify strongly with the GOP, for the most part.
While many enlist to get away from home, or for more money, almost all believe very strongly that they are making sacrifices necessary for the preservation of the Union, and thus, whether you agree or not, see themselves as the bedrock on which America’s success is built.
When I was on active duty, 20+ years ago, many who had served in Vietnam had a chip on their shoulder and believed the country owed them something, and we did. But there was a surprisingly big chunk who really didn’t contribute much – more than 20% of all Vietnam Vets still in the Army at that time, by my estimate.
I asked one Warrant Officer in the Fort Carson Public Affairs office once why he put in such short workdays, and did blessed little work when he did show up. He told me that he had earned every penny of his pay for the last 19 years, since he left the war, and every penny he would get in retirement, in 60 seconds in Vietnam.
Military people see themselves as part of what’s good about America, and believe that their willingness to take orders and submit to a very regimented institution somehow ennobles and elevates them above mere citizens, who get to do what ever they want. That aligns pretty strongly with conservative politics.
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Are they being abused ? Of course they think so. But as long as they believe the folks screwing them over are doing it because its best for the nation, well, Drive On.
To clarify, an IRR is someone who has completed the term of service on active duty that they signed up for, got transferred into an inactive reserve status, and then got called up due to a national emergency.
A typical enlistment in the Army is 3 years, with a 5 year period after that where they can be called up.
Now, before you go questioning the “emergency” nature of a war that’s been 7 years running, recall that, every single year of the Clinton presidency, Bill signed a decision that the country was in a national emergency as a way to avoid having to pay mandatory pay increases to Civil Service workers.
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David quotes the blogger as saying that 25% of “military” people pull most of the rough duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Strictly speaking, the word “military” refers only to the Army and the Marine Corps. But in this case I think it is being used as a substitute for “armed forces,” which would also include the Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force.
Let’s be frank: most of the Air Force doesn’t need to be in-country. They can do close air support and air dominance and most of their other missions from Qatar. The guys (and gals) of Air Mobility Command who drive the freight trains – C-17 Globemaster, C-130 Hercules, C-141 Starlifter (is this still in service,) C-5A Galaxy – obviously have to make the milk runs, and the guys (and gals) driving the platforms providing surveillance and close air have to fly OVER Iraq, but the 20-to-1 support folks can do the maintenance and refueling and so on from many miles away.
pretty much the same for the Navy & USCG.
EXCEPTION: people in specialties like military police, medic and lawyer from the AF, USN & USCG can fill in for Army folks with the same skills.
But remember that soldiers go for 12 to 15 months, and Airmen and sailors go on 4 to 7-month tours.
also WRONG.
Another way would be to end military operations that are injuring or impairing US national security, starting with misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Without going back to why we went to those two wars in the first place, why are we there now ?
Iraq – we are in Iraq today because we were there yesterday. n = n + 1. Inertia.
Staying there does not make America safer.
Let’s leave, and I mean now, not waiting another year so that the new Administration can get their bearings.
Afghanistan – admittedly I don’t know as much about this war. But I just heard Obama explain why he thinks we should stay, and my first impression is that we could advance those objectives better by helping locals, Pashtun, Afghan, Pakistani, whoever, secure and stabilize their own communities,
rather than having Americans move in and take over.
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