Charlie Rose

thedeac  03/11/2010 10:16 PM Report

It is apparent that the Speaker was less than genuine or forthcoming. Perhaps it is the nature of the beast. You usually elicit candor or, at worst, a non-commital comment. It is surprising that a person of her stature would so mislead when she must have known contrary evidence was already available.

hrc  10/06/2009 11:22 PM Report

Of such endeavor is greatness manifest.

robdverity  10/06/2009 07:48 PM Report

Madam Pelosi is formidable. Hope her reticents to capitulate for more troops holds. We can create enough enmity and enemies with those in situ. The ratio is doubtless minimized (but not erased) with lesser not a greater number of troops. Zero is the only sane number which ipso facto removes it from consideration.

REMant  10/06/2009 11:24 AM Report

1. Listening to them yesterday it's hard not to get the idea that a lot of doctors in the present situation of US medical care are beginning to believe that they will make more money from the govt than without it.

2. Aside from what is saved by management efficiencies, health care reform most certainly will not save the country money, especially without price or service controls, though it will transfer those costs of production to the country at large.

3. The stimulus bill has not yet in any way saved money either. It has saved jobs temporarily, but at the expense of adding to the national debt, and diminishing the value of the dollar. So far there's little evidence it has stimulated anything except cupidity. It may, in the sense of making needed structural changes, but that remains to be seen, and it will be far in the future.

4. You cannot just create "demand." This is the voodoo economics of the Keynesians, and if it were true, you could always spend your way out of any downturn. Is there anyone left who really believes that? Besides the idea of balancing the budget is clearly incompatible with it.

5. If the bail-out money is paid back with interest, it can only be because the financial institutions have finagled the money from the public at large with the Fed's connivance. They, themselves, are not productive and only productivity pays returns.

6. I suspect a well-contrived cap-and-trade system is better than a tax for several reasons: a. a tax will be evaded or passed on; b. financial authorities will undermine it; c. the government will become reliant on it, and seek to keep it bringing in funds like they do with tobacco. I do not doubt that there is a need for some public measures in this area, but I do think wiser to bring our world economies into line with the real needs of the people before undertaking them. Like the health care ideas, it is beginning at the wrong end.

7. The history of our current involvement Afghanistan reads very much like the period roughly 1955-1965 in Vietnam. The Karzai regime can be compared to Ngo Dinh Diem's. The villagers are also caught between two forces neither of which they like, nor probably even understand. The Taliban, tho not Marxist, is a similar sort of utopian movement like the NLF, American aid is supporting them and the American presence aiding recruitment. While there is no way we can build a new nation in Afghanistan in the short-term, the same problems face the Taliban, just as they have the Vietnamese. If we intend to try to win a purely military victory the rural population is going to suffer terribly, no matter what our strategy is. We tried them all in Vietnam. In the beginning by trying to build a Western-style army that only succeeded in bullying the population and providing weapons to the enemy, and later by trying to provide security for the people by moving them into "strategic hamlets." With the failure of these we put in several American divisions aimed at forcing the enemy to fight in the open and ending infiltration from the north, at which we mostly succeeded, but only at the cost of scaring this country into leaving, and all we ended up doing was destroying that country and its society. Even if we are successful in that now we will have to remain for the foreseeable future to secure the territory, or be forced to turn it over to another corrupt and repressive regime, probably reliant on our continuing support. Far better to worry about other things, as Messrs Will and Biden have argued. Our concern is with the potential in the area for the expansion of terrorism abroad, not whether the women in Kabul are mistreated, or Israel invaded, and that concern comprises more than just Afghanistan anyway. The longer we dither, the more opportunity we give the Taliban to demonstrate to the Arab world that they are morally superior, which like the Buddhist immolations in Vietnam, is the real meaning of the suicide bombings.