With McChrystal et al. pushing for a significant troop increase — an irresponsible one, in my view, given that it’s not clear anymore what the purpose of the war is — this comes as something of a pleasant development: President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday. The...

According to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), if you’re sick (even seriously sick, like with cancer) and don’t have insurance, you should either look for “an existing government program” or beg for charity. This is what passes for Republican “compassion” these days. You’re sick? Tough luck. ********** “No one in this country, given who we are, should be sitting without an option to be addressed,” he added. Yes, but existing government programs and “charitable...

Greenwald: Advocates of escalation in Afghanistan chose Bob Woodward to “reprise his role as warmonger hagiographer” by publishing Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s “confidential” memo to the President arguing for increased troops. As Digby notes, the vague case for continuing to occupy that country is virtually identical to every instance where America’s war-loving Foreign Policy Community advocates the need for new and continued wars. It’s nothing more than America’s...

I think it’s quite hilarious that Michael Barone, never a stranger to hyperbole, claims that liberals are anti-dissent: It is an interesting phenomenon that the response of the left half of our political spectrum to criticism and argument is often to try to shut it down. It’s also hilarious that he writes this without a trace of irony. It is true, of course, that the Democratic Party seeks loyalty. What political party doesn’t? Even here, though, it is nothing like the Republican...

Over at TPM, Brian Beutler has an excellent post up on why Democrats likely won’t use the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform with a simple majority in the Senate. Aside from the fact that the process could actually result in a less-than-desirable bill, given that non-budgetary matters could be thrown out by the parliamentarian (with Republicans pushing to have as much thrown out as possible), according to reconciliation skeptics, “there probably aren’t 51 votes in...

Can you blame President Obama for “snubbing” Fox News yesterday? Steve Benen: “Fox News spent months promoting last weekend’s right-wing protests in Washington, encouraging viewers to go register their outrage. And during the event itself, the Republican news network went a step further, encouraging the crowd to get louder once the cameras were on.” (HuffPo has more.) This is a network that wants Obama to fail, that wants health-care reform to fail, and that is actively...

Irving Kristol, father of Bill and one of the founders of neoconservatism, died on Friday at the age of 89. You can find obituaries, among other places, at the Times and the Post, as well as from Robert Kagan (a close friend of Bill and a leading neocon) and John Podhoretz (son of Norman, another founding neocon, at Commentary, one of the key neocon publications). I usually find myself in opposition to neoconservatism, and hence I usually found myself in opposition to almost everything Kristol stood...

From Sunday’s op-ed: In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president...

That’s right, what’s the point of Sen. Max Baucus’s health-care reform proposal? Is it to win bipartisan support? Yes, probably, given that Baucus all along has been trying to work with the few Republicans who have shown a slight (if hollow) interest in reform — namely, the GOP members of the Gang of Six. Not surprisingly, though, the Republicans in question, notably Sens. Charles Grassley and Mike Enzi, have already come out against Baucus’s proposal. And it’s...

It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was close… close enough, I suppose. Alas, President Obama left open the possibility that his preferred public option — which, in my view, should be non-negotiable (see also Krugman on this) — could be replaced with some other alternative to private insurance, such as a non-profit co-op system or a “trigger” (which would kick in a public option were insurance companies unable or unwilling to provide adequate coverage),...

The truth is that he has no interest in reform. In fact, for all his Gang of Six efforts, he’s pretty much against it. I delved into Republican opposition to reform, including Grassley’s, yesterday. Here is Grassley himself, who has been emphasizing his opposition to reform in his recent fundraising efforts, speaking on a conference call with Iowa reporters: There’s a feeling that the only way to get a bipartisan agreement is to defeat a Democratic proposal on the first hand and...

I tweeted on this last night, but I thought I’d link here to the NYT story: Seven months after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is reshaping the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division by pushing it back into some of the most important areas of American political life, including voting rights, housing, employment, bank lending practices and redistricting after the 2010 census. As part of this shift, the Obama administration is planning a major revival of high-impact civil...

It’s often edifying when Republicans show their true colors, even if they’re not exactly “beautiful like a rainbow.” On health-care reform specifically, Republicans on Capitol Hill have for the most part either been obstructionists or outright opponents, spinning about “socialism” and “death panels” with all the strength they could muster, much of it latching on with an irresponsible media establishment that emphasizes not the facts, not the truth,...

Well, the Republicans are to blame, of course. But, for Democrats, here’s some much-needed perspective from TNR’s Jon Chait: The Senate is what controls the process. That’s the chokepoint for any health care bill. The question isn’t how badly Obama wants a public plan, or how much he cares about bipartisanship. It’s whether moderate to conservative Democrats in the Senate will filibuster a bill that has a public plan or lacks GOP support. Everything else is details. In...

Guest post by Frankie Sturm Frankie Sturm is communications director at the Truman National Security Project and a freelance journalist. Ed. note: As part of our ongoing relationship with the Truman National Security Project, I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be cross-posting some pieces from Operation FREE, a new initiative that seeks to raise awareness about the links between climate change, energy, and national security — an extemely worthwhile endeavour, to be sure. Operation...

So. Is the “public option” dead or not? One of the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, Kent Conrad, says it is. (And I responded yesterday.) Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says is it as well… or not. Therein lies some confusion, and she may very well herself be confused. She seemed to back it on This Week (ABC) yesterday, only to pull back on State of the Union (CNN). As she explains on the latter, the “public option” is “not the essential...

One of Obama’s leading foreign policy gurus isn’t terribly enthusiastic about the current direction, such as there is one, of the Afghan war: Seventy-five U.S. and NATO troops died in Afghanistan in July, the deadliest month for allied forces in nearly eight years of fighting. More than 1,000 Afghan civilians have died this year, up 24 percent from 2008. Tens of thousands more American troops are en route, adding to the approximately 90,000 troops, both U.S. and allied, already on the...

“The American people remain anxious and confused about health care reform,” observes Marc Ambinder. “That is an underlying reality that Republican activists are so eager to exploit.” Yes, but it is also Republican activism — in the form of lies, distortions, and propagandistic fearmongering — that has manufactured much of the confusion and anxiety out there. Otherwise, Ambinder is right that “the loudest voices [have] tended to be the craziest, the most extreme,...

As the economy stabilizes, or appears to, with the prospect of a rebound on the horizon, if still a long way off, a major concern is that any genuine recovery will be largely a jobless one, with unemployment remaining high even as other economic indicators show improvement. This may not be the case, however. As Jon Chait noted at The Plank, citing the WSJ, the job losses have been largely service-relative, not manufacturing-related, as the service industry has “come to dominate U.S. employment.”...

He wasn’t a cinematic master, by any means, but he was one of the most distinctive American filmmakers of his generation, and it is indeed difficult to imagine American cinema in the ’80s without him. John Hughes died yesterday at the age of 59. I was a bit too young, at the time, for his early seminal movies, such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and even Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), and yet I came to love the...

So you know how CNN’s medical guru, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, is a Big Pharma flack? Well, it looks like, at least when it comes to health-care reform, the whole network is in the pocket of Big Insurance as well. As Greg Sargent reports at The Plum Line, CNN has refused to air an ad from Americans United for Change criticizing “insurance companies and Republicans.” The official excuse is that the ad targets a specific insurance CEO by name, Cigna’s Ed Hanway, who makes over $12 million...

I tweeted a bit on this last night, but I must stress again: The response from certain right-wingers to Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea to free the two American prisoners is simply appalling. Apparently, Krauthammer, Bolton, Morris, and their cruel and wrong ilk would rather Laura Ling and Euna Lee have rotted away in a totalitarian labour camp. They claim, without actually knowing any of the specifics (they’re full of idle, partisan speculation, as usual), that the U.S. must have...

Good news for Democrats, I suppose. Sen. John Ensign of Nevada — he with the mistress and the cuckolded husband on his staff, he with the parents paying the mistress off, etc. — has announced that he has no intention of resigning and will run for re-election in 2012. Let the “breathtaking hypocrisy” continue! (Cross-posted from The Reaction.) EDITOR’s NOTE: This post was supposed to go up on July 15 but due to a technical glitch it failed to appear.

I haven’t written on the Mark Sanford saga in a while — mainly because there hasn’t been much new/newsworthy to report (he’s still in office and he’s apparently trying to reconcile with his wife), but also because, I admit, I grew tired of it — but The State has some new details on Sanford’s trip to Argentina to see his mistress (or, to be more precise, on the story he spun to cover up that trip) that make his irresponsible actions all the more disturbing: Gov....

House Democrats released their long-awaited health-care reform bill yesterday, and the plan it proposes includes a government-run component (a so-called “public option”). No, it’s not exactly the single-payer, universal system that many of us prefer (and that we have here in Canada), but it’s comprehensive and ground-breaking, and likely would ensure coverage for the vast majority of Americans — in fact, almost all of them. The right, of course, is already objecting...